Current Exhibitions: Goya's Last Works & Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul

Goya's Last Works, running now through May 14th at the Frick on New York's Upper East Side, is the first exhibition in this country to focus exclusively on the final phase of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes' career, and particularly on the work he did while in exile in Bordeaux, France during the mid-1820s. This is to say that the work on display largely follows his famed Black Paintings-cycle, wherein the characteristic grotesqueness and violent spirit of his work comes into sharpest relief (as in the signature "Saturn") -- given the spare settings and the unrepentant horror of these creeping later masterworks. The Bordeaux cycle, to be sure, particularly picks up on the latter characteristic, especially in the crayon sketches featured at the Frick, which showcase the genuinely humane dimension of the artist's vision, as his retinue of beasts, convicts, lunatics, witches, the infirmed and the elderly gain not only representation but indeed humanity in spite of their ugliness (such as with the "Man Looking for Fleas in His Shirt"; 1824-5, water color on ivory). Of course there is still social critique (as in "Man Killing Monk," c.1824-8) and perverse humor ("To Eat a Lot," also c. 1824-8, which portrays a gentleman crapping) evident in these remarkable sketches.

Visually, Goya's paintings of this period (which, for this exhibition, include the wonderful "Self-Portrait with Dr. Arreita" [1820] on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts) eschew spatial depth in the same fashion as the Black Paintings, though few match the chromatic darkness of that marginally-earlier cycle. If there is a key to the portraits that Goya limned in southwestern France, it would seem to be (as my girlfriend Lisa Broad, a film scholar as it happens, observed) in his individual depictions of their mouths -- just as the key to Rembrandt's portraiture is in his handling of his subject's eyes. In both, it is possible for us to perceive an entire internal universe, though one might say in Goya's case it is more personality whereas with the Dutch master that universe is the soul.

Regardless, whenever one has the opportunity to see a large number of Goya's -- even in smaller shows such as the Frick's -- it is hard not to conclude that Goya was indeed the most purely talented painter to emerge between Vermeer (if not Velazquez and Rembrandt) and Cezanne. His was an art that looked to Velazquez in particular, but which imprinted his own internal tumult and social vision on an art that humanized often the most inhuman of subjects. As his friend Antonio Brugada once said of him, "[he] had never been able to imitate anyone," and by the time of this final phase, "he was too old to begin."

In contrast to Goya's unique idiom, the picture of Edvard Munch that emerges from the Museum of Modern Art's Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul is of a deft imitator who conveyed a singular vision only in the interstices of his lengthy career.
A cursory survey of the MoMA's expansive showcase would seem to indicate that Norway's most famous painter borrowed extensively from Manet, Whistler, Seurat, Sargent, Klimt, Gauguin, Ensor and Van Gogh (in particular), among others. Yet, Munch was capable of distinguishing himself as a gifted depicter of fin-de-siecle unease, anguish and even despair, as with his Death in the Sick Rooms-cycle, and with such masterpieces as the aptly-titled "Despair" (1892), "Moonlight" (1893) and especially the singular "The Storm" (1893; from the MoMA's permanent collection) where a gale-wind messes with a bride, hands to face, and the formless figures of her bridal party who imitate her gesture. It is in pieces like these that Munch's perspective is clearest, finding its formal expression particularly in their pale quality of light, their insistence of hard, mannered gesture and the indistinct duplication of human features that mark these works. If, in the end, we see works like these -- and the exhibition's structuring absence, "The Scream" -- as exceptions rather than the rule for Munch, then the importance of a show like the MoMA's can be easily interpreted: in portraying Munch as the artist he actually was, not in the artist a few spare masterpieces would have led us to believe.

Best Picture Nominees

The past couple of years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science has done a better than average job selecting those films which will compete for a 'best picture' Oscar. In 2003, remarkably, the AMPAS chose five relatively deserving titles, including my favorite for that year Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Last year, they nearly duplicated that mark, selecting only one not-so-good title, Ray, alongside four more-or-less deserving films (with the year's best picture, Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, actually winning top honors, for once).

Anyway, the AMPAS has demonstrated over the past couple of years that they do in fact have some insight -- some as they did chose the terrible A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Chicago (2002) as best pictures for their respective years. With their nominees for 2005, however, it is back to that earlier dark age -- even if they mercifully passed on Ron Howard and Rob Marshall's 2005 banalities. Okay, so two of the five films nominated are of above average quality, while numbers three through five are different shades of bad.

What follows are my brief assessments of the five titles, listed in descending order of preference. Beneath these is a second list of ten films which I would prefer to any of the five titles selected by the AMPAS to compete for the best picture Oscar, including the least offensive of this year's spate, Capote.


Bennett Miller's Capote is sustained by this year's flashiest (and to my mind best) male performance, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Southern novelist, wit and raconteur Truman Capote. Miller films the script's über-tight exposition in a startlingly unfussy, classically-sound manner, which at the same time offers some sense of the elegance of the film's predominantly Midwestern landscapes. But again, the performance is the thing here, as is the admirable complexity with which Miller paints his often un-heroic lead.

George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is easily the most visually flamboyant of the five nominees, shooting the Edward R. Murrow biopic in the sort of gorgeous high-contrast black-and-white that one is more likely to associate with the previous decade of American cinema. Never mind this, Clooney actually demonstrates an interest in style which is nearly approximated by the graceful cool of his performers, particularly by David Strathairn as Murrow himself, in a performance worthy of the actor's nomination. If Good Night, and Good Luck. doesn't quite match Capote in the former's ambiguity (if not integrity) with which the subject is depicted -- Clooney doesn't hesitate to canonize his hero -- the film's evocation of atmosphere (in the very broadest sense) nearly makes up for this shortcoming.

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain may well walk away with the hardware this year, as much one suspects for what its defenders would like it to say rather than for what it actually says or how it says it. This is not entirely the fault of Brokeback Mountain, which whatever happens on Oscar night, will remain a missed opportunity in genre revisionism (not that anything more should be expected of professional opportunist Lee). Ultimately, Lee's film is little more than a visually-flaccid examination of half-baked sexual pathologies, notable less for their supposed emotional depth than for the incomprehensibility of the structuring relationship. If Lee was indeed so keen on profaining the American Western, he should have attended more to its semantics.

Steven Spielberg's Munich should give the director's more vehement bashers enough ammunition for the rest of their natural lifetimes. How any thinking person could believe that this will do anything to heal the Israeli-Palestinian rift -- which Spielberg claimed on-record -- is unimaginable.
To do so, they would have to digest the morals of a narrative that builds its case upon the psychology of a hired assassin whose internal state has been willfully perverted for precisely this narratological reason (as Eric Bana's character is improbably wracked with guilt while he attends to the business of avenging the cold-blooded murder of his countrymen). Of course, human psychology does not exactly seem to be Spielberg's strong-suit, what with his ascribing of post-tramatic event syndrome to a character that didn't experience said occassion (most spectacularly, moreover, during one of the worst sex scenes in recent memory). Add to this the year's most heavy-handed -- and cloying -- conclusion and Spielberg would seem hard to beat in the category of worst 'best picture' nominee of 2005.

But for Paul Haggis' Crash, which is not only the worst of the five nominated films, but also the worst American film I have seen in the past twelve months. Granted, I am generally successful in avoiding contenders for honors such as this, but that said, there is something truly awe-inspiring to Crash's atrociousness. If you've seen Munich, think of the absence of any subtlty in the final scene and then apply it to an entire script and you begin to approach what Haggis is doing in Crash. That's just part of what you get with Crash, which when its not trading on this or that racial stereotype, offers such moments of understated elegance as Matt Dillon's Oscar-nominated black-hating cop who ends up rescuing the same African American woman from a burning car that he had molested earlier in the film; Sandra Bullock's perpetually angry white woman, who is helped after a terrible fall by the same minority maid who up to this point had been quite often the object of her tyrades; and most astonishing of all, the Islamic store owner who targets the wrong Hispanic gentleman for vandlizing his store and in the process shoots the latter's daughter... who nonetheless survives because of the forsight of the store owner's older daughter. That a film this bad could be under consideration for the title of the year's best invalidates any organization that would make this case -- as it seems to validate the auteur theory: surely Million Dollar Baby (which Haggis scripted) is Eastwood's genius after all.

Had the AMPAS been interested in recognizing truly deserving work,
they would have cited any one of the following ten films above the five they did in fact choose: Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (deserving of its cinematography nomination); Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (easily the year's best English language film); Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest; Phil Morrison's Junebug (Amy Adams should win in her supporting category); Woody Allen's Match Point; Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City; Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (hopefully will walk away with the best original screenplay trophy); Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; and David Dobkin's Wedding Crashers.