Archive for the ‘Lifestyle’ Category

By DANNY HEITMAN

David Klein

Mental depression is such a common topic in lifestyle pages and pharmaceutical ads that Americans might be forgiven for thinking of it as a strictly modern malady. But the problem of chronic sadness is an old one, as we’re reminded within the pages of Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”—first published in 1621 and still in print nearly four centuries later.

Mr. Burton (1577-1650) was an English vicar and a college librarian, and his thinking was informed by both religious orthodoxy and the more secular canon of classical literature. Mr. Burton’s treatise, like the man himself, rests between two ages—one in which the authority of Scripture reigned supreme, and a newer era acknowledging the power of deductive reasoning to sort out life’s great questions.

Mr. Burton incorporated both strains of thought in his “Anatomy,” for he was nothing if not inclusive. The book showcases his talent as a literary magpie, its more than 1,200 pages shimmering with bright bits of anecdote and quotation, verses and charts, lists and remedies. He never shuts up, which readers for centuries have taken as either a warning or a welcome.

Samuel Johnson, another great chatterbox of English literature, opened “The Anatomy of Melancholy” and easily embraced Mr. Burton’s loquacious manner. James Boswell said of Johnson that Mr. Burton’s magnum opus was “the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.”

That seems like quite a jacket blurb for a volume that would probably land in the trash can if it crossed a publisher’s desk today. A door stopper of a book on sadness does not, alas, seem like the makings of a best seller, although Mr. Burton’s “Anatomy” quickly went through five subsequent editions after its 17th-century debut.

One likely reason for the book’s staying power is that melancholy was merely a springboard for whatever else struck Mr. Burton’s fancy. He frequently steps to the side of his narrative to begin whispering asides that can last an afternoon. From time to time, he offers faint regrets for these sidebars, but his apologies can’t be taken too seriously, since he seems to take casual pride in labeling some of his chapters as “digressions.”

Mr. Burton often employs digressions from digressions from digressions, so that his themes, like a Russian nesting doll, lie embedded within successive shells of narrative. Not long after embarking upon the subject of God and melancholy, for example, Mr. Burton veers into “A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils,” which leads into an elaborate taxonomy of evil creatures, including the question of whether some devils “have excrements” or “feel pain if they are hurt,” and whether there can be both good and bad devils. Mr. Burton’s influence is evident in the narrative detours and catalogs of data within Herman Melville’s work, particularly “Mardi” and “Moby-Dick.” And, as Holbrook Jackson has noted, Walt Whitman also seems to owe a debt to Mr. Burton’s “large and multitudinous” prose.

Casting his prolixity as a virtue, Mr. Burton quotes Seneca: “When you see a fellow careful about his words, and neat in his speech, know this for a certainty, that man’s mind is busied about toys, there’s no solidity in him.” At another point, he waves off any aspirations to popular appeal: “I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else.” Paradoxically, Mr. Burton’s deaf ear to the rules of literary endearment becomes a form of endearment in itself.

“Bringing relief from the very thing it tries to identify.”

In beginning “Anatomy,” Mr. Burton exhausts more than a hundred pages just clearing his throat. Under the guise of Democritus Junior, heir to the Laughing Philosopher of ancient Greece, he tells readers that “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.” Here we grasp the essence of Mr. Burton’s strategy—open-ended conversation in pursuit of a cure, a pioneering version of talk therapy. In a subsequent passage, Mr. Burton traces the persistence of melancholy to the fall of Eden. Later, he points to more temporal influences on moods and emotions, concluding that causes of melancholy “are either natural or supernatural.” He deputizes himself as a tour guide to the human psyche, promising to find the triggers of sadness wherever they might lurk: “I will adventure to guess as near as I can, and rip them all up, from the first to the last, general and particular, to every species, that so they may be better described.”

At first, such a pledge sounds dryly resolute, like the plot synopsis for a science documentary. But as Mr. Jackson also observed, Mr. Burton is often surprisingly amusing: “He is not a deliberate humorist, yet he is often funnier than the professional wag. He is most frivolous when he is most earnest, and when he is frank and colloquial he is most profound.”

Mr. Burton mentions a common definition of melancholy as “a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.” This suggests a rough approximation of the modern symptoms of depression, although today’s patients suffering from this frequently distressing and painful illness would not be advised to use Mr. Burton’s text as a treatment manual. His treatise survives as a literary rather than a clinical accomplishment. That’s because Mr. Burton’s basic answer to what causes melancholy might best be summarized as “Anything. Sometimes. Maybe.”

Mr. Burton’s list of possible triggers is an exercise in free association. Everything from bad air to pork to venison is cited as a possible culprit, and like any analyst worth his salt, Mr. Burton points the finger at parents, too. He brings in Roger Bacon as a witness for the prosecution, quoting Bacon’s assertion that “corruption is derived from the father to the son.” An astute observer of academia, Mr. Burton identifies scholars as a high-risk group for melancholy because they’re so often “exposed to want, poverty and beggary.”

When a copy of the New York Review Books edition of “Anatomy” first landed in my mailbox, I sighed at its heft, greeting it as a mountain to climb rather than a journey to enjoy. But as a friend advised me, Mr. Burton’s treatise isn’t so much a book as a lifestyle—a text that can be dipped into at odd intervals rather than consumed straight through. The index alone is a tonic against boredom, promising instruction in such varied subjects as angels and Arabia, hemorrhoids and Hercules, onions and opium, polygamy and “poverty, avoidance of.”

I savor my copy as the late Lewis Thomas treasured his volume of Montaigne—for “the weekend times when there is nothing new in the house to read, and it is raining, and nothing much to think about or write about, and the afternoon stretches ahead all bleak and empty.” In this way, “The Anatomy of Melancholy” has become for me, like many readers, a small relief from the very thing it tries to diagnose.

—Mr. Heitman, a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House” (LSU Press 2008).

A version of this article appeared March 24, 2012, on page C13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Digressions on a Diagnosis.

By WILLIAM AMELIA

AF archive/Alamy

‘THE BETROTHED’ by Alessandro Manzoni has been adapted to many arts, including opera, ballet, film, theater and television. Above, a scene from Mario Camerini’s ‘The Spirit and the Flesh’ (1941), which was based on Manzoni’s novel.

“The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), Italy’s national literary classic, is many fine things. But above all it is a love story.

This long, involved love story explores the heart, history and the human condition. It is considered the greatest Italian novel of modern times and its author, Alessandro Manzoni, the principal novelist of 19th-century Italy and leader of the nation’s romantic movement. “With the exception of Dante’s Comedy,” in the words of Italian scholar Sergio Pacifici, “no other book has been the object of more intense scrutiny or more intense scholarship.”

Literary historians like to say that Manzoni (1785-1873) was influenced by Sir Walter Scott, particularly “Ivanhoe.” This influence is perhaps overemphasized. When the writers met, as the legend has it, they traded literary compliments, with Sir Walter ranking “The Betrothed” as the greatest romance of modern times. Clearly, it is the “Great Italian Novel,” running through hundreds of editions and translated into every major language, including Chinese. Students study it, people from all walks of life quote from it widely. Giorgio Bassani used a powerful Manzonian passage on love as an epigraph in his famous novel, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” Yet many Italians believe Manzoni’s work is not fully appreciated abroad.

Begun in 1821 and published in three volumes in 1827 when Manzoni was 42, “The Betrothed” was an immediate success and introduced a new genre, the historical novel. This was noted by Edgar Allan Poe, writing in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, when he hailed the novel, then translated into English, as “a work which promises to be the commencement of a new style in novel-writing.”

The novel became the most widely read work in the Italian language, and its clear, expressive prose became a model for subsequent Italian novels. But Manzoni continued to revise his novel and to form in it a standard and style for the Italian language, settling on the use of the Tuscan dialect for all of Italy. These revisions required 13 years to complete, and the greatly improved now-standard edition was published in 1840.

Lebrecht / The Image Works

Alessandro Manzoni

The tale is set in Lombardy in 1628 during the oppressive Spanish occupation and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). There is simplicity to the story, but that’s deceptive. Manzoni’s larger theme is the complex triumph of divine justice on earth, for the novel is religious as well as historical. In his study of history, Manzoni always felt himself drawn to the millions whom historical records utterly ignore—in his words the “gente di nessuno,” “nobody’s people.”

The betrothed of Manzoni’s title are Lorenzo Tramaligno (known as Renzo) and Lucia Mondella, two young peasants who share an undying love in their desperate attempts to marry against near-insurmountable odds. Renzo and Lucia, who live near Milan, plan to be wed by the local priest, Don Abbondio. But thugs of the local baron, the villainous Don Rodrigo, who himself desires Lucia, threaten Don Abbondio, and the weak, intimidated cleric tells the lovers that the wedding cannot be performed. The story follows the travails of the two lovers amid wars, famine, bread riots and plague. It is a journey that reveals religious hypocrisy, sainthood and such memorable historical characters as the Nun of Monza, a feared criminal known as the Unnamed, and the virtuous Cardinal Federigo Borromeo—a virtual political and social tapestry of 17th-century Italy.

Manzoni’s vivid account of the 1630 outbreak of bubonic plague in pestilence-stricken Milan, amid ravages, chaos and hysteria, is superbly drawn. Discussing Manzoni’s description of the Milan bread riots, a modern-day writer in a literary blog touched on the author’s eye for the larger picture and the timeliness of the novel’s content. “Replace,” the blogger wrote, “flour with oil and bread with gasoline and Manzoni’s chapter is a story for today.”

Manzoni’s advocacy of a united Italy made him a hero—some called him the saint—of the Risorgimento, the surge for Italian unification. Garibaldi, the leader of the movement, and Cavour paid him homage. His death at age 88 was a cause of general mourning throughout Italy. He received a magnificent state funeral with princes, ministers and nobles in the cortege. Verdi honored this patriarch of Italian literature with his great memorial, the “Manzoni” requiem.

Born into an aristocratic, liberal and literary family, Manzoni was a mild and reserved figure with a poetic sensitivity. A lapsed Catholic and a sometime skeptic, he married Henriette Blondel, a Swiss Protestant, in a drawing-room ceremony performed by a parson. When their first child was born, he returned to the church he abandoned, Henriette converted and they remained fervent Catholics. Interestingly, religious conversions occur in his novel.

“The Betrothed” was at the creative center of Manzoni’s life. The novel can be found in many of the arts. At last count, two operas, three films, a ballet, television productions and at least seven plays have been based on it. While it is Manzoni’s masterwork, he is also remembered as a poet. The death of Napoleon in 1821 stirred Europe and apparently Manzoni, who celebrated it in a popular and widely translated ode, “The Fifth of May.”

For this essay I have relied on two translations: Bruce Penman’s in the Penguin Classics edition and Archibald Colquoun’s in the Dutton edition. I also benefited from and recommend Natalia Ginzburg’s innovative biography “The Manzoni Family.” Ginzburg, a true light of modern Italian literature who wrote deeply of family relationships, suggested that the biography be read “without demanding more or less of it than a novel can give.”

—Mr. Amelia, an essayist and short fiction writer, lives in Dagsboro, Del.

Bordeaux, the world’s largest fine wine region has just released its 2011 vintage. This follows two spectacular vintages in 2009 and 2010, which saw prices rise by as much 50% for some châteaux. WSJ’s Will Lyons has been tasting the latest wines.

They can build the most sophisticated, technologically advanced wineries in the world, match them with immaculate, temperate cellars, and employ the most talented winemakers of a generation. But behind the neoclassical facades of Bordeaux’s spectacular châteaux, the Bordelais understand that however much attention to detail they lavish on their vines, they cannot control mother nature.

The region’s very best wines may command thousands of pounds a bottle, morphing into international brands and commodities to be traded in countless investment portfolios, but unlike fabricating a Hermès handbag or the latest McLaren supercar, if the weather conditions conspire to affect the growing season, there is only so much one can do to save the quality of the wine.

In 2011, it was as if the rain gods themselves had decided to temper the rapid price inflation of Bordeaux’s most sought-after wines. After two remarkable vintages in 2009 and 2010, years where conditions led to the production of wines with outstanding quality but also enormous price increases, 2011 experienced a growing season where, for the Bordelais, everything was thrown at them. Hail, drought, hot weather when cool was expected, cool weather when hot was expected, heat spikes, storms and rain all battered the vines, ripping through Bordeaux and causing some winemakers to admit it was one of the most unlikely growing seasons in living memory.

“We had summer in the spring and spring in the summer,” said François Mitjaville, owner of Saint-Émilion’s Château Tertre-Rôteboeuf, in reference to a year that saw temperatures rise to 30 degrees Celsius in April, hitting highs of 40 degrees Celsius in late June then plunging in July and August before a stormy Indian summer in September, which, in the case of the Cabernet Sauvignon variety, saved the vintage.

Will Lyons

François Mitjaville draws wine from the barrel for En Primeur tasters at Château Tertre-Rôteboeuf in Saint-Émilion, Bordeaux.

All of this has conspired to produce a vintage in 2011 of sporadic quality, with no real commonality or easy-to-digest narrative. “It’s not a great vintage, I will not lie to you,” said Olivier Berrouet, director at Château Pétrus. Correct. But that is not to say there aren’t some very good wines.

Those who have made good wine have mastered the art of decision making. Picking at the correct time to achieve the right level of ripeness, pruning in the vineyard to suit the weather conditions and, because of the very high tannin levels, limiting the amount of time the juice has contact with its skins. Due to the heat and lack of rainfall all the Merlot grapes were small with, in some cases, thick skins and uneven ripeness. Extraction is all important: Like a tea bag infused with hot water, if you extract too much, the tea can be bitter and strong. It is the same with wine, and those who haven’t extracted too much have handled the vintage well.

Having just returned from a week in Bordeaux tasting six-month-old barrel samples, my own assessment is that this is a vintage of variable quality, a year of highs and lows, when choosing which wines to buy is more important than ever. If 2009 and 2010 were years to stock up on Cru Bourgeois and lesser wines, (as quality levels were uniform), 2011 is a year to buy judiciously.

Of course, tasting the wines from the barrel offers a snapshot of a vintage and it is always unwise to generalize. But from the wines I tasted, the appellations of Pomerol, Pauillac and Saint-Julien have made good wines, with some châteaux producing exceptional examples. The quality of the wines in Saint-Émilion is mixed but it certainly isn’t as disappointing as some of the wines that are found in the appellations of Margaux and Pessac, albeit with some notable exceptions. Château Palmer in Margaux has made a wine of outstanding quality, as has Château Ausone in Saint-Émilion, which could emerge as the wine of the vintage.

In Pomerol, the wines possess a saline minerality and freshness on the palate. Far removed from the luscious wines of 2009 and 2010, they nevertheless have some charm in a reserved, clipped style. At Vieux Château Certan, the Cabernet Franc has fully ripened, adding another layer of complexity to the wine. Once again, this estate has made very good wines, as have châteaux L’Eglise-Clinet, L’Evangile and Lafleur.

The unusual weather doesn’t come without its benefits. It has been good for the region’s sweet and white wines. The cool June and July has enabled them to achieve freshness, acidity and concentration. In Sauternes, there are some very good sweet wines, including Château d’Yquem, which is a standout.

But whether these wines are an interesting purchase for both the connoisseur and the investor remains to be seen. The much-hyped 2009 and 2010 saw price rises by as much as 50% for some châteaux, including the five First Growths (Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild). Privately, négociants, the wholesale buyers who buy from the châteaux and sell to the trade, say prices will have to fall by as much as 50% for these wines to sell. If they do, the wines I have listed will offer very interesting buying opportunities. If they don’t, it is hard to recommend buying these wines en primeur.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

The obituaries for Hilton Kramer, the celebrated art critic who died last month, all made prominent mention of his devastatingly terse appraisals of those artists and institutions whose work he found wanting. It was Mr. Kramer, for instance, who dismissed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial exhibitions as “funky, kinky, kitschy claptrap.” But he was no less admired, if far less well known, for his powers as an advocate. Like all great critics, he knew how to praise, and his paeans to such underappreciated American modernists as Fairfield Porter and Milton Avery (whose later canvases he ranked “among the greatest paintings ever produced by an American artist”) did much to make their work more widely known.

Why, then, was this aspect of Mr. Kramer’s long career overlooked when he died? Because bad reviews always make a bigger splash than good ones. And why should this be so? Because critics tend as a general rule to do their most memorable writing about works of art that they dislike. In the words of Anton Ego, the haughty restaurant reviewer in Brad Bird’s film “Ratatouille,” they “thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.”

So it is—but as any critic can tell you, it’s also harder to praise than to pan. The reason for this is that the language of abuse is vastly more vivid than the language of praise. Evelyn Waugh, who in addition to being a great novelist was a superb book reviewer, neatly summed up this problem in a 1937 essay: “There are infinite gradations of blame, a thousand fresh and pungent metaphors for detraction, the epithets of dissatisfaction seem never to stale…but the moment one finds a work which genuinely impresses and delights, there seems no article of expression other than the clichés that grin at one from every publisher’s advertisement.”

Above all, it’s inordinately difficult to use humor to praise a good work of art, whereas nothing is easier than to crack jokes about a bad one. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan was, like Mr. Kramer, a passionate enthusiast, yet it is his pans that people quote to this day, and the lines that get quoted are invariably the funny ones—very often, to be sure, because their wit is wrapped around a hard core of truth. When Mr. Tynan described T.S. Eliot’s “The Family Reunion” as a “has-been, would-be masterpiece,” or wrote in a review of “Antony and Cleopatra” that Vivien Leigh “picks at the part [of Cleopatra] with the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag,” you could hear the thunk of the arrow hitting the bull’s-eye.

What is easiest to do, alas, tends to get done rather more often than it should, and nothing is easier than to make fun of that which you don’t understand. The first issue of Time magazine, published in 1923, contained this review of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “To the uninitiated it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half million assorted words—many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles—shaken them up in a colossal hat, laid them end to end.” A quarter-century later, an art critic for the New York World-Telegram opined that Jackson Pollock’s paintings “resemble nothing so much as a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.” One could easily put together an anthology of similarly uncomprehending reviews of modern masterpieces, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them sought to be funny at the expense of a work of art to whose originality the writer was unequal.

Once again, Anton Ego nails it: In “Ratatouille” he says that “the discovery and defense of the new” is the most valuable thing that a critic can do. “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations,” he adds. “The new needs friends.” Of course it’s important for critics to explicate the permanent virtues of the classics—especially at a time when those virtues are disdained by the trendy. But the ability to spot new art of quality, and the courage to praise it in print, is an equally important part of what makes a critic great. For all the gleeful virtuosity with which he skewered the second-rate, Mr. Tynan’s claim to fame rests no less securely on the reviews in which he hailed the London premieres of such now-celebrated plays as Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.”

I close with this instructive exchange from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Says Mr. Darcy: “The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.” To which the witty Elizabeth Bennet replies, “Certainly there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good.”

Me, neither—especially when it’s new.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes “Sightings” every other Friday. He is the author of “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared April 13, 2012, on page D10 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Criticism Is No Laughing Matter.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Purchase, N.Y.

‘American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and their Circle, 1927-1942,” a traveling exhibition now at the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, is an old-fashioned and expertly edited study in artistic influence during the Depression.

An august trio of scholars—William C. Agee, Irving Sandler and Karen Wilkin (a frequent contributor to this page)—retraces the ties of pedagogy and friendship that bound a trio of New York artists (John Graham, Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky) to one another and to their young protégé (Willem de Kooning)—a foursome that referred to itself as “The Three Musketeers” and “D’Artagnan.”

Other artists touched by these swashbucklers are represented as well: the progressive Art Students League instructor Jan Matulka, the painter and writer Dorothy Dehner, and the not-yet-famous David Smith, Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. Even the more accomplished Alexander Calder has a cameo.

These men and women, many employed by the federal government and happy to affirm as citizens a New Deal agenda, were more eager to pursue an international modernist one in their art. Nearly all of the more than 60 paintings and sculptures in these airy galleries bear the marks of Cubist and Surrealist spatial experimentation. Works with a populist or regional accent are mostly absent. Uppermost on the mind of these artists: What was Picasso up to now?

The glamorous and mercurial Graham (1886-1961) was the ringleader of this group. Born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, he had fled the Bolsheviks for New York and trained at the Art Students League. A charismatic theorist intoxicated with his own insights into the history of art—the wall text generously calls them “idiosyncratic”—he was the author of the zany 1937 book “System and Dialectics of Art,” which promised “to unite questions of art into a coordinated system” and featured illustrations of Cycladic, African and pre-Columbian sculpture as well as reproductions of and praise for Picasso’s work. A collector of so-called primitive art, he had a peerless eye for identifying young talent.

Graham and Davis (1892-1964) were friends who had visited Europe at the same time. The first gallery has paintings they did in Paris in 1928 and 1929. As Ms. Wilkin points out in her catalog essay, trans-Atlantic travel was exceptional among this crowd and earned the two men lasting prestige back in New York.

The contrasting energies between them is one of the binding forces holding this chronicle together. Davis was the more consistent, having already developed a style of synthetic Cubism that served him to the end of his life. The commercial landscape of daily life, viewed in the lighthearted spirit of jazz and Léger, was his main subject. The example he set for many American artists not on the walls (Walker Evans and Roy Lichtenstein, to name only two) is one of the happy and unexpected take-aways from the show.

Graham, on the other hand, was a chameleon, never sure which great artist to use for inspiration and cover. Throughout the galleries, one can see him thinking of Cézanne here, and Miró or Dubuffet or Magritte or Léger or Gorky there. In “Horse and Rider” (1926), he awkwardly tried to fuse motifs from De Chirico (towers, flags) and Picasso (harlequins). “The White Pipe” (1930), more successfully negotiates a truce between Freudian surrealism and cubist fragmentation.

Such extreme open-mindedness, along with exquisite taste, made Graham an ideal impresario. He was an early champion of Gorky and de Kooning. Indeed, “American Vanguards” terminates in 1942 when Graham organized “French and American Paintings” at McMillen Inc., an Upper East Side decorating firm. That small group show is noteworthy for being Pollock’s first appearance in New York, and as the place where Pollock met Krasner, his future wife.

De Kooning once remarked that he was lucky on his arrival from Europe in 1926 to meet Graham, Davis and Gorky, “the three smartest guys on the scene.” In the eight works here by the recent émigré, one senses him responding to Davis’s egg-beater paintings from 1927-28, a series that stripped down objects to floating geometric shapes of saturated color, and to Gorky’s lyrical, amorphic abstraction. Graham’s presence is harder to detect. In fact, the influence may have gone the other way, with de Kooning’s figures of ferocious women from the early 1940s charting yet another direction for the elder’s painting to go.

David Smith might never have turned from painting to sculpture had Graham in 1932 not shown him photographs in art magazines of what Picasso and Julio Gonzáles and Henri Laurens had done in metal. The next-to-last gallery has an outstanding selection of small-scale Smith sculptures from 1938-39, including one of the first he ever sold, “Structure of Arches,” now at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. (This show was organized by Addison and will be its last stop in the fall of this year.)

Mr. Agee’s catalog essay argues that the classical education in drawing by Graham, de Kooning and Gorky combined with the anything-goes attitude of their adopted country to give American modernism in the 1930s a flavor distinct from Europe’s. But, of course, over the horizon can be seen the postwar triumph of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. That teleology surely governed some of the selections here.

Figures who would become players in that later period make guest appearances. Gottlieb, born in 1903, a year before Gorky and de Kooning, was slow to feel the pull toward abstraction. One wall inserts a painting of his from 1938 of dingy fish houses in Gloucester, Mass., between three buoyant Davis abstractions from the same period. It’s a shock to turn the corner and then face Gottlieb’s “Pictograph” from 1942. The Ashcan School documentarian is now a Jungian symbolist. As the canvas hangs between two small Graham pattern paintings from the early ’40s, each done under the stimulus of Islam and African art, one can only conclude the Ukrainian exile was responsible for the middle-age New Yorker’s conversion to a more modernist program based in primitive art.

Among the many ironies of Graham’s erratic career is that he is now better known for the carnivalesque portraits he painted after the ’30s, when he renounced Picasso in favor of Poussin and Ingres. For a planned second edition of “System and Dialectics,” he omitted the names of Pollock and other young Americans he had once promoted.

This censorious revisionism, typical of the Soviet Union he had run from, backfired. By jumping off the Modernist express before it reached its destination, Graham was barely mentioned for years in surveys of the New York School. “American Vanguards” enlarges our sense of its prehistory in many ways, not least by giving his curious art and pivotal role as tastemaker their due.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared February 23, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Waiting for Picasso.

As the founder, chairman and chief executive of Abercrombie & Kent, a luxury travel operator, the 69-year-old Mr. Kent travels about 250 days a year. While he usually checks a bag, Mr. Kent, who lives in Monaco with his wife, Otavia, loads the essentials into his carry-on, a Louis Vuitton Président Classeur briefcase he bought in 1972.

“It was one of my breakthrough years at A&K. I bought this briefcase and a brand-new Mercedes,” he says. The bag, which Mr. Kent says weighs about 30 pounds when full, doubles as a portable gym: He uses it for morning weight-training while on the road.

Mikko Takkunen for the Wall Street Journal

Louis Vuitton Président Classeur briefcase: Retail price: $4,950

Mr. Kent, who was born and raised in Kenya, founded A&K with his parents as a safari company 50 years ago. He often journeys to remote spots to check out new itineraries, such as trips to see Bonobo monkeys in Congo and penguins in Antarctica. He also spends a lot of time in emerging luxury travel markets, such as China, Indonesia and Brazil, to open new A&K offices.

The contents of his carry-on are heavy on electronic gadgets, including an iPod, iPad and satellite phone. He also packs first-aid remedies like bacitracin—he uses the antibiotic ointment on scrapes he gets from brushing against coral while diving.

For footwear, he flies in Dolce & Gabbana sneakers or Gucci loafers. “They are very smart and very, very comfortable, even when your foot swells on a 17-hour journey,” he says of the loafers.

His best packing tip: Go over the itinerary in your mind in detail, including everyone you plan to meet, before you put anything in your bag. “I don’t think people do that,” he says. “They just pile everything in.” Mr. Kent always brings two suits, “in case I spill coffee down the first one,” he says.

—Andrea Petersen

A version of this article appeared March 8, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What’s in Your Bag?.