January 2011

Today, when a painting by a living American artist fetches seventeen million dollars at auction, as a picture by Jasper Johns did last year, or when hundreds of people stand in line to get into a museum, as they did for the retrospectives of Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning, and Georgia O’Keeffe, it is almost impossible to imagine the hostility and suspicion long encountered by American artists. In the early years of this century, a painter of independent or nonconformist leanings was a pariah. Thomas Eakins once replied to a biographical query, “My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect. …” New York was more tolerant than Eakins’s Philadelphia, but even there the art world was controlled by conservatives who wrote off the homegrown talent as insignificant. Fewer than six commercial galleries sold or showed the work of living Americans, and only two were willing to gamble on anything out of the ordinary. John Sloan was not wrong when he concluded, “Artists, in a frontier society like ours, are like cockroaches in kitchens—not wanted, not encouraged but nevertheless they remain.”

S. L. A. Marshall’s claim that only about one in five infantrymen actually fire their weapons in combat may or may not be accurate (“The Secret of the Soldiers Who Didn’t Shoot,” March). But as a World War II rifleman in General Patton’s Fifth Army, I can understand why such an assertion could be true, and it wasn’t refusal to fight.

My impression was that everyone was itching to line his sights up on enemy soldiers, and found it very frustrating when they didn’t show themselves any more than we did. Wasting ammo was not encouraged. Also remember that a good soldier doesn’t make unnecessary work for himself; whenever you fire your weapon you have to clean it, so you think twice about it.

Two months after the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series of 1909, my mother presented them with one of their most faithful fans—me. It took them another sixteen years to come up with their next triumph; and there were to be no more world championships after that until I was fifty. Sticking with a team like that just because you happen to have spent your early boyhood in western Pennsylvania is the sort of thing that gives you a reputation for being long-suffering, doggishly loyal, and probably no more eccentric than, say, Don Quixote.

I may as well admit that I was a Pirate fan before I knew they played baseball; I became one out of a provincial pride acquired in infancy. An older brother helped me spell the word Pittsburgh in the National League standings when I was six or so and the team was in first place. If the tabulation had happened to be of freight loadings instead of baseball, I might have grown up to be an enthusiastic fan of pig iron.

For most of the inhabitants of the small village of Norfolk in northwestern Connecticut, the blizzard of March 1888 was a disastrous occurrence. For Marie Kendall, a photographer who lived in the town, it was a chance to take uncommonly dramatic pictures. During the three days of the storm, she hauled her clumsy box camera, tripod, and glass plates from one end of the village to the other, recording the wild and frigid scene.

Kendall photographed the stranded railroad train and the teams of workers struggling to shovel the tracks, and she was there to record the arrival of the first locomotive when it finally got through. She climbed the church steeple for bird’s-eye views, and she got a picture of a building buried under snow with only its flagpole showing. Her photographs of bowler-topped heads barely visible above white drifts are almost surrealist to a modern eye.

Throughout 1989 the bicentennial of France’s Revolution is being observed in the United States with hundreds of exhibitions, performances, and symposiums. Among the events that will continue into the second half of the year are the following:

L’Art de Vivre: Decorative Arts and Design in France, 1789–1989

is an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City running through July 16.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man

—the germinal original document of the Revolution—will be on loan to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from France’s National Archives, through October 31. It’l be flown over by a Concorde SST that, when retired from service, will be donated to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

Words of Blood, Images of Fire

a collection of drawings, prints, and rare books depicting Revolutionary, events, will be at New York City’s Pierpont Morgan Library through August 20.

Lafayette: Hero of Two Worlds

Many, many authors have written about the Model T, but I’m privy to some information that this legion has ignored. My experience with Model T’s began in the Middle West in 1923 and continued on out to California. Like so many others, I drove only second- or third-hand models. Here are some of the things I learned.

SHIMMY

No writer I know of has ever described the shimmy—at least, not the Model T shimmy. Technically a shimmy is a self-excited oscillation of the front wheels about their vertical pivots, and it resulted from worn kingpins and their bushings. The whole front end of the car shook back and forth, sometimes gently, more often violently. And it didn’t stop—not by itself. A hard right or left turn might just do the trick. But with a very loose front end the shimmy would return at the next chuckhole or all by itself from pure whimsy. As a last resort, you slowed down to a walk; the shimmy didn’t like going at a walk.

JACKKNIFE

On the night of Thursday, October 24, 1907, nearly every important banker in New York was meeting in J. P. Morgan’s exquisite private library, located next to his house at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. In the magnificent East Room, with its three tiers of inlaid wood and glass cabinets containing the printed masterpieces of the world, the bankers sought a way to end the financial panic that held Wall Street, and thus the country, in its grip.

The best-known photograph of John Pierpont Morgan—indeed, one of the most famous portrait photographs ever taken—was shot, almost casually, by Edward Steichen in 1903.

A painter named Fedor Encke had been commissioned to paint Morgan’s portrait, but Morgan, as always, was a reluctant and restless sitter, and Encke was having trouble finishing the picture. So the painter asked Steichen to take a photograph of Morgan for him to use, saying that Steichen could take a photograph for his own use while he was at it.

Because of his imperial lifestyle and personality—and perhaps also because of the herd instincts of journalists —J. P. Morgan in the first decade of this century seemed to many the only important investment banker in the country. Certainly today he is the only one of that era who is still a household name. But of course there were many others of considerable importance on Wall Street, including George F. Baker of the First National Bank and James Stillman of the National City. (In later years these two institutions merged to form today’s giant Citibank.)

Still the best of the many biographies of J. P. Morgan is Frederick Lewis Allen’s The Great Pierpont Morgan , published in 1949. Allen’s The Lords of Creation (1935) remains a vivid and authentic picture of the financial world in which Morgan lived. For a detailed institutional history of the Morgan bank, see Vincent P. Carosso’s The Morgans, Private International Bankers, 1854-1913 (Harvard University Press, 1987). J. Pierpont Morgan: An Intimate Biography (1939), by Morgan’s son-in-law Herbert L. Satterlee, is exactly that, looking at Morgan close up with no great objectivity. The Pierpont Morgan Library, 29 East Thirty-sixth Street, New York, NY 10016, is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. , and on Sundays, from 1:00 to 5:00 P.M. For further information call 212-685-0610.