The week in culture,Friday, 31 December 2010
Excerpts: "There is sometimes a comedy to the cultural life
whichis not entirely dignified. What I mean by that is that you can suddenly
find that your expectations about a work, and your complacent assumptions about
the part you will play in the drama of your encounter with it, are overturned by
what actually happens...It happened to me the other day when I went to see the
Norman Rockwell exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery... The distinguished New
Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl gave concise expression to this sentiment about
10 years ago. "Rockwell is terrific," he wrote, "It's become tedious to pretend
he isn't." ... John Updike, who knew something about narrative, talked of
Rockwell as "always exceeding the necessary", catching rather well the
generosity of the pictures, which have a surplus of detail over and above their
central theme. So, as I walked towards Dulwich to make my entrance, I pretty
much knew the part I was going to play. People are still snobbish about Rockwell
(just read Brian Sewell's blazing review if you don't believe that), I thought,
but I'll go with the slowly emerging dissenters...I had – this is where the
comedy comes in – a mental picture of myself knocking aside the doors of
received opinion like a cowboy entering a saloon bar. At which point, received
opinion swung back and smacked me in the face...To paraphrase Schjeldahl, it
looked as if it was going to be very tedious to pretend that Rockwell was good.
And yet I couldn't immediately surrender my wish that he might be...It's time to
dig into a decadent Russian novel..."
"...I'm well aware of most of the gaps in my reading...But the
other night a friend mentioned that Vladimir Nabokov had once listed the
four greatest masterpieces of 20th-century prose, and then uttered a name I'd
never heard of (or had forgotten, if I once had). Have a guess at Nabokov's list
before you read on. I imagine quite a lot of you may get Joyce or Proust or
Kafka (for Ulysses, Ŕ la Recherche and Metamorphosis, respectively). But how
many of you got Andrei Bely, author of Petersburg, a symbolist novel that was
later dismissed as "decadent" by Soviet literary apparatchiks? It's possible
that Nabokov was being patriotic here, ensuring that his beloved Russia figured
in this truncated account of modern literature, but I doubt that he would have
wanted to expose a mediocre work to such challenging company. And since Nabokov
could reasonably claim a place in any list of 20th-century prose masters it must
surely be worth reading. My first resolution of the year is to set to and fill
the pothole. "
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btw: Nabokov was equally critical (in a negative
way) of Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali.
At least, this is what I understood Nabokov's observation to mean before I
searched after his reference in "Pnin" and discovered
that Rockwell's "Museum curator John Coffey cites scholarly opinions
of Rockwell’s work, including one from author Vladimir Nabokov: 'Salvador Dali is really Norman
Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood.' www.thepilot.com/news/.../rockwell-exhibit-brings-surprises/ . "