Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, edited by Nicole R. Myers and Katherine Rothkopf

The beautiful book his work deserves

The modernist painting style of cubism is generally considered to have been invented jointly by painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1910. Most art aficionados, if questioned for a third artist in that movement, would call up the name of Juan Gris. In fact, though Gris followed in the footsteps of Picasso and Braque, some (myself included) consider Gris to have been the one who really took cubism to its creative apex. Gris pushed the stylistic experiments in form, structure, and color farther than his better-known contemporaries, and in the process managed to produce many beautiful paintings. Even those who can’t stand cubism (and that’s probably the majority of the world’s population) might very well enjoy looking at a Juan Gris painting.

The still life, usually an arrangement of objects on a table, was a common subject matter for cubist artists and a particular specialty of Gris’s. Now his work in that area gets its deserved recognition with the beautifully produced coffee table book Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, edited by Nicole R. Myers of the Dallas Museum of Art and Katherine Rothkopf of the Baltimore Museum of Art. This book was published in 2021 by Yale University Press to coincide with an exhibition of Gris’s still lifes organized by those two museums.

This book is not intended to be a comprehensive biography or retrospective on Juan Gris. That has already been done at least twice, by Antonio Gaya Nuño in 1986 and by Christopher Green in 1992. This book is meant to focus solely on Gris’s still lifes, but it nevertheless does contain a biological overview and a fair share of scholarly content on Gris’s work. The assortment of essays included, however, is a bit random. Myers delivers a truly excellent essay examining how Gris went about planning and executing his still life paintings. For anyone who paints or draws, this chapter reads like a behind-the-scenes exposé into Gris’s methods and materials. Another essay is a string of brief institutional histories of every Spanish museum that owns a work by Juan Gris. It’s hard to see how that’s useful; wouldn’t a list have sufficed? Another essay explores the influence of Gris on abstract artists in South America. The connection feels only tenuously established, but this chapter did bring to my attention some Latin American artists with whom I was previously unfamiliar.

While the essays are hit-and-miss, the images strike the bullseye time and time again. The text divides Gris’s tragically brief career into five distinct stages. All of those stages are well-represented by selected artworks, and one can clearly see Gris’s progression as an artist over time. The paintings are all beautifully reproduced, most of them appearing at full-page size. The photography of the artworks and the quality of the printing are impeccable. When it comes to art publications, Yale University Press always makes a quality product.

I still think Green and Gaya Nuño’s books are better overall volumes on Gris’s life and career, but Cubism in Color is a great addition to the literature on Gris’s art. I doubt any art lover would ever say, “I’m of fan of Gris, but I don’t like his still lifes.” Still lifes were so integral to his thought and vision as an artist. This book celebrates Gris’s innovative visual experimentation and sublime talent for composition. His still lifes deserve a great showcase in print, and that’s what they’re given here.

Flowers, 1914

The Violin, 1916

Still Life with a Bottle of Bordeaux, 1919

The Open Window, 1921

Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson

More concerned with words than birds

W. H. Hudson was born in Argentina to a family of English and Irish heritage. He grew up in South America, emigrated to England in his early thirties, and published his first book in his early forties. Despite his late start, however, Hudson became a prolific author and published about four dozen books, mostly nonfiction but also a few novels (Green Mansions being his best-known work). Hudson was a naturalist who studied the plants and animals, particularly birds, of his native Argentina and later did the same in England. His book Birds and Man, published in 1901, is a series of essays about birds. In this volume, he’s only writing about English birds, not those of South America.

Hudson may have literally wrote the book on Argentine Ornithology (1888), but the books that I’ve read by him make it hard for me to believe he was a scientist. He writings come across more like the work of an avid birder with literary aspirations. What surprised me about this book, and why I dislike it, is because I learned almost nothing about the birds discusses, other than Hudson’s “artistic” descriptions about what they look or sound like. Each chapter focuses on a particular species, family of birds, or bird-related subject, within which Hudson will rattle off a string of anecdotes. These usually take the form of “I once saw a bird do this . . . It made me feel this way . . . That reminds me of a poem . . .” This book is not about the birds, it’s about Hudson’s feelings, and him showing off how he can relate those feelings through flowery language. 

This is not the first time reading a Hudson book has left me somewhat irritated (see also Idle Days in Patagonia). He seems like the kind of writer who one day decided, “I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to write x thousand words a day . . .” whether he has anything interesting to say or not. Here in Birds and Man he shows no interest in educating the reader about birds. Rather, Hudson is trying to earn his place among the great British essayists like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. One way to get there, he thinks, is to reference poets—Wordsworth, Tennyson, Cowper, etc.—any chance he gets. Despite his attempts to flaunt his erudition, Hudson is just not that good of a writer to belong in such company, and most of this book ends up being an utter bore. 

As a birder, Hudson also sports a very snobbish, know-it-all attitude towards those who aren’t his equals in bird knowledge. There is no sense of him welcoming amateur birders into the fold. Anyone who doesn’t fly into fits of ecstasy at hearing the song of the Wood Wren is a Philistine. Those with pet parrots are simpletons. Those who can’t name the species in their local woods are idiots. Hudson complains a lot in this book about taxidermy. He prefers living birds to stuffed ones. He thinks dead birds belong in specimen drawers where only ornithologists can view them. He hates museum displays of stuffed birds, from which the public might actually be able to learn about and appreciate birds, thus becoming less of the Philistines he despises so much.

One interesting matter he discusses is how English bird species have been driven to extinction or endangered status because so many collectors want to have glass cases full of pretty stuffed birds in their living rooms. There are also a couple mildly amusing stories about a pet owl and some pet parrots. Other than that, I found this book to be a complete waste of time. I’m a birder; I enjoy books about birds, but I did not enjoy this one.

Marcus Aurelius: A Life by Frank McLynn

More historical context than biography

British historian and author Frank McLynn has written over two dozen books of history and biography including books on Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Carl Jung. His biography Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor was published in 2010 and has since been rereleased as Marcus Aurelius: A Life. Marcus is often cited as the best of all the Roman emperors (or at least the least cruel and crazy) and is highly regarded as a paragon of leadership and wisdom. In this in-depth life history, McLynn sets out to investigate whether Marcus actually deserves such praise.

Besides being a Roman emperor, Marcus was also a philosopher. Many regard him as perhaps the closest anyone has come to the ideal of the philosopher-king that Plato put forth in his Republic. Marcus’s brand of philosophy was Stoicism, and he is considered one of the big three of that school (along with Epictetus and Seneca) because of his book Meditations, a classic Stoic text. If you’re considering reading McLynn’s biography because you are a modern disciple of Stoicism, prepare to be disappointed. McLynn despises Stoicism, calling it “nonsense” and “gibberish.” He thinks Marcus’s philosophical pursuits were a waste of time. Marcus should have concentrated on military and economical matters, as McLynn mostly does in this book. To McLynn’s credit, however, he does give some thoughtful and intelligent discussion to Marcus’s views on philosophy and religion, at least three solid chapters worth, plus a relentlessly negative appendix on Stoicism. Although tens of thousands of books have been published disputing contradictory views on Christian theology, McLynn thinks any time two Stoics disagree with each other, such inconsistency renders the whole school of thought null and void. I don’t agree with everything (or much) that McLynn has to say about Stoicism, but he’s certainly done his research, and I learned a lot about Marcus from this analysis of his philosophical thought.

The biggest complaint I have about McLynn’s biography of Marcus Aurelius is that only about a third of the book is actually about Marcus Aurelius. As the book opens, we get biographies of other figures who were connected to Marcus: a chapter on Hadrian, a chapter on Antoninus Pius, one on Lucius Verus, and maybe two on Fronto, Marcus’s tutor. McLynn provides historical context about what was going on in Rome at the time of Marcus’s reign, but he goes way overboard with it. For example, when he informs us that a war against the Parthians was underway during Marcus’s reign, we then get a complete detailed history of Rome’s relations with the Parthians going back two or three centuries, then a discussion of the Parthians themselves—their governmental structure, internal conflicts, the various nations and peoples surrounding them—then a primer on the organization of the Roman military, before we ever even get to talking about Marcus. After all that, what Marcus actually did about the Parthians, I couldn’t tell you. The Germanic tribes get a similar background treatment, but then you actually do get a pretty detailed blow-by-blow account of Marcus’s relations with them. McLynn sometimes wanders pretty far afield in his digressions, particularly towards the end of the book. In a book about Marcus Aurelius, did we really need the whole life story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

McLynn’s books have achieved a wide popular audience, but if this book is any indication, he writes with the scholarly rigor of a historian. This is not Marcus Aurelius for Dummies. Part of the historian’s job is to bust myths, and McLynn does some of that here. Given all the adulation that has been heaped upon Marcus over the centuries, the truth can’t help but be less flattering than the legend. McLynn points out that life was not so fine under the Marcus administration, and of all the Roman emperors, he was one of the most severe in persecuting Christians. McLynn certainly does admire Marcus as a leader, and he shows his respect for his subject by conducting a fair and thorough character analysis, neither a panegyric nor a hatchet job. He should have narrowed his focus more tightly on the man himself, however, instead of cramming in so much extraneous detail.

The Great Hunger by Johan Bojer

Norwegian naturalism

Norway’s Johan Bojer is known as one of that nation’s important realist authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bojer garnered enough critical respect to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Several of his novels were translated into English in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s. He is known for writing novels about Norwegian immigrant life in America, but his novel The Great Hunger, published in 1916, takes place entirely within Norway.

Peer Troen is a typical boy growing up in a small town in Norway. Troen is not his birth name, however. Peer is the illegitimate child of a prosperous former military officer from Christiania (today’s Oslo), Captain Holm, who pays the Troen family to board and raise his son. Peer’s mother was a prostitute, so his father, though friendly enough, refuses to claim him as a son. In fact, Captain Holm has another, legitimate family, and admitting that Peer exists would be an embarrassment to them all. Though Peer is certainly not happy being disowned, he learns to come to terms with his lot in life. He dreams of becoming a priest, at that time an upper-class profession requiring higher education. When both his parents die, however, there is no one left to pay the Troen family for his upkeep. Peer finds out his father was not as wealthy as he thought, and his inheritance is paltry. Peer is dropped into a life of poverty, but he still manages to work his way through engineering school in hopes of succeeding in a career.

The title of the book is both literal and figurative. While there is no mass famine here, the story does deal with the poverty and hunger of one Norwegian family. The “hunger” in question, however, more pointedly refers to the desire of humans to create, accomplish, and/or conquer and to leave behind a legacy for posterity. Bojer asks the question is enough to simply enjoy life? Are love and happiness the purpose of our existence? Peer seems to think so, for a while anyway. But can a man, or mankind, be truly satisfied with blissful complacency? One of Peer’s close friends begs to differ, asserting that the irresistible force of evolution imparts to everyone a Promethean drive to create, build, and strive toward progress, even at the expense of comfort and joy. This novel is chiefly concerned with the conflict between these two attitudes toward human nature and the meaning of life.

The Great Hunger is strongest in its first act, when it adheres most strictly to the tenets of naturalist literature. Peer must deal with the hand that’s dealt him by his heritage, and through him Bojer realistically depicts the struggles of poor and working class life in Norway. At about the halfway point, the novel starts to get more didactic and preachy, as if Bojer were delivering a sermon. This sermon, however, is a secular one that appeals to my personal freethinking inclinations. Bojer makes many openly atheistic statements that are a breath of rationalistic fresh air. By the early 20th century, more Scandinavian writers were penning literature from an atheist viewpoint, such as Bojer in Norway and Jens Peter Jacobsen and Johannes V. Jensen in Denmark.

I was less impressed with the later chapters of the book. For a while, it seems like Bojer is going to follow up on Peer’s bastard upbringing. Peer becomes friends with his own half-brother, who is unaware that they share the same father. That plot thread is never followed through, however, and remains inconclusive. The ending of the book in general is rather week, but adhering to realism often means that expectations of closure remain unsatisfied, much like real life itself. Nevertheless, I found Bojer to be a writer certainly worth investigating further, and I’m sure this won’t be the last of his books that I’ll read.

In the Year 2889 by Jules Verne

Short story of a utopian America

“In the Year 2889” is a short story by Jules Verne. Many literary scholars now consider this story to be the work of Michel Verne, son of Jules, but it was published under Jules Verne’s name. It is common knowledge that Michel carried on the family business by writing some “Jules Verne” novels after his father’s death. Michel never produced a classic like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or Around the World in Eighty Days, but the quality of his work is likely on a par with some of his father’s more mediocre offerings. “In the Year 2889” was published in the February 1889 issue of The Forum, an English-language magazine, while Jules was still very much alive. Reportedly, a New York newspaper editor asked Jules to write a story depicting the world a thousand years in the future, and apparently Jules delegated that task to Michel.

The story takes place in America on the 25th of September, 2889. It depicts one day in the life of George Washington Smith, a wealthy media mogul and founder of the Manhattan Chronicle. In the 29th century, the “media” in use is the telephote, something similar to our internet in that it delvers live streaming of events, on-demand news, and video communication with family and friends. Smith, a sort of Rupert Murdoch of his age, wields enough power and influence that his enterprises stretch beyond communications to include industry, finance, and politics. As such, he is consulted by various parties for his opinion on matters of world import. Through such conversations, the reader gets a glimpse into the global politics of this future millennia. Familiarly, America and Russia are the current superpowers, with China on the rise.

Some of Verne’s predictions in this book have proven to be prescient: the internet and media empires, as already mentioned; also chemical and biological warfare, scientifically processed foods and home delivery of meals, and various systems for harnessing clean energy from the environment. Others of his prophecies are as of now still rather pie-in-the-sky in nature, yet nevertheless have since shown up in many a science fiction story: the colonization of other planets in the solar system, ubiquitous flying cars, and the ability to freeze human beings in suspended animation for thawing back to life at a later date. To readers of the 21st century, some aspects of Verne’s future forecast seem rather quaintly cautious. The narrator reports with evident satisfaction, for example, that human life expectancy has risen from 37 to 52 years.

Being a short story, and not a very long short story at that, none of these ideas is really developed very thoroughly. The text is simply a rapid-fire stream of sketchy projections. In some ways, however, that’s a relief from some of the more ponderous utopian epics from the early years of the sci-fi genre. “In the Year 2889” is brief, and it may not be entirely realistic, but it is fun. Whether it was written by Michel Verne or not, this story is totally in keeping with what one would expect from Jules, and fans of the father will enjoy this work by the son.

The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer by Oscar Micheaux

Memoir of an industrious Black homesteader

Oscar Micheaux is best known as a pioneering Black filmmaker. He produced, wrote, and directed at least 40 films—some silent, some talkies—from 1919 to 1948. Prior to embarking on his film career, however, Micheaux first expressed himself through literature, publishing three books in the decade of the 1910s. His first published volume, 1913’s The Conquest, is sometimes referred to as a novel, but it reads more like an autobiography of the first 30 years of Micheaux’s life. Micheaux published the book anonymously, and the narrator’s name has been changed to Oscar Devereaux, but the events depicted in the book closely parallel those of Micheaux’s life. The names of other persons in the book have been likewise slightly altered, and the names of towns and cities are sometimes changed or abbreviated (for example, M—pls equals Micheaux’s hometown of Metropolis, Illinois).

Micheaux/Devereaux was born on a farm in Illinois, where his parents eked out a poor living. His grandparents were slaves; his father illiterate. Oscar, however, believed that through hard work and education he could better himself. He refuses to accept that his race should disqualify him from success comparable to his White counterparts, and he sets his sights on being a landowning farmer. He works for a few years as a porter on Pullman railroad cars, bouncing all over the country and even through Mexico and as far as Argentina. Through his travels, he discovers an attractive land opportunity in South Dakota and files for a homestead claim. For a few years, Devereaux is the only Black farmer in this region of South Dakota. Through his hard work, he earns the respect of his neighbors and adds more parcels of land to his holdings.

Along with Micheaux’s ambition and success comes an arrogance that’s evident in his writing. He expresses contempt for many of his own race—rich and poor alike—for being, as he sees it, lazy, short-sighted, and frivolous. He declares himself a progressive in the mode of Booker T. Washington and considers the vast majority of Blacks to be reactionaries. Micheaux also seems to think he’s God’s gift to women. When he finally does settle down with a partner, he talks about the relationship as if it were a business deal and has some rather unfavorable things to say about his significant other. At one point in the book, Micheaux/Devereaux falls in love with a White woman of Scottish extraction. The relationship itself is not surprising, but the fact that he wrote about it so candidly, in 1913, is quite surprising. He discusses some instances of interracial marriage on the South Dakota prairie, but chooses not to go that route himself.

The Conquest may be a valuable document of the African American experience, but much of what Micheaux relates could apply to the experience of farmers and homesteaders of any race or ethnicity. If you’re expecting stories of racism or discrimination, there’s almost nothing of that here. Much of the book concerns the homesteading process and Westward expansion. Micheaux goes into great detail about land laws, the claims process, and financial dealings. He also chronicles at length how several small towns in South Dakota competed for a railroad line and economic dominance in the region. As a document of this era, this will likely prove a treasure trove of information for historians, but sometimes such real estate business can become boring to the general reader. In addition, a great deal of The Conquest is about Devereaux’s love life, through which we get realistic glimpses into different classes of Black Society, both rural and urban, during this time period. The conclusion of The Conquest makes you wonder if the only reason Micheaux wrote this book was to get the last word in a quarrel with his in-laws.

When Americans think about African American literature, we generally think about critically acclaimed modernist writers from the Harlem Renaissance or afterwards—Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright. Often forgotten, however, are the African American authors of the earlier realist, naturalist, and muckraking eras who documented Black life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though film may be Micheaux’s claim to fame, The Conquest proves he deserves to be mentioned alongside pioneering African American literary luminaries like Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior by John Kricher

Basic overview with pretty pictures

Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) was an American artist and naturalist who was probably the most important figure in the development of birding as a hobby, pastime, and/or obsession. His line of Peterson Field Guides has grown beyond ornithology to over 50 volumes examining diverse aspects of nature and ecology (not all authored by Peterson). In 2015, the Peterson Institute started adding a series of Peterson Reference Guides to their line of books. The Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, written by John Kricher, was published in 2020.

I expected these Reference Guides to be for advanced birders who want to delve deeper than what’s found in the typical field guide, perhaps something along the lines of Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding, also in the Peterson line. I found the Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, to be surprisingly basic. Most of the information imparted in this volume can likely be found in the introductory chapters of a good field guide—the opening pages that most people ignore because they just look at the bird pictures. The way Kricher delivers the information is also not ideal. The book is intentionally written for a beginning-birder, non-scientific audience, but that doesn’t stop the text from being at times confusing and often boring.

The first half of the book provides some valuable information on bird anatomy. Those lessons are not aided, however, by the absence of diagrams in this book. That is likely a conscious choice on the part of the publisher: If we put a lot of pretty photographs in the book, that will attract general readers, but if we include diagrams, that will scare general readers away. They’ll think the book is too intense for them, like a textbook. So everything is written out by Kricher in prose paragraphs, even when that’s not the most appropriate way to deliver the information. The chapter on different stages of molting, for instance, is quite difficult to comprehend, when a simple table or chart would have made it so much easier to understand and remember. But if we put a table in the book, we’ll scare away those general readers! If you just want a general book on birds and the cool things they do, full of pretty pictures, then I would recommend David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds.

The most difficult aspect of writing or reading a book like this is that the general subject of birds, even just North American birds, encompasses an incredibly broad and diverse range of species and behaviors. The result of this is that most of the text reads like “Some birds do this. Some birds do that.” The only solution for that is to consult a book with specific behavioral information on every individual species, such as Kaufman’s Lives of North American Birds. That book is truly a reference guide, while Kricher’s is really more of a primer. Kricher tries to solve the problem of diversity by providing many examples. The trouble with this approach is that the book consists almost entirely of examples with very few principles or conclusions drawn. I also don’t like the fact that Kricher talks about himself so much in this book: I once saw this, or I once banded such-and-such a bird. I’m from the Northeast, so we’re mostly going to talk about Northeastern birds. I don’t really care what your personal perspective is. I want to learn about the birds, and not just the birds with which you have some kind of personal connection.

I have seen the Peterson Reference Guide for Sparrows and for Woodpeckers, and they seem to be more of what I expected from these Reference Guides. Those books appear to be deeper and more thorough in nature, simply because they’re not expected to cover every bird species imaginable. (and the publisher allowed some diagrams!) In general, the Peterson Field Guides are great; I’ve derived much joy and learning from them. This particular Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, is not one of the Institute’s better-thought-out offerings.