Ives.

For the past two nights, guests arriving at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall have found two harps and five extra music stands occupying part of the second balcony next to the stage. They sat unoccupied for the first part of the program on Wednesday and Thursday evening, as the New York Philharmonic debuted composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse's fearsome and taut 10-minute Prospero's Rooms (2012) and as Joshua Bell maneuvered his violin nimbly, delicately through Leonard Bernstein's Serenade (1953–54), offering an almost jaunty feel in the piece’s jazzy closing moments.

But after the intermission, two harpists and five violinists finally took up those positions to help perform Charles Ives's richly complex Symphony No. 4 (ca. 1912–18/1921–25). They were joined by scores of singers from the New York Choral Consortium, a Theremin, three pianos—one outfitted to play quarter tones—and a large retinue of other instruments. In the lobby during the break, some guests lingered in front of television screens showing the stage, eagerly watching the preparations. It has been nearly 10 years since the Philharmonic mounted the piece.

"There is nothing objectionable about a modern conductor choosing to divide the labors," the liner notes advised, and so yes, an additional conductor, Case Scaglione, came on stage with Alan Gilbert, for the Ives, sitting himself just a few feet to the left of the maestro. (Some conductors use two supporters.) Together they ably guided the orchestra through the piece’s most difficult sections, when multiple sets of instrumentalists play at different tempos and time signatures to make a collage of overlapping marching bands and Protestant hymns, an all-American cacophony. Though he was always admirably restrained, never a distraction, Mr. Scaglione lent some drama to the action, turning to various groups and up to the balcony, even sidling up alongside Mr. Gilbert in one particularly thorny section, reminding everyone of just how delicate and nuanced this music is, and how miraculous it is when musicians nail it, as happened on Thursday night, when I attended.

“It’s a piece that has to be experienced live,” Mr. Gilbert told The Times last week, and while that may be true of most music, I have never felt it as profoundly as with the Fourth, watching that little corps in the balcony float down ghostly melodies in the first movement, joined by the chorus with snippets of the hymn “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night”; or, in the second, watching two violinists at the far end of the stage as they danced quietly, almost unnoticed, with the piano. Mr. Gilbert rendered that wild second movement, the Allegretto, with an exacting viciousness, the brass turning violent by the end, as melodies pile on top of melodies to form a whole crashing wall of sound, in which no single theme is decipherable, just a glorious tangle of ideas.

Describing the program of the Fourth, Ives said that its maestoso Prelude asks "the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life"—the sort of questions Americans have been asking a lot this week—and that the following three movements are "the diverse answers in which existence replies." Those answers are complicated and fragmentary, hard to understand, which seems appropriate for the present moment. On Wednesday evening, The Times reported, the Philharmonic had played Elgar's "Nimrod" from his Enigma Variations (1898–99) as a memorial to composer Colin Davis and those injured and killed in Boston.

On Thursday, there was no Elgar, just Ives, but that was enough: his assorted ensembles formed and re-formed, often humming away at their own pace but uniting in brief moments of extreme beauty, as in the final, fourth movement, which the orchestra delivered with a crystalline clarity. The piece slowly grew, as a rumbling bass then woodwinds and piano entered. A Theremin sang through most of the movement, a spectral voice met only by the chorus at the very end, with a brief, always painfully too-short fragment of the melody for the hymn Bethany. The gentle patter of drums and cymbal clanked away thoughout the movement, ever-present and mysterious.

The program will be repeated on Friday and Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall.

“Oh no,” someone groaned. People began shooting photos and videos.
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Davoli in Pasolini's 'The Canterbury Tales' (1972).

A veteran New York art dealer recently complained to the Transom that the city’s art world has become much less fun over the past few years, citing as evidence the fact that no one drinks at business lunches anymore. We’d heard this complaint from other art types before. But could there finally be a change on the horizon?

Bottles of Chianti Classico had been uncorked and were steadily being emptied at the new M. Wells Dinette restaurant at MoMA PS1 around 10 a.m. last Wednesday, along with formidable helpings of blood pudding and eggs Florentine, buttery croissants and hearty maple donuts.

“We have all these pleasures—wine in the morning, this great food,” the museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, told the standing-room-only crowd, which, judging by the conversation, was filled with Italians. “So stay in the mood, and go across and have a look at Teorema and Medea and Salò,” the three films he’s installed at the museum as part of MoMA’s retrospective of Italian 1960s and ’70s filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. It takes a brave curator to pair blood pudding with the often-censored Salò, but never mind.

The show had been a long time coming, Mr. Biesenbach revealed. When he started at MoMA years ago, he proposed two exhibitions. “Both of them were voted down,” he said. The first was an exhibition of the 16th-century painter Caravaggio. “They said, ‘You started at the MoMA, not at the Met,’” he recalled. The second was a show devoted to the films of Andy Warhol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pasolini. “They said, ‘No, you can’t do this.’”

“In the meantime,” he continued, “We have done Warhol, we have done Fassbinder.” And now the Pasolini show has arrived, which includes a full slate of his films at MoMA, the film installations at PS1, and a variety of performances and readings of Pasolini’s writing.

Pasolini’s work had a role in forging Mr. Biesenbach’s long and fruitful friendship with the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose blockbuster MoMA retrospective he curated in 2010. “Twenty years ago, as a young curator in Berlin, I met Marina Abramovic, and she is a great artist.” Mr. Biesenbach said. “She was literally seducing everybody. She walks into a room, she flirts with everybody. She would flirt with the chair.” The room erupted in laughter.

“That’s how we became such close friends,” he continued. “I said, ‘Marina, you are like Terence Stamp in Teorema.’” In the 1968 film, a young Mr. Stamp has trysts with every member of an Italian family—husband and wife, son and daughter and, yes, the maid. “She was like, ‘Oh, great!’” (For a while, they thought about doing a project on the film, but it never came together.)

Roberto Cicutto, the CEO of Italy’s Luce Cinecittà film archive, which helped organize the retrospective, disagreed with Mr. Biesenbach. “Klaus Biesenbach looks very much like Terence Stamp,” he told everyone. “Marina Abramovic looks like Laura Betti,” the maid in the film. More laughter, making this one of the most joyful press events in recent memory.

Later on, the actor Ninetto Davoli, a red scarf hanging from his neck, took to the podium to talk about working with Pasolini. Except for the fact that his curly mop of hair is now white, he looks just about how he did in those movies 40 years ago. He spoke in quick, energetic Italian and gesticulated grandly, as a translator behind him gamely tried to scribble down his speech.

The Transom, sadly, does not know the language, but at least one part needed no translation, when Mr. Davoli looked heavenward and declared, “Bello e bello e bello!” to much applause. “It’s very emotional to be here today,” the translator said on behalf of Mr. Davoli. “We made 10 films together, and we worked for many years together.” Though Pasolini was derided in many places of the world, the actor said, New York accepted him, and he loved the city. “You can’t believe how happy it makes me,” he said. “Finally the world is starting to appreciate him.”

The New York Observer‘s

FROM THE EDITORS
Fall for Art
By Sarah Douglas and Andrew Russeth

ART
A Call to Arms
Dan Duray on celebrating a century of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

BOOKS
Close Reading
Michael H. Miller on Marco Roth and his upcoming memoir, The Scientists

FILM
Leading Men
Daniel D'Addario on the fall's presidential films, Lincoln and Hyde Park on Hudson

THEATER
Loose-Cannon Shannon
Harry Haun on Grace, at the Cort Theater

TOP 10s
Top 10 Museum Exhibitions
By Dan Duray

Top 10 Gallery Shows
By Andrew Russeth

Top 10 Books
By The Editors

Top 10 Films
By Daniel D'Addario

Top 10 New Plays
By Daniel D'Addario

Top 10 Classical Music & Opera
By Carl Gaines

"Life Sentences." (Knopf)

As William H. Gass’s own writing often has something of a confessional bent, it would not be inappropriate to begin a review of the eighth collection of essays by the great novelist, philosopher and critic, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Knopf, 350 pages, $28.95), with a confession. At 19, being underfunded, we lifted a copy of his pointillist 1976 classic On Being Blue from a bookstore. His listy, lush, jazzy, staccato, masterful riff on the epistemological variants, meanings and hues of the gloomiest color makes a powerful palliative in moments of blueness. That book was a dose of what he’s called his “metaphysical hot todd[ies],” elixirs we would recommend to any melancholic.

Mr. Gass, who was born in Fargo, N.D., raised in Warren, Ohio and educated on the GI bill at Wesleyan and Cornell after sailing the ocean blue during WWII, wrote of the ocean, “It was never blue. It was moody. There was a lot of it … On calm days its surface was the skin of a sleeping creature. I would wash my skivvies by tying them to the end of the rope and letting the ship pull them through the water as though I was fishing for a bigger catch, perhaps a dress suit.” He locked himself in the ship’s safe and drank all the medicinal brandy and “because of my exemplary incompetence was promoted, such is the navy way, to top secret officer.” Mr. Gass is, by adoption, St. Louis’s most favored literary son since T.S Eliot first planned a brief trip to London. He is undoubtedly, as he once wrote of the woman he called his great literary “wife,” Gertrude Stein, “American as git.”

But being American as git does not necessarily make one as wholesome as apple pie.

Mr. Gass is an ironist of the highest caliber, a metafictional novelist of the Coover, Barth, Pynchon and Gaddis school. At 87, he is an improbable éminence grise of American letters, festooned with accolades; if there is any justice in the world he will one day get his Nobel prize. When he is not deathly serious with his sly, avuncular delivery of 3-in-the-morning-crisis existential epiphanies, he is hilariously subversive.

Here, for example, from Life Sentences is his comparison of the virtues from his shamelessly prescriptive defense of lust: “Piety is a nasty little virtue. Reverence for Pa the father, Ra the god, and hurrah the flag. Piety is respect for power and privilege, ancestors and the dead-and-gone deities. There is nothing in the world worth worship … Adultery on the other hand, cannot be too frequently practiced.” A few pages later, in the same essay, called “Lust,” he addresses the uses of rage: “Old Man Yeats knew what was true. If you have no more anger at this world, anger at its willful stupidities, its grim indifference, its real sins: Its murdering hordes, its smug myths, exploitative habits, its catastrophic wastes, the smile on its hyena hungry face, its jackal tastes, then you belong to it, and are one of its apes—though animals should not be so disgraced as to be put in any simile with man.”

Though he is also a masterful novelist—Omensetter’s Luck (1966) is widely considered a classic—his reputation rests on his criticism and essays. Mr. Gass’s collected essays are sure to eventually be gathered and bound together in a voluminous Library of America edition and placed on bookshelves and dusty stacks alongside the likes of Emerson, Twain, Mencken, Muir, Baldwin, Whitman, Dos Passos, Du Bois and the James brothers.

As an essayist, his prose is gorgeously musical, ticking along smoothly as if measured out by metronome. He composes miniature fugues and conducts cadenzas while meandering around his subjects. To switch to a culinary metaphor: it’s the creamiest of intellectual fare. He delights in internal rhymes and polysyllabic arrangements. His sentences lilt without tilting over. He wraps every poised sentence around an effulgent core of epiphany. He is simultaneously both the royal arborist wielding the clippers that trim the hedges of the labyrinth and the questing hero with his fingers clasped around the minotaur’s horns. He lingers over and savors whatever he is writing about. In Sentences he admits that he has “never been able to break the denominating habit … In a recent piece [on Elizabeth Bishop], I managed to cram the names of 110 weeds into one paragraph.”

Per the collection’s playful, multiple-entendre title, the investigation of the life of the sentence—its turns, textures, sub clauses, predicates, its febrile shape and the slithery feel of its innards—has, in fact, been his life’s work.  He has dissected and diagrammed—like every other one of his essay collections, this one contains an essay composed of charts and a diagram—the English literary sentence more thoroughly and exhaustively than perhaps any other writer in the history of the English language. Over the years he has published essays on “The Ontology of the Sentence,” the “Geography of the Sentence” and how “The Sentence Seeks Its Form.” This new collection adds “Narrative Sentences” and “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence” to that list. He dabbles in semiotics, potters in semantics and putters around linguistics.

Originally trained as a philosopher, Mr. Gass has spent much of his life teaching undergraduate philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.  Far from being facile exercises in a kind of sonorous tonality, his writings carefully bridge the ancient lacuna between philosophy and literature with a kind of poetic, intertextual literary theory that is both evocative and rigorous. That approach is especially evident, in this collection, in essays on the Greek roots in “Mimesis” and “Metaphor.” His knotty, allusive, philosophical prose was a decisive influence on the late David Foster Wallace: when Wallace alighted upon graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard he intended to follow Mr. Gass’s career path, a philosophy professor by day and postmodern (though both have disliked and rejected that term) novelist by night.

Sentences picks up where the previous collection, 2006’s The Temple of Texts, left off. The first piece, “The Literary Miracle,” is his acceptance speech on the occasion of Temple’s winning the Truman Capote award for literary criticism. That book was preoccupied with the building of a quirky personal canon and proffering a defense of his classics. Sentences is largely a shift to elegiac reminiscence. Included is an extended essay on “Retrospection” and a few folksy pieces about baseball and patriotism. There is a wonderful meditation on the materiality of living whole “slices of life in a library.” He ruminates on the cruelty of Nazis generally, and on the duplicity of one, Knut Hamsun, in particular.

While his interests have multiplied, evolved and expanded, their scope has in some ways been set for 40 years. His style is eerily invariable (down to the static consistency of his sentence lengths), coherent as if having sprang forth fully formed from the brow of some literary demigod. The literary portraits here are grouped together under the rubric “Old Friends and Fresh Enemies.” Proust, Lowry, Stein, Henry James, Kafka, Nietzsche—he has written about them before, some a half dozen times, and at greater length. But while these latest essays may be slight by comparison, they offer the ripe insights of incessant and ardent rereading.

In a reminiscence in Sentences he writes that to “anyone who has reached eighty-seven years, as I have, only the past is likely to have much duration; greed and regret will have eaten the present, which is at best a sliver of cake too small for its plate, while the future fears it may cease before having been. I hear it running to get here, its labored breathing like an old man—eighty seven—on the stairs. Lust and rage, Yeats rightly said, attend one’s old age.”

As an octogenarian, Mr. Gass remains the sprightliest of essayists: his writing is piercingly incisive, melodious and radical. The present collection is like the title of the speech, and in the tradition of its predecessors, a literary miracle.

editorial@observer.com

There was a velvet rope set up on the street in front of the gallery, and beyond it stood a phalanx of PR reps and security guards. Gliding past the welcoming committee, we ascended the stairs. At the top, we found, behind the front desk, emblazoned in bold capital letters, “CULO BY MAZZUCCO.”

Like a few hundred young fashion and music types—a more racially diverse crowd than we had ever seen in a contemporary art gallery, truth be told—we were here to toast the unveiling of a new 248-page book of photographs by Raphael Mazzucco called, yes, Culo by Mazzucco. Culo? It’s Italian for ass, we were informed. Let us be clear: Mr. Mazzucco delivered.

Past the red-carpet photo-op section, the galleries were hung with photographs of nude women—lithe model types—exposing their bottoms. They were in bed, facing walls and kneeling. Three stood on a beach, gazing off into the sunset. In one print, the woman twisted to face the camera, surrounded by scores of wine corks that had been affixed to the canvas. Many were splattered with paint—raspberry red, ocean blue and, perhaps most suggestive, white.

We caught up with Mr. Shafrazi, clad in a suit and tie, in one of the galleries. He is short and stocky and handsome, with a mane of curly white hair that extends to his shoulders. “Oh, I’m not the man to ask about that,” the dealer told us when he asked how the show came about. “Ask one of the organizers.” It was a great party, we told him, and he thanked us amiably, shuffling off as The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems” came on the stereo.

The Transom repaired to the bar, which was stocked amply with Cîroc, the eau de vie marketed by rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, one of the executive editors of Mr. Mazzucco’s book, with Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine, who both arrived late in the evening. (“Interscope Records has always been a heat-seeking missile when it comes to shifts in popular culture,” Mr. Iovine writes in the introduction to the book.) It turned out, Mr. Shafrazi, one of the art world’s true eccentrics, who in 1970 defaced Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art, writing “Kill Lies All” in red paint as he shouted “call the curator, I’m an artist”—was only providing his gallery for the evening.

As we examined more of the paint-splattered photographs of nude women, taking notes as we sipped a glass of Cîroc and soda, a tall-dark haired woman approached. “Are you press?” she asked. “I’m the art dealer this evening.” We introduced ourselves. And though she then declined an interview request to discuss the show (“don’t quote me, or I’ll kill you,” she laughed), she offered to introduce us to Interscope’s lawyers. Unfortunately, they were busy, so we exchanged cards. “Call me tomorrow,” she said. “Tell me which was your favorite piece.”

It was early on Saturday afternoon, the third day of the (e)merge Art Fair, and Ms. Leene was brimming with energy. "I sleep with my art," she said. "It's a new experience, but it's kind of nice." Many of the other exhibitors—80 in total, split roughly evenly between galleries and artists—had opted to stay in other rooms in the hotel, which is owned by the art-collecting Rubell family, who plan to open a contemporary art museum nearby.

Ms. Leene had arrived into town from the Houston Fine Art Fair, which, like (e)merge, had presented its inaugural edition this month. She had removed most of the furniture from the room, including one of its beds, and hung messy text paintings by Ruud de Wild and lush photographs of insects by Agniet Snoep against the room’s pale yellow stripped wallpaper.

It was about 1 p.m., and the fair was quiet, though the number of visitors slowly picked up throughout the day. We were told that the opening evening and even the day before had been raucous, filled with artists and local arts supporters. Most of the galleries involved were young or small or both, and their works carried low prices. There were few works beyond the low-four-figure range, and quite a number of pieces—drawings and prints, mostly—available for a few hundred dollars.

"We have had a couple of good sales, and a lot of very good contacts,” said Walter de Weerdt, of Brussels-based Nomad Gallery, who had removed all of his room’s furniture, except for chairs and a desk, and filled it with small carved portraits by Aimé Mpane, who showed at the Smithsonian’s African Art Museum back in 2009. The portraits were priced at $2,500, and red dots hovered next to a few of them. With rooms going for $4,700 apiece, Mr. de Weerdt had likely covered his costs easily.

Mr. de Weerdt met Leigh Conner and Jamie Smith, co-directors of Conner Contemporary, who organized (e)merge along with Helen Allen, at the Art Brussels fair, and they sold him on the idea of coming to D.C. “The name of my gallery is Nomad Gallery, so I have to prove it,” he laughed.

However, even with those low prices, not everyone had made sales. “We’ve had a lot of note takers,” one gallerist told me, a comment that a handful of other exhibitors echoed.

“D.C. would seem to have everything necessary for a successful fair,” David Markus, of New York’s Josée Bienvenu Gallery, told The Observer. Indeed, the surrounding area is filled with highly educated, upper-income people with plenty of exposure to art. But D.C. has never had a commercial art scene on the scale of New York  or Los Angeles or Chicago. The area’s collectors buy elsewhere. A previous attempt at a fair, Art DC, held at the city's convention center in 2007, lasted only one year.

Bienvenu had secured two adjoining rooms and devoted one to a large-scale installation by Lebanese-American artist Annabel Daou, which was one of the few works priced in the five-figure range at the fair. “The State Department sent her work to the Cairo Biennale,” Mr. Markus said, “so this was a perfect opportunity to show it here.”

With a few exceptions, the caliber of the work on view at (e)merge seemed unlikely to draw major collectors and museum curators. But it could happen if D.C. develops a viable gallery scene (it will no doubt take time). Neighboring Baltimore, which has a fair amount of buzz and where a handful of artist-run spaces have caught national attention, doesn't hurt either.

Many dealers cited reasons for doing the fair beyond sales. “We thought that the galleries in D.C. needed a platform like this,” said Amy Cavanaugh Royce, the director of Honfleur Gallery, which is based in the Anacostia neighborhood in D.C. “We wanted to support the fair. It is really well intentioned. There has been lots of interest and lots of enthusiasm. There’s a really good vibe.”

Karyn Miller, the director of visual arts at D.C.’s Flashpoint gallery concurred. “There's such a palpable energy here, which I don't feel very often in D.C.,” Ms. Miller said. “It feels like we're part of something that's bubbling up.” Flashpoint had also secured two rooms, and devoted one to a pinball machine and slot machines lovingly redesigned and repainted by Kenny George. With the curtains drawn and the lights turned off, the room glowed with light from the machines. It was gorgeous.

In the ground floor ballroom and in the basement park garage, artists, who had beaten out hundreds of other applicants, showed their art at no charge. Unfortunately, the work tended toward the sort of half-baked conceptual, performance and installation works that has become de rigueur in the artist sections of the more loosely curated art fairs.

However, the hotel, designed by architect Morris Lapidus, famed for his ritzy Miami Beach hotel, the Fontainbleau, had its charms. The stairwell to the basement featured shimmering blue tiling, and the pool looked refreshing, though it had no takers on our visit.

On Sunday, The Observer visited the Phillips Collection, the modern art museum founded by Duncan Phillips and his mother Eliza Laughlin Phillips in 1918. There were on view a trove of modern European works, half of Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series" (the other half resides at MoMA) and a small number of works by the Color Field painter Morris Louis, a onetime D.C. resident.

We had our (e)merge tote bag hanging over our shoulder and, two separate times, young museum attendants stopped us to ask if we had been to the fair. They had friends in the shows, and were enthusiastic to hear how it had been. (e)merge, it seemed, had tapped into latent enthusiasms, allowing people to show work and network, all commendable side effects.

"It's good for the art community here, because everyone eventually leaves," one of the women told us. We asked her about what she did for a living. "I'm an artist," she replied. "I'm going to leave."

arusseth@observer.com

"Madeleine Leaning on Her Elbow with Flowers in Her Hair" (1918) by Renoir.

A $1 million Renoir painting plucked from a Houston home by an armed robber earlier this month remains at large, and local police officials now tell press that they believe that the work may be on its way out of the country. Details for the reasoning behind that suspicious have not been released.

ABC News in Houston reported that the work, a 1918 painting titled Madeleine Leaning on Her Elbow with Flowers in Her Hair, was stolen by a white man wearing a ski mask and sporting a semiautomatic gun earlier this month.

"It's a Renoir painting. It's highly recognizable." Katherine Cabaniss, the executive director of the Crime Stoppers crime-fighting organization in Houston, told the television station, warning the robber. "Someone who's in possession of that property can easily be identified."

As The Observer reported earlier this year, it is difficult, but not altogether impossible, for criminals to sell stolen artworks. Stay tuned.

Charles M. Royce. (Photo: Greg Kinch Photography)

The board of the Frick Collection announced today that it has appointed Charles M. Royce, the president and co-chief investment officer of Royce & Associates and president of the Royce Funds, as its newest trustee.

Frick chairman Margot Bogert cheered the decision in a statement to press. "He brings to this group a long-abiding focus on the preservation of historic properties as well as a professional background in finance," Ms. Bogert said, "and we are confident that his perspective will prove very useful to the landmarked Frick Collection and the care of its beloved buildings.”

Following a long career in finance, Mr. Royce has moved into the realm of historic preservation in recent years. In 2003, with his wife Deborah, he acquired a Victorian hotel in Watch Hill, R.I., which he reconstructed and repurposed as a nonprofit cinema. The couple has also repaired the Avon Theater in Stamford, Conn.

Earlier this year, the Frick's board tapped Ian Wardropper, the chairman of the European sculpture and decorative arts department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to serve as director of the museum.