THEATER

Pershing Square Signature Center
Van Gogh's Ear

"The vibrancy of Van Gogh’s paintings is only half his story. He frantically worked on several paintings at a time, experimenting with color and form. Time became his enemy as violent fits of madness and terrifying hallucinations consumed his being. Wrestling a fractured psyche with his determination to paint the beautiful, fragile world he saw, Van Gogh revealed his struggle to his brother Theo. ERC’s Van Gogh’s Ear brings the tormented creativity of Van Gogh to life. “If my work is that of a madman … I should prefer my insanity to the sanity of others”

Van Gogh's Ear

The famous artist finds his sound in this new theatrical concert.

Carter Hudson stars in Eve Wolf's Van Gogh's Ear, directed by Donald T. Sanders, for Ensemble for the Romantic Century at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
(© Shirin Tinati)

Vincent Van Gogh sounds absolutely gorgeous. For those protesting that Van Gogh was a painter, not a musician, playwright Eve Wolf and the Ensemble for the Romantic Century has a response in Van Gogh's Ear, a theatrical concert now taking place at the Pershing Square Signature Center. The show ties events in the troubled Dutch artist's life to some of the most arresting music of his age. It's less a play with music than it is a concert with elements of theatricality.

The title conjures the severed ear that has often overshadowed the artist's work in the public imagination. It takes on an entirely different meaning in this show, which lovingly curates an aural landscape to accompany Van Gogh's visual one. An ensemble of six onstage musicians performs music by Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré (with a piece each by Ernest Chausson and César Franck). Through these formally daring and highly expressive musical works, Wolf makes an argument for Van Gogh as a fellow traveler: Like these composers, his art bridges the divide between 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century Modernism. Think of it as a highbrow jukebox musical. Theo van Gogh (Chad Johnson) stares across the stage at his brother, Vincent (Carter Hudson), in Van Gogh's Ear.
(© Shirin Tinati)

Music underscores Van Gogh (Carter Hudson) at work in his studio, his self-mutilation, his stint in an asylum at Saint-Rémy, and his eventual death. Wolf (artistic director of the 16-year-old company) has drawn on Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo, to create the limited text of this mostly musical experience. That fraternal drama is also the most compelling one in the play. Theo (a sympathetic Chad Johnson) steadfastly supports his brother even as he fails to sell a single painting. Johnson bitterly chokes down a glass of wine as Hudson weakly states, "Theo, my debt to you is so great that when I have paid it, the pains of producing the pictures will have taken my whole life from me." He's right about the eventual toll of his art, although the idea that he would ever pay Theo back proves to be a fantasy.

Hudson easily assumes the mantle of this textbook tortured artist. He drinks and broods, sometimes limping across the stage to stare out the window of his tiny cell. "In autumn, when the leaves acquire something of the violet tinge of the ripe fig, the violet effect will manifest itself vividly through the contrasts, with the large sun taking on a white tint within a halo of clear and pale citron yellow," he entrances us with his observations of light and color, like a badass Bob Ross. David Bengali's vibrant projections, all of which are drawn from Van Gogh's own paintings, further illustrate his words. Hudson's crisp Great Plains diction gives the Dutch artist a particularly American vibe. His sad eyes and handsome looks suggest Van Gogh as a tragic heartthrob, one who lives passionately and dies young, following a path that stretches from Jesus Christ to James Dean.

While Theo correctly surmised his brother's talent and eventual influence, scrupulously saving his correspondence, Vincent did not return the favor. Few of Theo's letters survive as a result, a problem that Wolf addresses by keeping him in stony silence throughout. Only the artist speaks, while Theo looks on, often pained by what he hears. When he finally does open his mouth, it is to sing Debussy's magnificently melancholic "Beau Soir." Johnson brings a rich tenor to the role, fully articulating the inflections of light and dark in the lyrics. 

Van Gogh (Carter Hudson) drinks in his studio in Van Gogh's Ear.
(© Shirin Tinati)

Renée Tatum and Kevin Spirtas are the two other actors in Donald T. Sanders's dreamlike (if a bit sleepy) staging. Tatum brings a powerful voice to Gabrielle Berlatier, the brothel employee to whom Van Gogh bestows his detached ear. Spirtas luxuriously plays the foppish asylum director, Doctor Peyron. His one line makes him the only other character to speak, breaking a convention that hitherto set Van Gogh apart and made him seem more alien in this otherwise musical world. It's not a worthwhile sacrifice for a modestly comedic monologue.

Designer Vanessa James (set and costumes) creates a handsome, mostly white playing space. Taking the shape of a bedroom and sitting area, it is actually a blank canvas that the artist will fill with color (via projection) by the time the play is finished. While James has created convincing period costumes for the actors (Vincent's blue jacket and straw hat is ironically reproduced), the look for the musicians is somewhat more confusing. They wear long white thawbs with green kufi caps. Colorful slippers peek out from underneath their robes. This is perhaps meant to suggest the elemental colors Van Gogh employed, but it actually makes it look like Van Gogh is hallucinating about a Muslim string quintet.Carter Hudson plays Vincent Van Gogh in Van Gogh's Ear at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
(© Shirin Tinati)

That design misstep doesn't dampen our appreciation for the artistry onstage: Henry Wang (Violin), Yuval Herz (Violin), Chieh-Fan Yiu (Viola), and Timotheos Petrin (Cello) form a mean string section, with clear-cut dynamics and a smoothly blended tone. Max Barros and Renana Gutman switch off at the piano, wowing us with their flying fingers on this very difficult music. Fauré Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor is particularly impressive, perfectly expressing with music Van Gogh's heavy, seemingly rushed, but always precise brush strokes. There are few lovelier ways to spend 100 minutes.

LINCOLN CENTER

Mostly Mozart Festival
Rose Theater

Don Giovanni
Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer - Conductor and Director

"Don Giovanni, created by Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte in 1787, brought an old popular legend to the stage in the most complex and modern music of its time. Commissioned for an Italian opera troupe based in Prague, the two-act opera melded elements of high tragedy with the low and frequently risqué humor of opera buffa. The role of Don Giovanni itself embodies this dichotomy, in depicting an aristocratic gentleman whose sexual adventures and open philosophy—Viva la libertà!—lead him to forsake the dignity of his class, transgress society's moral codes, and ultimately cross the line from pleasurable risk to destruction and death. The premiere of the opera took place at the Estates Theater in Prague on October 29, 1787; the following May, with some alterations and a few additional numbers as well as a new cast, it opened in Vienna.

Next week's production, created by Iván Fischer with singers, actors, and members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, presents Mozart's original conception of the opera as it was first performed in Prague. Modern audiences, usually treated to some hybrid of the two versions, are accustomed to hearing Don Ottavio perform an aria ("Dalla sua pace") in the first act; but in Prague, Ottavio emerged in virtuous opposition to Don Giovanni only in Act II, with the eloquent coloratura of "Il mio tesoro." A scena introduced in Vienna for the celebrated singer Caterina Cavalieri as Donna Elvira ("Mi tradì quell'alma ingrata") did not appear in Prague. And Mozart's original finale extends beyond the descent of Don Giovanni to hell, bringing together the entire community of survivors for a full and lengthy reflection on their own futures, and the punishment due to those who sin."



“I have seldom seen this climactic moment staged to such haunting effect,” wrote the New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini about Don Giovanni’s descent into hell as staged by the “immensely gifted” conductor Iván Fischer (NPR). First performed to sold-out houses at Mostly Mozart in 2011, this provocative staged concert of Mozart’s opera overflows with musical revelations and dramatic innovation. Soprano Laura Aikin reprises her “standout” performance (New York Times) as the suffering Donna Anna and baritone Christopher Maltman is the titular playboy, dragged to his fiery fate in the unforgettable finale.



This production of Don Giovanni was co-produced by the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Müpa Budapest.

MUSEUM

The Museum of Modern Art - MOMA
Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends

"In 1959, Robert Rauschenberg wrote, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” When Rauschenberg launched his career in the early 1950s, the heroic gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism was in its heyday. He challenged this tradition with an egalitarian approach to materials, bringing the stuff of the everyday world into his art. Often working in collaboration with artists, dancers, musicians, and writers, he invented new interdisciplinary modes of artistic practice that helped set the course for art of the present day. The ethos that permeates Rauschenberg’s work—openness to the world, commitment to dialogue and collaboration, and global curiosity—also makes him a touchstone for our time.

Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, the first 21st-century retrospective of the artist, presents over 250 works across mediums from his six-decade career. Collaboration was always critical to Rauschenberg, and his inclusiveness did not stop at the point of making; it often involved the viewer. “My whole area of art has always been addressed to working with other people,” he reflected. “Ideas are not real estate.” To highlight the importance of exchange for Rauschenberg, this exhibition is structured as an “open monograph”—as other artists came into Rauschenberg’s creative life, their work comes into these galleries, mapping the play of ideas.

The acclaimed artist and filmmaker Charles Atlas collaborated with the curatorial and design teams on the exhibition’s design to foreground Rauschenberg’s deep engagement with dance and performance. For many years, Atlas worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as stage manager, lighting designer, and in-house filmmaker; in that capacity, he worked alongside Rauschenberg on some of the company’s productions."

MUSEUM

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/arts/design/mexico-cristobal-de-villalpando-metropolitan-museum.html

From Colonial Mexico, a Towering Vision of Grace

By JASON FARAGOJULY 26, 2017

“Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus,” 1683, by Cristóbal de Villalpando, an altarpiece in “Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Collection Propiedad de la Nación Mexicana, Secretaría de Cultura. 

Bound up the steps to the front door of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, open your bag for inspection, pay your $25 or 25 cents for a ticket, and walk straight forward. You’ll be in the dim Medieval Sculpture Hall, with its giant iron choir screen — but something unusual, something brilliant, is peeking out beyond it. The usually empty doorway to the Lehman Collection, at the back of the museum, is overwhelmed with dumbstruck apostles, swaddled in silks of rose and lilac; there are prophets with long white beards, backlit by dazzling sun. In the center of it all, beckoning tour groups to his fellowship, is the white-clad, mustachioed son of God, his body halfway between flesh and light.

What you’re seeing through the door is the top half of a stupefying 28-foot-tall altarpiece by Cristóbal de Villalpando, the most important painter of 17th-century Mexico — or New Spain, as the viceroyalty was called when it stretched from Central America to Florida and Louisiana. The altarpiece, completed in 1683, has never before traveled from its home in the colonial cathedral of Puebla, Mexico. From now until October, this masterpiece of the Mexican Baroque — a lighter, less rigid style than its European counterpart, making use of bright color and free ornamentation — stands alone in the Lehman Wing courtyard, and its churning collision of saints and mortals should encourage all sorts of veneration. Not since 2001, when the interior of the Guggenheim was painted black to offset a masterpiece of the Brazilian Baroque, has a Latin American altarpiece of such scale and importance come to New York.

Cristóbal de Villalpando’s “Annunciation,” 1706. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Collection Museo Regional de Guadalupe, INAH Guadalupe, Zacatecas, Mexico 

“Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque” includes 10 smaller works by the artist, upstairs in the Lehman Wing. You’ll see them eventually, but walk down to the basement level when you arrive to view the altarpiece from up close. The transfiguration of Jesus that you saw at a distance occupies only the top of the painting, while below is an Old Testament vision of darker character. It depicts a passage from the Book of Numbers, in which the Israelites are being ravaged by snakes for doubting the word of God. Women weep or gaze in horror; a serpent winds itself around a muscular body on the ground. Moses, whose head radiates with hornlike beams of light, directs the Israelites to gaze upon a brass sculpture of a serpent, wound around a cross-like pole at the lower center, just beneath Jesus in the upper half. The sculpture, commanded by God, will heal them.

Cristóbal de Villalpando, detail from “Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus,” 1683.Cristóbal de Villalpando, Collection Propiedad de la Nación Mexicana, Secretaría de Cultura. 

In your first minutes with Villalpando’s altarpiece, you’ll probably still be working out the cast of characters, whose demonstrative poses and resplendent robes double down on Baroque theatricality, and figuring out how the halves work together. For it’s a bizarre double world that Villalpando depicts, not cleanly divided, but bleeding across its Equator, from Old Testament to New and back. Moses appears among the terrified Israelites and again in the clouds of the vibrant upper half, beside Jesus in his cocoon of light. The landscape, steeply raked like a theatrical stage, is mostly contiguous from bottom to top. The desert through which the Jews wander extends upward to become Calvary, where the cross is cast into shadow and bedecked with a crown of thorns, a whip, a lance, and other instruments of the Passion.

Just what are these two scenes, biblically unrelated, doing together? The literal answer is given by a saucy-faced angel holding a panel, which explains in Latin that “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” In other words, the bronze serpent is a prefiguration of Christ’s Crucifixion and the world’s salvation.

But contradicting the famous ban on graven images in the Second Commandment, in this painting God explicitly demands the creation of a work of art. Not an idol, the brass serpent nevertheless saves lives. The sculpture is a stand-in for Christ but also a work of art in itself, and you can therefore see the altarpiece as a vindication of Villalpando’s own painting, meant to inspire reverence and reveal the workings of grace.

Cristóbal de Villalpando’s “The Adoration of the Magi,” 1683.Cristóbal de Villalpando, Fordham University Collection 

There is little biographical information about Villalpando, whose most important works are in churches and rarely travel. Born in Mexico City, he was only in his early 30s when he completed the Puebla altarpiece. He would have learned the rudiments of Baroque figure painting from older artists in Mexico City and from Flemish prints, especially those after Peter Paul Rubens. After all, Rubens, as much as Villalpando, was a subject of Hapsburg Spain — present-day Belgium remained under Spanish rule until the start of the 18th century — and colonial Mexico City was plugged into a trans-Atlantic flow of images and ideas that linked the Spanish empire.

The 10 religious paintings upstairs testify to the complex exchange of European and Mexican influences in Villalpando’s art. All but one is on loan from Mexican collections, and while it’s a pleasure to discover them, not all are of equal sophistication. His early, Italianate “Agony in the Garden,” from the 1670s, sees him faltering with drapery and struggling with scale, and a small picture of Adam and Eve in Eden would be hard to distinguish from those of thousands of Flemish journeymen. But in paintings like “The Holy Name of Mary,” a glorious, asymmetric composition from around 1695 in which the Virgin contemplates her own name written in the clouds, Villalpando infused the drama of the European Baroque with the bright light of the New World.

Cristóbal de Villalpando’s “The Agony in the Garden,” circa 1670–79.Cristóbal de Villalpando, Collection Museo de El Carmen, INAH Mexico City, Mexico 

Exhibitions of colonial Latin American art are so rare in the United States that it would be churlish to wish this one were larger. (A major exhibition of 18th-century Mexican painting opens this fall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, part of the huge festival Pacific Standard Time.) You’ll still have to go to Mexico City to discover Villalpando’s full achievement, but the outstanding altarpiece from Puebla should be a pilgrimage site of its own this summer. Down in the bottom right corner of the altarpiece, in a flash of gold against the darkness, is a notable signature: “Villalpando inventor.” That proud and deserved designation testifies that an artist in New Spain had no reason to think of himself as a mere European imitator. He was an inventor of his own, and his gaze extended as far as paradise.