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Object Lesson
Two landscapes by Gainsborough
September/October 2005
by Scott Wilcox
Scott Wilcox is curator of prints and drawings, and Angus Trumble is curator of paintings and sculpture, at the Yale Center for British Art.
In a letter to a fellow painter, Thomas Gainsborough complained: “I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.” Though he was one of the greatest portraitists of his age, Gainsborough always preferred to paint—and draw—the landscape.
This splendid landscape drawing (top), acquired by the Yale Center for British Art in 2004, is notable not only for its quality but also for corresponding almost exactly to a fine oil painting long in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Center. We know Gainsborough made sketches outdoors and then created his final composition in the studio, often with the aid of a model he constructed with various props: sand, reflecting glasses, and, for the trees, broccoli. But despite the obvious similarities between the drawing and the oil painting, the drawing was almost certainly not a preparatory study for the painting. It is too finished, too plainly an artwork for its own sake. Which then came first?
From the beginning of his career, Gainsborough had enjoyed making studies and drawings of real places, usually in his native Suffolk. But increasingly he devised perfectly balanced compositions that paid tribute to the “classical” landscape tradition of the seventeenth century, especially the work of the great painter Claude Lorrain. While drawings such as this one were occasionally a record or replica of a painting, they were more frequently freestanding works of art, often presented as gifts to his friends. On this basis, then, one might plausibly argue that the drawing followed the painting.
Two distinct changes to the composition, however, suggest the opposite. In the drawing, the three cows and goat in the foreground form a relatively schematic group compared with the corresponding part of the painting, which is livelier and more complicated. Two of the cows are no longer permitted to stand squarely back-to-back. Meanwhile, the rest of the herd, a more distant bovine trio merely suggested in the drawing, is positioned with far greater care on the crest of the foreground ridge. In the circumstances, it seems likelier that Gainsborough’s thinking developed (with some satisfaction) from the drawing toward the painting, and not in the other direction.
Not the New Haven you remember
Anthony Weiss '02 writes and teaches in New York.
Int. library of the Yale Club of New York—Summer
A trim, classical room. The walls are lined with books. On the ceiling, plaster putti frolic in pastoral scenes. A brass plaque commands, “Silence.” The sounds of midtown Manhattan traffic drift in from outside.
Alumni sit in rows of straight-backed chairs, balancing glasses of wine and plates of cheese and fruit. Green programs announce the evening’s performance: Shattering, an original screenplay.
The actors, led by Elizabeth Newman '02, author of Shattering, enter to polite applause. Newman, elegant in a simple black dress, explains that Shattering is a screenplay, and thus much of what would be shown must instead be described. She, as the narrator, will describe it.
With that, she begins, and the audience is transported, as if by Metro-North train, to …
Int. Greater New Haven, CT
Artist Julian Pierce awakes to find himself upon the floor of his studio. His hand is bleeding, cut by shards of glass.
Julian is a rising young sculptor. A Yale graduate, he still lives in New Haven—not the prosaic, restaurant-ridden city Elis know, but an ominous, unsettled place where madness and deception lurk in the shadows. He works in the hermetic squalor of an abandoned warehouse by I-95. With the help of friend and fellow alumnus Fred Grove, Julian sneaks into the Yale–New Haven Hospital morgue to make anatomical sketches for his glass sculptures.
While sketching in the morgue, Julian accidentally discovers the corpse of a beautiful young woman. She inspires a dream, which in turn inspires a new work: Ophelia, a woman drowning. One day, the somewhat livelier Annabelle Stevenson wanders into Julian’s studio. She works for the Whitney Museum, and she has come to scout Julian’s work for a new show.
Lest anyone mistake Shattering for autobiography, Newman is not waiting for success to wander into her life. In the six months since she graduated from Boston University film school, Newman has written two full-length screenplays (including Shattering) and is setting up her own production company. She is currently looking to find backing for Shattering. She would like to direct the script herself, but she is pragmatic: “Sometimes people make the mistake of clinging too tightly to a script.” If need be, she will sell it and move on.
For Julian, alas, success is not so easy. As the green programs warn us: “Jagged is the edge between insight and insanity.” A young woman identical to the one in the morgue is found murdered in New Haven, becoming a tabloid sensation. Annabelle reads one of the tabloid stories as she is walking through the tunnel of New Haven’s Union Station, and she accuses Julian of inventing his dream. Only it doesn’t make sense—Julian had never seen the papers, didn’t know of the murder.
Newman reads the elaborate descriptions with gusto. Her expression brightens and darkens with each nuance. The audience listens, with rapt attention. As the screenplay comes to its final climax, her voice rises, intensifies. There is no dialogue now, only an orgy of imagery.
The girl is before Julian, drowning. She is staring at him. He moves towards her, grabs her …
The end of the script: Newman describes, crisply, the final image. The audience is silent for a moment, then breaks into applause. The actors stand, and Newman beams. Friends come forward to congratulate Newman and the actors. The rest of the audience drifts out the door and into the city.
Saloon singing 101
Ron Schachter '77 contributes to Yankee magazine and National Public Radio.
It’s nearly 10 p.m. in a Yale basement as a small group of casually dressed cabaret students—looking like it’s been a long day—take turns rehearsing in front of each other and three instructors, who offer a chorus of constructive criticism.
One young woman makes her first attempt at “A Quiet Thing,” by Broadway songwriters Kander and Ebb. “At the end of every phrase, you broke eye contact,” notes producer Erv Raible. “You were shaking your head a lot,” adds cabaret legend Julie Wilson.
Another student takes a lyrical stab at the love song “In a Restaurant by the Sea,” by cabaret composer John Bucchino. “Why the choice to do this song so little and so quiet?” Raible asks her. “Singing softly takes the same energy as belting it out.”
“I didn’t hear the words. Would you speak the song for us?” Wilson suggests. “Most people do not sing distinctly,” she explains later. “I always nail them on that. If you do not understand the story they’re telling, what’s the point?”
Since 2003, the Cabaret Conference at Yale has established itself as a kind of boot camp for cabaret performers, with cabaret luminaries such as Wilson, Sally Mayes, and Heather MacRae serving as the drill sergeants. It all culminates with a fully rehearsed live performance on the last night of the week-long conference. Besides the three-hour group singing sessions (twice daily), the 36 participants fill their 14-hour days with workshops and lectures on topics ranging from musical comedy to the business side of cabaret. Singers get instruction on scripting the patter they share with the audience between songs, and extended image consultations cover everything from effective wardrobe and publicity photos to “professional behavior.”
“That includes what you look like out there and how you go about your business, and not becoming a high-maintenance performer who turns off club owners,” explains Raible, the conference’s executive director and a former club owner himself.
The 36 student-singers at this year’s August conference were culled from 150 who had auditioned in Toronto, London, and a dozen U.S. cities. They arrived with uniformly grade-A voices—but a range of performing backgrounds, ages (mid-20s to mid-50s), and day jobs (a network TV producer, a fragrance company executive, a law school dean).
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime program. I don’t think you could get such a concentrated, intensive look at cabaret if you weren’t here,” says Sharon Hunter, who works in musical theater around St. Louis and recently started singing regularly in jazz bars. “The challenge is to go back and see what the market is for a cabaret act.”
Bright and early in another rehearsal studio, the students run through selections from Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell. Teachers Lina Koutrakos and Sharon McNight, better known for their work in New York’s major clubs and on Broadway respectively, are as busy as tailors—paring the refrains in one song, bringing down the key in another, cutting out distracting physical movements, and steering the singers closer to their audience.
“Think about what you’re saying to us,” Koutrakos urges one young performer. “You’re looking up at the heavens. Don’t do that. We want you here.”
In fact, the emphasis all week was on relating to the lyrics in the songs and to the people in the audience. “There’s something about being right in front of them, in the flesh,” says Wilson, whose singing career has spanned almost 60 years. “If I don’t have a specific person I know, I will pretend that I know someone and stay there with him and sing just to him. And the whole audience gets it.”
The lessons were not lost on student John Lynn, who works as a vocal coach in Minneapolis. “They keep saying, 'Quit singing!' It’s all about the story, communication, humor, and eye contact, and about taking more risks. There was so much homework I wasn’t doing. To get up and just sing a song almost feels disrespectful now.”
In defense of free speech
Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment
Floyd Abrams '59LLB
Viking, $25.95
Reviewed by Alan M. Dershowitz '62LLB, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Floyd Abrams has lived—and continues to live—a remarkable career in the law as one of the world’s primary legal defenders of free speech. Speaking Freely recounts that career, the many wins along with the occasional losses. It recreates vivid cross-examinations, contentious oral arguments, and remarkable strategy sessions. It brings the First Amendment alive in presenting the cases and controversies that have given it meaning over the past 35 years.
Although Abrams has litigated First Amendment cases for a third of a century, that relatively brief period in our history has been central to the development of free speech doctrine. Contemporary readers will have difficulty believing how narrow—really non-existent—the First Amendment was in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1915, the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. authored a decision that was fairly representative of the times: the majority opinion in Fox v. Washington, one of the silliest and most repressive decisions ever penned in this or any other democratic country. In that case, an editor was sentenced to jail under a Washington state law making it a crime “to encourage or advocate disrespect for law,” because he had written an editorial that criticized “opponents of nude swimming.” When rebuked for his cavalier attitude toward freedom of speech, Holmes told Judge Learned Hand that a state should be as free to protect itself against dangerous opinions as against the spread of smallpox: “free speech stands no differently than freedom from vaccination.”
Holmes' views changed over the years; in 1919, he would wax eloquent upon the concept that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The Supreme Court’s view changed also. Floyd Abrams documents that change both as participant and analyst, and he does so in a readable and accessible style, combining brilliant constitutional analysis with a telling narrative.
The highlight of Abrams’s career, and the opening section of this book, is the Pentagon Papers case. In its well-known ruling, the Supreme Court refused to enjoin Abrams’s client, the New York Times, from publishing excerpts of a classified document about the origins of the Vietnam War—excerpts the government claimed would endanger the security of the United States. Abrams’s function in that groundbreaking case was secondary to that of then-Yale law professor Alexander Bickel, but he played a central role in devising the winning strategy.
Although the Pentagon Papers case is celebrated by the media and all First Amendment advocates, this was not a case that could be won on the basis of free-speech “absolutism”—that is, the argument that there can be no limitations on publication, even in situations posing grave danger to the security of a nation. A far more nuanced principle had to be presented to the court in order to secure the needed majority. An exchange between Justice Potter Stewart '37, '41LLB, and Professor Bickel illustrates this point. Suppose, Stewart said, that when the justices of the court returned to their chambers and opened up the sealed record, they found something in the Pentagon Papers whose disclosure would cause the deaths of a hundred innocent young soldiers; what should they do?
A: I would only say, as to that, that it is a case in which in the absence of a statute, I suppose most of us would say —
Q: You would say the Constitution requires that it be published, and that these men die, is that it?
A: No. I am afraid that my inclinations to humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment in a case of that sort.
The High Court ruled by a 6–3 majority for the Times, and Americans were free to read the Pentagon Papers. Abrams believes that it was Bickel’s non-absolutist answer that garnered the two crucial votes. (No one died as a result of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Indeed, many lives were almost certainly saved, because the publication probably hastened the end of the war.)
Because Abrams represents real clients with real financial interests, rather than abstract principles alone, his cases well demonstrate the nuances of freedom of speech. For example, his chapter on campaign finance reform—in which he describes his constitutional opposition to “do-gooder” legislation that limited corporate and other contributions to political campaigns—demonstrates that an expansive view of the First Amendment does not always produce “liberal” results. Then, too, his occasional conflicts with the American Civil Liberties Union are revealing and educational. In the Pentagon Papers case, the ACLU was unhappy with Bickel’s failure to argue an absolutist position; it filed a special post-argument memorandum disavowing what Bickel had called his “inclinations to humanity.” The ACLU’s primary “client” is the First Amendment itself rather than the media who use and sometimes abuse it, whereas Abrams necessarily had to place the interests of his institutional clients over any doctrine or ideology. Perhaps for this reason, Speaking Freely is more about the pragmatics of the First Amendment than about its theoretical underpinnings or original understandings.
Abrams’s book speaks to the cases rather than the man behind them. But there is more to the story than the cases, important as they have been. There is, too, the enormous influence Floyd Abrams has had on the legal profession and lawyers. For two reasons that may not be obvious to readers of this book, he is a wonderful role model for aspiring young lawyers.
One of these is that Floyd Abrams was the first lawyer to turn the defense of the First Amendment into a profitable legal business. That is a very good thing, both for the First Amendment and for the legal profession. Before Abrams, the defense of the First Amendment was primarily in the hands of do-gooders, amateurs, and general lawyers who happened to represent media clients. Few, if any, law firms had a First Amendment practice with First Amendment clients and repeat business. Abrams changed all that. He built a lucrative practice around his First Amendment work and attracted brilliant young lawyers to his firm based on that practice. He showed young lawyers that they could do good and do well at the same time. His defense of media giants was certainly lucrative to him and his firm, but it also benefited all Americans who care about the truth. The defense of freedom of speech was no longer a pro bono, part-time job for amateurs and zealots alone. It had become an important branch of big-firm practice.
The second reason is that Abrams showed how to turn good luck into a good career. Students always ask me how much of success is luck and how much is skill. I tell them that good luck is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. Abrams demonstrated this in the Pentagon Papers case. He would be the first to acknowledge that his selection by Bickel for that case was largely a fortuity; Bickel had been Abrams’s professor at Yale Law School and they had worked on a case for the Times together, several years after Abrams had graduated. Abrams took full advantage of that fortuity with his hard work, his brilliance—and his foresight in understanding the commercial potentials of a First Amendment practice. Most other lawyers would have been satisfied to chalk up the win and have something to tell their grandchildren about; Abrams built on that case and attracted a client base that is the envy of the legal profession.
Today there is rarely a major First Amendment case—from Rudolph Giuliani’s failed efforts to shut down an art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, to the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to disclose a source—in which Floyd Abrams is not a central player. It is difficult to imagine who could possibly replace him when he retires from practice. But because he has constructed a viable practice out of the defense of free speech, we can be confident that he will leave the First Amendment in good hands.
In Print
The Ape in the Corner Office: Understanding the Office Beast in All of Us
Crown Business/Random House, $25.00
Richard Conniff '73
Businesspeople may not enjoy being compared to “bare-ass monkeys,” but in Conniff’s fascinating examination of the natural history of the corporation, it’s easy to see the resemblance. Conniff, a National Magazine Award–winning writer (and frequent contributor to this magazine) and a survivor of the executive wars, uses insights from animal behavior research to show that success is more about cooperation than carnage.
Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $25.00
Jacques Leslie '68
“We erect dams assuming that they are eternal,” says Leslie. “Yet all dams die.” In a thorough look at the social, environmental, and economic issues surrounding the modern-day equivalent of the Great Pyramids, the author attempts to “see dams whole.” Leslie examines dam-building projects in India, South Africa, and Australia and the people implementing them or, in some cases, blocking them.
The Breast Cancer Book: What You Need to Know to Make Informed Decisions
Yale University Press, $15.95
Ruth Grobstein, MD, '57PhD
A breast cancer diagnosis is terrifying, but if it happens, says Grobstein, a respected oncologist, “Do not panic. It may be hard to believe, but you have time.” In an authoritative, reassuring, and easy-to-understand book, the author explains “how to explore your options, discuss them thoroughly, and make the right [treatment] decision for you.”
The Tender Bar
Hyperion, $23.95
J. R. Moehringer '86
In mythology, children are raised by wolves. In this exquisite memoir, Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, recounts his upbringing in a Long Island bar. The book, by turns hilarious and poignant, evokes the fascinating characters who became the author’s surrogate fathers, as well as his coming of age on a bar stool—and at Yale, the New York Times, and the home fashions department of Lord & Taylor.
Break, Blow, Burn
Pantheon Books/Random House, $20.00)
Camille Paglia '74PhD
“Few literature professors know how to 'read' anymore,” laments Paglia, “and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students.” But America’s premier literary and cultural provocateuse does, and in these close readings of masterworks—Shakespeare’s sonnets to Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”—she shows how to interpret poetry and why the poetic “art of condensation” still matters. The title of the book is from John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV.”
Taste: A Literary History
Yale University Press, $35.00
Denise Gigante '87
In English literature, there is a connection between food that tastes good and the gourmand’s good taste. In this exploration of writing from Milton to Dickens, Gigante shows how the simple act of tasting a meal became a metaphor for refined judgment in art, clothes, cuisine, and other aesthetic aspects of life.
More Books by Yale Authors
Floyd Abrams 1979LLB
Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment
Viking, $25.95
W. John Archer 1968
Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000
University of Minnesota Press, $39.95
Ian Ayres, William K. Townsend Professor of Law, Yale Law School, and Jennifer Gerarda Brown, Senior Research Scholar, Yale Law School
Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights
Princeton University Press, $24.95
Ian Ayres, William K. Townsend Professor of Law, Yale Law School, and Gregory Klass
Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent
Yale University Press, $45.00
Ulrich Baer 1995PhD, Translator and Editor
The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
Modern Library, $19.95
H. H. Bradshaw 1958
Execution Denied: The Story of Marshal Ney, Napoleon’s “Bravest of the Brave"
Publish America, $19.95
Elise Broach 1985, 1990MPhil
Shakespeare’s Secret
Henry Holt, $16.95
Nicholas Brown 1952PhD
The Renewal of Society through Education: A Series of Personal Essays
Vantage Press, $8.95
Carol Bundy 1980
The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell Jr.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $30.00
Stephen Burt 2000PhD, Editor
Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden
Columbia University Press, $34.50
William B. Carey 1950, MD
Understanding Your Child’s Temperament
Xlibris, $18.69
George W. Carrington 1942
Adventures and Misadventures: The Life and Some of the Times of George W. Carrington, USMC
Vantage Press, $14.95
Nan Cohen 1989
Rope Bridge: Poems
Cherry Grove Collections, $17.00
Rachel Devlin 1998PhD
Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture
University of North Carolina Press, $49.95
Robert H. Ferrell 1951PhD
Five Days in October: The Lost Battalion of World War I
University of Missouri Press, $19.95
Stanley Flink 1945W, Editor
Sequels and Second Acts: The Metamorphosis of Yale 1945W
Aurelian Honor Society, $25.00
Walter Frisch 1973
German Modernism: Music and the Arts
University of California Press, $45.00
Denise Gigante 1987
Taste: A Literary History
Yale University Press, $35.00
Lori D. Ginzberg 1985PhD
Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York
University of North Carolina Press, $49.95
Ruth Grobstein 1957PhD, MD
The Breast Cancer Book: What You Need to Know to Make Informed Decisions
Yale University Press, $15.95
Bruce Hesselbach 1972
High Ledges, Green Mountains: My Section Hike of Vermont’s Long Trail
Bondcliff Books, $18.95
Danian Hu 2001PhD
China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917-1979
Harvard University Press, $39.95
Jill Kargman 1995 and Carrie Karasyov
Wolves in Chic Clothing
Doubleday, $21.95
Colleen Kinder 2003
Delaying the Real World: A Twentysomething’s Guide to Seeking Adventure
Running Press, $12.95
Harlan Krumholz 1980BS, Professor of Cardiology, Epidemiology, and Public Health, Yale School of Medicine
The Expert Guide to Beating Heart Disease: What You Must Absolutely Know
HarperResource, $14.95
Stephen Lassonde, Lecturer in History, and Dean, Calhoun College
Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870-1940
Yale University Press, $45.00
Sydney Lea 1964, 1972PhD
Ghost Pain: Poems
Sarabande Books, $20.95
Thomas E. Lovejoy 1964BS, 1971PhD, and Lee Hannah, Editors
Climate Change and Biodiversity
Yale University Press, $65.00
Julia Reinhard Lupton 1989PhD
Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology
University of Chicago Press, $35.00
Patrick J. Lynch, Director, Yale School of Medicine Media Services, and Noble S. Proctor
A Field Guide to North Atlantic Wildlife: Marine Mammals, Seabirds, Fish, and Other Sea Life
Yale University Press, $19.95
Samuel A. MacDonald 1995
The Agony of An American Wilderness: Loggers, Environmentalists, and the Struggle for Control of a Forgotten Forest
Rowman and Littlefield, $21.95
Dale B. Martin 1988PhD, Professor of Religious Studies, and Patricia Cox Miller, Editors
The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography
Duke University Press, $24.00
Christie McDonald 1969PhD, Editor
Images of Congo: Anne Eisner’s Art and Ethnography, 1946-1958
5 Continents, $39.00
David B. Moyer 1972MD
The Tobacco Book: A Reference Guide of Facts, Figures, and Quotations about Tobacco
Sunstone Press, $46.00
Yale Daily News Staff, Editors
The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges 2006, 32nd Edition
St. Martin’s Press, $18.99
Thomas Pinney 1960PhD
A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present
University of California Press, $45.00
Isabel Rose 1990
The J.A.P Chronicles: A Novel
Doubleday, $22.95
Adam Rothman 1993
Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
Harvard University Press, $35.00
Stephen Sandy 1955
Weathers Permitting: Poems
Louisiana State University Press, $26.95
Dorothy G. Singer, Senior Research Scientist and Co-Director, Yale Family Television Research and Consultation Center, and Jerome Singer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Co-Director, Yale Family Television Research and Consultation Center
Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age
Harvard University, Press $29.95
Jeremi Suri 2001PhD
Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente
Harvard University Press, $18.95
Richard N. Swett 1979
Leadership by Design: Creating an Architecture of Trust
Ostberg/Greenway Communications, $39.50
David Teten 1992 and Scott Allen
The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online
AMACOM, $19.95
Henry Ashby Turner Jr., Stille Professor of History Emeritus
General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe’s Biggest Carmaker
Yale University Press, $38.00
Harlow Giles Unger 1953
The French War Against America: How a Trusted Ally Betrayed Washington and the Founding Fathers
Wiley, $27.95
Benjamin Wheeler 1982, Gilda Wheeler, and Wendy Church
It’s All Connected: Global Issues and Sustainable Solutions
Facing the Future: People and the Planet, $20.00
William H. Willimon 1971Mdiv, Editor
Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church"
Duke University Press, $34.95
Peter Kurt Woerner 1968, 1970March
Peter Kurt Woerner, Architect and Builder: Buildings and Projects, 1968-2004
Nine Square Editions, $40
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