From Homer to the Present

It happens that your correspondent once had the privilege of making the acquaintance of Harvard classics professor John Finley, who has been said to have a personal acquaintance with Homer himself. So it was with no small amount of interest that the Knickerbocker stopped by the opening of the Dahesh Museum’s “The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art From the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts,” a remarkable show in a museum that, in the year of its 10th anniversary, has emerged as one of the gems of New York.“The Legacy of Homer” was mounted in collaboration with the Princeton University Art Museum, which is staging a companion exhibition. While musicians strolled around the Dahesh’s elegant new premises playing lutes, and a man dressed as Odysseus posed for pictures with guests, we found ourselves face to face with Peter Trippi, the high-spirited director of the Dahesh who is on a mission to illuminate for a New York public the glories of the art produced by the painters who studied in the art schools of 19th-century Europe.It was the bequest of the collection of a Lebanese writer and connoisseur, Salim Moussa Achi, who used the pen name Dr. Dahesh, that formed the foundation of the museum. And it’s one of those bequests that is having a growing impact. One individual we encountered was James Cooper, director of the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center and publisher of one of the most remarkable magazines in the city, American Arts Quarterly. He was growling about the Modernists and praising the beauty of the classical canvases in the show. We found ourselves transfixed, en route to the Homeric part of the show, by a little painting of figures on a staircase by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It’s about 3 inches wide and a foot high.Your correspondent encountered two keepers of the academic flame in New York drawing and painting circles, Andrea J. Smith and Judith Pond Kudlow, who are, respectively, director and dean of the Harlem Studio of Art, whose brochure carries on its cover the quotation of Leonardo da Vinci, “Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.” Their studio is one of the seats in which these traditions are passed to a new generation of painters. It was wonderful to walk past canvases of Jacques-Louis David or Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux from the Homeric show and watch two modern masters remark on the achievements of an earlier academy.Dinner was upstairs from the show at the restaurant connected with the museum, Cafe Opaline, where one of the trustees of the Dahesh, Amira Zahid, an elegant and cheerful lady, spoke of the “exciting yet rough beginnings” of the museum during which, she said, “the skepticism of the press” was “counterbalanced by immediate recognition from art professionals around the world as well as from the public.” Quoth she: “Academic art is back, the people have spoken, history has been corrected.” She said that the next decade of the Dahesh “is now entrusted to its public.”She did not quote this wry little limerick that I once heard, but I will:A painter awoke in old TroyBlinked and exclaimed, ‘Oh boy!Hand me my brushesAnd pose in the thrushesFor art that none can alloy.’***ROOMFUL OF LAURELS If poet laureates are literary peaks, then the Poetry Society of America’s dinner Tuesday was a mountain range. A painting by Helen Frankenthaler graced a room where eight poet laureates read their work intermittently and alphabetically over dinner and dessert. Each has held the post that from 1937 to 1986 was called “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress” until an act of Congress changed it to “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.”PSA president William Louis-Dreyfus and board member David Emil,a former Battery Park City Authority president, collaborated in planning the fund-raising evening. In introducing Louise Gluck, Mr. Louis-Dreyfus said the poet had been reluctant to attend: “She wasn’t good at small talk.” He had told her that he wasn’t either and that they could sit together.Robert Hass traveled from California and current poet laureate Ted Kooser arrived from Nebraska, where he sat with New School president Bob Kerrey, his former senator. Mr. Kooser said that 20 years ago he started writing poetry as a lark – sending Valentine poems to women he knew and wives of friends. The list has grown from about 50 to 1,200. “Valentine’s day is really the poet’s holiday.” He read his 1991 Valentine’s poem “Barn Owl” and his 1992 poem “Song of the Ironing Board.”Maxine Kumin read the poem “Jack” from her book “Jack and Other New Poems” (W.W. Norton). She spoke about having been the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress for 18 months in 1981-82. She noted that there had been only four women appointed to the post between 1937 and 1981. A senior library official had once declared, “We don’t count” the number, to which Ms. Kumin persisted, “But we do.”Reading first was Billy Collins, whose poem “The Trouble with Poetry” opens a chapbook that the PSA published for this occasion. Samantha Thornhill read laureate Rita Dove’s poem “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove.” PSA executive director and New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn introduced a recording of Stanley Kunitz. She also said Mr. Kunitz has been reading “Moby Dick,” and that everyone who visits him is asked to read a passage from the novel.Robert Pinsky arrived from Boston by car after his flight was canceled. He read “Samurai Song” and spoke about the role of poet laureate. “To me, there’s a beautiful contradiction in having an official poet,” he said. Poetry is the art that is defined as being on the scale of one person, he said. “Unlike cathedrals,” poetry is made by an individual.Mark Strand recalled how as poet laureate he lived in a house in Washington that leaked when it rained. He read, “I Had Been a Polar Explorer.” Richard Wilbur read “Blackberries for Amelia.” He explained the last two words of the title: “I was told by the New Yorker that they didn’t care for dedications, so I took the dedication and put it into the title.”The Knickerbocker asked Bill Moyers about the role of poetry in this sprawling country. “It’s a simple matter to me,” he said. Poets cannot make a living with their writing “so they are free to speak the truth.”gshapiro@nysun.com

From Homer to the Present

From Homer to the Present

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