LWD Art Appreciation ~ January 2024

I’m going to continue this monthly art appreciation series for another year. I’m still convinced that we can all use a bit of culture and art in our lives if for no other reason than as a counter to the often inane social media we are exposed to. It never hurts to elevate our consumption, right?

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ART APPRECIATION
January 2024

This year I’m changing things up a bit. Instead of poetry, I’ll be selecting a short story each month.

I’ll continue with a monthly artist although we might occasionally explore other art forms besides painting.

For music, we’ll enjoy jazz music this year instead of classical. This is something I’ve been wanting to delve into more deeply and I hope you’ll enjoy it with me.

Finally, for the film section, my son suggested “screwball comedies”. I think that sounds like so much fun! We all need more laughter in our lives, right?

So let’s get started with our first selections of 2024…

Short Story

Bartleby, the Scrivener

I read this in high school but honestly don’t remember a lot about the story. I do, however, still have a picture in my mind of the office in which the beginning of the story takes place. I’m looking forward to reading it again.

“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam’s Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. A Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who—after an initial bout of hard work—refuses to make copy and any other task required of him, with the words “I would prefer not to”. The lawyer cannot bring himself to remove Bartleby from his premises, and decides instead to move his office, but the new proprietor removes Bartleby to prison, where he perishes.

Artist

Renoir

One of the leading lights of the Impressionist movement, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) remains a towering figure in art history with enduring public appeal. Sun-kissed, charming, and sensual, his work shows painting at its most lighthearted and luminous, while championing the plein air and color innovations of his time.

Renoir’s oeuvre was prolific, with some several thousand works in his lifetime. Much influenced by forerunners such as Courbet, Degas, Manet, Delacroix, he worked with contemporary peers such as Monet to explore fresh uses of color and brushwork, rendering texture and depth with different-hued daubs. Drawn to intimate and tender human scenes, his subjects include lovers, mothers, and numerous nudes.

As his career progressed, Renoir investigated different styles and techniques, shifting away from the feathery Impressionist touch to a more robust, classical corporeality, sometimes called his “Ingres period,” and later to monumental pieces such as The Bathers. From the abundant output of his lengthy career, this essential artist introduction selects key Renoir works to explore his innovations in the art of painting, as much as his traditions in pursuit of beauty, harmony, and the female form.

Jazz Composer

Miles Davis

Miles said that he had wanted to draw closer to African and Gospel music as well as the blues, but admitted that he had failed in this intention. Nonetheless, he created his most indisputable masterpiece, containing two of the most popular standards of modern jazz, ‘So What’ and ‘All Blues’ On ‘Flamenco Sketches,’ Miles struck out to explore the harmonic realms of modal music, which he would radicalize ten years later. He also borrowed from Bill Evans, the principal creator of this album, the kind of blue that is reflected in ‘Blue In Green.’ For the last time, Miles called back the pianist who had just left his quintet, and it was Evans’ harmonic conceptions, inspired by early 20th century European music, that dominated Kind Of Blue.Wynton Kelly, the group’s new pianist, only appeared once, on ‘Freddie Freeloader,”’and was stung sharply by this affront: the ultimate touch of bright red to heighten the depth of the blue.

Screwball Comedy

It Happened One Night

Opposites attract with magnetic force in this romantic road-trip delight from Frank Capra (IT’S a WONDERFUL LIFE), about a spoiled runaway socialite (THE PALM BEACH STORY’s Claudette Colbert) and a roguish man-of-the-people reporter (GONE WITH THE WIND’s Clark Gable) who is determined to get the scoop on her scandalous disappearance. The first film to accomplish the very rare feat of sweeping all five major Oscar categories (best picture, best actor, best actress, best director, and best screenplay), It Happened One Night is among the most gracefully constructed and edited films of the early sound era, packed with clever situations and gags that have entered the Hollywood comedy pantheon. Featuring two actors at the top of their game, sparking with a chemistry that has never been bettered, this is the birth of the screwball comedy.