Existe-t-il une peinture juive? —Fritz Vanderpyl
Some learned the palette is the devil’s platter,
the brush a crucifix: by law, no icons
no graven images “made unto thee.”
Yet Soutine dries creeds in the Paris sun,
his strokes prayers for pardon. Others are freer.
A mystery. I find no common style,
no ism, as in penstand, nest for thought.
Marc Chagall’s villages, Soutine’s dead turkeys,
Sonia Delauney’s rings, make an odd stew.
In Kisling’s painting, “Kiki” of Montparnasse
lies on flowered silk. Nearby, a window opens
on more windows. Air, light. Still I say
could Michelangelo have carved “La Pieta”
without belief, his trust only in stone?
Even Rouault, godless, hunted by God,
painted Christ’s head slashed with lines. How faith crushes
and builds. But not them. Torn up from dry soil,
replanted, pruned back, they blossom again
like horse chestnuts under a new god.
Their only faith, if one can call it that,
lurks in this day’s sunlit buildings, leaves
that still sparkle with raindrops, and brushstrokes
that catch the glimmer. Some fled pogroms.
But take Modigliani, from Livorno,
whose women, swans, gaze with clouded pupils.
The painter’s stare. Doorlocks pried open,
they blink under puff-clouded skies,
talk at Le Dome until the paint runs free,
then, each to his easel, gather beliefs
like lilies that die as the canvas blooms.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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