Pictures

Visual Studies 
Looking Good
In Thomas Struth's retrospective, sometimes his "precise looking" helps history flow. Sometimes it freezes it dead.

By James Polchin

A few years ago, the journalist Janet Malcolm interviewed the German artist Thomas Struth in Dusseldorf. She accompanied him to a nearby factory where he photographed industrial machines. Malcolm watched from a distance as Struth worked at his meticulous and time-consuming process. At one point in this visit, Struth discussed the work and influence of Bernd and Hilla Bechers, his photography instructors at the Dusseldorf Academy where he studied art in the 1970s. The Bechers produced a huge collection of now iconic black and white photographs of water towers, coal burners, blast furnaces and factory facades gathered from the industrial landscapes of the Rurh valley near Bernd’s childhood home. The work spans nearly three decades beginning in the late 1950s. What they produced were cool and crisp images, repetitive in composition, and nearly hypnotic when viewed together. The lighting is always overcast to avoid shadows. The distance between camera and subject is always the same. The perspective is always slightly elevated from ground level, reducing the subject’s monumentality to a more human scale. 

   

• "Thomas Struth: Photographs" The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Through February 16, 2015.

“When Bernd and Hilla made this contract with themselves in the 1950s to catalog these kind of objects,” Struth tells Malcolm, “German photography was all abstract subjectivism.” He added, “People didn’t want to look at reality, because what you saw in Germany in the fifties was destruction and the Holocaust. It was all a terrible reality, so precise looking was not a widespread impulse.”

In Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Malcolm relates this encounter with Struth and notes that this precise looking was “a model of ethical rigor.” It was also an approach to history. Their photographs offer images of a fading German industrial landscape, a history that recalls a life before the war. As art historian Blake Stimpson relates, “Bernd once observed that the structures before their camera ‘seemed to us like individuals,’ each one with ‘a look of its own.’” In recording these structures, the Bechers where also wanting us to look at the past. Bernd noted: “I was overcome with horror when I noticed that the world in which I was besotted was disappearing.” Their “precise looking” was a kind of radical longing where history and the present collide.

You can find much of this same precise looking in this small exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Struth’s work. Unlike the retrospective that the museum mounted over a decade ago, this show is more limited in its approach to the artist’s archive. It juxtaposes the small, urban photographs of New York and Rome that he did in the late 1970s, next to the wall sized color image “Pantheon, Rome” (1990) from his famous museum series, which sits across from the moody and casual portrait “Eleanor and Giles Robertson, Edinburgh” (1987), which is not far from “Tien An Men, Beijing” (1997), with its swath of a solid red wall that supports an image of Mao who looks upon sightseers wandering on the grey stones in the square. The mixture of time and place asks us to look not so much at the artist’s evolution, but rather to consider Struth’s approach to photography amidst the historical collisions that make his work both mundane and deeply layered.

Thomas Struth (German, born 1954). Hot Rolling Mill, ThyssenKrupp Steel, Duisburg, 2010. Chromogenic print 67 11/16 × 79 15/16 in. (172 × 203 cm). Purchase, The Rosenkranz Foundation Gift and Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2014. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2014.288). © Thomas Struth

Take his early series of New York photographs. Struth arrived in New York in December of 1977 on a scholarship from the Kunstakademie to photograph the streets of the city. He was only 23 years old. The city was a mixture of decay and decadence, wrapping itself against the winter, trying to forget the chaos of looting and arson that erupted in the previous summer amidst a two-day blackout.

Struth’s black and white photographs make the city look like a ghost town. “Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978” shows a wide street in the foreground, littered with debris. An El Camino parked on the left side gives the image a distinctive 1970s feel. There is not a human in sight. As the image recedes, the street narrows, and the former factory building facades become a shrinking pattern of vanishing perspective.

Look at “Dey Street, Financial District, New York 1978” or “West 21st Street Chelsea, New York 1978” or “115th Street at 2nd Avenue, Harlem, New York 1978” and the views are all pretty much the same. It is this view that Struth was nearly obsessive about: this vanishing point perspective that he repeated in other cites (London, Paris, Rome) in the 1970s and 1980s. What emerges is a somewhat surreal pattern of urban views, absent human activity, mixing older weathered buildings with the aspirations of modern skyscrapers. The young Struth’s New York cares little for the human life of the city. Rather it presents us with the layers of history built in stone and concrete and steel, conceptual patters of architecture and decay.

Thomas Struth (German, born 1954). Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978. Gelatin silver print 29.5 x 40.6 cm (11 5/8 x 16 in.) Gift of Henry S. Hacker, 1982 The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1982.1053.1) © Thomas Struth

The wall text connects this series with the work of Eugene Atget who photographed the changing and vanishing geography of Paris in the late 19th century with a similarly keen eye for documentation. I was also reminded of Atget’s student and biggest promoter Berenice Abbott, who documented old New York in a series of photographs in the 1930s. Or Walker Evan’s images of decrepit southern plantations in the same period also come to mind. Modernist photographers were often documenting what was disappearing.

For Struth, however, his images seem more self-conscious about their documentary eye. It would be naïve of this work as objective. Rather he was interested in what a documentary photograph could show us, what such precise looking could allow. In their repetitive staging, his urban photographs ask us to look at the city from a similar vantage point, over and over again. What would we see in such a pattern of looking? But they also ask: how can this precise looking capture a longing for the present moment?

The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples, 1988. Chromogenic print. 119.1 x 159.7 cm (46 7/8 x 62 7/8 in.) Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts; Jennifer Saul Gift; Gift of Dr. Mortimer D. Sackler, Theresa Sackler and Family; and Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz Gift, 2010. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2010.121). © Thomas Struth

One clear indication that Struth’s documentary style is not simply about photographic objectivity is how his subjects are so clearly trapped in their historical moment. We know these streets of New York could only be from the 1970s. There are few universals in Struth’s work. His subjects appear paradoxically objective and historically subjective at the same time. Unlike the Beecher’s compositional uniformity or even Evan’s distancing gaze on southern facades, Struth’s subjects hold in them a self-conscious awareness of their own time and place, even as the moment is passing. His photographs remind me of what Berenice Abbott once called a photograph’s ability to capture the “vanishing instant.”

Looking at the New York series today, some four decades later, I could only notice what was lost. The view down Dey Street in the financial district ends in a ghostly glimpse of the World Trade Center façade. In “58th Street at 7th Avenue, Midtown, New York 1978” I notice the small sliver of the old New York Coliseum jutting out on the left side, and remember walking past the abandoned monolith on Columbus Circle back in the 1990s. It was torn down a few years later and replaced by the uber-luxurious Time Warner Center with its glass and stone veneer, its five star hotels, penthouse apartments, and upscale shopping mall. Struth’s images of Soho or Tribeca look nothing like those neighborhoods today: consumer spaces filling post-industrial abandonment.

The weight of history fills Struth’s photographs. In “Pantheon, Rome” (1990) the centuries old dome dominates the wall-size work. The small crowd of tourists looks so alienated by the height and weight of history, lost in this moment of looking. This photograph was part of his museum series, photographing the postures and gestures of museum patrons from St. Petersburg to Paris to Florence and New York. We encounter in this series, as we see in “Pantheon, Rome,” a self-reflective sense of our own looking, our own encounters with the art works and the history they conjure. In his large format photographs, we, like his subjects, confront our smallness in front of history’s gaze.

 Tien An Men, Beijing, 1997. Chromogenic print 184.2 x 228 cm (72 1/2 x 89 3/4 in.). Gift of Graciela and Neal Meltzer, 2002. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2002.498) © Thomas Struth

Consider “Tien An Men, Beijing.” We get in this image the juxtaposition of Mao’s iconic official portrait looming over the square as a woman poses for a picture next to a stone statue. The image juxtaposes the personal and vernacular with the official state portrait. Struth took this image a decade after the violent suppression of the student uprising in the square, and it is difficult not to look at this photograph within those earlier events in mind. The wall text tells us this photograph “is a complex, ambiguous meditation on the potential of the individual subject caught in the flow of history.” Sometimes history flows. Sometimes it tramples. What is fascinating in such seemingly mundane moments is how personal and official histories are both anchored to image making.

We see a different kind of history in the portrait “Eleanor and Giles Robertson, Edinburgh” (1987). The aged couple leans against opposite sides of a worn and stained wooden table. Red patterned wallpaper surrounds them. Off in the distance, through avocado green doors, you sense there is a bookshelf groaning. For his many portraits series, Struth would get to know his subjects, spend time with them, before sitting them in front of his camera. He let his subjects decide how to be photographed. Here, Eleanor, calm and elegant, looks directly at us. Giles, in profile, stares off to the side with a relaxed smile. Taken in 1987, the image looks nothing like the era (however we imagine Edinburgh in the late 1980s). They hold instead, as Struth described them, a “form of being in the world we could only imagine in the 19th century.”

It is however, his museum series and his urban portraits that stand out in this show. At a talk at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Struth said of his urban photography: “every building is like a face. Every neighborhood is like a crowd.” The last image of this show bears this out in a haunting way. “Times Square” (2000) centers on the digital façades of the image saturated square, caught in the early morning light. We witness a fleeting moment of a woman’s face projected on a video screen stretching several stories above a Nasdaq logo. Her head towers over the streets, and dwarfs the logos and advertisements that compose the square’s commercial surround. A few actual humans on the streets cast a blurry movement. But it is the woman’s face, stretched and distorted, that both centers this photograph and turns it into an image of an image, a portrait within a portrait. The photograph, like the best of Struth’s works, offers a moment of visual longing amidst the force of politics and markets, much like the woman smiling for the snapshot in Tien An Mein Square or the crowd gazing upward in the Pantheon, cameras at the ready, grasping for a place in the vanishing instant. • 22 October 2014

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James Polchin teaches writing at NYU and is the founder and editor of the site Writing in Public. 

Basquiat

Basquiat in the American South

• by John d'Addario on October 30, 2014
• 3

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “King Zulu” (1986). Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Government of Catalonia Art Fund. Former Salvador Riera Collection. (© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, New York 2014)

NEW ORLEANS — To see Basquiat and the Bayou, the “exhibition within an exhibition” that by general consensus is the must-see component of the sprawling Prospect.3: Notes for Now biennial triennial that opened in New Orleans on October 25, you need to make your way to the top floor of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in the city’s Warehouse Arts District. The Ogden’s handsome brick and glass building sits across the street from the Contemporary Arts Center and is adjacent to the Louisiana Civil War Museum, formerly known as the Confederate Museum; the National World War II museum occupies a seemingly ever-expanding constellation of buildings in its own campus across the street. It’s a fertile setting for what turns out to be a provocative contextualizing of the artist’s work.

Curated by Prospect.3 artistic director Franklin Sirmans, who also co-curated the 2005 retrospective of Basquiat’s work that originated at the Brooklyn Museum, the nine paintings in Basquiat and the Bayou present a compact survey of various themes related to the American South — including jazz music, slavery and its legacy, race relations, and Afro-Caribbean influences — that the artist explored over the course of his brief career.

Much is made in the (excellent) exhibition catalogue for Basquiat and the Bayou of Basquiat’s first (and only) visit to New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival with artistOuattara Watts in April 1988, just three and a half months before his death: “Jean-Michel said he had a surprise for me,” says Watts in a quote from the catalogue. “And he took me to see the Mississippi. It symbolized the bond between us, because of the slaves who traveled on it when coming through the Delta.”

It’s a story that bolsters the show’s narrative of the artist’s fascination with the region and its history, though there’s no evidence of that visit in any of the works here — all of which except one were completed in the years before Basquiat ever laid eyes on the Mississippi, much less the “bayou” of the exhibition’s title (which is used here both for its alliterative convenience and as a metonymy for New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, and the South in general.)

Nonetheless, Sirmans offers a convincing argument that the South played an important imaginative role in Basquiat’s work, in varying historical and semi-fictive degrees. To quote Sirmans’ catalogue essay, “Basquiat, as a child of the New World metropolis, fought long and hard with the shadows of the South.”

Only one painting here references New Orleans directly: “King Zulu” (1986), on loan from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, is an homage to Louis Armstrong, who was born in New Orleans in 1901 and returned to his hometown in 1949 to reign as King Zulu, or honorary leader of the city’s oldest and most prestigious African-American carnival organization, or krewe.

Members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, as it’s formally known, are drawn from an upper echelon of prominent business and community leaders, and Armstrong himself considered his reign as King Zulu to be the fulfillment of a childhood dream. But the parade has always presented a curious spectacle to outsiders not familiar with New Orleans carnival traditions: Zulu krewe members parade in an exaggerated blackface costume, complete with spears and grass skirts, and pass out highly coveted decorated coconuts to delighted crowds of both black and white spectators along the way.

Is Basquiat’s depiction of Armstrong in blackface, then, an acknowledgement of the honor that Armstrong was accorded as King Zulu, or the outsider’s critical reaction to a seemingly racist tradition? As is often the case with the best of Basquiat’s work, the painting offers no easy reading one way or the other, and the spectacle of Armstrong’s garishly made up face and leering grin floating serenely in a sea of blue with the honorific “King Zulu” and a four-piece jazz ensemble hovering around him remains an ambiguous one.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Zydeco” (1984). Installation view in “Basquiat and the Bayou” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans (photo by John d’Addario)

Ambiguity also plays a part in the largest piece in the show, the massive “Zydeco” (1984) on loan from the Bischofberger Collection. (Its scale, pristine condition and vibrant colors alone are practically worth the cost of admission.) The title, central figure, and even the color palette all pay tribute to that most indigenous of Louisiana musical traditions, which is itself a hybrid of French Creole, Cajun, African American, and Native American influences. With a similar disparate mix in his own ancestry, it’s not difficult to posit that zydeco would have appealed to Basquiat on a personal level.

But the figures and shapes on the outside wings of the triptych add another dimension to this depiction of Southern culture. The zydeco musician is surrounded on one side by a camera operator (who instructs “DON’T LOOK IN THE CAMERA”) and on the other by a display of Westinghouse appliances and crowned skulls, suggesting his status as both a subject for media scrutiny and as a possibly martyr-like object for consumption — much like Basquiat was en route to becoming himself around the time the painting was created. (And don’t forget that the mid-1980s were also the years that bought us the mass commercialization of Cajun culture in the form of Cajun-spiced everything on store shelves nationwide.) 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “CPRKR” (1982) (Donald Baechler Collection, New York)

Aside from “King Zulu” and “Zydeco,” most of the remaining paintings in Basquiat and the Bayou announce their Southern associations in more subtle ways. Sometimes they’re a little too subtle: on the surface, there’s little of the bayou in “CPRKR” (1982), Basquiat’s tribute to jazz legend Charlie Parker. (As Sirmans points out, the date on the painting refers to a posthumous benefit performance for Parker at New York City’s Stanhope Hotel and not to the actual date of Parker’s death, as has been occasionally cited.) To Sirmans’ credit, however, the inclusion of “CPRKR” here doesn’t come across as padding but rather as a useful adjunct to the paintings (like the nearby “Zydeco”) that evince one of the exhibition’s themes (jazz music, in this case) more explicitly.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Natchez” (1985) (Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Zurich © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, New York 2014)

And then there are a few works where the “Southerness” seems to amount to little more than the sort of the “name-dropping thing” which Basquiat copped to in his oft-quoted 1983 interview with Henry Geldzahler in Interview magazine. The title of “Natchez” (1985) references the “Queen City” of the Mississippi Delta and with its lists of names of jazz musicians, titles of blues songs, and music-related phrases (including the suggestive ”Soften it with an oboe”), the piece may be viewed as a sort of connotative textual portrait of a particular place: “a remix,” says Sirmans, “before such words had the associations they do today.” But the dozens of pieces of Xeroxed paper which comprise “Natchez” also include lists of zoo animals and sketches referencing solar phenomena, among many other things. As a “remix,” then, if “Natchez” is “about” the South, or the Delta, or jazz music, it can just as easily be “about” any number of other things too.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Embittered” (1986). Installation view in “Basquiat and the Bayou” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans (photo by John d’Addario)

Likewise, the accordion player in “Embittered” (1986) is apparently all that’s needed to allow the painting to be viewed as somehow “Southern,” even though the figure is only one of several motifs in the piece (others include Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony and professional boxing). In the context of the show, it’s tempting to view the assortment of figures on the right side of the panel — one of whom wears a giant Residents-esque eyeball on her head — as fantastic creatures sprung from a Mardi Gras nightmare. However, Basquiat found the panel with the figures already drawn on it by another artist and incorporated it into his assemblage. It’s a happy coincidence given the painting’s current display in New Orleans, but also a caution against reading too much “Southerness” into some of the paintings here — i.e., the kind of overreading that Basquiat and the Bayou occasionally brushes up against despite (or perhaps because of) its best intentions.

But there are other moments in Basquiat and the Bayou where the Southern themes in Basquiat’s work don’t depend on a handful of scattered associations. The most powerful painting in the show, unusual for Basquiat, doesn’t contain any text at all: “Procession” (1986) depicts a row of starkly rendered individuals marching behind a lead figure brandishing a skull. In his catalogue essay, Sirmans likens the figures to slaves or workers in a prison gang; to a New Orleans eye, the figures also call to mind participants in a second line, the procession of mourners which follow the remains of the deceased in a traditional jazz funeral (and which has now been co-opted to celebrate everything from weddings tothe opening of Prospect.3 itself.)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Procession” (1986). Installation view in “Basquiat and the Bayou” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans (photo by John d’Addario)

In its composition and formal qualities, “Procession” is also the work in the show which links Basquiat’s work most closely with the tradition of Southern self-taught artists he admired. (In another fortunate coincidence, two pieces by Sam Doyle, whose work so captivated Basquiat that he is said to have once traded an entire suite of paintings for one of Doyle’s pieces, are also currently on view at the Ogden in an exhibition of works from the Gasperi Collection on the museum’s second floor.)

However it’s read, the somber aspect of “Procession” lends a subtle shading to Basquiat’s famous description of his work as “80% anger” in that same 1983 interview referenced above; here, that anger is tinged with a distinct historical melancholy. But anger predominates in the frenetic, disturbing “Exu,” painted in the months leading to the artist’s death in August 1988. (Whether it was painted before or after his visit to New Orleans the same year remains a matter of speculation.)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Exu” (1988). Installation view in “Basquiat and the Bayou” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans (photo by John d’Addario)

“Exu” is a name of the Yorùbá deity also known as Eshu, Elegba, Legba, and Papa Legba in various Afro-Caribbean religious traditions including Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodou, and the Louisiana Voodoo practiced by descendants of West Africans bought to the New World as slaves. Under his various names and attributes, he is venerated both as a guardian of the crossroads and as the personification of death. Depicted in a frenzied riot of all-seeing eyes, spears, and offerings of rolled tobacco, Exu is a morbidly prophetic subject for a painting created a short while before the artist’s own death. But it’s Exu’s role as the protector of travelers — not to mention his status as the “trickster” god — that even more appropriately marks him as a fitting emblem for Basquiat’s peripatetic eye and mischievous visual inventiveness.

As satisfying as the nine paintings are as a group, Basquiat and the Bayou is almost as significant for what wasn’t included in the actual exhibition. The catalogue for the show features other works by Basquiat which also explore Southern themes — several of which, like “Jim Crow” (1986), do so more explicitly than the ones on view at the Ogden, giving a tantalizing suggestion of how expansive the show could have been in a world of low insurance premiums and unrestricted loan access. One painting in particular, the richly associative “Undiscovered Genius Of The Mississippi Delta” (1983), is listed in the catalogue as being part of the current show, but didn’t make the final install; the fact that it changed hands for nearly $24 million at Sotheby’s last May (which the chronology in the exhibition catalogue makes note of) may have something to do with it.

Even in its attenuated final presentation, however, Basquiat and the Bayou provides a smartly organized model for the type of thematic exhibition his work deserves more of (just as Jordana Moore Saggese’s new Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art provides a new model for Basquiat studies in general), and an opportunity for a focused look at Basquiat’s work in a new context. It’s the crown on top of the Prospect.3 pile, and reason enough to visit New Orleans this fall.

Basquiat and the Bayou is on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans through January 25, 2014 as part of Prospect.3: Notes for Now. Visitprospectneworleans.org and ogdenmuseum.org for more information.

Halloween

Today is All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween. The modern holiday comes from an age-old tradition honoring the supernatural blending of the world of the living and the world of the dead. Halloween is based on a Celtic holiday called Samhain. The festival marked the start of winter and the last stage of the harvest, the slaughtering of animals. It was believed that the dark of winter allowed the spirits of the dead to transgress the borders of death and haunt the living.

Eventually, Christian holidays developed at around the same time. During the Middle Ages, November 1 became known as All Saints' Day, or All Hallows' Day. The holiday honored all of the Christian saints and martyrs. Medieval religion taught that dead saints regularly interceded in the affairs of the living. On All Saints' Day, churches held masses for the dead and put bones of the saints on display. The night before this celebration of the holy dead became known as All Hallows' Eve. People baked soul cakes, which they would set outside their house for the poor. They also lit bonfires and set out lanterns carved out of turnips to keep the ghosts of the dead away.

Delightful Vintage Halloween Cards for the Spooky at Heartby Tracy O'Neill, Social Media CuratorOctober 28, 2014

On Hallowe'en (1908)
Image ID: 1587792

Hallow'een greeting (1908)
Image ID: 1587782

All Hallowe'en greetings (1908)
Image ID: 1587812

Hallowe-'en greeting (1917)
Image ID: 1587794

Hallowe'en pleasures (1911)
Image ID: 1587790

What the boys did to the cow (1908)
Image ID: 1587798

Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year - and the most beautiful too » The Spectator

Mr Turner: the gruntiest, snortiest, huffiest film of the year - and the most beautiful too » The Spectator

Books

CHRISTOPHER SERRA FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

A COUPLE of years ago I was walking up Sixth Avenue in New York with my friend, the literary agent Michael Carlisle. Michael was ebullient; he had just sold a book about Miguel Cervantes to Bloomsbury, an excellent small press best known for discovering “Harry Potter.’’

“It’s a book book, it’s not a ‘book,’ ” Michael explained as we descended into the subway. “I represent books. There are enough ‘books’ in the world already.”

Around the same time, cartoonist Garry Trudeau embraced the book vs. “book” distinction in his “Doonesbury” strip. Jeff Redfern, a.k.a. the anti-Taliban fighter “Red Rascal,” had just received a seven-figure advance to tell the Rascal story, and his friends accused him of selling out. “It’s a book, not a ‘book,’” Redfern pointedly told his detractors.

A challenging distinction, to be sure. Celebrities, sports heroes, YouTube sensations, and feckless politicians generally create “books,’’ or have them created for them. Chumps like me — and Jeff Redfern! — write books. “I understand the distinction,” my friend, the writer Roger Lowenstein observed. “ ‘Books’ are the books that keep your books off the bestseller lists?”

Precisely.

This column is a handy field guide to differentiating these two species in the wild.

“Book”: Amy Poehler’s widely touted memoir-confessional “Yes Please,’’ in which the author confesses “that I had no business agreeing to write this book.” Globe reviewer Kara Baskin agrees: “Lots of this book feels like filler,” Baskin writes, citing the “pervasive sense that [Poehler] felt pressured into this gig.”

Dear Amy, here is our title for the inevitable sequel: “No Thank You.”

Book: “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The acknowledgments are comical. It looks as though former Tufts professor Martin Sherwin lost control of his research and drafted author Kai Bird to put this book in order. The result is sublime, a portrait of a sensitive, polymath genius devoured by a ferocious new world, partly of his own making.

“Book”: Andrew Cuomo’s “All Things Possible,” a thinly disguised attempt to launch the Cuomo name into presidential orbit, yet again. Houston — I mean Albany — we have a problem. The New York Observer cited a “tidal wave of lousy Amazon reviews,” and The New York Times ungraciously reported that the book, for which HarperCollins paid $700,000, had sold 945 copies during its first week of sales. Shades of Deval Patrick’s notorious “book”-bomb, “A Reason to Believe.”

Book: “Isabella: The Warrior Queen” by Kirstin Downey. I’ve read only about half the book, and have marveled at the just-plain-folks nature of the Ferdinand and Isabella royal household. On their marriage day, “the couple were so poor they were compelled to borrow to meet the wedding expenses.”

Isabella hand-stitches all of Ferdinand’s shirts, which doesn’t prevent him from fathering numerous children with various mistresses. Downey credits the able and ambitious queen with creating the foundation for “the world’s first great truly global superpower.” And with Columbus, of course.

“Book”: Gabmeister Bill O’ Reilly and his tame historian Martin Dugard have outdone themselves with their latest mammoth bestseller, “Killing Patton.” In previous outings, e.g. “Killing Lincoln,” they’ve merely spun actual historians’ works through their typewriters to create by-the-numbers “history” for the Fox News crowd.

Now they’ve had to invent a story more or less out of whole cloth, because, inconveniently, General George Patton died in an auto accident. Or did he? O’Reilly and Dugard have tuned their historical antennae to a conspiracy freak-quency suggesting that the precursors of the CIA and the KGB collaborated on Patton’s murder in a German hospital after his staged auto mishap.

Don’t worry, it’s only a “book.”

Some Advice

Twenty years ago—on November 25, 1994—Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following “short credo” (as he called it in a letter to a friend) for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf.

David Williams/Corbis

The grave of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery, London, March 2014

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.

I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the King of France.

He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.

Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.

This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.

So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?

I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.

I am glad to note that toward the end of my long life some realization of this is beginning to dawn. Rationality, tolerance, rare enough in human history, are not despised. Liberal democracy, despite everything, despite the greatest modern scourge of fanatical, fundamentalist nationalism, is spreading. Great tyrannies are in ruins, or will be—even in China the day is not too distant. I am glad that you to whom I speak will see the twenty-first century, which I feel sure can be only a better time for mankind than my terrible century has been. I congratulate you on your good fortune; I regret that I shall not see this brighter future, which I am convinced is coming. With all the gloom that I have been spreading, I am glad to end on an optimistic note. There really are good reasons to think that it is justified.

© The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2014

Teachers

LA Johnson/NPR

Today, NPR Ed kicks off a yearlong series: 50 Great Teachers.

We're starting this celebration of teaching with Socrates, the superstar teacher of the ancient world. He was sentenced to death more than 2,400 years ago for "impiety" and "corrupting" the minds of the youth of Athens.

But Socrates' ideas helped form the foundation of Western philosophy and the scientific method of inquiry. And his question-and-dialogue-based teaching style lives on in many classrooms as the Socratic method.

I went to Oakland Technical High School in California to see it in action.

It's the first period of the morning, and student Annelise Eeckman is sparring with teacher Maryann Wolfe about Social Security. They get into the roller-coaster nature of the U.S. stock market and the question of what role the market should play, if any, in workers' retirement plans.

"It's not influencing me," Wolfe says.

"You're not retired currently," Eeckman counters.

"But I have stock," Wolfe says. "You know what happened Thursday and Friday, right? Friday it started going back up again; yesterday it went up a little bit more."

"And what if tomorrow it dips?" Eeckman says.

"Well, yeah, but you depend on one day?"

In this 12th-grade Advanced Placement American government class, students are not just encouraged, they're expected to question the teacher — and each other.

That's at the heart of the Socratic method that's come down to us from the streets of Athens: dialogue-based critical inquiry. The goal here is to focus on the text, ideas and facts — not just opinions — and to dig deeper through discussion.

Maryann Wolfe leads her AP American government class at Oakland Technical High School in a discussion about the history of third parties in American politics.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

On this particular morning, students are tackling the history of third parties in American politics. They're poring over the platforms of past candidates, including Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan.

"I'm just trying to figure out what the Republicans must be thinking, what Pat Buchanan must be thinking," says Wolfe as she leans on her lectern.

"Well, if we look at the group of people that the Republicans tend to focus their opinions on, they're usually of the more wealthy classes," one student says.

Senior Jonah Oderberg confidently pushes back on the idea of school vouchers, which Wolfe is defending.

"If you have that high-enough income to afford that private education," says Oderberg, "that should be coming out of your own pocket. There's already adequate public schools."

"So you want me to pay double?" asks Wolfe, smiling as she walks closer to Oderberg's desk in the back of the room.

"Um, no," Oderberg says. The class laughs.

"Sounds like it," Wolfe counters and turns back to the front of the class.

'The Complexity Of The Issues'

This is good classroom jousting.

OK, one student is falling asleep.

But everyone else is wide awake and into the discussion.

"I think the Socratic method means that you're going to have a whole bunch of ideas floating to the surface," says Wolfe, who helped build this school's Socratic seminar program, which is part of a national Paideia program that encourages the Socratic method.

"I want them to see the complexity of the issues. I believe the students really learn that way. Because they have to speak, they have to be engaged in what we're trying to learn."

For Wolfe, the Socratic method at its core means getting students to actually listen to each other and to differing opinions. It's been her main teaching tool during her nearly three decades in the classroom.

"Maybe we won't find exact truths in this class," she says. "But we will at least look at all possibilities, and they will have a truth right at that moment. And the moment comes when they have to stand up and debate it, when they have to write an essay about it. They have to take a side."

As part of the class, Wolfe requires students to get involved with a local political campaign, ballot measure or issue. Senior Sierra Robbins is volunteering for a local effort to boost the minimum wage, which she says has changed her views about the power of civic engagement and the role of government.

"It felt so distant and too big to be changed," Robbins says. "And I went out and talked to people, and it felt really different. It felt like you could really do something."

'Critical Dialogue'

Socrates didn't write anything down. And details of his life remain largely unknown. Many of his ideas, and much of his life as a teacher and philosopher, are known largely through the writings of his best student, Plato, in his Dialogues.

But we do know that Socrates — the man and myth — valued reasoned, logical oral arguments that sought truth through probing discourse.

Today you can call Wolfe's Oakland classes Socratic. But maybe this is just what good teaching looks like: an engaged, passionate teacher facilitating a critical dialogue and acting as a kind of intellectual coach. Not a teacher merely lecturing or teaching to a test.

I asked 17-year-old Maddie Ahlers what she's gotten out of the program.

"I think that the Socratic method has to be a part of good teaching, because it's one thing to write an essay or be able to take a test," Ahlers says. "But later in life, you're gonna have to be able to articulate your own views and say verbally what you think about an issue or anything you believe."

Black Pine Circle

At Oakland Tech, Socrates lives on mainly in its AP classes and seminars. At some other schools, he is literally everywhere.

At Black Pine Circle, a private school in Berkeley, Socrates' stenciled face peers out at students from many of the walls and hallways.

"Now remember, in the inner circle we don't need to raise hands," sixth- and seventh-grade teacher Tim Ogburn tells his students. "Let's just try to have a conversation. Outer circle for right now, I just want you guys listening."

Seventh-grade students respond to teacher Tim Ogburn's questions about a Japanese creation myth. Their school,Black Pine Circle, in Berkeley, Calif., follows the Socratic method.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Every class is imbued with Socratic style, and the pedagogy includes regular Socratic seminars. (OK, Socrates likely skips gym class.)

"When you hear people tell a story it kind of gives you an idea of who they are," says one seventh-grader in Ogburn's class. Students sit in semicircular rows discussing a Japanese creation myth. One circle is tasked with talking while another is supposed to just listen — and think.

Ogburn is trying to get students to look beyond the basics: that the myth was part of a pre-scientific society trying to explain the world.

"So, inner circle, tell me: How is this story about balance?"

When done right, Ogburn says, he is facilitating a real dialogue. It's a method he hopes his students can use to approach lifelong learning as well as life itself.

"The Socratic method forces us to take a step back from that and ask questions like: What's going on here? What does this possibly mean?" Ogburn says. "What's important? What's less important? What might be motivating this person to say this?"

Head of School John Carlstroem agrees. "What we're trying to teach kids is to ask the question, 'What makes you say that?' " he says.

"I think that the best scientists and mathematicians — that's the question they're asking in all of their work: 'What makes us say that? What gives us this idea?' "

In the eighth grade, students are expected to take charge. In English class, teacher Chris Chun sits to the side and largely stays quiet while eighth-grader Alexander Blau leads a small-group discussion on George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Animal Farm.

Another group silently listens while a third group will offer critical feedback.

"Does anybody here know what 'beatifically' means, and could you guess it based on the context?" Blau asks the group. "Tommy, do you think you have an idea?"

After the discussion, teacher Chun asks the class how they did. The other students comment on the discussion. One student suggests Blau shouldn't have let another student, David, take over as the leader. Then the groups switch, and another student-led discussion begins.

"We really remind our teachers that what we're trying to get at is the process of learning for learning's sake," Carlstroem says. "Let's not make this all about learning to gain information but to learn how to learn. I think that's when the democratic process comes through in all this."

Start 'Em Young

At this K-8 school, it's never too early to start a Socratic seminar. Black Pine Circle's kindergartners start with a Question of the Day. On the day I visited, first-graders were doing basic addition — as a group — using dominoes.

First-graders at Black Pine Circle School in Berkeley, Calif., learn basic addition using dominoes.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

"I think of it as the teacher doesn't have the one true answer; the class constructs knowledge together," says first-grade teacher Leila Sinclaire. "They need to learn how to listen to one another and learn from one another and celebrate mistakes. I don't explain things by saying, 'This is what we're doing and this is why.' I ask them: 'What are you interested in and how can we explore that together?' " Sinclaire says.

Carlstroem says young children respond well to this style of teaching.

"Five-, 6- and 7-year-olds are so naturally curious that in many ways they may be the most naturally Socratic," he says. "Those of us who have had 3-year-olds know that that's a part of what that is when they say, 'Why? Why? Why?' all the time."

Some scholars argue that Socrates was being ironic and playful when he said that all he knows is that he knows nothing. His call for intellectual humility was also meant to poke fun at the pretensions of Athenian society. So maybe it's fitting that the Bay Area has a school dedicated to the Socratic method. At times Silicon Valley's 'we're saving the world one app at a time' ethos could perhaps use a dose of Socratic humility.

Scholars today are still trying to parse what's truly Socratic from Plato's idealized accounts. Was the great teacher mainly a creation of his student?

Maybe it doesn't matter.

"Would we still do it if it was called Frodo's practice?" asks Head of School John Carlstroem. "My answer is yes, because the proof is in the pudding. When we look at what happens in a Socratic classroom and how it works — it's amazing. I think the reason we call it Socratic practice is because, like a lot of things, we're working at it."

They're practicing and refining the techniques of critical thinking all the time, he says. It's a process that's never really finished.