This week: Edward Bawden, late medieval England, Beethoven’s quartets, Arden of Faversham, escaping Soviet censorship & more.
Edward Bawden’s England, by Gill Saunders (Thames & Hudson): Those waiting for the Tube at London’s Victoria Station will surely know the silhouette of the namesake queen, a wax cameo in tile, that graces the underground walls. But do the riders know the designer? That would be Edward Bawden (1903–89), one of a gifted group of twentieth-century British artists who did much to shape our view of that nation. Bawden’s winsome work in multiple media, often focused on traditional British life and produced in capacities ranging from the commercial to the artistic (Bawden made no distinction between the two), depicts an England—the village church, the harvest season—that even then was being lost to urbanization and technological advancements. But he was no Luddite, comfortably producing advertisements for train travel in addition to his studies of country life. A new book by Gill Saunders, published by Thames & Hudson in concert with the Victoria & Albert Museum, is a jewel box containing numerous reproductions of Bawden’s cheerful art. —BR
“Rich Man, Poor Man: Art, Class, and Commerce in a Late Medieval Town” at the Met Cloisters (through August 20): In sixteenth-century England, the town community was governed not only by the complex collection of courts and their respective laws but also by strict conventions surrounding the social order. Those who violated these communal boundaries were often subjected to harsh forms of punishment. Popular media in the form of ballads, poetry, prints, and sculpture told tales of disobedient wives, emasculated husbands, overly foolish jesters, and angry peasants, all of whom overstepped those boundaries and incurred the wrath of the community, typically through intricate communal shaming rituals (also known as “skimmington” or “charivari”). “Rich Man, Poor Man: Art, Class, and Commerce in a Late Medieval Town,” a new exhibition at the Met Cloisters organized by Melanie Holcomb, the curator and manager of collection strategy for the Met’s Department of Medieval Art, provides an exceptionally wide-ranging collection of sculpture and ornamental objects from this communal tradition that adorned the single house of a prominent Exeter cloth merchant. —JW
Beethoven’s quartets performed by the Dover Quartet at Town Hall (March 26): Beethoven died before in 1827 before he could hear his String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131 (1826) premiere. It very much seems to be a product of his turbulent final years of illness and depression. Though Beethoven’s prolonged custody battle over his nephew Karl had finally died away, Ludwig’s deep-seated frustration remained: Karl had shown no promise as a musician and sought to leave his studies at university for a career in the army. Alas, uncle and nephew were at loggerheads, and Karl climbed to the heights of a ruined castle where he made a suicide attempt. After he was discovered the next day by passersby, his words were thus: “I became worse because my uncle wanted me to be better.” One can’t unsee that stormy backdrop when listening to the jagged final movement, among the most tortured music Beethoven ever wrote. Hear No. 14 together with two of Beethoven’s early quartets, No. 3 and No. 6, this Sunday at Town Hall, courtesy of the Dover Quartet, a scion of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and one of the leading interpreters of Beethoven’s quartets today. Their three-volume recording of them was just completed last August. —IS
Arden of Faversham, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat, directed by Jesse Berger, performed by Red Bull Theater (through April 1): Based on the very real story of Thomas Arden’s grisly Valentine’s Day murder by his wife Alice and her lover Richard Mosby, the Elizabethan domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592) has been variously attributed to Kyd, Marlowe, and of course Shakespeare. It’s no Macbeth, though there are some family resemblances—see how Alice claws at a persistent spot of blood after the murder. But the rough edges make us all the more thankful for the work that Jesse Berger and his whole team at Red Bull Theater have done to resurrect this minor classic. With an adapted text by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat, the taut production preserves the tragedy while freshening the (still dark) comedy, reminding just how closely those genres were linked in Elizabethan times. —RE
The Tamizdat Project Rare Book Auction (through March 31): The phenomenon of samizdat—meaning, in Russian, “self published”—is fairly well known in the West: how Soviet citizens covertly distributed illegal books by Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, and many others via hand-copied manuscripts and hand-typed dossiers. Less remarked upon, however, is tamizdat (in Russian, “published [over] there”): books printed by a network of independent publishing houses and private interests in the democratic West that kept a free canon of Russian literature alive for Russian expatriates—and for those brave enough to smuggle copies back into the Soviet Union. In recent years the Tamizdat Project has spearheaded an effort to preserve the memory of tamizdat literature. For the next eleven days, the Project is holding an online auction offering a trove of rarities, the proceeds from which will raise money for Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Russian students fleeing repression and war to study at American universities. Gems include first editions of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, signed editions by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Joseph Brodsky, and a vintage Russian edition of Orwell’s Animal Farm—surely not for light reading on the Leningrad subway. —IS
By the Editors:
“Land of ghosts and legends.” In search of Crusaders in chainmail and a city of the dead in the Caucasus Mountains.
Isaac Sligh, The Critic
From the Archives:
“Léger’s modernism,” by Hilton Kramer (March 1998). On Fernand Léger at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dispatch:
“Something golden in the state of Denmark,” by Gregory T. Clark. On “Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.