Sense and Sensibility

Hudson River School’s Unsung John Frederick Kensett

In the summer of 1872, a feverish sense of possibility infected John Frederick Kensett. In what would, fatefully, be his last summer, the Hudson River School painter seemed to perceive landscapes with a clarity and precision absent in his earlier Hudson River School canvases. His prodigious output that summer– nearly 38 works – glisten with a purity and lucidity that borrows as much from the emerging Barbizon school as it does from his own powerfully unfettered vision.

One of those works “Sunset on the Sea” is as clean, crisp and pellucid a landscape as Kensett produced. It is one of three Kensett works lent to the New Britain Museum of American Art by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while it renovates its American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries. The Met has lent New Britain seven of its prized Hudson River School works and while most eyes will gravitate to Frederick Edwin Church’s “The Parthenon,” it is the late Kensett works that should command attention.

That’s not to deride Church’s grandiloquent achievement. The six-footer “The Parthenon” is a majestic achievement, particularly if you prefer your art at high and xenophobic decibels. New Britain’s own, earlier Church, “West Rock, New Haven ” is a far more compelling and well-balanced work, devoid of Church’s overwrought lionization of the Ancients.

But the most stirring works here belong to Kensett, the Cheshire native long saddled with the moniker “second tier” Hudson River School painter. The distinction is unfortunate, but apt. Kensett never had the bravura of Church or Alfred Bierstadt and he lacked the innovation and sublimity of Thomas Cole. But Kensett possessed a captivating sense of the tranquility, as opposed the muscularity of nature.

Even in his works from the 1850s, like “Hudson River Scene,” (1857), Kensett balances the sense of nature’s power with a Claudean sense of pastoral serenity. The crusty hillocks on the banks of the Hudson become curtains that unveil the still, pewter river sprinkled with sailboats. In the dense, richly textured foreground, lichen-coated rocks secure tall, mottled oaks that lunge thirstily toward the water.

This is a more placid, less brawny work than the works of Durand or Cole, nearby. While Durand was able to give his work a pious potency, Kensett’s luminosity, which grows purer with time, reaching its apex in Kensett’s stirring “Eaton’s Neck, Long Island.”

Inaugurated by Englishman Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School saw in the country’s vast grandeur a sense of divine providence. Wilderness moved from the haven of deviltry to the font of holiness. Artists like Cole, and Asher B. Durand, who believed art was meant to promote “the moral perfection of mankind” invested their landscapes with a sublime sense of providence – the gargantuan icecaps of Frederick Edwin Church and the august benevolence of Kensett’s White Mountains – were signposts for the omnipresence of God.

Of course, with that tacit blessing of the Almighty, came a sense of political sanctity. A country so abundantly blessed could do no wrong.

Except, of course, that it did.

The Civil War brought Americans sense of divine providence to a crushing coda. The bombastic, deified landscape not only did not play in a country bloodied by fratricide; it looked ridiculous. Perhaps realizing the absurdity, Church took off for more consecrated grounds and came bounding back with al sorts of images from the Andes to the Acropolis.

But artists like Kensett, and Winslow Homer, whose magnetic “Harvest Scene” has also been loaned to New Britain, stayed put. Like many Americans, he began to search out a private retreat as a kind of balm for the physical and psychic mayhem the war engendered.

That is what brought him to Contentment Island in 1867. Kensett’s friend, artist Vincent Colyer, had bought land along Long Island Sound the year before. The years spent by the Sound had an almost redemptive effect on Kensett; his paintings grew more luminous and limpid, and his output more prolific. His resplendent “Sunset on the Sea,” a reductive and radiant image of the dimming tangerine sun dissolving into the calm, caressing waters of the Sound epitomizes the still, ruminative peace we seek along the water’s edge. It is one of the 38 images Kensett painted in that productive summer of 1872.

In November of that year, as she was crossing a causeway to Contentment Island, the carriage that carried Colyer’s wife overturned. Her skirts were caught in the wheels of the carriage and she struggled under the weight of her dress in the icy waters. Kensett, who never married, came upon the scene and, horrified, plunged in after her. His efforts were in vain; Colyer’s wife, Mary Lydia, drowned. Exhausted by his efforts, Kensett contracted pneumonia. Recovering enough to return to New York, he set up a studio in the YMCA, and died later that day of heart failure. He was 52.

The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art through 2010.

They’ll Know We Are Chrisitans How?

If

you are looking for a healthy, stable, economically viable place to raise a family, Denmark is the place for you.

Like its neighbor Sweden, it has a 100 percent literacy rate, a 3 percent annual growth rate, low infant mortality and a healthy per capita income. Denmark’s standard of living is among the highest in the world and Sweden has one of the world’s longest life expectancies and lowest birth rates.

But there’s one element neither of these countries has: religion.

God has about as much place in Scandinavia as Bill Maher does in the Vatican.

Though most Danes and Swedes identify culturally as Lutherans, fewer than 24 percent believe in a personal deity, a conviction held by 90 percent of Americans. Virtually no one goes to church in these countries; like most European nations, Sweden and Denmark are devout secularists.

To a Scandinavian, belief in God, says sociologist Phil Zuckerman, is tantamount to belief in Santa Claus.

And yet life in this defiantly irreligious section of the world is profoundly moral. In addition to crime rates that would make any American envious, Denmark and Sweden are among the most generous donors of international aid. Denmark’s government gives 64 cents per capita in foreign aid; Sweden gives 61 cents. The United States gives 13 cents per capita in foreign aid.

These and other revelations led Zuckerman to investigate what in this country can seem an impossibility: An atheistic society filled with morally decent people who make a good living, care for one another, and are generous to those less fortunate.

In other words, godless societies are not the barbarous plains of iniquity some in the Christian Right would suggest, but healthy, happy, productive societies that seem, if you will, more Christian than this one has managed to be.

In “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment,” Zuckerman, of California’s Pitzer College, examines the apparent paradox: Heavens to Betsy, atheists can be morally decent, too.

One has to hope that Christians cannot be so passionately blinkered to ignore what is obvious to anyone who has stepped outside of a church: Plenty of deeply principled people have contributed to the meat of this society without the benefit of religion.

Conversely, plenty of indecent behavior corrodes some of the most religious places on earth. This month, a Harvard Business School study found that one of the most “religious” — states in this country —-Utah — purchases more Internet porn than any other state. The Harvard analysis reported that online porn subscription rates are higher in states that have enacted conservative legislation banning same-sex marriage or civil unions, where surveys show support for conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality.

Even regionally, the “least religious” states in the country (that would be those in New England, according to the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life) are also the safest, healthiest and most tolerant. The states with the highest murder rates, particularly those involving guns, are in the South, the region with the highest levels of religious attendance [Dash] and the highest rate of divorce than the Bible Belt.

Is the “religious” swath of this country just filled with moralizing hypocrites of the type so roundly skewered by Flannery O’Connor? Or are Zuckerman and the like neglecting the cultural hegemony of places like Scandinavia, as Yale professor Thomas Ogletree suggests. “The key advantage of both Denmark and Sweden is that they are highly cohesive societies, genetically, culturally and socially,” he says. “In cases like that, people don’t tolerate wide disparities of income and wealth because they’re [all] family.”

The U.S. has the highest income inequality in the industrialized world. Economists report that 80 percent of net income gains since 1980 went to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. The more income inequality a society has, the more friction, frustration and, alas, crime. “What’s troubling to me,” Ogletree said, “is why do not persons in faith get more involved in that issue. It’s very disappointing to me that even Roman Catholic leaders talk more about abortion than poverty. But classic Roman Catholic teaching says that you should really care about your brothers in need.”

Religion, as recent headlines grotesquely remind us, can never be free from apostasy, hypocrisy, or just plain flagrant abuses of power.

One answer to “The New Atheist Crusaders” might be found in the simple Christian hymn, “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” Rather, it is understood, by our political positions and our volume. It would be a great relief if the strident were to adopt a humility more in keeping with their faith.

It has become more than embarrassing to watch clerics thunder about the ravages of sin one day and shuffle through a perp walk the next.

Still, those who criticize the religious for failing to live up to their own standards of perfection forget that faith is a practice, not an achievement. It is a process, not a fait accompli. <$>It is not law, ethics, morality or jurisprudence.

British critic John Ruskin distinguished between religion, as feelings of love and reverence; and morality, which is the law of correctness in human conduct.

If we could start by being civil to one another, the faithful and the faithless might come to some kind of harmony.

Yeah, But What Is It Worth?

Inside the Rose Art Museum.

Earlier this year, when Brandeis University voted to close its celebrated Rose Art Museum and put its works up for sale, art connoisseurs were apoplectic. Established in 1961, the Rose Art Museum is one of the great prizes of the Waltham, Mass., university and hawking its collection to the highest bidder seemed not only impetuous, but indecent. Where was the reverence, to say nothing of the gratitude for a collection begun with a $1 million gift from magnanimous donors?

Gratitude, to say nothing of decency, collapsed along with the stock market. Brandeis, like everybody else, has seen its endowment crumple under the weight of the economic downturn. Its endowment, like those of individuals and foundations, has dipped 30 percent in the past year. It faces a budget gap of nearly $79 million and has been madly trying to staunch its financial hemorrhaging by raising tuition and fees, paring expenses and not filling positions. But that hasn’t been enough. Like destitute Americans losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills, Brandeis is looking to pawn the family jewels to keep the house afloat.

Nobody who has watched the contemporary art market over the last 10 years can be astonished that anybody with a collection of paintings by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Wharhol would try to hawk them to pay the bills. The same folks clutching their chests in incredulous revulsion helped the art market spin crazily out of control, making masterpieces by the world’s greatest artists unaffordable to the world’s greatest museums.

Throughout history, monarchs who have been up against it have dipped into the state treasury and hocked their jewel-encrusted baubles for a flash of solvency. It’s hard to reproach Brandeis for its rashness. And after all, somebody’s going to get those Willem de Koonings and Helen Frankenthaler. One man’s loss is another man’s fortune.

But the size and scale of the Rose sell-off is unprecedented. And precedent is what’s at issue here.  If one school can cannibalize its museum to sustain its student center, what’s to keep other, more august universities – like Princeton, Harvard or Yale – from doing the same? Moreover, if a university makes a habit of auctioning off its art works, why in heaven’s name would anyone ever donate a piece of work to such an institution again?

The predicament at Brandeis may seem arcane to those who have never been in an art museum, or those who have little use for the contemporary American works in which the Rose specializes. But the Rose predicament encapsulates the pickle in which most of us find ourselves in these recessionary days. Something has got to give – the massage or the meat.  We have been forced into a frugality whose dynamics reveal our values. What really matters to us? “Our deeds determine us,” George Elliot wrote, “even as we define our deeds.”

Marsden Hartley.

When the National Academy Museum in New York decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for $15 million, art lovers went berserk. Recently, the New York State Legislature introduced a bill to prohibit museums from selling art to fuel their operation expenses. Many in New York have still not recovered from the indelicacy of the New York Public Library selling Asher B. Durand’s iconic “Kindred Spirit” to that brazen upstart, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, for $35 million in 2005. One museum curator I talked to could barely contain a sob at the mention of the sale.

Those of us who benefit from university museums such as those at Yale or the University of Connecticut, will obviously be wounded by Brandeis’reckless and ultimately counterproductive decision. But the real losers are universities, where so much of the painstaking, penetrating and innovative research in art incubates. These researchers discover and help define how we look at art, as much as what art we look at. Take a walk through the engrossing exhibit on Darwin and the visual arts at the Yale Center for British Art, or the Picasso and Visual Language at Yale University Art Gallery. These exhibits are of the sort, as Holland Carter has noted, that are too small and specific to be housed at larger museums.

One of the most freakishly engrossing exhibits I’ve seen was one on Adolph Hilter’s years as a painter in Vienna. The exhibit was at Williams College Art Museum and it was chillingly perceptive. It was also preposterous to imagine seeing the exhibit at a larger institution.

The family of the Rose Art Museum’s benefactors has already objected to the “plundering” of its collection. The Massachusetts Attorney General is looking into whether the sale would violate the family’s will. Perhaps the art work will be saved – or perhaps we will be looking at the first in what may be a sustained attack on the body of art that is testament to our greatest possibilities.

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

Surgery, Steroids and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Athe gym, my friend and I wonder.

Are they real?

Has she had work?

How old is she any way?

Can’t be, we say.

We are, of course, two middle-aged women perusing a gym full of pneumatic breasts and moon-shaped buttocks. It is a pathetic exercise, of course, captious and utterly beneath us. But we can’t seem to help ourselves; we can’t believe our eyes.

This season Jane Fonda, 71, returns to Broadway after a 45-year absence. She is, as Meredith Vieira unctuously gushes on NBC’s “Today” show, gorgeous, and anyone who has breezed through a grocery store checkout line can tell you why. She’s had work<. Lots of it, probably, and she’s admitted to it. But as I watched the unflappably resilient Fonda parry softballs on “Today,” I couldn’t help but ask myself: Does it really matter? Do I subtract points from Fonda’s beauty index merely because it’s obvious she’s the apotheosis of good plastic surgery? Can my mind undo something my eyes cannot refute?

I thought of Fonda, arguably the exemplar of the American woman’s body disorder, in the context of Alex Rodriguez’ ambiguous admission of steroid use. I’m no sports expert, but if we take Rodriguez at his word (admittedly a cognitive leap) does it make him any less a baseball player, particularly if we admit, as seems likely, that everybody else in baseball was similarly juiced? I know just enough about baseball to believe that Major League Baseball turned a blind eye to steroid use because the fans loved the results. What I wonder is how much of the steroid scandal was greased by what I like to call the Dolly Parton problem: Our willing suspension of disbelief.

We all know Dolly Parton has had adjustments to what she famously quipped “everything that sags, bags or drags.”

And yet fans embrace her in spite of, or perhaps because of, the plastic surgery. As with Fonda or Rodriguez, what we see is more important than what we know. And what we see is exactly what we want: perfection.

When, after the Obama Inauguration, reports surfaced that the symphonic quartet performance was pre-recorded, many viewers were aghast. They pulled the wool over our eyes, purists grumbled. But the wool is routinely pulled over our eyes —-  from Jennifer Hudson’s lip-synched “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, to Kanye West’s CD “808s & Heartbreaker.” As Time magazine reports, West, like most pop artists, indulges in the audio crutch Auto-Tune, a computerized program that makes vocals flawless.

Where, Eric Felten asks in The Wall Street Journal, does this penchant for perfection come from? “Perhaps it’s of a piece with our age,” he writes. “Plastic surgery and air-brushing are no longer sufficient improvements on models who already possess impossible beauty — now it’s common for their images to be digitally manipulated….”

It is what my friend and I refer to as the “beauty asterisk.” As we ponder, shamelessly, over the facial uplifts and mammary inflation of lithe bodies in Lycra, we are undeniably awed.

These women are<$> beautiful, our eyes insist, even if our brains counter that their beauty is medically enhanced. The question is: Does it really matter? Of course not. But there is a sense of envy-soaked outrage that insists that there is something fundamentally unfair about a woman looking at 71 as we did at 43. Somehow, we have infused morality into plastic surgery; as though there is something deficient in a woman who would resort to surgery for a trifling matter such as looks.

Increasingly, I think not. Oscar Wilde’s perpetually youthful Dorian Gray may have made his deal with the devil, but the rest of us are merely trying to calibrate how much juice we want to inject in a society that demands nothing less than perfection.

Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy. c. Republican-American, 2009.

contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

Miracle on the Hudson — or Not

On Jan.15, at 3:25 in the afternoon, US Airways flight 1549  lifted out of LaGuardia with 155 passengers and crew. Seconds after liftoff, a collision with a flock of birds crippled the plane’s ascent. The pilot, seizing the controls from the co-pilot, instantaneously evaluated the peril and swiftly tracked a course along the Hudson River, into whose icy currents he directed the aircraft.  

We all know what happened next. The jet didn’t sink. The passengers, including an infant, were safe. The incident has grafted itself into our national mythology and granted the hero of the hour our most esteemed bequest: a spot on the 50-yard-line at our venerated national bloodbath: The Super bowl.

Almost immediately after the discovery that all 155 aboard the plane survived, the media had baptized the marvel: “The Miracle on the Hudson.” Suitable for framing.

This is the season for miracles in a country starved for them. Hope, the buzzword of the new administration and the beacon of a new generation, is virtuous and temporarily satisfying. But for sustenance, for girding our loins for the treacherous road ahead, we need a miracle. Just one.

Lent is about many things – sacrifice, empathy, repentance, surrender. But miracles are the tempo that builds the Lenten story. Christ cures the blind. He animates the lame. He opens the ears of the deaf and, perhaps best of all, he exorcises the demons that gnaw at us. In many ways miracles are the intercessors of the ambivalent. They upset the apple cart of faith, and are remarkably effective at gathering adherents. They offer what faith never can: Certitude in world drenched in doubt.

I cannot have been the only one in America troubled by the use of the term “Miracle on the Hudson.” Perhaps it is inevitable that the persnickety would wince at a term so freighted as “miracle.”

C.S. Lewis

Before you answer, a suggestion from Aristotle, particularly useful in my own profession: “Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.”What, then, was the miracle?

Perhaps one of the most familiar miracles in the Gospels is the multiplication of the fishes. We were all taught this story in Sunday school. Jesus is confronted by a vast throng, savaged by hunger. His disciples suggest that Jesus dismiss the crowds so they may return home to get something to eat. “No need,” Jesus says, and gathers five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, blesses and breaks the food, giving it to his disciples to distribute. Five thousand, Matthew tells us, “ate their fill.” And when the fragments were gathered up, they filled 12 baskets.

That, you see, is a definitive miracle in the way we were raised to appreciate them. From very little, Christ creates a banquet. Miraculous, right?

But for me, the miracle happens just before. If you read the 14^th chapter of Matthew, you will find the story of the death of John the Baptist. Herod has had John arrested because John had the temerity to tell Herod “It was not right” for him to live with the wife of his brother. This ticked Herod off, but not as much as it incensed his wife. So, on Herod’s birthday, his wife’s daughter, Salome, performed what we have come to  believe was the notorious dance of the seven veils. So taken was Herod by Salome’s erotic – err, exquisite – dance, that he tells the young woman she can have anything she wants. And what, prey tell, does little Salome want? Prompted by her mother, she wants John’s head on a platter. Herod waffles, but agrees, thus killing Jesus’ cousin and closest confidant, and not incidentally ushering in a cliché that plagues us still.

It is in the moments after Jesus learns of his cousin’s death that he is greeted by the hungry crowds. When Jesus heard this, Matthew tells us, “He withdrew by boat from there to a deserted place by himself.” This is one of many, many times in which Jesus absents himself from the mob, reminding us of the sustenance and urgency of solitude. The only man in the world who understands him, the one to whom he has submitted, the one, Luke tells us, who jumped in his mother’s womb at the arrival of Mary to his mother Elizabeth’s house – is dead. How many of us have endured the anguish of losing our most intimate friend?

And yet at this moment of vulnerability, with the wound still seething, the crowd confronts him—thirsty for his words, hungry for his solicitude, desperate for his grace. And Jesus? Who wants, more than anything, a moment to assuage his grief? What is Christ’s response. “His heart,” Matthew tells us, “Was moved with pity, and he cured their sick.”

If you are a working parent, this is a scenario too familiar to you. You have  been up to your eardrums in crises at work. You have missed deadlines. You have forgotten the Olive Oil at the Stop & Shop. Your car needs gas. You have just lost your closes friend in the world and you would like to tell that world to go straight to blazes. You want only to close your eyes and breathe in some stillness and indulge your reverie and mourn your friend.

But your husband has thrown out his back. And your daughter has a book report due – which is news to you. You have a PTA meeting and your dog has clearly ingested something non-organic.

And anybody would be entirely within their rights to say, as my mother often did, “Calgon, take me away.”

But Jesus. Doesn’t. Say This. His heart moves instantly to pity. His reflex is compassion. This, of course, is what makes him Christ and the rest of us believers the  haplessly devoted. You can look at Matthew’s story and tell me that the miracle is the multiplication of the fishes. But I look at that and I see that the miracle is reflexive compassion. For Christ, kindness is not a virtue; it’s an instinct. And our work as Christians is to make it instinctive for us, too.

I don’t think that God turned that U.S. Airways jet down the length of the Hudson River any more than I think he sent that flock of geese into those engines. I don’t think that a pilot who trains for decades for just this event is a miracle worker. But I do think that when that plane landed, and those passengers tended to one another, grabbing infants, and old men and hurling anxious women over their shoulder, that was miraculous. On the wing of that plane, as ferry boats pivoted on the water and raced to the needy, we saw people whose instinct was to help. We saw people, without regard to their welfare, wrench power out of places they never knew, keep their wits in the midst of fear and understand that survival is for everybody.

Does it take divine intervention to achieve such a miracle? I believe it does. I believe that the greatest miracle God achieves is the turn in our hearts, the expansion of our souls, the swelling of our compassion, the understanding that the way out of despair is too frequently as available to us as a neighbor’s need.

We are in the depths of a national crisis whose denouement is obscure, but whose victims will be legion. For many of us, the world will tatter in ways we can neither fathom nor evade. A thousand little cuts besiege the 300 million people of this country. When hope runs thin, they will look for miracles. And when they look for them, remember this: The miracle begins with you. You are the miracle, and have been since your birth. How tempting it will be to look for pyrotechnics when, we must remember, God spoke to Elijah in whisper.

Don’t look for the miracle. Be the miracle. The miracle is you.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s blinding empathy

He was ugly and he was sickly.

His eyes were too close together. His lips were too thick. His dwarfish body was freakish in its asymmetry. Perhaps those garish dames with their lurid green skin, the ballerinas with the brawny calves, the sylphs with their pointy noses and jutting chins were a kind of revenge. The revenge of the hideous over the beautiful.

One could make the argument that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was little more than a mischievous imp, a malicious asterisk on the wrong side of the Impressionist movement. It’s certainly easy to see Toulouse-Lautrec that way, in part because of his aristocratic pedigree, which perversely diminished his accomplishment (best to have your artists poor), and in part because he eludes categorization. That has been enough to marginalize Lautrec to an adorable freak [Dash] puckish, clever and suitable for framing.

A new exhibit of more than 80 works by Toulouse-Lautrec at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., makes it hard to dismiss the assessment. Something about Toulouse-Lautrec, scion of an aristocratic brood that could trace its lineage to Charlemagne, inclines to the deviant. It is not just the lascivious leer of  “The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge,” a gray lothario inclining toward two tawdry women. Or the beefy jowls of the matronly sister in “At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and Her Sister.”

It is that even the pretty women, stars of the theater like Jane Avril or Yvette Guilbert, can look pinched and drawn, depleted and dodgy. It is no wonder that the standard cliché has been that Toulouse-Lautrec was merely projecting his own physical grotesquerie on women he could never possess. Toulouse-Lautrec, of course, only added to the mythology, proclaiming “To think I would never have painted if my legs had been just a little longer.”

But the truth is undoubtedly more complex. And as the Clark exhibit makes clear, what can look like perversion may have been a kind of tenderness. After all, Toulouse-Lautrec, a gifted painter who studied in the academic tradition, had access to the doyennes of society and might have made a nice living for himself paying homage to them a la John Singer Sargent. But instead, he went slumming, to Montmartre and the cabaret, to the music halls and debauched world of the demimondaine which he so salaciously chronicled.

That, of course is what he did. Toulouse-Lautrec’s work is as much reportage as it was artistry. He captures the vitality and carnality of late 19th century Paris, with its infatuation with the prurient and the freakish. So bawdy and outlandish are Toulouse-Lautrec’s subjects that it’s easy to loose sight of his vigorous economy and masterful use of line and color. Many of his most powerful works, including his popular “Jane Avril,” are conveyed by the simplest, most sensual of lines, executed with three bold colors – inky black; buttery yellow; tangerine. What Toulouse-Lautrec does is strip away the hurly burly and slice to the essence of personality-in Avril’s case, the voluptuous curve of her wasp waste. In the case of Yvette Guilbert, the long black gloves and lanky legs.

The Clark wisely begins its exhibit with an arresting portrait of a working-class girl, “Carmen,” painted in 1884 when Toulouse-Lautrec was only 20. The red-headed woman (Toulouse-Lautrec had a fondness for red-heads) he painted is brutish and vulnerable, saucy and fragile. She is a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and suspicious eyes, which look over the viewer’s shoulder warily. Her mouth is hard and defiant and the straight-on composition gives this sullen working girl dignity and presence.

“Carmen” is one of only four paintings on view and it whets the appetite for more. It is a telling piece and talismanic guide to this show, which breaks no new scholastic ground, but exposes Toulouse-Lautrec as a far more nuanced and empathetic artist than he is often credited as being.

Born in 1864 in Albi, France to two first cousins whose ancestors had long intermarried, Toulouse-Lautrec was afflicted with a hereditary bone disease. After breaking both legs as a young teenager, he stopped growing, never topping 5 feet. To his father, who considered falcons and dogs his most loyal companions, the disappointment was devastating. His mother, a religious hysteric, poured all her energy into him and he ever after referred to her as his “sainted lady mother.”

Well-liked and self-deprecating, Lautrec frequented brothels and absinthe bars, developing habits that would eventually kill him. His comfort in the debauched life of Montmartre was facilitated by a fetishistic nymphomaniac who called Lautrec her “clothes hanger.” It may have been his own self-mockery that led Lautrec inevitably into art that is at once a send up of Salon sensibilities and a satire of the decadence in which he delighted.

Edith Wharton liked to call the fin-de-siecle the “age of innocence,” but there was little innocence in the wantonness of cabaret life. Lautrec is a gifted satirist, sharper than Thomas Rowlandson, more economical than Daumier, more inventive than Hogarth. His own deformities must have made him acutely aware of how much of social life was about looking and being looked at. Many of the early lithographs here [Dash] real tour de forces of color and line [Dash] magnify the insolence of staring. “At the Concert,” with its perverted perspective and gaping observers is only a tad less cutting than “The Balcony with a Gilded Grotesque Mask.”

The latter, an acerbic image of a well-dressed woman peering prudishly through her opera glasses, is both a marvelous play on words and an ingenious composition. Who [Dash] or what [Dash] is the grotesque mask, the Medusa-like ornamentation on the balcony, or the ridiculous woman with the black plumed hat above it?

Toulouse-Lautrec obviously did not enjoy being looked at and his most biting images turn the tables on the gawkers. Often these are women, but very often Toulouse-Lautrec depicts libidinous men, drooling over women half their age. In one early lithograph, a gentleman approaches a girl in the street and asks her age. “Fifteen, sir,” she replies. “Already too old,” he complains.

Is that humor or is that disgust? For Toulouse-Lautrec, it must have been a bit of both. Many of these cabaret stars, like Avril, were his close friends. Avril, in fact, becomes the lens for the empathy that Toulouse-Lautrec disguises with saucy humor. An image of her walking alone, her face hard, with a tint of a lurid yellow-green that suggests spotlights or the ubiquitous absinthe, is laced with compassion. This is Avril after the show, decompressed and sullen, a candor that moved Toulouse-Lautrec, a man well-acquainted with loneliness.

Actresses outside of the limelight, prostitutes at ease [Dash] these subjects brought out the tenderness of Toulouse-Lautrec. The show ends with a series of lithographs that Toulouse-Lautrec did of prostitutes in their brothels, a tantalizing manuscript that scarcely sold. Perhaps no one really wanted to see prostitutes as Toulouse-Lautrec did, girlish and exposed, ordinary, frightened, coltish and depleted. But this series, with Lautrec’s trademark twitchy lines, abundant use of white space and psychological insights are among his most tender and most honest. He is at home here, among the whores and matrons, understanding the artifice that must be summoned to tackle each day.

Breaking Bread and Cell Phones With the Dead

 After her British friend died, my friend continued to send Christmas cards to her address in London.

It was a way, she said, of avoiding the grim reality.

Another of my friends continues to have mail delivered in her mother’s name, to her address, in spite of the fact that her mother has been dead nearly six years. She refuses to make the necessary corrections. It is a way, she told me, of keeping her mother alive.

Since my best friend Judi died of cancer four years ago, I have written her mother every month. I do it because, though we only met each other in those ghastly hours before and after Judi’s death, I have grown fond of Rhoda, whose loss seems the most complete a mother could endure. I write her, in part, to mollify the schism in her life since she buried her daughter, and to revive, too, for me a friend whose death continues to reverberate.

In “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” now playing at TheaterWorks, Hartford, a woman answers the bleating cell phone of a man who has just died, and unwittingly, becomes enmeshed in his life.

As a play, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is a metaphysical farce that has far less teeth than playwright Sarah Ruhl’s more meaty endeavors, like “Eurydice” and “Clean House.” But is the sort of play whose morsels of wisdom trickle back to you long after the house lights are extinguished. Ruhl’s riffs on the ephemeral nature of technological connection [Dash] through cell phones, texting, Facebook and the like [Dash] strike a resonant chord in a culture longing for intimacy and driven to distraction. But in answering the fundamental question: Why pick up the cell phone of a stranger, Ruhl makes one of her more poignant observations. “When Gordon’s phone rang and rang, after he died,” says Jean, the main character, “I thought his phone was beautiful, like it was the only thing keeping him alive, like as long as people called him he would be alive.”

It is a conceit not quite as bizarre as it might appear. Ask anyone who has called the home of the recently deceased only to hear the recorded message [Dash] so disembodied yet so startlingly alive [Dash] of the departed on an answering machine. When is it time to erase the voice of the dead, to dispose of his clothes, to stop his subscriptions, to tend to the innumerable and periodic assertions that insist on his vitality? When, in short, is it time to pull the plug on the dead?

Jean’s decision to answer the cell phone and her choice to spin elaborate fibs about to comfort the aggrieved is alternately devious meddling in the emotional muck of strangers or the panicked consolation of an unstable woman, longing for connection.

“A

ll those molecules, in the air, trying to talk to Gordon [Dash] and Gordon [Dash] he’s in the air too [Dash], so maybe they all would meet up there, whizzing around [Dash]those bits of air [Dash]and voices.”

I suspect that is what my friend is thinking when she licks the stamp on the air mail envelope that will carry her Christmas message to an address that no longer bears the name of her late friend. For her, the pantomime is a way of insisting on the continued presence, however incorporeal, of the friend she refuses to grieve.

I had a cousin once, a devoted and benevolent woman, who lost her daughter in a drunk-driving accident. The girl was only 23, vivacious and beautiful, and her mother seemed to mark time by the year’s preceding her daughter’s death and those after. Every day, my cousin visited her daughter’s grave. Every day, for 42 years.

“She needs to move on,” my mother would say. Moving on is something of a mantra for my mother, an unsinkable woman whose vitality disguises a veiled disdain for those who wallow in grief. It has, I think, kept her going when others would fail.

But I always considered my cousin a remarkable and honest woman. Perhaps it was not mourning she was doing, all those days at the graveyard, plucking out dandelions and muttering “Hail Marys.” Perhaps it was a conversation with her daughter that the rest of us could not access. W.H. Auden said, ”Through art, we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.” How we break that bread [Dash] in letters to nowhere or through a dead man’s cell phone [Dash] is as unique as the souls we mourn.

Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

. “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” runs at TheaterWorks Hartford through March 15. For tickets and information, call (860) 527-7838.