(Mostly) Humans of Fifth Avenue (Main entrance at 82nd Street), New York

Here are a few more of the non-crime faces I shot in New York on Sunday. From the Metropolitan Museum to Noir at the Bar New York is not a bad way to spend a day.

For reference, here's is that other group I shot.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Fletcher Flora, or Why American P.I. fiction from the 1950s is like Late Roman art

American P.I.  fiction
from the late 1950s.

American P.I. fiction from the late 1950s—and I know you'll agree with me on this—is like Late Antique art. Each grew out of a tradition that established enduring standards of perfection (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in one case, Classical Greek and Roman art in the other). The weight of each tradition, part of the past yet still exerting powerful influence in the present, drove some of its inheritors into self-consciousness and bizarre exaggeration as they tried to create something new while at the same time remaining faithful to what had gone before.

Late Antique art

Fletcher Flora's 1958 novel Leave Her to Hell is as self-conscious as all get-out. Here are just a few examples from the first three chapters:

"The door was opened by a maid with a face like half a walnut . You may think it’s impossible for a face to look like half a walnut, and I suppose it is, if you want to be literal. But half a walnut is, nevertheless, all I can think of as a comparison when I think of the face of this maid."

 *

"Nine times out of ten, when someone tries to describe a woman who is fairly tall and has a slim and pliant and beautiful body, he will say that she is willowy, and that’s what I say. I say that Faith Salem was willowy."

*

"I woke up at seven in the morning, which is a nasty habit of mine that endures through indiscretions and hangovers and intermittent periods of irregular living."

In the last two examples, especially, Flora has his hard-boiled P.I. narrator/protagonist question standard scenes of P.I. fiction (the description of the beautiful female client, the narrator/protagonist's description of himself) even as he lives those scenes. I'll save the rest for a dissertation, but for now, suffice it to say that a novel that questions itself and its conventions on every page (so far) is a compelling but hardly restful experience.. Here's the novel's opening:

"A woman wanted to see me about a job. Her name, she said, was Faith Salem. She lived, she said, in a certain apartment in a certain apartment building ... "

Now, let's go see what the rest of the book is like. In the meantime, what crime writers, novels, or stories have reminded you of a period or a genre from another art form?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Detectives Beyond Borders' life of Johnson

Dr. Samuel Johnson (aka Blinking 
Sam), by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
the Huntington

Vacation: 1. Intermission of juridical proceedings, or any other stated employments; recess of courts or senates. ...

2. Leisure, freedom from trouble or perplexity. 

— Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language

I consulted my copy of Johnson's dictionary for terms related to law and murder (you know, to crime fiction), and I found the above — apt, since I bought the book during my most recent respite from trouble and perplexity.

Johnson was a man of words, but I bought the book because of a picture. I'd always associated Sir Joshua Reynolds with those endless English eighteenth-century society portraits by him, George Romney, and others, but this dynamic, loosely executed picture made me realize that Reynolds could do a fine job when he got hold of a worthwhile subject. And what the hell; the society pictures probably earned Reynolds and the others a nice living.

(Henry E. Huntington, who founded the collection where the Johnson picture hangs, loved eighteenth-century English portraits, and the Huntington has a room full of them. It's probably no accident that the most congenial portrait in the room to my eyes was Reynolds' of the celebrated English actress Sarah Siddons portraying the dramatic muse. It was about the only painting in the room whose subject is pictured doing something other than showing off his or her era's new attitudes to leisure. The same room, by the way, includes this impressive young man.)

Back to Johnson, whose portrait hangs upstairs from the society pictures opposite Henry Raeburn's portrait of James Watt (left). Can you imagine a scientist as a celebrity today?  Suddenly the eighteenth century's painting seems more like the century's literature, which included men like Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau writing for an educated public as well as for themselves and one another. It's still not my favorite period in art, but it's a lot more interesting to me than it was before this week.

(Detectives Beyond Borders readers may soon read more about Dr. Johnson. The preface to his dictionary includes an assessment of the dictionary maker's place in the public esteem that, with the substitution of one job title for another, would describe perfectly the lot of a modern-day newspaper copy editor in America.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crime fiction at the Art Institute of Chicago, plus a question for readers

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942.
Oil on canvas, 84.1 x 152.4 cm, 33.125 x 60 in Art Institute of Chicago

"Just then we had another customer. A car squeaked to a stop outside and the swinging door came open. A fellow came in who looked a little in a hurry. He held the door and ranged the place quickly with flat, shiny, dark eyes. He was well set up, dark, good-looking in a narrow-faced, tight-lipped way. His clothes were dark and a white handkerchief peeped coyly from his pocket and he looked cool as well as under a tension of some sort. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself only not cool.

"He looked at the drunk's back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in-down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself-and spoke to the bar kid.

"`Seen a lady in here, buddy? ...'"

— Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

Statue of the God Horus as a Falcon,
Egypt, Ptolemaic period (335-30 BC),
Art Institute of Chicago

"`Well, what did he say?' she asked with half-playful petulance.

"`He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.'"

— Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

*** 

I saw the art; I thought of the writing. But the purest piece of crime fiction here at the Art Institute of Chicago tells a story by itself, no outside writing needed.

The artist: Goya. The paintings: Friar Pedro and El Maragato. The series of six small pictures gives us Friar Pedro (a Gerry Kells or Tough Dick Donahue for his time) foiling, disarming, and shooting the bandit El Margato. The bandit threatens the friar, the friar wrestles the bandit, clubs him with a gun, shoots him, and ties him up.

Friar Pedro Offers Shoes to El Maragato and Prepares
to Push Aside His Gun, Francisco José de Goya
y Lucientes. 1806, Oil on panel, 11.5 x 15.75 in.
(29.2 x 38.5 cm) Art Institute of Chicago

And you know the stock hard-boiled scene where the hero contemplates and analyzes his chances of distracting then jumping the bad guy so he can take away his gun? A thousand crime writers have written the scene in this century and the last one. Goya painted it in 1806.

What works of art have made you think: Wow, that's a crime story!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013 

Killer in the Rain, or What's your favorite crime art?

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, "Shirai Gonpachi," from
The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido Road,
1852, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Today's offering comes from the printmaker Kuniyoshi's series depicting the post stations, or rest stops, on the inland Kisokaido road between Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto.

Such series were a favorite of Japanese printmakers, depicting natural sights and vignettes of human activity. This example incorporates an earlier favorite Japanese genre, the actor print (yakusha-e or, if you prefer, 役者絵). An excerpt from Sarah E. Thompson's description of the scene in her book about the series will explain why it belongs here:

"In both real life and drama, Gonpachi's criminal career began in his home province of Tottori, where he killed a man named Honjo Sukedayu ... This print shows the moment just after the killing, when Gonpachi emerges from Honjo's house into the rain. An umbrella and a rain clog (with a cover to keep the foot dry) can be seen on the ground beside him; the umbrella and swords also appear in the series title border [upper right]."

That could be a scene from a crime novel. What is your favorite art (painting, print, drawing, or sculpture) that hits you like  crime fiction does? Links to visual examples welcome. Here's one from yesterday's Detectives Beyond Borders post.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Big art in Portugal

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

I like art that looks like richly drawn cartoons, whether it's from the late Roman period, the twentieth century, or so fresh that the paint looks barely dry. I like it whether it turns up in a train station, in a museum, or on the street.

Here are an azulejo in Porto's São Bento station (left) of a Portuguese king about to kick some butt, and a third- or fourth-century mosaic (above right) of Hercules in a domestic spat in Lisbon (Painters have it easy. Sculptors and mosaicists deserve extra props for portraying facial expressions in stone and glass.)

In Porto, someone put some empty wall space to good use in the old Ribeira section (yet another UNESCO World Heritage site).

What's good about this art? It's narrative and decorate at the same time. It's colorful, it's easy to read (Look at the postures and facial expressions), and it will make you smile even if the figures in the artwork don't share your amusement.

Long live big art!
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Old and new

(Right: Female figure, attributed to the Ashmolean Master, Greece, Cycladic Islands, Naxos Early Cycladic II, Dokathismata variety, 2400–2300 B.C. The Menil Collection, Houston. Below: A building considerably newer in another part of town.)

You know what Houston is, don't you? It's an intoxicating mix of old and new.

The new I knew about (Houston has no zoning to speak of, and residents say it eats its old buildings for breakfast); the not-so-new I didn't know until now.

The not so new came in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum and the Menil Collection (neither of which is depicted at left). The latter is home to the Cycladic woman pictured above and to collections from the Byzantine and Medieval worlds, Africa, the Pacific Islands (notably a giant anthropomorphic slit drum from Vanuatu and a war and hunting god from Papua New Guinea), the Pacific Northwest, and, from closer to our own time and place, rooms devoted to Cy Twombly and surrealism.

The Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum offers an evocative setting for some thirteenth-century church paintings that have an interesting history.

The two museums are recent foundations, both having opened since 1987. The founders came from oil-drilling money. It's always good to reflect on the wealth and power that brought great art collections together, whether in the museums and the National Gallery founded by the railroad and steel barons from Boston to Washington, or in the Vatican museums. It's one more layer of pulsating life behind all that art, and it's nice to know that rich people can find good things to do with their money.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The simple art of murder

(Sidney Nolan, Death of Constable Scanlon, 1946, National Gallery of Australia)

A comment about the Carnival of the Criminal Minds' current stop in Australia got me thinking about Ned Kelly. That, in turn, cast my mind back to some memorable crime art I saw a few years ago: Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings, chilling and whimsical at the same time.

What examples can you think of? What other fine crime art ornaments the world's museums, galleries, churches and public squares?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008