Monthly Archives: June 2009

Savage Beauty: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Life

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To be a biographer must be a great thing, I for one find the lives of the writers and artists whose work I love as interesting as their work. I’ve been deep into Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like other poets I love, she difficult, demanding, calculating, celebrity-mongering, brilliant poet of love affairs and bohemianism and addictions. I swear I loved her for writing before I knew she had a place between Baudelaire and Byron in the annals of poete maudit.

I followed the poet from girlhood, where she was an ambitious poet, to adulthood, when she remained an ambitious child in an aging shell. The fairy tale Millay helped create of herself, as the little girl poet from Maine who gives voice to a generation of Jazz babies, a seductive whip of a girl sleeping with anybody whose anybody, falls apart.

Let the rest of us, she grows old. She doesn’t take it well. Chronic drinking develops into addiction rather than lifestyle, and a habit for morphine steals her middle age. She becomes a hollowed out thing who could no longer write. And this she records in a notebook even as she stops writing all else. What time she wakes up, what she consumes, everything until she goes to bed.

A fascinating blog called Daily Routines pieces together how various distinguished people past and present lived. Gerard Richter woke up at 6:15 am to fix his family breakfast before starting work in his studio at 8 am. The writer Haruki Murakami for example runs marathons after working all morning. Millay in her early 50s was quite the opposite:

Chart
Miss Millay
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.
7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress
7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm…
7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking
8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude…
8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)
9:00- “
9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)
11:15- Gin Rickey
12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)
12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette
1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

(M.S. is a morphine shot.)

Her devoted and charming husband Eugene took care of her like she was a little child through all this, even developing his own morphine addiction to see what she was going through by attempting to quit. After he died of lung cancer in his 50s, Edna was left alone and she kicked her morphine habit, although she continued to use prodigious amounts of alcohol and other pills. Yet she was finally beginning to write poetry again. Then, a year and half after Eugen died, she fell down the stairs of her home and broke her neck.

Ravels in Review Friday

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Here we are again, two weeks into June and no sign of the rain letting up. Rain, rain, rain….

Anyhow, what did we talk about this week? Looks like we were all over the place.

  • No consensus was reached over a top 200 artist list by the Times. (No Surprise there).
  • My formula for how to destroy a cocktail party or create change looks like art critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page.

This constant rain is especially annoying as I was going to go get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park this morning. Now I have a conundrum. Not only if I should wait in the rain, but is the performance going to get rained out? Alas, our frailty is the cause of such concern, as Viola would say, and I think I’m go find an anarok and trudge out there.

How to Destroy A Cocktail Party, or Create Change

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If I were to give you instructions on how to destroy a cocktail party at the Venice Biennial, I would give you a list like the Top 200 Artists and let the hourdes of opinionated art lovers devour each other. Why is Rauchenberg at number 13 compared to Francis Bacon’s number 12 spot?, etc. To offend even further, the artists at the party probably didn’t make the list! You then might smile oilily and ponder aloud why so few woman are on the list? Chaos would ensue.

If you wanted to stimulate such a phenoma online, look no futher than Jerry Salt’z Facebook page, where the art critic for New York Magazine post a short message to his friends questioning the scanty representation (4% !) of women in the permanent collection of pre-1970 art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Thousands of people responded on Facebook. Normally, discussion of top artists is mere cocktail party banter and the Guerilla Girls have seen their heyday, but in this case the social forum of Facebook took things one step further. Here is a discussion more like an online protest against MoMA.

The screen shot captures Jerry posting the following:

Your comments over the last 2 weeks have been truely amazing. MoMA gave its initial response. Next, I’m sending myself to Venice (yes, I pay my own way, D’oh!). Around June 17 we’ll re-engage & ask for a response from the Curator of the Perm. Coll. of P. & S. Ann Temkin. We won’t talk about the entire museum or new buildings. We will say it is time to install A LOT more work by women on 4 & 5 NOW, no matter what.

MoMA had noticed the thousands of comments on Saltz’s Facebook page and the outcry there was enough to galvanize an official response via Facebook!

MoMA had responded to Jerry, per the below, thus opening a dialogue:

Jerry Saltz (New York, NY) wrote on June 3, 2009 at 1:49pm

This is to all of you from MoMA (you all need to ask yourselfs if this is enough; we also have to ask how we also have to ask how many TOTAL works of art MoMA counted to arrive at its figure; and what gallereis were excluded):
Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation.And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women’s Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you’ll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going.

To which Jerry adds:

Jerry Saltz (New York, NY) wrote on June 3, 2009 at 2:01pm

A note to all of you: Now is NOT the time to “get tired” or back off. You all have MoMA on the line, right here, right now! Even if you contributed to previous conversations, you owe it to yourselves to say something HERE. Keep it SHORT, direct, and respectful. Artists, this is your chance. Even those of you just ‘listening in… Read More.’ Now is the time. I promisde you MoMA will not PUNISH you (if they do, tell me); it will RESPECT you for speaking up. All 4900 of you need to STEP UP NOW, otherwise …

So a comments section on a Facebook page has gotten the attention of MoMA, and opened a dialogue. This strange public campaign headed by Jerry Saltz, art critic by day, Knight-on-Charging-White-Steed by night, is going to discuss including more works by female artists in the permanent collection and is now trying to plan a letter. God help them, the thousands of them trying to decide on what exactly to say, which sounds near impossible, and, to be cynical, I would be shocked if MoMA actually did anything but talk with them.

Still it is an amazing use of social media as its most vocal, and it is amazing to think what is often idle, angry talk could generate something positive. I hope something comes of it. And all this from the man who doesn’t have a blog because it would be too much work…