Books I'm Reading: Michael Pollan's Cooked

I’ve just finished Michael Pollan’s Cooked (Penguin Books, 2013). At its core, the book is a look at how cooking transforms raw ingredients into something new, but it also looks at cooking from the perspectives of human culture and health. The book is organized into four sections, one each for the elemental forces of fire, water, air, and earth. 

Pollan puts himself at the center of each of his four exlorations. He approaches cooking as a curious amateur, documenting his successes and failures as he gradually gains a deeper understanding of cooking with fire (grilling and roasting), with water (braising and boiling), with air (baking), and with “earth” (fermentation), reinforcing the idea that cooking is a skill that most people have become distanced from but that anyone can reclaim. His hands-on experiences –whether mastering slow-cooked barbecue or keep a sourdough starter alive – ground the broader arguments in tangible, relatable moments. Along the way, he introduces us to a number of memorable characters, including Ed Mitchell, the barbecue master; Harry Balzer, who studies food eating habits among consumers; Samin Nosrat, who introduces the author to “grandma cooking;” the baker Chad Robertson; and fermenter Sandor Katz, among others.

Cooked is partly a critique of modern industrial food culture. Pollan argues that the decline of home cooking has had important consequences for public health, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion. He connects the act of cooking to a greater awareness of ingredients, portion sizes, and nutritional value, while also emphasizing the role of home cooking in fostering patience, mindfulness, and shared experience. The book is more than a culinary memoir. It is a work of cultural analysis.

Cooked is entertaining because it combines intellectual enquiry with genuine enthusiasm for food and the act of preparing food. Pollan presents cooking as a practical and deeply satisfying response to contemporary challenges around eating well. Finally, for those inspired by the prose, Pollan provides four recipes in an appendix at the end of the book, one related to each of the four sections of the book. Recommended. Pollan is always worth the time in my experience. 

 

Books I'm reading: Simon Winchester's "Knowing What We Know"

In his Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic (Harper Perennial, 2024), Simon Winchester guides us with his usual skill (blending biography, intellectual history, and anecdote in lucid prose) through a broad and complex topic – human knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge – with a focus on a central question: How have we come to know what we know?

He sets out to explore the means by which knowledge (in the broadest sense) has been passed from generation to generation, covering everything from the earliest oral traditions and the emergence of writing to Wikipedia and AI language models. The digressions are many and always interesting, but sometimes the subject seems too big for a single volume. 

What emerges is a recurring concern with the vulnerability of knowledge – throughout history (for example, the risk of fire destroying an ancient library), but particularly in an age of information overload based on digital storage, and he ends the book with musings about the ease with which information about virtually anything is available today with the push of a button or a spoken request directed at a handheld device. He sounds a bit nostalgic about hard-won knowledge, relating a story about navigating on the open sea before GPS systems became available and I have long wondered how London cabbies must feel about GPS navigation considering the time and effort they have traditionally had to put into acquiring "the knowledge" (referring to map-perfect memorization of the streets of London). He never really answers the question of whether this availability of knowledge represents a loss or if we should see it as freeing our minds for other things, and so the end of the book left me hanging a little, but engaging storytelling throughout the book made it very much worth the time it took to read. From Winchester, I would have expected nothing less. 

Books I'm Reading: The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Jason Fagone’s The Woman Who Smashed Codes is an engaging biography that focuses attention on Elizebeth Smith Friedman (she spelled her name Elizebeth, rather than Elizabeth), a woman I had never heard of. I picked up the book recently for a dollar at a thrift store simply because I have some interest in codes and spycraft and it looked interesting. 

Friedman was a pioneer of American cryptology. She virtually established the field in the US along with her husband, William Friedman. Her work shaped modern codebreaking at a fundamental level. The book shows that her methods and successful code breaks influenced the outcome of both WWI and WWII. The book is carefully researched and written in clear, readable prose. I found it hard to put down. I read all 345 pages in only two sittings (427 pages including the notes). In her lifetime, her work and contributions to cryptology were frequently obscured by the requirements of government secrecy and often she was overshadowed by the accomplishments of her more famous husband, but the book makes a convincing case for thinking they were at least equals. 

The first part of the book focuses on Elizebeth’s serendipitous, somewhat bizarre introduction to pattern analysis when she accidentally lands a job with one George Fabyan (another character I had never heard of) as an assistant to one of Fabyan's hangers-on (Elizabeth Wells Gallup) who was obsessed with proving that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Francis Bacon and that Bacon encoded secret messages in the texts of the plays, a pursuit that Fabyan supported and Miss Smith doggedly stuck with under Gallup's tutelage until it became clear to her that the idea was nonsense. It was at Fabyan's Riverbank compound in Geneva, Illinois that Miss Smith got her start in codebreaking and also where she met William Friedman. 

From these beginnings working side-by-side with Friedman, she became a crack codebreaker working on her own to take down rum-running gangs during prohibition and later breaking Nazi codes and helping to lay the foundation for the National Security Agency. Author Fagone combines historical detail with personal narrative, showing in detail how her work dismantled domestic smuggling operations and exposed Axis espionage networks in South America during WWII. Her feats of codebreaking made significant contributions to Allied successes during the war but they could not be publicly acknowledged. Among the book’s strengths is how it challenges the male-dominated narrative of intelligence history in the US, in particular, showing how much of the work she and her teams did (working mostly for the US Coast Guard) was attributed to others when shared with agencies such as the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover appears to have routinely passed off Coast Guard cryptanalysis as work done by the FBI. Because of the need for secrecy in many cases, Elizebeth was never in a position to set the record straight. Here, Fagone has done that. He not only restores her legacy but also explores the emotional toll on both her and her husband of lives spent in secrecy, dealing with the pressures of wartime service, and of the personal sacrifices they made (William Friedman was largely responsible for breaking Japan's "Purple" code during WWII, a code generated by Japanese code machines similar to the Nazi Enigma machines).

I rarely read reviews of books I've read, but, for some reason, I looked at reviews of The Woman Who Smashed Codes at Goodreads and found a wide spread of reviews. Most were four stars. Slightly fewer were five-star reviews. Clearly, the book has been well received by readers. However, there were also many two-and one-star reviews. These were mostly based not on the content of the book or the research but aimed at the presentation. Many complained that the narrative is not strictly chronological or that it gets mired in detail about subjects these readers thought unimportant to the story (for example, not a few of the reviews object to the large amount of space devoted to George Fabyan and the main character's time working for him). Others felt there was too much space devoted to William Friedman and that the book buries Elizebeth's story in his story, once again shrouding her life behind that of her spouse. 

In contrast, I found these sections interesting, important in elucidating Elizebeth's character, and not out of proportion. The book, in my view, makes a convincing case for the importance of Elizebeth Smith Friedman's life to US and world history and it seems a worthwhile book for having done that. I suspect (although I have no evidence to support this guess) that many of the negative reviews were written by younger readers who have lost the capacity to take in a story at its own pace, to savor details, to enjoy tangential explication. These may be the same people who can't sit through an older movie because it requires them to pay attention to dialogue and character development – people who require entertainment to incessantly bludgeon them with stimulation. It would be interesting to see a graph of the ratings on one axis and the ages of the reviewers on another. Maybe I'll post this review on Goodreads. I'd give the book five stars. 

Books I'm Reading: The Age of the Horse

I’ve just finished reading Susanna Forrest’s The Age of the Horse (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016), subtitled “An Equine Journey through Human History.” The book offers a sweeping look at the shared histories of horses and humans, starting with a short section on equine evolution, from the earliest horse-like species about 56 million years ago to the present day. Although a history, the ideas are presented not strictly chronologically but by tracing a number of themes that the author likens to “bridle paths” with sections headed wildness, culture, power, meat, wealth, and war.

The treatment of evolution and domestication traces the shift from Eohippus to Equus caballus, the modern horse, and outlines how wild horse populations have been subdued and made into work partners and food sources in different parts of the world. She discusses everything from Mongolia’s wild takhi herds, the haute école riding displays at Versailles, newly established polo clubs in Beijing, and equine therapy programs for veterans in Arlington, Virginia, drawing on personal anecdotes and archival materials to illustrate how horses have served as labor, as instruments of war, as symbols of wealth and status, and as food. The section discussing the history of humans consuming horses for food and the various ways horse carcasses have been made use of in different periods and cultures I thought particularly interesting. One line, on Page 230, mentioned the boiling of horse’s hoofs for the production of Prussian Blue, a connection that I didn’t quite understand (and one that is not elaborated on in the text). That sent me to the Internet to investigate – which kept me occupied for the better part of a day (details here).

An interesting and enjoyable read. I thought it engagingly written despite a fair number of horse-specific terms that I had to look up along the way. Recommended. 

 

Books I'm Reading: Airplane Literature

I recently traveled to Japan and back. I distracted myself from the inconveniences of flying economy class (almost eleven hours there and just over nine hours back) with some reading, as people do, but I'm a moderately nervous flyer, so I find it impossible to read while flying unless the book is either a collection of shortish essays that allow me to read in bursts or it's light, very brisk reading. I took Frank Abagnale's Catch Me if You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake with me (Broadway Books, 2000; I picked up a used copy in a thrift store a few years ago thinking it might be interesting to see how the movie version departs from reality) and, ahead of my flight home, I picked up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia: A Tale of Innovation and Obsession (Penguin Books, 2022) at a bookstore in Haneda Airport. I read the entirety of Catch Me if You Can on the way to Tokyo and most of The Bomber Mafia in the air on the way home. They were both good, fast-paced choices, Catch Me if You Can in particular because, if you've seen the movie, most of the story is already familiar.

Some incidents in the movie Catch Me if You Can have always seemed implausible to me. It turns out that, although clearly details have been altered and certain incidents added or exaggerated (or underplayed; the book suggests the real Abagnale spent a lot more of his time pursuing women than the character in the film does), most of it is true in a broad sense. I noted two major differences, though. I have always thought Abagnale's apprehension in the film especially problematic. It makes no sense. It's hard to believe anyone could have established or acquired and operated a large-scale printing shop in the middle of a tiny town in France without anyone noticing as the DiCaprio character appears to do in the film. In reality, the nearly perfect, essentially real (although forged) checks Abagnale was using at the end of his career as a bad check passer were innocently made by the gullible father of an Abagnale girlfriend who, very conveniently, owned a printing company (he was told they were being made as samples).  

The other main difference – and it is a striking difference  – between reality and the movie is in the punishment the real Abagnale received at the hands of the French government after his arrest. He endured shockingly cruel treatment in prison (barely fed, in solitary confinement without light, sleeping in his own excrement for months on end) and the book devotes a great deal more time to describing his stint in prison and how he was eventually released than the film version does. Worth a read.

The Bomber Mafia was the name given to a group of US military men who before and into WWII (comparatively early in the history of aviation), believed, before any proof was available, that precision bombing alone would someday be the way wars were won and, by avoiding high casualties both among soldiers fighting on the ground and among civilians, won more quickly and more ethically. Led by Major General Haywood S. Hansell, they put their faith in the Norden bombsight, which, in theory (in perfect conditions – conditions that almost never prevailed), allowed dropping a bomb in a precise location from tens of thousands of feet in the air. The bombsight, despite its promise and the resources that went into its production and protection (its development was top secret and units in use were to be destroyed to prevent capture), had a very bad record in actual use. Eventually, the opposing view, championed by Curtis Le May – that indiscriminate "area bombing" (and eventually indiscriminate firebombing using napalm canisters) was more effective – prevailed, ultimately resulting in the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo (and then cities all over Japan), which in the space of a few hours killed more people than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan later in the same year (comparing the immediate deaths anyway; the lingering effects of the atomic detonations eventually killed more people).

The details are mostly recorded history. What makes this book of interest is its focus on the way members of the Bomber Mafia, who, despite huge losses suffered by bomber crews using the bombsight and repeated failures to hit targets with enough bombs to make the sacrifices worthwhile, refused to accept failure and repeatedly doubled down on the idea of precision bombing, placing blame for unacceptable results elsewhere. The book is more an examination of social psychology than a war tale and its look at how people get attached to questionable ideas and stubbornly defend them despite contrary evidence seems particularly relevant at the moment. The irony is that toward the end of the war, precision bombing became increasingly possible and, today, with drones and computer-guided munitions, it really is possible to "drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet" as those championing the Norden bombsight claimed. Whether precision bombing, in practice, was truly more ethical than carpet bombing continues to be debated. Le May argued that anything that shortened the war ultimately meant fewer deaths than would have occurred if carpet bombing with incendiary bombs (and atomic bombs in Japan) hadn't been used. Hansell and the Bomber Mafia were appalled by indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. This book asks you to decide whose side you would have been on. Another book worth reading. 

Books I'm reading: Pawpaw: In search of America's Forgotten Fruit

Not long ago, on a visit to Petaluma (for what reason I no longer remember) I stopped into the large heirloom seed store there and saw on the front counter several copies of Andrew Moore's book Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015). Having lived for some time in southwestern Ohio (in Dayton between the ages of 10 and 17), smack in the middle of the pawpaw's native range, I have tasted a pawpaw, although only once. I don't recall where the fruit I ate came from, but I vividly remember how pleasantly surprised I was by its exotic taste and its large, shiny, black seeds. That would have been sometime around 1976 or so. Later, as a student of Japanese at Ohio State University, I remember thinking of that one pawpaw again when I came upon a pawpaw tree on the OSU campus six or seven years later. Since then, I have off and on wondered about the pawpaw. So, seeing this book in Petaluma, I purchased a copy, which I have just finished reading. The book is written in the first person and reads rather like a travelogue as the author criss-crosses the plant's range to talk with growers and enthusiasts and people who, like me, remember the pawpaw but have lost touch with it, chronicling the fruit's history and its slow revival.

It's been 10 years since Moore's book was released. A few weeks ago I was able to go online and easily order a pair of pawpaw trees to try in my California garden – cultivars that appear to have been just coming into the market at the time of the book's publication. That is evidence that pawpaw development has continued and that this fruit, once common throughout its range, is making something of a comeback. I don't know how these trees native to the Midwestern US states will do in the hotter, drier climate here, but I'll do my best to nurture them. The trees arrived a few days ago. I planted them shortly afterward. I've enclosed them in cages to keep marauding deer away and given them some protection from the mid-day sun.

Books I'm Reading: Susan Hall – Painting Point Reyes

Susan Hall is a painter I know from seeing her work over the years at the Erickson Gallery in Healdsburg. I've long been drawn to her abstracted landscapes of the Point Reyes area, where she's lived and painted most of her life, aside from a stint in New York as a younger woman at which time she was a friend of Mark Rothko, among others. In particular, I was taken by a distant view of cliffs overlooking a beach with pale seals basking that was dominated by a vast cerulean sky offset by the white cliffs. I loved this painting and felt a particular connection to it as I know precisely the view depicted, having been to the spot across the bay from the cliffs on birding trips. I recently dropped into the gallery and saw there a new piece by Hall in much more vivid colors than she has used in the past entitled "Deer on the Ridge." 

As the title suggests, the painting is an expansive view of a golden ridge with a few tiny deer along the ridgeline, these barely sketched in, creating a tiny accent that makes apparent the scale of the landscape they stand in. Billowing white clouds rise up behind the ridge. In the foreground, are scattered trees. Across the golden hills stretch bands of rufous and lilac that make the scene come alive. The whole is done in multiple, thin, almost transparent layers with the prominent brushwork that is typical of Hall's style. Danielle at the gallery kindly gave me a copy of Painting Point Reyes, a monograph on Hall (Green Bridge Press, 2002), which I have just finished reading. While it is mostly a selection of paintings from around 1998 to 2001, it also includes three short essays on Hall's work and her relation to the Point Reyes landscape. 

"Deer on the Ridge" and other recent work by Hall is rather more colorful than much of the work that appears in the book. Hall's earlier work used a much more limited palate dominated by ochre and olive in thin, flat washes very reminiscent of the California Tonalists, although darker. Often when looking at her work I'm reminded of the murals at the De Young Museum by Piazzoni. The way she abstracts the landscape and uses accents of intelligently chosen contrasting colors reminds me also of the Canadian painter Lawren Harris. The more recent work, with its bolder, brighter colors reminds me of Bonnard and printmaker Carol Summers. That said, Hall is immediately recognizable as Hall. 

Books I'm reading: Robert Motherwell: Early Collages

I recently finished reading Robert Motherwell: Early Collages (The Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2013), the catalog accompanying a show of Motherwell's early work in collage at The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2013 and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014. In addition to about 60 color plates, the book includes four essays on Motherwell's first experiences doing collage, an interest that he continued to pursue throughout his career. 

Among these essays, I found "Made of Paper: Motherwell's Materials in the 1940s" particularly interesting. It discusses the types of paper and other materials the artist used in the early works, the glue he typically used, and the backing materials he employed. I was a bit startled to learn that he used Duco Cement (which I remember from my childhood as a cheap, all-purpose hardware store glue), Lepage's Mucilage, and Lepage's Liquid Glue (inexpensive household glues I remember as well). Clearly, the idea of using archival materials was not well established at the time even among the artists that were starting to lead the world art scene. 

A number of the papers he used were colored with fugitive dyes. Bright purples and magentas, in particular, have faded in some of the work to light brown or a pinkish beige. The essay includes photos of some of the work as it looks now alongside digital recreations with the color restored to what it likely was when the work was new. The digital restorations were based on areas where the original color was protected from light exposure by overlapping collage elements. The fading was fairly rapid, it seems. Motherwell is quoted in the essay in later interviews and he seems to have accepted the changes without too much regret, but clearly the original, vibrant colors make for stronger compositions. Below is just one example.  

Books I'm reading: 2024

Looking back on 2024 from the perspective of the reading I got done, it's a bit depressing to see that I finished only nine titles – ten if you count the book I'm finishing now, in January 2025, that I started in December (see below). It's tempting to congratulate oneself for reading anything at all these days, knowing that many Americans read their last book in high school or college. Rather than taking comfort in that sad statistic, however, I take some instead from the fact that nearly all the reading I did was substantial. With the exception of a collection of popular essays on engineering-related subjects by Henry Petroski that I took along on my March–April trip to Japan, I read about art history in 2024, and mostly academic writing rather than writing aimed at a broader audience. A lot of it, while worth it, was challenging and slow going. I have several more volumes along the same lines waiting on my bookshelves for 2025. 

That last book was Sea and Sardinia, by D. H. Lawrence (I read the older Penguin paperback edition shown). I had thrown it into my bag on the morning of my departure for Los Angeles for a short trip in early December. I chose it simply because it was small and light. In the end, I read most of it at home, after my return, although, with the two-hour delay to our departure because of fog in LA, I was glad to have had something to make a start on. I have no idea where it came from. I don't remember buying it. It may have been something my father left behind. It's an odd little volume. A travelog, it recounts a short trip from Palermo to Sardinia and back over the course of a few days. The trip is by ferry to Cagliari and from there north up the spine of Sardinia by train and motor coach (brand new in 1921) eventually to the port at Olbia. From Olbia they travel by ferry to the Italian mainland (landing north of Rome). Following a train trip south to Naples, they cross by ferry again from back to Sicily. 

There is much description of the landscape; the dreary, impoverished towns they stay in with filthy inns, indifferent innkeepers, and scarce, unpalatable food; of the peasants, with a great deal of attention paid to the subtle differences in their costumes from region to region; and of the various other characters Lawrence and his companion (whom he refers to as the Queen Bee, or the q-b, for short) encounter along the way. Lawrence and the q-b don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much and one wonders what prompted the trip in the middle of winter. Vague wanderlust is the excuse given. That said, Sea and Sardinia is interesting for the glimpse it gives of Sardinia 100 years ago, not long after the end of the First World War. 

Books I'm Reading: Night Studio

Musa Mayer's Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Knopf, 1988) has been in my bookshelves for years - more than 25 years. When I took it down recently to finally read it, the sales slip was still in it. I bought it on September 2, 1989 at a store in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo. I paid $5,900 for it, which in those days was about $40 (¥146/$). I tended to buy whatever looked of interest and was willing to pay what it cost because interesting English-language books were comparatively hard to find in Tokyo at the time.  

Musa Mayer, born Musa Guston, is the painter's daughter. While she is not otherwise a writer, as far as I know, she writes very well, painting a vivid picture (unavoidable pun?) of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a famous man and particularly of her stained relationship with her father who appears to have been more attentive to his painting than he was to his family – which is not to say that he was cruel or manipulative. He was simply devoted to his work. 

Additionally, the book was interesting on a personal level because it turns out that the author left New York and her parents as a young bride and lived and worked in Yellow Springs and Dayton, Ohio – both locations I know well. It's odd how often Yellow Springs seems to pop up. Among my artist friends here in Sonoma County, two have lived in Yellow Springs, and one, like Musa Mayer, worked at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs. According to the book, Mayer became a counsellor and worked with youth patients at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Dayton. I walked past Good Samaritan every day on my way to high school, although my school is no longer standing and I've heard that Good Samaritan is gone too. 

Books I'm Reading: The Imagery of Surrealism

In the past year, my reading has been focused on art history. My interest in art history is nothing new, but this spate of reading was set off by a show at Modern Art West, in the town of Sonoma, back in September of 2022 focused on female Abstract Expressionist painters working on the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s. Reading about these women (I recommend Ninth St. Women, in particular) led me to reading specifically about Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. Reading about Frankenthaler led me to reading about Motherwell, which led me to reading the anthology of Dadaist writing he edited and that led me to The Imagery of Surrealism (first edition, Syracuse University Press, 1977) by J. H. Matthews, a dense, difficult read that required concentration and perseverance to get through.  

I suspect that many people think primarily of painting or collage when they think of surrealism, but, as this book makes clear, like dada, surrealism was as much a literary movement as a movement in the visual arts, and, again like dada, true surrealists looked at surrealist imagery (whether verbal or pictorial) as secondary to action, in this case the act of creating while separating the mind from the constraints of convention to tap into what was variously termed "inner need," "the inner model," or sometimes just "desire." Kandinsky, though not a surrealist, called it "inner necessity." Surrealists believed that rational thought was the enemy of the creative impulse and that some means was necessary to bypass rational thought to access the inner model (as a side note, I find it frustrating that it's hard to find practical suggestions as to what that means exactly was or should be). 

As the jacket blurb notes, Matthews "asks why and with what consequences surrealism denies values on which our education in art and literature have taught us to rely." The author points out that because words are our means of articulating our understanding of reality, literary images that defy common sense are particularly confounding and they are at danger of being dismissed as simply nonsensical, while painted or drawn images can be easier to accept if we allow ourselves to hold at bay our instinctive reaction, which is to analyze and attempt to find a rational explanation for what we are seeing based on our everyday experience of the real world. On the other hand, he points out that in painting and drawing, it is easy to fall into hackneyed symbolism, and he accuses Dalí of having done just that. He has high praise for Magritte, Tanguy, and Miró among better known surrealist artists, but the book is remarkable for the wealth of examples it presents by a wide range of lesser known artists, which (again according to the jacket) are mostly from the collection of the author and from other private collections and published in this book for the first time. A challenging read, but worth it if you want to deepen your understanding of surrealist thinking throughout its history, from the 1920s well into the 1960s or 1970s. 

Books I'm Reading: The Dada Painters and Poets

As one with an interest in art and art history, I have, of course, long been aware of Dada. I had seen photos of the fur-lined teacup and the clothes iron with spikes, and of Duchamp's everyday objects presented as art. I was aware of the Dada celebration of the absurd, but, reading The Dada Painters and Poets (edited by Robert Motherwell; I read the second edition, in paperback by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, published sometime after 1979. The original publication was in 1951), I have gained a much richer understanding of just what Dada was.

I knew that Dada had its start in Zurich around 1916, but I see from reading this compilation of primary source material (apparently still the most complete collection of such material available in English), that while Dada spread quickly to Berlin, Cologne, Paris, other European cities, and eventually New York, Dada was short-lived, having mostly petered out by the early 1920s (one writer here sees Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto as the end of Dada). 

What I didn't understand was how subversive Dada was. It tends to be seen as playful – and certainly there was an undercurrent of humor in Dada with bourgeois aspirations often the butt of the joke; the Dadaists loved to confuse and confound with nonsense, but that aspect of the movement appears to me to have been less central than it's been made to appear. The early Dadaists were hell-bent on creating chaos, happiest when their demonstrations led to riots and when riots and the indignation their antics caused were reported in the papers. Dada was meant to be disruptive. It was anti-art. It was not fundamentally intended to make art out of the ordinary, despite Duchamp's "ready mades". True Dada condemned art, literature, philosophy, and the "high priests" of those pursuits. 

I think it is often forgotten that Dada originally wasn't conceived as an art movement at all. Real Dada, pure Dada, was understood to be an attitude, a state of mind, a perspective for interacting with the world. The art we associate with Dada, both the visual art and the literature of Dada, were seen as incidental. Yet, Dada was nothing if not self-contradictory. While these productions were incidental, the art and literature of Dada were essential to Dada because they were the media through which the Dada sprit was presented to the world. This core contradiction within Dada ultimately led to its, perhaps inevitable, self-destruction from within. 

Years later, Pop Art and the Conceptual Art movements looked back to Dada for inspiration but neither were characterized by the same kind of darkness, it seems to me. 

Books I'm Reading: The Collected Works of Robert Motherwell

I've been on a reading spree lately – reading focused on New York in the 1950s, the abstract expressionists, and, in particular, the women that were associated with the New York School – that was my starting point at least. One book has led to another, most recently to The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Oxford University Press, 1992, edited by Stephanie Terenzio). It's been on a bookshelf in the living room for years. I don't recall when or where I purchased it. I saw it somewhere used and thought it might be interesting to read. I finally started it a couple of weeks ago as it suddenly seemed particularly appropriate to do so in the context of the other reading I'd been doing and I've just finished it. As it's a collection of shortish pieces, it's ideal for dipping into for short spells as time allows, but I found myself reading it for long stretches. 

This recent reading has been educational. Most of the artists I've been reading about have long been familiar to me and I've seen their work in person numerous times in museums all over the world, but I realize that, until now, I've known little about their personal lives, about who they associated with, about their views on making art or what they thought about the art of others. Motherwell, it turns out, was an erudite man who, over a long career, wrote quite a lot about making art and about the art of others. For the most part, he writes very clearly, although his use of a few terms took some getting used to (more about that below). The book includes writings from 1941 through 1988 (he died in 1991). It includes essays, contributions to exhibition catalogs, scripts for and transcripts of public talks, introductions to volumes that he was involved in publishing, miscellaneous notes, and letters. Each selection is introduced by editor Stephanie Terenzio to give context and these introductions are often detailed and as enlightening as the writings they precede.

I didn't know that Motherwell had been a philosophy student at Harvard before becoming a painter, that early in his career he associated closely with the surrealists that fled Europe in the lead-up to Word War II, that he was active as a teacher and an editor, or that he is such an excellent source of information and deep thought about the early years of the abstract expressionist movement (he came to be seen as the intellectual of the movement, although he doesn't appear to have liked that label). 

Throughout his writings he emphasizes how important the ideas of the surrealists were in the early days of abstract expressionism and focuses on the concept of "psychic automatism," which he sees as the seed from which abstract expressionism grew. In his famous manifesto of 1924, André Breton coined the word "surreal" (above real, or beyond real) and first articulated the idea of psychic automatism, if my understanding is correct. He defined surrealism in terms of psychic automatism, saying surrealism is "pure psychic automatism through which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought," the idea here being that the surreal emerges directly from some pre-conscious realm and the idea of "action painting," a term that came to be used as a synonym for abstract expressionism, developed out of this kind of idea. Action painting emphasized the physical act of painting itself from which the art that emerged was understood to be primarily a record of the action. Jackson Pollack's drip paintings were the quintessential action paintings. Abstract expressionism developed ultimately in many directions, but, reading Motherwell, I've understood for the first time this early connection between surrealism and abstract expressionism. Motherwell notes, importantly, that surrealism itself was anti-abstract art. 

Another idea Motherwell repeatedly emphasizes is that modern art (he is speaking in the 1950s here) is international and historically inclusive. He says the modern artist stands apart from community and tries to connect directly to the universe in contrast with the traditional artist; traditionally, he says, the artist has been part of the community and expressed the values of the community from within. He says in one piece that modern art is universal, drawing on the entire history of art and that it seems radical (that is, it seemed radical at the time of its emergence) only because most people know only the tradition of realism handed down "from Greece and Rome and the Renaissance and modern modes of illustration." Much of his early writing is aimed at trying to help a baffled public understand what modern (= non-representational) painting was.  

Several terms, I must admit, I had a little trouble with. I lacked confidence at first (and to some extent still do) that I was precisely understanding his intended meanings. "Plastic" is one of these. As an adjective, "plastic" has always meant to me something close to "formable" or "malleable" (aside from the more obvious meanings "made of plastic" or, figuratively, "cheap.") By the time I had finished the book, I decided he was using it more or less to mean "creative" and I am somewhat relieved to see that the Oxford English Dictionary lists that as among the meanings of the word when used as an adjective – a usage that first appears in 1662 – although it was unfamiliar to me.  

Another of these is "feeling." Naturally, I know the word, but Motherwell uses it in a specific way, to mean "sensitivity" or "ability to feel" and he goes to some trouble in one of the selections collected in this volume to contrast it with "emotion" and to say the two are not synonymous, although they commonly are used interchangeably.  He says feeling is "the objective response to what externally is" (his training in philosophy is frequently evident in his writing), while "emotion" is something internal. His view is that most surrealist work is emotional as is the work of German expressionists like Ludwig Kirchner. He seems to think "felt work" is superior to "emotional work" while admitting at the same time that he loves the emotional work of Goya. 

In addition, his writing has adjusted my understanding of the word "abstract." I see now that when I have used it, I probably really meant "non-representational." He points out that "to abstract" means "to select" and that that implies referencing reality; an abstraction is a selection from and simplification of the real. If we say "non-representational" we can eliminate the idea of starting with an image (a mental image) of reality and arriving at a simplified form of that image that emphasizes its essence. A non-representational work bypasses the selection and simplification – the selective emphasizing of aspects of – a reality-based image. There's a great deal of confusion even among artists about the meaning of words. I imagine that's why visual artists are visual artists and not writers. 

In a nutshell, The Collected Writing of Robert Motherwell is a rich collection of primary source material related to the world of art in the US, particularly New York, between the 1940s and the 1980s and of thinking about art. There's really too much here to absorb in a single reading. This is a book I may have to re-read in a year or two. Before I do, however, I have several others to read on the subject of modern art – books I've become aware of through reading the present volume. The first of these is The Dada Painters and Poets, an anthology edited by Motherwell himself. Then there's The Imagery of the Surreal (by J. H. Matthews) and  Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (by William C. Seitz and Dore Ashton with contributions also from Motherwell). By the time I finish those, I'll probably need a break to try to digest it all.

Books I'm Reading: Lee Krasner: Living Colour

I've just finished reading Lee Krasner: Living Colour, edited by Elaine Niarne (US paperback edition, Thames & Hudson, 2024), a monograph accompanying a 2019 exhibition of Krasner's work that showed first at the Barbican Art Gallery in London (later traveling to Germany, Switzerland, and Spain) – a continuation of my recent deep dive into the history of the women painters among the Abstract Expressionists. This is a richly illustrated show catalog but it also includes a number of essays about Krasner's work, a 1970 interview with her, and a chronology. An excellent overview. 

Books I'm Reading: Ninth St. Women and Women of Abstract Expressionism

A show I saw in September 2022 at Modern Art West, in the town of Sonoma, that focused on female Abstract Expressionist painters working on the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s was my introduction to quite a few artists I'd never heard of at the time. Among women associated with Abstract Expressionism, I was aware of a few names like Jay DeFeo, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, but didn't know a great deal about the work of the first three of these and it was only by seeing an extensive Joan Mitchell retrospective at SF MOMA in October of 2021 that I gained any familiarity with her work. The show in Sonoma piqued my curiosity about other women abstract painters and prompted me to do some reading. A small show of work by Bernice Bing at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco shortly after the Sonoma show further stimulated my interest in these artists. 

Recently, I've read New Art City (Jed Perl, Vintage 2007) and Fierce Poise (By Alexander Nemerov, Penguin, 2021), the latter about Helen Frankenthaler, and have just finished Ninth St. Women (Mary Gabriel, Back Bay Books, 2018) with the very long subtitle Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art. I've also just finished Women of Abstract Expressionism (Edited by Joan Marter, Denver Art Museum and Yale University, 2016,  the catalog for a show of the same name at the Denver Art Museum from June to September, 2016, traveling then to the Mint Museum, in Charlotte, North Carolina (October 2016–January 2017) and the Palm Springs Art Museum (February–May 2017)).

This latter, being an exhibition catalog, is mostly reproductions of work by the artists included in the show –  three to five pieces each by 12 artists (Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington, and Ethel Schwabacher) supplemented by a handful of essays, a brief interview with Irving Sandler, a chronology, and short biographies of the women in the show and of other women that were active at the time and working in the Abstract Expressionist style. Among these other women are Bernice Bing,  Zoe Longfield, whose work I was particularly impressed by at the Modern West show, Betty Parsons (who I knew from Ninth St. Women more as a gallerist, but I see that she was a painter as well), and Gertrude Greene. 

I was surprised when I read the short Gertrude Greene biography. I had never heard of her, but then it dawned on me as I read that she was the wife of John Wesley Greene (known as Balcomb Greene). Balcolmb Greene is a name I did know because my parents were acquaintances of the Greenes, having visited them at their home in Montauk on Long Island on at least one occasion in the company of Joseph W. and Marjorie Groell and Philip Pearlstein. Marjorie was my mother's best friend from college. They both attended Carnegie Tech (today Carnegie Mellon University) at the same time as Andy Warhol and Pearlstein (although they were a few years younger). Both Joseph W. Groell and Pearlstein later taught art at Brooklyn College. Jospeh W. Groell is the brother of the painter Theophil Groell (who also went by the name Theophil Repke early in his career and who my mother and the Groells I knew always referred to as "Teddy"). My mother told me that I occasionally played with one of Pearlstein's daughters (although I was too young to remember) and that she (the daughter) once gave me the flu. Among things my father, Stuart Talcroft, left behind after his death is a set of photographs he took of Balcomb Greene and others at Greene's home during that visit, with the Groells, Pearlstein, and my mother present. In the photo here, Balcomb Greene is at right and Pearlstein (center left) sits sideways to the table. The woman at left may be Philip Pearlstein's wife, Dorothy (Cantor) Pearlstein. The younger man (center right) I have not been able to identify (photo © Stuart Talcroft). This was September 1957.

The essays include an "Introduction to the Exhibition," by Gwen F. Chanzit, "Missing in Action," by Joan Marter, that addresses the question of why the women painters have been neglected in histories of Abstract Expressionism, "Biographies and Bodies: Self and Other in Portraits by Elaine and Bill de Kooning," by Ellen G. Landau, "The Advantages of Obscurity: Women Abstract Expressionists in San Francisco," by Susan Landauer, which points out that attention focused on the New York painters and the comparative neglect of the West Coast painters (and women in particular) allowed the latter a great deal of freedom to explore, and "Krasner, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler: Nature as Metonym," which suggested that the male painters tended to use metaphor, while the women used metonym, but the writing was rather hard to follow in this last essay. Despite that, Women of Abstract Expressionism is a useful and attractive reference work. 

Ninth St. Women focuses on the five artists in its subtitle (Krasner, de Kooning, Hartigan, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler), but, perhaps inevitably, the book takes in the whole scene; it runs to over 700 pages, nearly 900 with notes and bibliography. There is much about the men who were painting at the same time, about the critics, the teachers, the poets, and the gallerists associated with what came to be known as the New York School. The conditions advanced painters in New York worked under at the time, often in barely furnished, unheated spaces with no hot water, were as rough as the lives they lived which, until some of them began to find commercial success, were characterized by artistic struggle, dealing with misogyny in the case of the women (who felt compelled to adopt an approach to life perceived as masculine in order to be taken seriously), poverty, hard drinking, raucous partying, and unconventional romantic relationships (although it should be noted that both Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler came from well-to-do families and had resources most painters didn't). 

The book traces the early influence of Hans Hoffman as a teacher and the appearance on the scene of European surrealists and others as they fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s (mostly older, conservative men that appear to have been particularly misogynistic), the sudden fame of Jackson Pollock and the destructive alcoholism that eventually led to his artistic impotence and  death (and how that affected Krasner and others), the shift in the mood of conversation at places like the Cedar Bar and the Five Spot as recognition and wealth accrued to painters like Pollock and De Kooning, with the talk in the bars going from "art over beers to galleries over bourbon". The book makes it clear that it was a spectacular but surprisingly short-lived rise to fame for Abstract Expressionism (at least for the men), lasting from about 1950 to about 1965; by the mid-sixties, attention had shifted toward painters like Rauschenberg and Johns and later Warhol as Pop Art emerged. 

I had never understood that Frankenthaler is arguably the mother of color field painting. While that's entirely logical once it's pointed it out, I had never made the connection between her work and the work of painters like Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, who apparently were emboldened to pour thinned paint onto unprimed canvas after seeing the work of Frankenthaler, just as Frankenthaler felt freed to experiment by seeing the work of Pollock, which vastly altered her conception of what painting could be (Frankenthaler was not alone). I hadn't understood how small and tight the core group of painters was. Everyone seems to have known everyone, they visited each other's studios, they met nightly in the bars, they talked, they painted, they wrote and read about each others work, they drank, they arranged shows, they went to openings, they had parties, they had sex, and they painted. The cross-fertilization appears to have been broad and intense. I hadn't known that Elaine de Kooning became an influential writer about art, mostly in the pages of Art News or that she did a great deal of portraiture and had a period during which she focused on canvases inspired by watching sporting events. I wasn't aware of Krasner's central role in trying to keep Pollock from his violent, alcohol-fueled excesses and to keep him productive (to the detriment of her own work) – or really anything about their relationship, or her career. I hadn't known that she later turned very successfully to collage. The book was an introduction to dozens of lesser-known peripheral characters and even a small lesson in the geography of Long Island. The detail is vivid. The pages are overflowing with insights not only about how the woman made their way as painters in a style that has long been seen as quintessentially masculine, but about what it is to be an artist at all. There's an entire course in advanced abstract American painting at mid-century in these pages. Ninth St. Women, is a remarkable bit of scholarship, deeply researched, meticulously notated, rich in detail, and engagingly written. Highly recommended. 

 

Books I'm Reading: Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering

On my recent trip to Japan, I took along Henry Petroski's Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering (Vintage, 1997) to read while traveling. Being a series of independent essays, it seemed well suited to episodic reading. In the end, I had little time to read while overseas, but, back home again, I've finished it. 

This group of essays ranges widely, covering topics as diverse as the Panama Canal and the Ferris Wheel, Christian Schussele's painting "Men of Progress," the Channel Tunnel, and the Petronas Towers. 

Petroski, in my experience, is always entertaining. He writes succinctly, with enthusiasm for a subject that might at first seem less than exciting, and with a knack for making a rather technical subject more than just accessible, always bringing to life the personalities behind the projects. 
 

Books I'm Reading: Fierce Poise

I recently finished Fierce Poise, by Alexander Nemerov (Penguin, 2021) about artist Helen Frankenthaler. I've always liked her work. I'm not sure when I first became aware of her, but it may have been seeing a large textile designed by Frankenthaler that used to hang in the lobby of the Winters National Bark (still there as far as I know) in Dayton, Ohio. 

I realized quickly that my familiarity with Frankenthaler was rather superficial. It extended mostly to seeing isolated works in various museums around the world over the years. I actually knew nothing at all about her private life, and Fierce Poise is more about her private life than it is about her art. I had had no idea that she came from a wealthy family, no idea that she had had a long relationship with Clement Greenberg, nor that she had been married to Robert Motherwell. Not sure how I missed that, but I don't think much about the private lives of artists when appreciating their work. That said, the history is always interesting.   

Books I'm Reading: New Art City

2023 has not been a great year for reading. There was a time, when, living in Tokyo, when I had a long commute, that I read a book a week or more using my time on the train to and from work. Since returning to the US, 22 years ago now, I've been reading a book a month or so, but this year, with the death of my mother in January and all the responsibilities that stemmed from that, I've been able to get through only a handful of titles. 

I most recently finished Jed Perl's New Art City (Vintage, 2007), which was an interesting look at New York in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but rather dense and I was slow to get through it. It starts off with a chapter that underscores the importance of Hans Hoffman as a teacher in New York in the 1930s before moving on to look at the major artists of the period based in New York – Joseph Cornell, Jackson Pollack, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and others – as well as the critics who were writing about these men and women. Inspired, I'm now reading a book about Helen Frankenthaler, and I have another on deck specifically about the women who were working as artists in New York during the period. So many books, so little time....

Books I'm reading: History of the Violin

I recently read this 2006 Dover reprint of a book by William Sandys and Simon Andrew Forster originally published in 1864 about the history of the violin and other stringed instruments. It was not exactly what I was expecting. While it covers early precursors of the violin, it does so in a rather haphazard way and there are so many overlapping terms for the earliest instruments that I was not left knowing a great deal more than I already knew. In addition, the book frequently gets bogged down in lists of instruments made by individual luthiers or genealogies of families of luthiers, some of which I skipped through. No attempt is made to define technical terms used and the text is liberally seasoned with Latin and French quotes with no translations.

While the book discusses the famous Amati, Stradivarius, Guarneri, and Stainer families, it also devotes a great deal of time to recent (at the time of writing – that is, 150 years ago) families of violin makers with a special emphasis on English violin makers. These last are hard to keep straight because of the English habit of naming everyone James, Thomas, John, or Charles, sometimes for multiple generations. I came out of my reading more confused than anything. That said, there was enough of interest between the covers that I DID actually finish the book, my skipping of lists here and there not withstanding. Interesting, but I think most modern readers would expect a more organized and objective treatment of the subject than the title suggests.

Books I'm Reading: The House on the Strand; Light Years

I haven't been reading lately as much as I customarily do. Too many distractions, I suppose. I've been much more deeply engaged in listening to music recently. It could be that – although the two aren't necessarily incompatible. 

My mother died in January. In the last ten days or so of her life I spent a lot of time in the hospital at her bedside. I brought a couple of books with me, picking up whatever was to hand. I'm not sure why, but I chose a copy of Daphne Du Maurier's classic The House on the Strand (a 1974 University of Pennsylvania Press paperback edition) that was on one of my bookshelves (as it happens, a copy my father left behind at the time of his death). I first read The House on the Strand in high school when I was going through a phase of reading a great deal of fiction by English writers, many of whom were suggested by my grandmother and my mother (school teachers both, my grandmother a teacher of English literature in high school; I read a great deal of Thomas Hardy at the time), so it is was perhaps an appropriate choice. 

I didn't remember much about the book, but it's held up pretty well, I'd say. Although a certain suspension of disbelief is required to accept the idea of a potion that transports people back in time, the transitions are written rather deftly and I enjoyed reading it again. The only Thomas Hardy novel I've re-approached as an adult is Return of the Native, which seemed rather naïve to me on re-reading. I recently re-read Moby Dick, which I enjoyed as much the second time around as the first. 

The other book I read during my mother's final days was Light Years (Icon Books, 2015), by Brian Clegg. I have a habit of subjecting myself from time to time to books about physics in the hope of better understanding some of the great peculiarities of the quantum world, but there always comes a point at which the mind boggles and I'm left feeling worn out and confused and like I've made no progress. Still, I like to keep trying. This was among the easier such books I've read, though, because it was essentially a survey of the history of human thinking about light and it was only at the very end of the book that the ideas became challenging. It was engagingly written and worth the time, I thought. It was at the very least a useful distraction. So far, these are the only books I've read in 2023. I will try to do better in the coming months....