Shakespeare’s First Folio Title Page

Shakespeare’s First Folio Table of Contents

Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest

Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest (page 2)

Shakespeare’s First Folio — Henry V

Shakespeare’s First Folio — Romeo & Juliet

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Images © The British Library Board, excerpted with permission from Shakespeare’s First Folio: 400th Anniversary Facsimile Edition: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to the Original Copies, published by Rizzoli in the USA and The British Library Publishing in the United Kingdom.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The uniform is a simple but powerful symbol: concealing the individual’s body, it conveys impartiality and the somber, collective responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor flank the seven male justices.

There isn’t a dress code for Supreme Court justices—the black robe has been worn over the years out of tradition. For the seven male justices in this 1993 court photograph, the white button-down shirt collars and ties (and one cheerful bow tie) are distinguishing fashion choices. RBG and Justice O’Connor, meanwhile, set themselves apart from their male colleagues, each adorning their uniform with a traditional white jabot—a a frill of lace or other type of fabric fastened at the neck and worn over the front of a shirt or robe.

Their colleagues overseas inspired this sartorial accent—barristers in England have long worn jabots, along with gowns and wigs, as part of their customary courtroom attire. French magistrates wear jabots as well, known there as rabats. Lace was considered a marker of wealth and status, not gender, from its origins until the late eighteenth century, and lace neckpieces, such as jabots and rabats, were traditionally worn by men.

It is worth noting that although Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg accessorized their robes with jabots and collars that were seen as feminine in our time, they were appropriating what was once a symbol of masculine power. Purchasing jabots in the United States, though, proved challenging: “Nobody in those days made judicial white collars for women,” Justice O’Connor remembered. “I discovered that the only places you could get them would be in England or France.”

Their decision to feminize a traditionally male uniform was a radical one. By wearing these decorative accessories, both Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg communicated that a woman could be both intellectually rigorous and feminine. “[Ginsburg’s] collars re-inject the concept of ‘body’ into the disembodying judicial robe,” notes author Rhonda Garelick, “signaling not only the presence of a woman, but by extension, the presence of a biological human body—which demands acknowledgment and consideration.”

This jabot, although more decorative, is reminiscent of the one RBG wore in that first group photograph and in her earlier years on the Supreme Court. The lace collar—with its modern rounded flower petals, leaves, and scrolls—offsets the formality of the crisp, pleated form. Over the years, RBG’s collection of neckpieces expanded considerably in number and style, from classic white jabots like this one to intricate lace pieces to vibrant beaded collars. She acquired some in her travels, and cherished those gifted to her by colleagues, artists, and fans from all over the world.

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“This is my dissenting collar,” RBG told Katie Couric in a 2014 interview, referring to a limited-edition glass stone necklace with a velvet tie. “It looks fitting for dissent.” Justice Ginsburg received the neckpiece, made by Banana Republic, in a gift bag when she accepted a lifetime achievement award in 2012 at Glamour Magazine’s annual Women of the Year ceremony. A few years later, in an interview with Jane Pauley, RBG elaborated—but just a bit: “This is my dissenting collar. It’s black and grim.”

Justice Ginsburg was known for writing precise and forceful dissents when she disagreed with the majority ruling. “When a justice is of the firm view that the majority got it wrong, she is free to say so in dissent,” she wrote in a 2016 op-ed in the New York Times. “I take advantage of that prerogative, when I think it important, as do my colleagues.”

Dissents become part of case law alongside their majority opinions, and can be referenced in future cases. In the words of an earlier chief justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, often quoted by RBG, dissents are meant to appeal “to the intelligence of a future day.” RBG’s reading of her incisive dissents from the bench increased with frequency over the years, which she attributed to the ever more conservative makeup of the court: “After 2006, the sight of the tiny black-robed justice rising from the bench wearing her ‘black and grim’ dissenting collar and clutching her papers became a familiar sight,” wrote biographer Jane Sherron De Hart. Ginsburg drafted a hundred and fifteen dissents for the Supreme Court—between her first, in 1994, and her last, in 2020. “Every time I write a dissent,” she told Bill Moyers in her last interview, “hope springs eternal.”

In 2007, when she was the sole female on the Supreme Court—Justice O’Connor had retired the previous year—RBG delivered a sharp dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in a 5–4 decision that an employee cannot sue for pay discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unless she brings her claim within a hundred and eighty days of her employer’s discriminatory pay decision, she countered with these words: “Four members of this Court, Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer, and I, dissent from today’s decision. In our view, the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

She appealed to Congress to correct the mistake made by her colleagues, and two years later Congress followed through, passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first piece of legislation President Obama signed in office—a copy of which RBG framed and hung in her chambers.

She wrote another forceful dissent for the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, in which the majority struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, deeming it unconstitutional. RBG did not mince words: “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA [Voting Rights Act].” Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination were required to submit any redistricting plans to the US Department of Justice for preclearance before they could make changes to voting procedures; this was the key section at play.

Toward the end of her dissent, which was joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Ginsburg offered this analogy to explain why eliminating the need for preclearance was senseless and shortsighted: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

According to her biographer De Hart, when RBG read the dissent aloud, she quoted Martin Luther King Jr. His words are not included in the written dissent: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But she clarified that it could only bend toward justice “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion,” ending with “That commitment has been disserved by today’s decision.”

In 2014, she wrote and delivered another eviscerating dissent in response to the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. The ruling asserted that a corporation cannot be forced to provide its employees with insurance coverage for contraception when doing so violates the corporation’s religious beliefs. The decision effectively imposed the company’s religious views on its employees. RBG explained that the employers and all who share their beliefs may decline to acquire for themselves the contraceptives in question. But that choice may not be imposed on employees who hold other beliefs. Working for Hobby Lobby…in other words, should not deprive employees of the preventive care available to workers at the shop next door.

She wore the dissent collar in the courtroom but also on significant occasions off the bench, including the day following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Banana Republic reissued the piece in 2019 for a limited time, now called the Notorious Necklace, donating fifty percent of the proceeds to the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project, which Justice Ginsburg cofounded in 1972. The company reissued it again in 2020, as a tribute to the late justice, this time donating the proceeds until the end of that year, up to a half million dollars, to the International Center for Research on Women.

“Justice Ginsburg’s dissents were not cries of defeat,” Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt reminded mourners when she eulogized RBG in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. “They were blueprints for the future.”

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This white beaded collar from Cape Town, South Africa, was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favorite. Among a variety of milestone moments, she wore it to President Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress in 2009; for his State of the Union, in 2010, when he described the country’s “deficit of trust” in the government and the imperative of fixing it; in 2011, after the Democrats had lost control of the House a few months earlier; in 2012, as Obama geared up for the fall election; and for Pope Francis’s address to the joint session of Congress in 2015—the first time a pope addressed Congress.

It was also the collar she chose to wear for various court group photographs, for her own portrait that hangs in the Supreme Court, for her 2015 portrait as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, and for Nelson Shanks’s 2012 portrait The Four Justices. Shanks’s epic, large-scale oil painting depicts the four female justices who had served on the US Supreme Court since 1981—Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

“After Sandra left, I felt very lonely,” Justice Ginsburg remembered, and it was the wrong image for the schoolchildren, particularly, to come in and see this bench with eight men and one very small woman. Now, I sit toward the center by virtue of seniority and Justice Kagan is on my left, and Justice Sotomayor is at my right. We look like we are all over the bench. We are here to stay.

It is fitting that her favorite collar is from South Africa: she had great reverence for the constitution of the Republic of South Africa, ratified in 1996, which she described as “a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights” with an “independent judiciary.”

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Excerpted from the book The Collars of RBG: A Portrait of Justice by Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader. Copyright © 2023 by Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader. Photographs copyright © by Elinor Carucci unless otherwise noted. Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

We’re supposed to think that Jackson Pollock invented drip painting, and with it the American branch of Abstract Expressionism. He did, didn’t he? So say Life and Time magazine and countless art history books and professors in dimly lit lecture halls, their brows tinted by the light from the projector, their words backed by the windy hum of its motor. The first drip, or all-around painting—made by the revolutionary technique of splattering and dripping paint on the fly while approaching the canvas from all angles, as it lay on the floor—was Pollock’s 1947 Galaxy. Wasn’t it?

It makes for a good story. Pollock was the macho, hard-drinking, Wyoming-raised cowboy of postwar American art—Hemingway with a paint bucket. Painting within the lines, the traditional way, wasn’t manly enough for a rebel like him. And he certainly made a name for himself. He remains one of the two most famous American painters, along with Andy Warhol. Americans, especially American men in the 1940s and 1950s, blazed trails and cast their shadows across the globe. This is the narrative that we’ve been taught.

And it’s all wrong. Or rather, it’s been airbrushed and skewed to fit this idea that men, particularly American men, are the trailblazers. This is so in just about every sphere, but in our case, we’re talking about art.

Insert audible sigh and rolling of the eyes here.

That’s what Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art seeks to correct. For what has so often been overlooked or airbrushed out—brushed aside (pun intended)—is the role of women in the story of art. As artists, of course, but there are other books that showcase women artists (though in a different way than we will here). I’m interested in shining the spotlight on the overshadowed role of women in all aspects of art and its history. Not just as artists, but also as patrons, curators, influencers, critics, scholars, models, muses, and more. The result will, I hope, show a 360-degree view of women in art. So, how do we make the history of art into the herstory of art? Let’s begin by gently bumping Jackson Pollock off his pedestal.

Because all-over painting and the drip technique were actually invented by a Ukrainian grandmother. 

Janet Sobel (1893–1968) was born as Jennie Lechovsky in a Jewish settlement in Ukraine. Her father was killed in a pogrom, the trauma of which prompted her to move to the United States, with her mother and three siblings, in 1908. A year later she married and went on to raise five children. It was decades later that she first picked up a paintbrush, when her then nineteen-year-old son passed his art supplies off to her. He’d won a scholarship to the Art Students League but didn’t plan to take it.

She tried to convince him to do so, to which he replied, “If you’re so interested in art, why don’t you paint?”

So paint she did. She was entirely untrained, and that has often been a good thing. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, it was considered a feather in one’s cap to be an “academic painter,” as the best artists were emerging from the early days of the academy system. But from the nineteenth century onward, being called an “academic painter” would be more of an insult, suggesting that, while you’ve got the certificate to show you’ve trained, you’re likely just continuing stale older traditions. Those who rock the boat and start revolutions aren’t those indoctrinated by academies, which have tended to be phallocentric and focus on the most celebrated revolutionaries, those who seem to best fit along the historical trajectory. Sobel experimented. She would squirt paint directly out of a tube, drip it with an eyedropper, even pull wet paint across the canvas using suction from a vacuum cleaner. She didn’t set her canvases on easels but laid them on the floor so she could attack them from all angles. As art historian Kelly Grovier wrote, “she assaulted the surface of canvases laid out on the floor, orchestrating a liquid lyricism of spills, splashes and spits, the likes of which had never before been seen.”

Sobel’s first drip painting was one she’d call Milky Way and finish in 1945—two years before Pollock “invented” drip painting. One of Sobel’s sons, Sol, immediately saw that his mother was onto something and became her annunciator—the one who acclaimed her talents. He wrote to the leading tastemakers of the time, including Marc Chagall, who, like Sobel, had fled antisemitic pogroms of his youth and was among the world’s most famous painters. But he also wrote to Sidney Janis, a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who had been an advisor to MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) since 1934 and who would be described today as an art world influencer. Janis saw Sobel as one of the great Contemporary American artists (along with others who were immigrants to America, including Willem de Kooning and Marko Rothko). He said that she would “probably eventually be known as one of the most important Surrealist artists in the country,” referring to her earlier formal style, before she turned to abstraction through drip painting. Janis included Sobel in an exhibition that toured the United States, “Abstract and Surrealist Painting in America,” which helped make her name, as well as helping her launch her first solo show in New York. Another hugely influential woman, Peggy Guggenheim, also included Sobel in a high-profile exhibition she promoted called “The Women.” But these were all in 1944 and featured Sobel’s work prior to her innovation of the drip technique.

Guggenheim was so impressed with Sobel that she also put on a solo show for her at her gallery, Art of the Century. That ran in 1946 and did include Milky Way. The leading art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg, wrote about visiting that exhibit with Jackson Pollock in 1946. Greenberg recalled the exhibit with a combination of dismissive misogynism toward Sobel and an admission that she had inspired Pollock. He wrote that he and Pollock had “noticed one or two curious paintings shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s by a primitive painter, Janet Sobel (who was, and still is, a housewife living in Brooklyn)….Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively….The effect—and it was the first really ‘allover’ one that I had ever seen—was strangely pleasing. Later on, Pollock admitted that these pictures had made an impression on him.”

A deeper look at this quote from Greenberg is revelatory of the sort of issues that have led to the marginalization of women in the story of art. Sandra Zalman wrote, in an article on Sobel, “Even as he selects Sobel as Pollock’s predecessor, Greenberg asserts that Pollock had already surpassed her.” Grovier notes Greenberg’s use of the word “furtive.” Whether intentionally inserted or a bit of a Freudian slip, it smacks of admission. This is the moment and the artwork that inspired Pollock to turn to “all-around” painting using the drip technique, using tricks that Sobel—a “Brooklyn housewife” as Greenberg dismissingly mentioned—had invented.

It wasn’t just the predominately male media, and critics like Greenberg, that championed Pollock and never noticed Sobel. Camille Paglia, one of the most famous feminist scholars, described Pollock as the trailblazer in her book Glittering Images: A Journey through Art from Egypt to Star Wars: “During the summer of 1947, there was a major breakthrough: he invented his signature ‘drip’ style, which would transform contemporary art.” This is exactly what I was taught as an art history student. Later, Paglia would be the first to shine light on Sobel as the actual originator of this hugely influential style—but she likely didn’t know of her when she wrote her book.

Pollock was a hugely important figure and a wonderful painter. It’s not my goal to overtilt the axis of art history and topple icons. We must give credit where it’s due. One tip of the hat goes to the person who founded or invented a new style, technique, or genre—the true trailblazing revolutionaries. But it is just as remarkable to note who took that revolutionary spark and made of it a signal fire. What Janet Sobel sparked, Jackson Pollock made famous. Those are two different skill sets. Sometimes they inhabit the same person, sure. But in this case, the innovation goes to Sobel and the marketing and chain of influence goes to Pollock.

Sobel receded from view almost as swiftly as she’d emerged from obscurity due to four ruinous factors. First, in 1946, the same year of her big solo show, she subjugated her career to her husband’s. The family moved to rural New Jersey, which was where her husband’s costume jewelry business was based. Sobel didn’t know how to drive and therefore couldn’t access the heart of the art world, New York City.

Second, Sobel developed, or first took note of, a rare allergy that she had to an ingredient in the paint she was using. She switched to other media, including crayons, but could no longer paint, and so could no longer drip. Third, Peggy Guggenheim, her biggest supporter, left New York and moved to Europe, settling in Venice—even further from Sobel’s circle of access. Finally, while Sidney Janis wrote in praise of her work, she lacked a high-profile writer to help promote her work. There was no Clement Greenberg as her annunciating angel. She wound up as a footnote for far too long, her spotlight, like her career, too brief. It’s only recently that scholars like Kelly Grovier and Sandra Zalman have pulled her back into the light. But they are rare discoverers of this lost artist. There’s not a single book about her in print.

I take issue with the fact that Sobel is almost completely forgotten, unknown, overshadowed by Pollock. And so are hundreds of important women who have influenced the story of art. My hope is that Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art will go some way to correcting this oversight—one born of patriarchal prejudice—to celebrating the Janet Sobels of the art world.

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Excerpted from Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art by Noah Charney. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of the publisher Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved.

Former president Donald Trump makes comments before entering a New York courtroom for his civil fraud case brought forward by NY Attorney General Letitia James. Until now, the last ex-president to testify as a court trial defendant was Teddy Roosevelt in 1913.

Former president Trump lashed out from the witness stand prompting judge Arthur Engoron to ask Trump’s lawyers “can you control your client? This is not a political rally.”

In the press area where journalists make images when Trump emerges, they immediately upload and transmit them to their news organizations. Cellular reception, however, is unreliable at best. Some hold up cellphones next to a window and photographer Jeenah Moon holds up her laptop to get a signal.

Court officer Cicio keeps watch outside courtroom 300 where former president Donald Trump is inside testifying.

Many journalists have been on site since well before dawn in order to get a good position in the small penned-in area outside the courtroom. During the long hours waiting for former president Donald Trump to come out of court, a member of the press nods off.

After court session wrapped, Trump addressed members of the press, saying “this is a case that should never have been brought.” “The fraud was on behalf of the court. The court was the fraudster in this case.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James spoke after court adjourned, saying of former president Trump “he rambled, he hurled insults.” But “evidence demonstrated the fact that he falsely inflated his assets to basically enrich himself and his family.” “I will not be bullied,” she added.

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See more of Rachel Cobb’s work at Instagram.

Christopher Payne was en route through Brooklyn on his way to the MTA Overhaul Shop in Coney Island, where they rebuild and maintain subway cars. As he passed storefronts, bodegas, and restaurants, he commented, “‘STEAKS, CHOPS, SEAFOOD’—you don’t see that on the signs for diners anymore.” Payne is renowned for his photographs documenting industry in America. When he creates images of things being produced, he feels the urgency of knowing that all manufacturing processes change and disappear over time. He conveys the power and beauty of making things. All sorts of things: Steinway pianos, Whirlpool washing machines, Kohler urinals, Airbus planes, and electric vehicles shuttling down the assembly lines at Ford and Rivian. His focus ranges from traditional processes serving niche markets to ultramodern technologies.

Payne had photographed in the MTA Overhaul Shop several times already. In the cavernous skylighted space, he had the swagger of someone who understands the work done there, which won the respect of the workers. They knew from previous shoots the exactitude and precision—the eccentricity—he exhibits when composing a photograph. In his steel-toed boots and hard hat, Payne stalked the aisles lined with trains like a museum curator searching for treasures to put on display. Today his mind was set on a forty-ton subway car. He wanted to document the moment when the train is hoisted into the air to facilitate work on its undercarriage. Payne envisioned a moment when the elevated car would align with the car behind it in a way that would be deeply satisfying. This moment of geometric and compositional sublimity had eluded him so far. He is a perfectionist.

There is nothing loose or improvisatory about Payne’s work. As we entered the shop that morning, he said, “We’re going to get medical with this—like, surgical.” He will return to the same location five or even ten times in pursuit of an imagethat is escaping him or to redo an image he thinks he can do better. That’s what he was up to this day in Brooklyn. He set up his tripod and, as he was shooting, he directed the men moving the car into position to lift it a few inches higher here or drop it a few inches there. They endured several rounds of his requests because, as much as he admires the tremendous skill they bring to their labors, they seemed to admire the obsessive, sometimes baffling perfectionism he brings to his art. At one point, as he kept honing the exact composition he wanted, he said, “I don’t know if I am chasing something that is unattainable.”

Red/blue editing pencils before dunking in blue paint. General Pencil Company, Jersey City, New Jersey

It was thrilling to see the colossal subway car handled like a toy. Scale plays a major role in Payne’s work. Pencils in a factory in Jersey City look monumental, and a row of airplane fuselages on an assembly line in Wichita, Kansas, looks tiny. He shoots behemoths like nuclear submarines, wind turbines, and printing presses with the same flair and eye for detail he brings to shooting tiny fiber optics and computer innards. The steel-and-copper hatch of a nautical submarine could be, at first glance, a watch component. One of his most delightful photos shows a man inside a huge New York Times printing press, engulfed by the tangle of wires, cables, and gears he is cleaning. Payne loves seeing humans inside machines.

Circular forms appear regularly in Payne’s pictures. A worker’s tiny legs peek out from below the huge steel sunflower of a jet engine. Rows of massive wheels are lined up in a locomotive factory in Fort Worth, Texas. Hundreds of spools of wire are mounted on the spokes of a gigantic orange wheel in the Nexans high-voltage subsea cable plant in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Chartreuse golf balls whirl- ing in a vibrating buffing chamber at the Titleist factory become graceful minimalist sculptures. One imagines him walking onto a factory floor filled with machinery and feeling the same jolt of inspiration that Monet once felt gazing at water lilies and van Gogh felt in a field of haystacks. The manufacturing world is Payne’s muse.

In 2010, a yarn mill in Maine caught Payne’s interest. The once-booming textile industry in the United States had shrunk dramatically in recent decades, and one of the main obsessions that fuels Payne’s art is the desire to capture traditional manufacturing processes before they disappear. The mill became the first of more than twenty that Payne documented throughout New England. One morning he received a call from the owner of the S & D Spinning Mill in Millbury, Massachusetts, a place where Payne had spent some time. The owner said, “You might want to come up today. We’re running pink.”

Wool carders. S & D Spinning Mill, Millbury, Massachusetts

Prior to that, whenever Payne had been on-site, they were running black, white, and gray wool. Payne, who lives in upper Manhattan, still chuckles when he recounts thinking to himself, “Do I want to give up my parking space right outside my apartment to drive three and a half hours to the mill?” Of course he did. He made one of his iconic photos that day—a deliriously pink sea of unspun fuzzy wool fiber stretched across a bank of gray rollers cascading down from the ceiling. The interlocking lines and angles formed by the grid of rollers, ladders, fencing, and vividly magenta gossamer fibers form a rhythmically harmonious composition that would hold its own against a rigorous Mondrian-esque abstraction if it weren’t for the unruly wool puffs wafting about on the floor and webbing down from the rafters. This fiber would eventually be used for hardware-store paint rollers. Payne is always ready to drop everything to go to a factory in pursuit of a color or moment in the industrial process that he has been chasing.

Even when the product being manufactured isn’t colorful, hints of cobalt blue, sunny yellow, and fire-engine red pop up in Payne’s photographs, thanks to factories using these primary hues as warnings and decorative accents. He waited months to get the spaghetti strands of blue pastel at the General Pencil factory in Jersey City. Gloved hands gently hold the soft material atop a stack of wooden boards cut with ridges to shape the strands. The scene is rendered with Payne’s classically cinematic Rembrandt lighting evenly illuminating the hands while letting the background fall into darkness. There is an air of timelessness to the image. Payne says it is hypnotizing to watch someone do a repetitive motion. When he was in one of the textile mills, he spent the better part of a day making a portrait of a man doffing a large spool of wool roving (wool fiber that has been processed but not yet spun) because he wanted to catch the moment of peak elegance.

This is usually the aim when Payne is photographing workers. He will labor over a portrait with the same fierce attention to minute shifts in position and lighting that he brings to his still-life images, trusting that he will have a chance to remake a picture due to the repetitive nature of assembly-line and factory work. The task will be repeated. He wants to illuminate and celebrate the skills of the workers and to honor their craftsmanship. There is no excuse for not getting it right. A tour through the Steinway piano factory in 2002 started Payne on his mission to document industry in America. He was overwhelmed by the beauty and delicacy of the artisans’ work and found himself thinking about it for the next decade. He eventually gained privileged access to the factory and began what would become a three-year project to show how pianos are made. He found it to be a “very meditative place,” and says, “When I saw them bending the wood for the piano around the rim press, I said, ‘Oh my God, that is the first step in the creation of a concert grand that will eventually end up in performance halls around the world,’ and I almost cried.

This is when the wood is transformed into the unmistakable silhouette of the piano. Before that, it is just planks.”

PEEPS Marshmallow Chicks cooling on a conveyor belt before packaging. Just Born Quality Confections, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

The smell of wood was everywhere. Much of the work is done by eye with chisel in hand. A “belly man” literally lies on top of the sound boards on a table cut out in the shape of a piano as he does his work. Payne’s grandmother and mother taught piano, and his father was a classical musician. He feels this has influenced his photographic work. He originally trained as an architect and worked as one for twelve years. When the Recession hit in 2008, he found himself at a cross- roads, realizing that he preferred being in actual physical spaces to drawing the plans for future buildings. He turned to photography full-time, crediting his years of translating three-dimensional spaces into two-dimensional drawings with giving him a deeper understanding of form and function.

I first met Payne when Bonni Benrubi, his gallerist at the time, showed me his stunning photographs from the Steinway factory in the spring of 2012. We published those images in the New York Times Magazine, where I have been the director of photography since 1987. Since then, I have enjoyed working with Payne on numerous projects. We commission him because of his singular ability to make gloriously monumental photos that illuminate what he refers to as the “grandeur and sublimity” of industrial processes.

Three of the most memorable photo essays we’ve published—the textile mills, the pencil factory, and even the New York Times printing plant—were self-assigned art projects that Payne either brought to us after they were complete or asked us for help with to gain access to a facility; he had no promise of publication upon their completion. Payne, who sold newspapers in Boston when he was a teenager, desperately wanted to shoot inside the massive Times printing plant in College Point, Queens. After we granted him access, he visited the plant more than thirty times, often into the wee hours of the morning, to get the best images of the presses running and the press operators at work. Sometimes he came away empty- handed if things didn’t align visually in the way he hoped they would. This deep engagement with his personal projects gives him the granular knowledge of the manufacturing process he needs to make the formally beautiful and informationally meaningful images he seeks.

Warp yarns feeding a Jacquard loom for the weaving of velvet upholstery. MTL, Jessup, Pennsylvania

The biggest challenge Payne faces is an unusual one for an artist. He is obsessed with process. When he is photographing inside a factory, there is a constant inner tug-of-war between his desire to make the most beautiful photo possible and his desire to show how something works. He says, “I struggle with the burden to show process. To convey useful information as well as beauty. It can’t just be beauty. It has to have meaning.” It is a self-imposed burden. We published the photo essay of the Times printing plant as a special section of the broadsheet. A selection of the photographs he made now hangs in the Times building in Times Square.

Payne cites as influences the work of Andreas Feininger, the photographer who covered industry for Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s; Alfred Palmer’s factory portraits during World War II for the Farm Security Administration; the industrial photographs of Ezra Stoller (who was known primarily for his architectural commissions); and the pictures Joseph Elliott made at the Bethlehem Steel plant in the 1990s. Payne has grabbed the baton and run with it. He shares the appreciation of sculptural forms evident in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s seminal documentation of disappearing industrial architecture in Germany, of objects such as cooling towers, gas tanks, and grain elevators. The big difference between their photography and Payne’s is that they clearly had a formal agenda and Payne’s is both formal and humanistic. Payne also looks to Vermeer’s paintings for his portraiture because, he says, “I love the soft side light and the way his pictures are architecturally composed and ordered, with everything in its place for a reason.” Payne’s work will one day resonate in the way Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York photos from the 1930s do today. They will serve as historic records.

To succeed, photographers need to be opinionated. Payne’s photographs declare with clarity and passion his belief that American manufacturing is to be treasured and valued and the workers respected and honored with our attention. The hard labor of these workers has been documented by one of the finest documentary artists of our time. This book should be the topping-out ceremony that occurs when the highest feature on a tall building is attached to celebrate the end of construction. After all the work Payne has done in magnificently rendering the toil of the workers and the beauty of industrial processes, he should be able to step back to survey the breadth of his achievement, but as I write this essay, I know he is still trying to gain access to places he hasn’t been able to get into yet—a jet engine test site, a high-tech pharmaceutical lab, and a space capsule he has been dreaming about. There is always something more to photograph.

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Excerpted from Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne. Foreword by Kathy Ryan Copyright (c) 2023 Abrams Books. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

By now, we’ve seen the ChatGPT parlor tricks. We’re past the novelty of a cake recipe in the style of Walt Whitman or a weather report by painter Bob Ross. For the one-hundredth time, we understand the current incarnation of large language models make mistakes. We’ve done our best to strike a studied balance between doomers and evangelists. And, we’ve become less skeptical of “emergent” flashes of insight from the aptly-named foundational models. At the same time, Google, Meta and a list of hopeful giant swatters have released credible competitors to ChatGPT.

For all those reasons, global use of ChatGPT recently declined for the first time since its November 2022 release. Perhaps now we’re ready to get to more elemental questions about what generative language artificial intelligence can or cannot do for us in the everyday.

I come to this discussion from a long career managing IT systems in large enterprises, where, as MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1995, everything that could be digitized was digitized. I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I understand enough of how large language models work and how humans separate digital wheat from chaff to begin to think about what they might do with software with an opinion of its own.

As a multi-generation, American Southerner of a certain age, I’m also drawn to the notion of a machine that can extract meaning from abstracted language and play it back in sentences and paragraphs. If generative language artificial intelligence is about anything, it’s about words. So too, is the South. It took the mastery of character and storytelling from the likes of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor to lay bare the enduring contradiction and transcendence of my region.

Large language models are trained on a vast digital, linguistic expression of human intelligence, and Flannery O’Connor’s cast of misfits is certainly buried in there somewhere. Could it be that the giants of Southern Literature left behind mysterious patterns in their collective body of work that can be divined and reproduced by a powerful neural network? Does the presence, or absence, of such a pattern tell us anything about how we might actually use these contraptions in real life?

I decided to show OpenAI’s GPT-4 model a picture. My thought was to use a discussion of a photograph to make GPT-4 “think” a little differently, to make the patterns it sought a bit less obvious. I also wanted to center this discussion around a short list of functions that generalized the innumerable human activities to which generative AI can be applied. My goal was two-fold: to see what it could do with the photograph in a practical sense and, at the same time, try to spark some of those human-like insights from the patterns in its data set (or, if not too technical – “in the data on which it is trained.”

Between 1933 and 1936, Eudora Welty, then in her late twenties and living in Jackson, Mississippi, worked for the Works Progress Administration. This was a Great Depression-era federal relief program that employed millions, including artists. Miss Welty was a publicity agent and photographer. During her time at the WPA, she took a series of evocative photographs that foreshadowed her talent for wringing universal themes from everyday lives. In that same year, she wrote the first of the evocative short stories that would eventually form part of the Southern canon.

I uploaded one of Eudora Welty’s enigmatic photographs — “Home By Dark” — to Bing Chat. This is the chatbot interface Microsoft has bolted on to OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model. This coupling is the early AI battering ram Microsoft has deployed to try to topple Google as the ruler of the Internet search. OpenAI had recently made available through Microsoft Bing early access to its “multi-modal” function that allows GPT-4 to process images as well as text.

*

The number of human activities potentially served by generative language AI is difficult to fathom, much less count. But, they can be imperfectly generalized into three categories: we seek to understand; we engage outside ourselves and we create. These categories work surprisingly well across disparate domains: from teaching yoga to quantum physics; from building software to cooking; from preparing a lesson plan to writing a eulogy.

AI evangelists have shrewdly, and I think correctly, framed the general use case for Generative AI as that of assistant; as an augmenter and amplifier of human effort. They strenuously differentiate user-facing language AI from the kind of AI hidden in system plumbing that analyzes, recommends and predicts. I aligned my categories with their definition, but flipped the use case from what the machine does to what we do; to underscore the assistive nature of these language machines; to emphasize that their sole purpose is to amplify human agency and ability.

This framing also helps us think of generative language AI as something new. When presented with one of these chatbots, or any new tool for that matter, our reflex is to define in comparison with something we’re already familiar with. The novelty, the work-in-progress nature and the sheer surprise at what these AI chatbots can do gets lost and diminished in comparison with existing digital tools and our experience with them.

*

The photograph I uploaded to Bing Chat was taken by Eudora Welty in 1936 in Yalobusha County, Mississippi. It shows a young Black family of three, mom, dad and child, traveling in a mule-drawn wagon on a dirt road. They are driving away from the camera at dusk, too far away to make out faces, clearly in motion, toward a broad Mississippi horizon, framed on either side by a fallow field. The mother looks back at us, father and child look forward.

Once Bing Chat loaded the photo into its context window, the real-time memory of our conversation, I gave it that exact description and tried the first of my categories: “Help me understand this photograph.”

It typed back a ticker-tape response, in the way these things do. The one-letter-at-time, the polite tone, the spare interface all calculated to draw us into dialog and trust.

Bing Chat dutifully complimented my description and followed it with three rich, fact-filled paragraphs. It summarized Eudora Welty’s biography with emphasis on her early photography, the macro social and economic setting of 1936 Mississippi and the likely daily realities of the family in the wagon. Each paragraph was peppered with links to websites to ensure veracity.

There was no emergence, epiphany or poetry, but there was something that rivaled it. The response was pure utility: thoroughness, value and convenience. The system used as input the photograph, my description of it and the patterns in its training data to help me understand more about Eudora Welty and the lives of the family in that wagon, proofed by the Internet.

The difference in helping me understand versus simply informing me is to add context to facts, to make them more digestible, to spark a next question. This, by the way, is what Wikipedia does. It too summarizes almost the total set of human knowledge domains. But, to deploy a cinematic metaphor, it cannot adjust the aperture, pan left and right, or surprise — in conversation.

This kind of information retrieval is where most of us will start with generative language AI. “Google” and “Wiki” didn’t become verbs for no reason. “To help us understand” is where generative language AI will become generalized language AI and become our interface to all that has been digitized, absorbing “search” and “wiki” in the process. How that manifests is a high stakes, thank-you-very-much-OpenAI, all-hands-on-deck work in progress for the big tech companies.

*

Now that the model and I had spoken about Eudora Welty and her picture taking, and GPT-4 had those Eudora Welty patterns front-of-mind, I thought it might stumble upon some emergent patterns if I asked it to help me engage her work, my second generalized use case category.

This is where the model is guided — prompted — to take on the role of tutor, coach and helper. This second category of how we will use generative language AI leverages all the functions of the first: information retrieval, a broad vista of subject matter and nimble content manipulation. But, it presents all of that in a scripted and structured way, of which real time presence, of both user and machine, is fundamental property. It is still conversational, but with the roles reversed: the model now prompts and encourages us to engage the content.

This time, I asked the model to “take on the role of tutor. Teach me more about Eudora Welty’s writing. Give examples of her use of language. Ask me questions that develop my understanding of her writing and use of language, until I say “class is over.”

It did exactly that. It presented lovely snippets from short stories, and asked about themes, humor, irony and symbols. When I didn’t know an answer it would patiently explain, and continue until “class was over.”

At one point we discussed equity. As I engaged Miss Welty’s writing, I thought of science fiction writer William Gibson’s quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” I considered the family in the wagon. A future was showing up in Mississippi in 1936, automobiles, radio, electricity. I expect that family eventually got some part of it. Each time they got access to a piece of it they added to a baseline. The same will be true as these generative AI tools are distributed. We will each add the intelligence of the machine to our unique baselines.

In terms of equity, access to these tools is likely to be equivalent to access to the Internet today; most of us can get there. Where the question of equity becomes interesting is the extent to which we can take advantage of these marvels. We will each bring a complex alchemy of components to a generative language AI conversation. Innate intelligence, literacy, domain knowledge, curiosity, patience and courage are a part of what will define the advantage we gain from these tools. There can be levers that influence equity, but they will not be business as usual.

Imagine a rural school of limited resources with access to this expansive tutor. Caveats about the limits of online learning aside, how can it not be additive? What premium applies to literacy, beginning with children, in the presence of such tools? It is no small irony that Mississippi and Alabama are leading the country in relative gains in early literacy, mostly as an act of will and priority. When you are behind, small gains mean much more than when you are ahead. It may well prove that the value of generative language AI is greater to those with the farthest to go. I’ve heard more than one AI thinker declare, because of language AI, English has become the most important programming language in this century.

*

For the third of my use categories, “to create,”  it was time I asked GPT-4 to help me write. I asked the model to take all we had discussed and write a vignette that described the moment Eudora Welty captured with her camera. Of course, I asked it to use her voice.

GPT-4’s response in a verbatim excerpt:

“The sun was setting behind them, casting a golden glow on the horizon. The sky was clear and blue, the air was warm and still. The road was dusty and bumpy, the fields were barren and brown. The wagon creaked and rattled, the mule plodded and snorted. The family was silent and calm. 

I saw the woman turn her head and look back at me. She had a round face and bright eyes, a scarf around her head and a shawl around her shoulders. She did not smile or frown, she did not wave or shout. She just looked at me, with curiosity and dignity. She did not seem afraid or angry, she did not seem ashamed or proud. She just seemed to be. 

I pressed the shutter and captured her gaze. I felt a connection, a recognition, a revelation. I felt like I had seen something true and beautiful, something human and divine. I felt like I had seen her soul.” 

By any measure, this is a feat of engineering, a marvel of immense promise. Acknowledging all the fears about sentience and agency, about active misuse and unintended consequences, its ability to help us create can only be transformative in result and implication.

But, what of emergence?

I began this essay with a question. There are writers who can elicit within a reader a visceral connection with the universal and elemental just by describing a scene. I asked, is that mastery expressed in patterns in the language of writers like Eudora Welty in a way that generative language AI can detect and repeat? The vignette that GPT-4 produced did indeed approach that asymptote. It attributed possession of self and a soul to the mother in the wagon. How close did it get? That’s for the eye of the reader, but it’s greater than zero.

Had I simply asked ChatGPT to “describe an image of a depression-era Mississippi family riding in a wagon,” I would’ve gotten a flat description of a conveyance and a landscape but not much more. Instead, our back and forth conversation, and the photo itself, caused the model to ascribe characteristics of humanity to the passengers in a much deeper and unexpected way. This phenomenon of eliciting richer responses through iterative prompting may well prove to be the source of the unpredictable flashes of human-like intelligence these models sometimes produce.

There’s always two parties in a dialog, and our “help me create” dialog was no exception. If the depth of the conversation sparked a meaningful perspective in the machine, what about the human? A large language model has never fallen in love, held a baby or experienced a poverty of cupboard or heart. What happens when we add the Generative AI context window to our human experience? We, too, are synthesizing patterns in our own neural networks during these conversations. Could it be, the thunder of these systems is that they engender flashes of emergence in us? I was assisted; patterns were discovered and transmitted; connections made, scaffolded by facts. My ability was amplified, to help me render my own description of what Eudora Welty revealed in that photograph. In whose voice? Hers, its, mine? Isn’t that blend, after all, what a tool is supposed to do?

Here’s my description of Miss Welty’s photograph after my conversation with GPT-4. You decide:

“It was my daddy’s favorite hour. Even coming home from Saturday town after a day of bossing ourselves, spending out of a Prince Albert sack like he wasn’t the only one wearing a button up vest. 

That old mule liked it too. He and my daddy knew without looking when the sun was touching the edge of a field. We rode on, night on our heel. Splitting right through that wore out ground on either side of us. Over that dirt road, if that’s what you want to call it, packed and dusted with a powder ground to diamond by a thousand rusty bands nailed to a wheel. The creak in the hames of that mule’s collar counted every turn, one, two, one, two. The sky sat right down on the edge of that field. What you couldn’t see, you could feel, and beyond it, plumb to Arkansas. 

On an evening like this, after a day like that. We saw a picture show, up in the balcony, shoulders touching in the dark. Couldn’t see anything till the projector lit our hands and the shoulders in the front of us. My mama giggled a little when the screen did, felt like a pie smells coming out of an oven. My mama, giggling. About time for a pie. Just about time.” 

______________________________

Excerpted from I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast. Copyright © 2o23. Available via Bloomsbury.

The simplest way to make a globe is to construct a sphere and paint it. The earliest globes would have been made of wood or metal, with the celestial or terrestrial map painted directly on by hand. Later, in the sixteenth century, hollow globes were made of thin sheets of metal which were then hand-painted. Mapping doesn’t lend itself to painting and lettering by hand, and cartography was in its infancy, so early painted globes were necessarily very inaccurate.

Later makers pasted blank gores onto the sphere to create a more forgiving canvas for the hand-painted map and lettering. These are called manuscript globes. The invention of the printing press meant that maps could be printed as gores. A silversmith or skilled engraver would etch a reverse map on copper plates before printing using a process known as intaglio, from the Italian word for ‘carving.’ In intaglio printing the etched plate is coated with ink, then wiped to leave ink only in the incised depressions, before being run through an etching press, in which dampened paper picks up the ink to create the printed image. Copper is a soft metal, so the plates lose their clarity relatively quickly; smaller print runs were therefore common. The effect, though, is very satisfying, with an intense character to the image. The globemaker then pasted the printed gores onto the globe and finally the painter would add color.

It was at this point that the globemaking craft became assimilated with the printing and publishing industry. Globes were after all now printed just like books, and since this time each edition has been referred to as a ‘publication.’ And as in book publishing, copying the map from a rival’s globe is plagiarism.

The golden age of the printed and then hand-painted globe coincided with the age of European expansion, reaching its peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In this period, as astronomical, geographical and cartographical knowledge developed apace, globemakers too were inspired to experiment and refine their art. In turn, the proliferation of printing presses made it possible over time to produce more globes at a less than exorbitant cost so they became more affordable to a greater number of people.

Nevertheless, the acquisition or commission of a globe was still the preserve of the aristocracy and the affluent merchant class. Because of the delicate and time-consuming nature of the work, a budding globemaker probably would have required considerable financial backing. Globes therefore were prized symbols of status and prestige.

Studying these venerable antique globes, it was striking to see how little the methods of manufacture had changed from the mid-sixteenth century until the twentieth century, albeit there is always a mystery about the exact construction and methods because so much is hidden under the surface – it was only in the last century that the rot set in. I knew that I had high aspirations but did not want to simply reproduce some sort of cheap faux-antique facsimile. Instead, my ambition was to produce a handmade globe that felt classic yet at the same time unusual, relevant and contemporary.

Bellerby Globes. shot by Tom Bunning for part of his ‘Crafted’ Series.

I come from a line of keen artists. My grandmother and my mother both loved painting with watercolors; my grandmother even taught it for many decades until well into her nineties. I have several of their paintings, although they are stored in my attic because, sadly, I just don’t share their enthusiasm for this medium; I don’t like the imprecision of the application, although more likely I don’t care for watercolors because I have never been very good at painting with them. However, in collaboration with the crispness of the cartography on a globe, watercolors acquire another dimension, allowing you to build up a rich color patina over many layers without obscuring the text. It really is a perfect match.

Watercolors were no doubt used on the finest old globes for this reason; indeed, I would go so far as to say they could have been invented for globemaking had they not been conceived centuries earlier than the first painted globe. Globemakers must surely always have planned to paint their globes with watercolors; they knew their creation would have pride of place in the purchaser’s house, so beauty was paramount. We might love the look of these old globes now, but when they were made, they were positively revered. Meanwhile Chiara Perano, a friend of Jade’s obsessed with astrology and mythology, had been designing a celestial globe, mapping the stars and drawing all eighty-eight constellations by hand. She also decided that my original basic cartouche was not suitable for her celestial globe, and she quickly came up with a much better design.

In the early years of Bellerby & Co., my approach to publicity and marketing was a little scattergun. Finding the correct person to contact at publications for editorial content was far from straightforward. I just fired off the odd email here and there, and occasionally the employee handling the info@ or press@ account would pass it on to the editorial team. Sometimes this miraculously resulted in some publicity for Bellerby & Co. globes, such as a tiny feature in House and Garden magazine.

Just as Chiara was finishing the first Bellerby & Co. celestial globe, the Perano Celestial model, David Balfour, the property expert on Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie Hugo, saw the House and Garden piece and commissioned me to make four globes for a scene in the film, one of which was to be a celestial globe in two pieces; they were going to film the scene in a clockmaker’s studio, so our globes fitted the bill.

The deadline for the Hugo globes was ridiculously tight – filming was due to start in June 2010, and I had to build in extra time for their in-house approval. And I was still learning many of the processes and practicing only on 50-centimeter globes; the commission was for a 40-centimeter celestial globe and three much smaller terrestrials. I worked into the night for weeks for next to nothing – I was just excited to be asked.

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Excerpted from The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft by Peter Bellerby. Copyright (c) 2023 Bloomsbury Publishing. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

I’d been in practice as a conservator of art and architecture for about twenty-five years when I had my first big, bona fide failure. Before then I’d made only minor errors that could be easily fixed and disclosed—as our profession requires us to do—with little fanfare or consequence. My irreparable blunder came in 2009, when the world was in economic freefall and there was little work to be had.

I had just moved back to Los Angeles after a fellowship year at the American Academy in Rome when I was called in by an architect to address the emergency removal of an exotic early-twentieth-century wall covering on a historic Craftsman residence. Called Anaglypta, a name amalgamated from the Greek words for “raised” and “cameo,” the embossed wood pulp paneling was so rare that I had never even heard of it before. Neither had any of my local colleagues.

One thing about conservators is that we love encountering unusual materials. For me, who has a particular affinity for twentieth-century proprietary inventions, like Bakelite, Linoleum, and Formica, this Anaglypta project was a dream come true, especially since I was starting a new solo practice after three decades of partnering with others.

All of my previous partnerships had ended bitterly. My father had had similar repeated problems with work associates, a fact that both he attributed to the fact that “people are greedy and backstabbing.” My mother, who was prone to raging at the two of us, privately said to me, “Your father’s problem is his ego. He thinks that just because he was born rich, he’s better than everyone.”

My father’s family had been well-off middle class in pre-revolutionary Cuba. My paternal grandfather Alberto, a 1920s immigrant to Cuba from Romania, had owned a dry-goods store and two apartment buildings. Because my grandfather refused to believe that the United States would allow Communism to exist ninety miles from its shores, the family lost everything when we left for Miami, and I grew up in a house where there were constant worries and fights about money.

When I left home to go to college, I vowed to live life differently. I would avoid the scorching arguments, never hit my child or have serial blowups with friends and family. However, apart from hitting my child, which I studiously avoided, the reverse was true: I fought often with my first husband and we wound up divorcing. My partnerships, the first in Philadelphia and then two others in Los Angeles, turned out to be so contentious that I ended up in court with one of them and had not spoken to the two others in years.

I chalked up the demise of my Philadelphia partnership to both of us being young and inexperienced, but I was certain that my Los Angeles associates, neither of whom had either the training or experience I’d had when we started off together, had been simply greedy and overreaching. Nonetheless, despite the fact that I was one of the most well-trained and experienced architectural conservators in Los Angeles, no one wanted to work with me, even people I had trained and mentored in the past.

The Anaglypta removal was a rush job to accommodate a change in plans during a kitchen renovation. The architect who called me in to do it said that demolition was to start the following week—a preposterous schedule for such an undertaking. But this was a juicy project, and the fact that it was being offered to me, and not my backstabbing former partners, even though I’d been away for an entire year, seemed to be proof of my superior abilities. Besides, I was also told that once the material had been removed from the wall, I would have plenty of time to clean and prepare it for reattachment.

I arrived in Altadena in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains on a hot, dry, and windy morning. Though I had never been to this particular place before, the tree-lined street of Craftsman houses swept me with nostalgia: those gabled roofs, wide porches and lawns flanked by oaks and redwoods was a vision straight out of my childhood drawings.

When I was a newly arrived Cuban immigrant living in Miami Beach with totally distraught parents who struggled to make ends meet and come to terms with their losses, I filled notebooks with what I imagined to be real American neighborhoods of pine trees, rosebushes, and pitched roof houses like the ones I stood before. Moms that smiled and never screamed or used a belt, or told their only, lonely child that they wish she had never been born. Serial abandonment throughout her childhood had made my mother volatile and violent. Marrying my father had provided her a modicum of safety, but losing everything when we left Cuba shattered her peace of mind.

With its abundance of darkly polished woods and Batchelder tile fireplaces, the 1910 Craftsman house conveyed domestic comfort and an era of history when artistry mattered. The Anaglypta was in great condition, firmly bonded to the dining room’s walls. Crouching with a magnifying loupe over my eyes, and probing the edges of the embossing with a scalpel, I realized that I was going to have to put at least some brakes on the removal.

“We’re going to have to face the material with Japanese tissue so it doesn’t fall apart during removal,” I said. What I really should have told the architect was that he was proposing an impossible schedule. But I didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for them to call in one of my competitors, especially the two who I felt had betrayed me.

The following week, I arrived at the site to apply the facing, hoping this would buy me time to figure out the rest. What I found, instead, was that the contractor had taken it upon himself to start removing the panels. Alarmed, I dropped my tool kit and rushed over to lend a hand. To my astonishment, the panels came off in one piece, with little damage.

Calamity only began the following week, when I began flipping the panels in order to remove the plaster bits that remained stuck to the backing. The pulp began to splinter like bits of Roman glass. I should have stopped right then and there, but I was too swept up in the process, especially my own need to succeed. I asked the contractor to bring the panels to my studio. There, alone, I continued pressing at the problem, using different tools, to no avail. The panels kept falling apart.

At night, I awoke in terror at my own hubris. Why did I take on something that I knew could not work? Why did I not walk away when I saw that things were not being done correctly? Abject and certain I’d be sued, I finally admitted that I could not finish the project. The architect was furious. “But it wasn’t my fault!” I cried. “It was the contractor. He started the process.” Though the blame did begin with others, I should have known better. Conservators are trained to keep damage from happening and stop it when it does. My ego didn’t let me do that.

I fell into a tailspin, questioning my professionalism, my need to always succeed and best my competitors. Though my new solo practice grew exponentially, I felt alone and friendless, unsure of my fitness for the work itself, which is supposed to be approached judiciously and humbly, in service of materials and not the other way around. But that failure was exactly what I needed to set on a path of repair that went beyond the boundaries of conservation.

Now ten years later, I still wince when I think of those Anaglypta panels. But I also know that that failure forced me to confront my arrogance. As I began peeling back the layers of my personality, I began to see all of us who fail, destroy, and damage despite our best intentions—my parents, whom I had blamed, my partners, whom I’d loathed—through the eyes of a conservator—in other words, someone who understands that we are all damaged in one way or another, and seeking the source of our vulnerability is a prelude to redemption.

This personal exploration led me to write a memoir titled Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. In it, I come to terms with my own failures while blending my family story, the history of my beleaguered birthplace, and the tenets of the conservator’s practice. The personal work is far from over. Just like with the materials of art and architecture, the tender fragments of the human heart need ongoing maintenance for a long time.

______________________________

Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger is available via Row House Publishing.

In 2005, the Bolshoi Ballet paid a visit to New York. The company had a new young director no one in New York had heard of: Alexei Ratmansky. He was only thirty-seven and, though a product of the Bolshoi’s school, had never been a member of the company. Instead, he had had a respectable but not illustrious career dancing in Ukraine and Canada and Denmark. As it often does when on tour, the Moscow company, which is known for its extroverted and athletic style, presented a couple of old chestnuts, Don Quixote and Spartacus, as well as a nineteenth-century spectacle ballet, The Pharaoh’s Daughter. But the thing everyone was talking about was Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream, a farce set in the 1930s on a collective farm somewhere on the Russian steppes. It seemed like an odd choice to bring back what in Soviet times was known as a “tractor ballet,” extolling the virtues of communal life and productivity, accompanied by an energetic, cheerful—perhaps too cheerful—score by Dmitri Shostakovich.

What was this ballet? It should have been terrible: anachronistic, ridiculous, stylistically retrograde. And yet it was exactly the opposite: funny and silly and sad, filled with touching details that laid bare our flawed human nature. It included a hilarious (and ironic) parade of giant vegetables, a grand entertainment performed by the gathered farmworkers, a boisterous dance for an accordionist who imagines himself to be a sort of Rudolph Valentino, performances en travesti, a man in a dog suit riding a bicycle. And in the middle of all this, a romantic situation worthy of Beaumarchais, treated with the tenderness of Mozart. I knew I’d never seen anything like it. I was intrigued.

I was also surprised. My eyes, like those of many American ballet lovers, had been trained in the cool, elegant modernism of George Balanchine. Like painting and music before it, ballet’s great advance in the twentieth century had been its move away from overt narrative and toward abstraction. Who wrote symphonies about the triumph of the spirit anymore? Who made story ballets? All you needed for a great work, Balanchine and others had taught us, was bodies moving through space to music (the drama was inherent in those bodies and the way they, and the choreography, responded to and expressed something deeply embedded in the music). Choreography, if it was good, was enough. In the late twentieth century, some choreographers had gone even further, deconstructing ballet’s technique and conventions (forget hierarchy, forget courtly manners, forget illusion). Dancers, they showed us, were just people, albeit people who could do extraordinary things. The question was, Where would ballet go from there? Was there anywhere left to go?

The Bright Stream, then, was a radical departure. It was everything a sophisticated ballet was not supposed to be: it had a tuneful score, clearly drawn characters, and a story rooted in a specific time and place. It used pantomime, something one simply didn’t see outside of the classical nineteenth-century ballets, and even there, the consensus was, a little went a long way. Mime! Everyone thought it was dead. Here the characters seemed perfectly happy to converse as well as dance. In this onstage world, contrary to Balanchine’s famous dictum about there being no mothers-in-law in ballet, there could be mothers-in-law, and cousins, and tractor drivers, and dogs on bicycles. And you felt you knew precisely who everyone was. And it was funny!

Sitting there watching it all, I felt two emotions at once: glee at the liveliness of what was unfolding before me and curiosity about the artist who had created it, someone who knew the tragic history of collectivization yet could poke fun at the idea of propaganda ballet, embracing its kitsch Soviet formula and yet making something stylish and clever and touching out of it. The ballet exuded irony, a very postmodern quality, but also—and this was the interesting part—warmth. Despite yourself, you cared about the characters.

This was because Ratmansky’s characters were not empty caricatures. They were people. It came through clearly in the characterizations of the Bolshoi dancers. In Don Quixote and Spartacus, performed that same week, they had been emphatic and ham-handed, like actors shouting at the top of their lungs, but here they were nuanced, specific, expressive, and really funny, more like characters in a French farce than figures in a grand spectacle. It was clear that great care had been taken in the development and honing of every role. Even better, you could feel the distinct personality of each dancer shining through the mask of his or her character.

Add to this the musicality of the choreography. It was as if every idea Shostakovich had developed in the music had found its equivalent in the steps Ratmansky devised for the dancers. Sometimes Ratmansky’s musicality was lighthearted, as in a scene in which a girl milked a cow—the udders were a dancer’s fingers—in time to the music; sometimes his way of interpreting the music created its own images. A whirring in the strings and woodwinds became an undulating movement for the arms, like the moving parts in a machine. But in every case the steps helped the viewer to hear the music better, to catch its jokes and see its layers of subtext. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, it turned out. At the end of the intermission, as Ratmansky was returning to his seat, the choreographer Mark Morris stopped him in the aisle. “Baby, you’re the top of the town,” he told the startled Ratmansky.

I left the theater elated and full of questions. Who was this choreographer? What else had he done? The worlds of Russian and American ballet were far enough apart that his name was known only to a few ballet specialists in New York. But before the year was out, it had been announced that Ratmansky would make his first work for New York City Ballet the following season.

By 2008, three years later, Ratmansky had decided to leave Moscow for New York. I had my first interview with him the following year, when he joined American Ballet Theatre (ABT) as artist in residence, a position he holds until the end of 2023. In that conversation I was struck by his reticence and his resistance to overanalysis, paired with a kind of gentleness expressed through impeccable manners. For someone who had directed one of the largest, oldest, and most fractious companies in the world, he seemed to have surprisingly little ego.

The other thing that shone through was his unquestioning devotion to the art of ballet. At the time, a new history of ballet, by Jennifer Homans, had just come out, with an epilogue suggesting that it was a dying art. “You know, even if she is right,” Ratmansky said of Homans, “I don’t care. I do what I love.” He didn’t seem to worry too much about what other people thought. He had utter conviction in the art itself.

In 2019, a year before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Ratmansky celebrated his tenth anniversary with American Ballet Theatre. In those ten years he had created almost fifty ballets for companies around the world. He has now endured a pandemic. He becomes restless when he’s not working. His former boss at ABT, Kevin McKenzie, told me once that he thought Ratmansky was a “creation junkie.” I think he may be right. I asked him once how he felt after finishing a ballet. “You feel very light because you’re so empty,” he answered. Was it a good feeling? I asked. “Yes, as long as it doesn’t go on for too long. Two or three weeks is perfect.” The pandemic forced him to stop for almost a year. It was a strange sensation for him, almost like not existing. Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the place where he grew up and where his family still lives. His sense of self was deeply shaken. He kept working.

In 2017 I stood in Ratmansky’s living room in a nondescript high-rise on the east side of Manhattan as he and his wife, Tatiana, showed me some steps from a ballet he was working on. It was August. He was wearing flip-flops and shorts; she was in a light summer dress. The room wasn’t particularly large, so sometimes, as they moved, they ended up in the kitchen. He would catch her after a turn, and she would go through the motions of flitting away from him with a few quick jumps. (She was one of the first people he choreographed for and is still his most trusted adviser and frequent choreographic assistant.) They were relaxed, laughing, and I realized what an extraordinary thing I was seeing. Ballet is not something formal or abstract to Ratmansky—it is his natural habitat, the language in which he feels most conversant, his home, the air he breathes.

It’s unusual to be around a person so at ease with what he does, whose training and temperament and intellectual curiosity appear to be in complete harmony. This was what I intuited when I saw The Bright Stream, and what I felt even more palpably that first time we spoke. This impression has only intensified with every conversation that has followed, every rehearsal I’ve watched, every ballet of his I’ve seen. Everything besides creation is secondary.

The desire to understand that singular drive made me want to write this book, which is based on years of watching Ratmansky’s ballets onstage, of sitting in studios while he works with dancers during the creation process, and on interviews with him and with people who have known and worked with him throughout his life. I interviewed his parents and his sister, Masha, in Kyiv, schoolmates from his Bolshoi school days, dancers and ballet masters who worked with him at the National Ballet of Ukraine, and colleagues from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and many other companies. I watched countless videos from his private collection of recordings. But most important, over the course of four years I had the pleasure of spending many hours speaking with Ratmansky himself, as well as with his partner in crime and art (and wife), Tatiana. Those conversations have infinitely enriched my impressions and understanding of his work, as well as of the person behind them.

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Excerpted from The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet by Marina Harss. Copyright © 2023. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc. All rights reserved.