Hasta La Ideas

Brooklyn-born artist David Levine, whose caricatures of everyone from John Keats to Martha Stewart have graced the pages of The New York Review of Books (among other publications) died today from prostate cancer and a combination of other illnesses. He was 83.

Levine had a penchant for pouncing on politicians, who he once told Time magazine “should be jumped on as often as possible.” His sharp and satirical eye for chief executives is on display in American Presidents (Fantagraphics). Published last year, the book is a collection of Levine’s caricatures and anecdotes that chronicle the highs and lows (especially the lows) of five administrations.

Writer Bruce Weber has composed an elegant tribute to Levine for The New York Times, but it’s hard to improve upon the words of the late John Updike, a favorite Levine subject, who had this to say about Levine more than 30 years ago:

Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease. Levine is one of America’s assets. In a confusing time, he bears witness. In a shoddy time, he does good work.

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Starting the day off with a sad announcement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s former director, Thomas Hoving, passed away late last week at the age of 78. Hoving ran the Met for a decade, following a very successful, but brief stint as New York City’s Parks Commissioner in the mid-60s, something fondly remembered here in this post by both retired NY Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal and one from author George Prochnik. His entire career was chronicled in his own trouble-making, Met-despised memoir, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in Michael Gross‘ wonderful, secret history of the (in)famous museum and its people, Rogues Gallery. The Times has a nice obituary covering his life, as does the Washington Post and in this entry on New York‘s Vulture blog. Gross, who had spent lots of time with Hoving over the past couple of years in putting together Rogues, has a great entry on his own blog, sharing both his thoughts, some notes he’s received from the people who knew him, and even some words from Hoving himself. And helpful when you’re reading glowing quotes from people like also-former-Met-director Philippe de Montebello, here’s a quote Gross gave in the aforementioned New York story:

He was a lot more honest than the Met’s more recent leaders would have you believe, and far more real than the bearhugs he’s now getting in death from a museum mafia
that disdained him for the last thirty years of his life.

As our recommended tribute to Hoving, we think you should spend the next couple of minutes going back to his 2006 appearance on Studio 360, talking about fraudulent art.

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Back in early October, we were getting a little worried about Oscar Niemeyer, the world’s oldest starchitect (I.M. Pei ranks second), who at 101 had undergone two major surgeries, one planned, one not. But like we said back then, “if there’s one thing we can say about Niemeyer, he’s a fighter.” And how right we were. A Brazilian newspaper is reporting that his recovery has gone well and, surprise surprise, he’s back to work:

The daily newspaper O Globo reports that Niemeyer is working on a collection of buildings in the city of Niteroi, outside of Rio de Janeiro.

Here’s to fifty more years of productivity, Mr. Niemeyer.

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Sad news to start off the day with. Late yesterday, it was reported that Jeanne-Claude, the French artist who was married to and collaborated with Christo on a wide-variety of massive projects that largely involved huge installations, like “The Umbrellas” in Japan and “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park, has passed away due to complications from a ruptured brain aneurysm. Although frequently controversial, the pair showed incredible perseverance with their projects against what always seemed like insurmountable odds, and in the end were often rewarded with praise, even if not everyone passing by fully understood what they were going for (it wouldn’t seem like it, but for some nice remembrances, check out their “Common Errors” page and read through the pages of misconceptions). On the artists’ site, Christo has said the couple’s work will continue, which we can assume he’s referring to their planned work in the UAE and in Colorado. The Washington Post has put together this slideshow, taking a look at Jean-Claude’s life. Here’s a bit from the NY Daily News about Michael Bloomberg‘s response:

Mayor Bloomberg said Thursday he offered his condolences to Christo in a phone call. He praised them as visionaries who brightened the city and showed the world how art can transform an everyday view into something magical.

“It gave New Yorkers a whole different view of the city, of themselves. It helped tourism, but more than anything else, it expanded our minds and gave all of us for a number of days a chance to think about how big the world is, and Jean-Claude and Christo have really always thought bigger than the rest of us,” Bloomberg said.

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Egyptian archeologist Zahi Hawass, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, is part cultural guardian, part Indiana Jones. No television program remotely concerned with the ancient world can resist him. In a fact piece in the November 16 issue of The New Yorker, Ian Parker excavates the man, the myth, the stetson.

“Hawass’s task—in effect to Egyptianize Egyptology by means of a personality cult—is not an easy one,” writes Parker, before going on to demonstrate the complicated mix of archeology, show business, and politics that occurs daily at Hawass’s office in downtown Cairo. It’s a two-part setup, with an outer office staffed by Egyptians and an inner sanctum (the “foreign office”) focused on his English language output, including books, a website, and a newspaper column. It is there where he “likes to take phone calls while simultaneously signing handwritten invoices and rebuking subordinates.”

While I was at the office, a Zahi Hawass Day plaque arrived from Indianapolis, and a European delegation tried to close a deal for a Tutankhamun exhibit. A graphic designer showed Hawass possible jackets for a new book of his, The Lost Tombs of Thebes. (He has published more than a dozen books.) After quickly approving one of the designs, Hawass noted, in the pleasant tone of a person forced to say something crushingly obvious, “I think you have to enlarge the name.”

(Fantastic illustration by Floc’h for The New Yorker)

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