This morning I watched a documentary on Alice Neel. It was the best art documentary I've ever seen. It was done by her grandson. Dennis Claxton forwarded a link here:
http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Alice-Neel/70101810
I wasn't a member, but I signed up for a free month. Alice Neel was a figurative painter of extraordinary power. It turns out the film has a long ago friend painter, editor, art critic from the 1950s. At 032:12 you will see a B&W still photo of him sitting in chair next to his portrait done by Alice Neel. His name was Hub Crehan. He lived pretty much as Neel did and was probably a friend. Well, I know he must have been. His wives and children were just as traumatized as hers were. His paintings were in a similar style and he had the same uncanny power to penetrate the soul of a person through their face.
This power relates to something that Joanna said about the ugliness of some woman, I forgot who. I strongly recommend J download this documentary and watch. I spent the first twelve years of my boyhood this kind of bohemian household devoted to art, writing, drinking and abusing each other. But I was lucky to have the relief valve of staying over at my father's place out in Reseda on weekends. It was a complete bore, but at least it was safe.
Next topic, Jacobin and pink-scare. Good issue with lots of LBOers writing. My only suggestion is to consider adding a `department' devoted to resuscitation of left writers especially in the US. Many of these men and women were completely suppressed during the 40s through most of the 60s. My generation never heard of them and could have greatly benefitted from reading them.
I am reminded by watching Alice Neel. She was completely suppressed by the art scene from about 1950 onward. The reason was the art wars where representative work was forceably replaced by abstraction. This turn in American Art directly corresponded to cold war and a switch from semi-socialism and liberalism to the asshole business minded political establishment. The haute bourgeois will not buy work that is as psychologically critical of them as Alice Neel was.
Next topic. Marv Gandal recently recommended Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate. I did a wiki search and found the non-fiction war writings. A Writer at War. After an archive search I see he was recommended by Augelus Novus on thread asking for suggested readings on the Holocaust back in 2008. I had already studied that subject so much I was sick of it. Much of the background reading on Strauss, informs the subject in depth. I had studied it visually from early 1960s. I used to draw from the photographs.
Grossman got himself hired by the Red Army newspaper and followed the armies from August two months after the Germans invaded. I am at page 228. Stalingrad has been retaken and Paulus's 6th army has been surrounded and 300,000 have surrendered.
Grossman is the best writer I ever read on war. Walt Whitman's wartime journals come close, but he never went to the front. He was a voluteer orderly. Then there is Tolstoy in both War and Peace and Sebastopol Sketches. Grossman is in that league.
Grossman was often at the front and talking to soldiers. He had a skill something akin to what I was trying to describe in Neel. Grossman also wrote about the upper eschelon commanders in the same vein. His editor often didn't publish Grossman's work, or heavily doctored it. Grossman was angry with him, but his editor was protecting him.
After the war, Grossman's Life and Fate was almost nominated for a Noble Prize and Stalin crossed his name off the list of Russian submissions.
His work was obviously suppressed in the US during the cold war and no translation were made until recently.
Now this is why it is an important project to resuscitate other writers and artists before they disappear in the universal silence and darkness of history.
Example. Crehan was one of the disappeared ones. He kept his paintings rolled because they were easier to move. Until he got on disability as an alcoholic, he was often homeless. At one point Titus told me he was living under a small bridge that nobody could see.
When he died his ex-wife collected all she could which was a stack laid flat about two feet high. She tried to donate them to the Oakland Museum California collection. The stupid curator wouldn't take them. She finally gave them to her brother-in-law who ran a speciality bookstore. He got as many as he liked and hung them in his book shop.
Now Crehan was certainly not in Grossman's league, but he added a psychological depth to his criticism and reviews of the first wave AE New York school. At the time he was writing for Art News and Arts magazines.
For one thing, he saw the connection between the European Surrealists who came to avoid the war and painters like Alice Neel. You can see that there was a whole world of Greenwich Village in the down and out 1930s who hung out and did similar work to Neel. You can see it in Franz Kline's early work, and certain figure studies in Gorky, de Kooning, Louis Nevelson, Lee Krasner... many more.