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January 5 through December 5, 2012

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Stephen Colbert dressing for a rehearsal of “The Colbert Report.” More Photos »

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: January 4, 2012

There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot. The idiot Colbert was the one who made a nice paycheck by appearing four times a week on “The Colbert Report” (pronounced in the French fashion, with both t’s silent), the extremely popular fake news show on Comedy Central. The other Colbert, the non-idiot, was the 47-year-old South Carolinian, a practicing Catholic, who lives with his wife and three children in suburban Montclair, N.J., where, according to one of his neighbors, he is “extremely normal.” One of the pleasures of attending a live taping of “The Colbert Report” is watching this Colbert transform himself into a Republican superhero.

Suburban Colbert comes out dressed in the other Colbert’s guise — dark two-button suit, tasteful Brooks Brothersy tie, rimless Rumsfeldian glasses — and answers questions from the audience for a few minutes. (The questions are usually about things like Colbert’s favorite sport or favorite character from “The Lord of the Rings,” but on one memorable occasion a young black boy asked him, “Are you my father?” Colbert hesitated a moment and then said, “Kareem?”) Then he steps onstage, gets a last dab of makeup while someone sprays his hair into an unmussable Romney-like helmet, and turns himself into his alter ego. His body straightens, as if jolted by a shock. A self-satisfied smile creeps across his mouth, and a manically fatuous gleam steals into his eyes.

Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it. In 2008, the old Colbert briefly ran for president, entering the Democratic primary in his native state of South Carolina. (He hadn’t really switched parties, but the filing fee for the Republican primary was too expensive.) In 2010, invited by Representative Zoe Lofgren, he testified before Congress about the problem of illegal-immigrant farmworkers and remarked that “the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables.”

But those forays into public life were spoofs, more or less. The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

“It’s bizarre,” remarked an admiring Jon Stewart, whose own program, “The Daily Show,” immediately precedes “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central and is where the Colbert character got his start. “Here is this fictional character who is now suddenly interacting in the real world. It’s so far up its own rear end,” he said, or words to that effect, “that you don’t know what to do except get high and sit in a room with a black light and a poster.”

In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick Perry by spelling his name with an “a” — “for America.” A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”

Just as baffling as the Iowa corn ads — at least to the uninitiated — were some commercials Colbert produced taking the side of the owners during the recent N.B.A. lockout. These were also sponsored by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, but they were “made possible,” according to the voice-over, by Colbert Super PAC SHH Institute. Super PAC SHH (as in “hush”) is Colbert’s 501(c)(4). He has one of those too — an organization that can accept unlimited amounts of money from corporations without disclosing their names and can then give that money to a regular PAC, which would otherwise be required to report corporate donations. “What’s the difference between that and money laundering?” Colbert said to me delightedly.

In the case of Colbert’s N.B.A. ads, the secret sugar daddy might, or might not, have been Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who has appeared on the show and whom the ads call a “hero.” We’ll never know, and that of course is the point. Referring to the Supreme Court ruling that money is speech, and therefore corporations can contribute large sums to political campaigns, Colbert said, “Citizens United said that transparency would be the disinfectant, but (c)(4)’s are warm, wet, moist incubators. There is no disinfectant.”

Colbert’s abettor in his super-PAC efforts is, of all people, Trevor Potter, a Washington lawyer who is a former chairman of the F.E.C. and was general counsel to John McCain during the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns and has become Colbert’s personal lawyer. “T. Potts,” as Colbert sometimes calls him, is a bit of a performer himself and is now a regular on the show. Colbert once toyed with enlisting a smoke machine to enhance his entrances.

“Aren’t lawyers allowed to have fun?” Potter asked me a few weeks ago, adding that he knew what he was signing up for by appearing on the show. He also said he thought that Colbert was serving a useful function. “I’m very careful not to ascribe motive to him — he can speak for himself,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. He can find the laws ironic or funny or absurd. But he’s illustrating how the system works by using it. By starting a super PAC, creating a (c)4, filing with the F.E.C., he can bring the audience inside the system. He can show them how it works and then leave them to conclude whether this is how it ought to work.”

Colbert says that education isn’t his aim with the super PAC — being funny is. Nevertheless, he proudly showed me that if you Google the phrase “super PAC,” his name is one of the first that shows up, and the evolution of his super PAC has lately been the show’s big, ongoing narrative. As Potter pointed out, when Colbert began his super PAC, he wasn’t sure how a super PAC worked; he just knew he wanted one. Now he is full of plans, most of them confidential, for more “grand actions,” as he calls them.

Colbert declined to tell me how much money was in his super PAC’s treasury, pointing out that “that’s what PACs do — they don’t have to tell you.” But there are almost 170,000 names on the super PAC’s e-mail list, and some 30,000 people have given him money.

In October, Colbert offered the Republican Party in South Carolina $400,000 to defray the cost of the presidential primary there in January in return for naming rights — he wanted the ballots, the lanyards, the press credentials to say “The Stephen Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Primary” — and for a nonbinding referendum question that asked the voters to decide whether “corporations are people” or “only people are people.” This issue has been Colbert’s hobbyhorse since August, when Mitt Romney told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend,” and needless to say, Colbert too is on the side of corporate personhood. “Just because someone was born in a lawyer’s office and is incorporeal doesn’t mean he should have no rights,” he likes to say.

“I figured that if they’d sell me the naming rights, they’d probably be willing to sell me a referendum,” Colbert told me. “I always assume that anything that could be for sale probably is.”

Amazingly, the South Carolina Republicans were on the point of agreeing to Colbert’s proposal, and ballots were printed that included the referendum question, when the state Supreme Court ruled that the counties, not the party, had to pay for the primary and that the ballot could not include referendum questions. When the Republicans declined to pursue the matter, Colbert made the same offer to the state’s Democrats, who filed an appeal. Even Colbert seemed a little surprised, pointing out that he had repeatedly warned both the Republicans and the Democrats that his aims were satirical and that their very willingness to negotiate with him could become a joke on the show. “It turns out that both sides are happy to take my money,” he said.

In late December, in an op-ed for a South Carolina newspaper, Colbert sweetened the deal to $500,000 if the Republicans would reconsider, join the Democrats in appealing the ruling and give him his naming rights and the referendum question. “Call it a Christmas miracle,” he wrote. “I’ve already filled out the check, and to prove it’s no joke, I’ve written ‘No Joke’ in the memo line.”

The Colbert character, whose taped descent, godlike, from the empyrean while clutching an American flag begins every show, was originally intended as a takeoff on Fox News figures like Sean Hannity and especially Bill O’Reilly. Though Colbert doesn’t much resemble O’Reilly physically, the persona has mastered some of O’Reilly’s pen-wielding, hand-stabbing gestures, and his credentials as a right-wing blowhard are beyond doubt. He thinks that gays will go to hell, that a flaming moat should be built around America to keep out immigrants and that Christianity is, or ought to be, the official national religion. He believes not in truth but in “truthiness,” a term of his own invention.

Over the six years that “The Colbert Report” has been in existence, this character has developed an elaborate identity of his own, leaving O’Reilly and the others far behind, and has achieved heights of renown seemingly denied to television personalities who aren’t made up. The Colbert character has appeared, clad in a skintight speed-skating suit, on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Like O’Reilly, he has published a best-selling book, “I Am America (And So Can You!),” but he has also guest-edited an issue of Newsweek and once wrote Maureen Dowd’s column in The Times (and, while he was at it, Frank Rich’s by adding the words “It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan and God is gay”). There is a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor named after Colbert (Colbert’s Americone Dream) and a NASA exercise device (the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Elliptical Trainer, or Colbert) and a minor-league hockey team mascot (Steagle Colbeagle the Eagle) in Saginaw, Mich. There would have been a bridge in Hungary named after him, after he encouraged his followers to submit his name in an online contest, but government officials decided at the last minute that the winner could not be living or someone not fluent in Hungarian.

Fittingly, “The Colbert Report” itself began as a joke of sorts. In 2003 “The Daily Show,” on which Colbert was a regular, began running brief commercials for something called “The Colbert Réport,” which promised to drive “straight past the issues.” The show didn’t exist, nor at the time were there any plans for it. These bits were mostly just a jab at O’Reilly. But in 2005 Stewart persuaded Comedy Central to think about doing the show for real and Colbert was given an eight-week tryout, which proved so successful that “The Colbert Report,” minus the French accent, quickly became a fixture in the late-night lineup.

The blustering O’Reilly-like persona is an outgrowth of a character Colbert had been playing on “The Daily Show” almost since the beginning, and briefly on the short-lived “Dana Carvey Show” before that: a self-important, trench-coated reporter who does on-location stories in a way that suggests his own presence is the real scoop. The models Colbert had in mind were people like Stone Phillips, Bill Kurtis and especially Geraldo Rivera. “I loved the way Geraldo made reporting a story seem like an act of courage,” he told me.

After Jon Stewart took over from Craig Kilborn as host of “The Daily Show” in 1999, he encouraged Colbert to make the character more political, perhaps by incorporating some of the opinionated know-nothingism he routinely displayed in a point-counterpoint segment called “Even Stevphen,” in which he and Steve Carell (also a regular, before he moved on to “The Office”) used to debate things like Islam vs. Christianity and the goodness or badness of the weather, shouting things like “Yes!” “No!” and “Shut up!” at each other. At first Colbert resisted a little. “I thought topical stuff had an ephemeral quality — it would be meaningless in a week,” he told me. “I wanted my character to be eternal.”

Stewart said: “What he says is all lies. I didn’t push him, I berated him. If I remember correctly, there was physical punishment.” Then he added, seriously, “It was an attempt to change the editorial environment a little — a question of aiming the flamethrowers.”

Stewart also recalled that Colbert worried at first that the “Report” might not be sustainable, and says he kept pointing out, “ ‘I don’t know anyone more interesting than you. You know so much about so many different areas.’ ” Stewart went on: “I’m not at all surprised that the show is good — he’s amazing at it. He’s able to weave a character in a way that’s never been done on television before — rendering this fictional character in 3-D, live, in such a way that he’s still able to retain his humanity.” The extra dimension, he explained, is the other Colbert, the real one. “The third dimension is him. That’s the thing we started to see here. He is so interesting, smart and decent. He’s a good person, and that allows his character to be criminally, negligently ignorant.”

The Colbert on-screen persona is actually less rigid than it used to be, and Colbert can dial it up or down as he chooses. There is now more of a winking quality to the act, a sense that we’re all in on the joke. And in the last part of the show, when Colbert typically leaps up from his desk and bounds across the set to a table in front of a fireplace with the Latin motto “Videri quam esse” (“To seem to be, rather than to be”), where he interviews a guest about a new book or movie, he usually tamps the character down enough to allow the guest a few minutes to get his or her own message across.

When Harry Belafonte was on recently, for example, Colbert cut him some admiring slack and even joined in singing “Jamaica Farewell,” instead of ripping into Belafonte for being a lefty agitator. A month earlier, in September, the Colbert presence was so friendly and relaxed that Al Gore, on to talk about the Climate Reality Project, forgot himself and violated the show’s cardinal rule — he broke the fictional wall. Talking about Keith Olbermann, Gore said, “He scares Fox News, and he scares your character, as he should.” “My character?” Colbert cried in mock bewilderment.

Colbert is not Ali G. He doesn’t sandbag the unsuspecting. And he is particularly careful to visit guests beforehand in the green room and prepare them for what’s going to happen. When John Lithgow was on recently to promote his new memoir, “Drama,” Colbert warned him that his character would become the biggest jerk Lithgow had ever met. “Just pretend I’m the drunk in a bar who won’t shut up,” he said.

But in the early days of the show, when Colbert’s persona was more earnest and deadpan, and when people were less used to it, there were some memorably strange and awkward moments. In 2005, the show’s first season, Colbert interviewed a humorless and expressionless Barney Frank, who said, “Ignorance does not offend me” when Colbert seemed surprised to discover that he was gay. A moment later Frank threw up his hands and declined to proceed, saying that the questioning had become too dumb to take seriously.

But easily the most awkward moment in Colbert’s career, and also in many ways a defining one, was his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006. Mark Smith, an A.P. reporter who, as head of the correspondents’ association, was responsible for booking the talent, admitted later that he wasn’t all that familiar with the show, which was only three months old when he approached Colbert. Neither, to judge from video of the event, were many in the audience. Colbert got up and addressed the president, saying: “I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things. He stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a powerful message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world.”

Never cracking a smile or breaking out of character, he went on to praise Bush for believing “the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday” and to point out that the administration wasn’t sinking but soaring. “If anything,” he said, “they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.” Nor did he leave out the correspondents themselves. “Over the last five years you people were so good,” he said. “Over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming: we Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try and find out.”

It wasn’t, in truth, Colbert’s funniest hour, and it ended with a pretty lame video of Colbert, now imagining himself as White House press secretary, being stalked by an angry Helen Thomas. Many in the audience, the president in particular, seemed not to know what to make of this guy. Whose side was he on, and was he joking or not? Yet a video of the performance went viral within hours, and Stephen Colbert became something like a household name. Writing in The Times, Frank Rich said Colbert’s routine that night was the “moment when the American news business went on suicide watch.”

“I was happy how it turned out,” Colbert says now of that evening. “But I had no sense that it was any special deal.” Not until the next day did someone point out to him that a Web site called Thank You, Stephen Colbert had gone up and there were already 14,000 responses on it.

Colbert grew up in Charleston, where, for much of his life, the family lived in the George Chisolm House, a Federal-style mansion that is one of the city’s many historic houses. He may have been biologically destined to be an entertainer: he was the 11th of 11 children. He says now that most of his siblings were funnier. “My brother Billy was the joke teller,” he told me one morning in his office upstairs in the building where “The Colbert Report” is taped. It looks like a dorm room, with a “Lord of the Rings” pinball machine at one end, an elliptical trainer at the other, a Nixon campaign poster on the wall and a desk strewn with knickknacks. “My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.”

In 1974, when Colbert was 10, his father, a doctor, and his brothers Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, died in a plane crash while flying to a prep school in New England. “There’s a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone’s becoming a comedian, but I’m not sure that’s a proven equation in my case,” he told me. “I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.” He added, in a tone so humble and sincere that his character would never have used it: “She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”

One result of his father’s death is that Colbert stopped making much of an effort in school. “Nothing seemed that important,” he said. “What was the cudgel over your head?” By high school he had become dreamy and nerdy, spending all his time reading science fiction and playing Dungeons and Dragons, and his friends were all the same way. “Socially, we were out in the hinterlands,” he said. “Living in the social mud huts.” But during junior year he happened to say something that made people laugh, and pretty soon he had become the school wit. It was around that time that he started Frenchifying his name. “I was probably still Colbert to a lot of people,” he said, pronouncing the T, the way the rest of his family did. “But in my mind I was coal-BARE.”

Colbert went to Hampden-Sydney College, in Virginia, one of the few places he could get in. He majored in philosophy and was miserable and depressed much of the time. “Belated grieving is what it was, and it lasted till I got out of college,” he said. The one thing he enjoyed was acting in plays, and eventually he told himself: “You’d be crazy not to take that as a hint. It’s the only thing you work hard at.”

With the encouragement of his mother, who had once aspired to be an actor herself, he transferred to the theater program at Northwestern. “She said, ‘I don’t know why, but I’m not worried about you,’ ” he said, laughing. “I think it was foolish, irresponsible parenting.”

Chicago is to improv what Seattle once was to grunge bands, and in his years there, both in college and afterward, Colbert embraced the movement. He even studied with the strange and legendary Del Close, a reformed drug addict and a pagan who was sometimes known as the Ted Kaczynski of comedy. For Close, improv was more nearly a philosophy or a way of life than just a way of getting laughs, and Colbert embraced his ideas sufficiently that in the late 1980s, when he took a job answering the phone at Second City (the famous breeder of comic talent, practically a farm team for “Saturday Night Live”), he briefly thought he was slumming. “I thought, Yeah, yeah, I’ll answer the phones, but I’d never want to perform here,” he said. Even after he joined the Second City troupe, in which Amy Sedaris and Steve Carell were colleagues, what he really wanted to do, he said, was straight theater. “I’d think to myself, I’ve got to do ‘Hamlet,’ I’ve got to do avant-garde theater, and so I would quit, grow a beard and do a play.”

Colbert’s co-conspirator in those days was the director and playwright Dexter Bullard, who would call him up and say, “Do you want to get in trouble?” Getting in trouble meant hiring a hall, inviting some critics and then picking a play — something by Havel, say, whom they had barely heard of — and learning it and putting it on in a week or so. You could argue that “The Colbert Report” is just a funnier adaptation of the same principle, put together in even less time.

Colbert’s first TV job was on “Exit 57,” a half-hour sketch-comedy show that he wrote and performed with Sedaris and Paul Dinello, which was sometimes funny and sometimes not. He later worked and appeared with Sedaris and Dinello on “Strangers With Candy,” a series that was a parody of earnest after-school specials. The standout on both shows was Sedaris. Colbert seems too bland in a way — too sane and too conventionally good-looking — to be a great comic performer. The role he was born for, an exaggerated version of himself, hadn’t yet come his way.

Colbert remains enormously fond of those early shows, especially “Strangers,” which he likens to free-form jazz. But he said that when he began doing his location pieces for “The Daily Show,” the ones that evolved into “The Colbert Report,” he found great satisfaction in the craft of them. “I thought of it as making these little Chinese boxes, with intricate inlay,” he said. “I loved that. It’s like an artist known for his sculptures all made with found objects glued together with human bodily fluid, and then he’d photograph them, and the photographs would be burned and the ashes would be turned into a painting. But did you know he also made neat little wooden boxes?”

By now Colbert and his staff, which numbers about 80, have the show down to something like a science. They call it the “joy machine,” with equal emphasis on the fun and the mechanics, and the engine runs practically nonstop, at very high r.p.m.’s. By 11 every morning, a rough plan for that day’s show is established and the writers — all of them brainy and most in their 30s — are sent off, usually in pairs, to come back with finished scripts in just a couple of hours. Editing and polishing goes on all day, and sometimes continues even after the taping is done, around 9 or so.

The show’s writing process is extravagantly wasteful. Colbert likes to say, “Let’s make it perfect and then cut it.” Every day enough good jokes or ideas are jettisoned to fill another couple of half-hours. Some are deemed too weak by Colbert’s demanding standards, some are put on hold for want of time on a given night and are then forgotten, and some are merely left behind as the show is swept along with the relentless news cycle. “The trade-off with the show is that you can have an idea and see it on TV that night,” Tom Purcell, the executive producer, says. “The downside is that you have to do it all over again tomorrow. It’s a hungry beast.”

Some good Chris Christie and Tim Pawlenty material had to be dumped, for example, when Christie and Pawlenty took themselves out of the Republican presidential race. Other promising bits abandoned recently were one about a porn bunker developed by some adult filmmakers in anticipation of the Mayan doomsday prophecy; one examining the possible Nazi past of the clothing company Hugo Boss; a piece about how it’s legal in 36 states for prisons to shackle pregnant inmates while they’re giving birth; and a little film clip about how Americans needed a new young woman to worry about, now that Amanda Knox has been freed. Colbert suggested that perhaps one of the interns could be put in a box and attacked by bees.

In early October, when Hank Williams Jr. and his “Monday Night Football” song “Are You Ready for Some Football?” were taken off the air by ESPN after Williams compared the golf game between Barack Obama and John Boehner to Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu, and said that Obama and Joe Biden were like two of the Three Stooges (he failed to specify which), it seemed like a godsend. One of the writers suggested that they invent some phony video of Hitler out on the links, actually swinging a golf club. Another came up with the notion of a new song: “Are You Ready for Some Foosball?” Colbert had a better idea. Perhaps Stephen Sondheim could be persuaded to write a song about what it was like to be alone and forlorn after football, when the game is over and your life has not changed. He even wrote Sondheim, who is a friend of the show, an e-mail that began “Will you help me save America and football?” Sadly, Sondheim declined.

Colbert, who is good at compartmentalization, manages in spite of this exhausting schedule to make time for his family. For some of the writers, the job is more all-consuming. One of them, Opus Moreschi, told me that he solves the problem of how to balance the job and a life by forgoing the life. “Basically, I’ve never had a life except for comedy, so it isn’t that much of a problem,” he said. Yet for all the demands that Colbert puts on his staff members, he is apparently beloved by them. “There are a lot of unhappy people in comedy,” Purcell said, “and sometimes you get a very radioactive vibe. But Stephen has an excellent way of treating people. You should never underestimate the power of good manners.”

Emily Lazar, a supervising producer and the show’s talent booker, said: “When the show started, Stephen was 41, 42 — something like that — and he was one of us. He relates to being a worker bee. He understands what our lives are like.”

Many of the show’s writers also have improvisational training and once a month or so put on an improv evening at the UCB Theater in New York. A couple of them are even bold enough to channel the Colbert persona during meetings, so that there are multiple Colberts in the room, and Colbert himself isn’t even one of them. For all its scriptedness, the show has a loose, try-anything quality. One of the basic rules of improv is never to say “no,” but always “yes” or “yes … and” — to take a premise and expand on it.

Colbert’s super PAC is in a way an extended improvisation with no end in sight. It just keeps adding new layers. Why does he have a super PAC? Because he can and because it’s funny. On most evenings the show’s best moments occur when Colbert is winging it with a guest. There’s the Colbert persona listening and grinning while the other Colbert, the one who is surely not an idiot, processes what the guest is saying, invents a response and then translates it back into the language of his character. The process happens faster than most of us can think. “The trouble with the jokes,” Colbert said to me, talking about the ones scripted beforehand, “is that once they’re written, I know how they’re supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I’m more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.”

Lazar said: “Stephen has all these personalities that he’s learned because he watches people and has an incredible intellectual and emotional memory. They are gathered in his lower extremity and he can call them forth at will and actually become those people.”

Colbert likes to say that the whole show is a “scene,” a term that in improv-speak means not just a unit of dramatic time but a transaction in which one character wants something from another. The other character in this instance is us, the audience, and what Colbert wants from us is love. The one moment on “The Colbert Report” that is not fake is when he sits at his desk and basks while the audience chants, “Ste-phen, Ste-phen, Ste-phen!” He can’t get enough.

The show also enables a Walter Mitty side of Colbert, which is why he says he will never get tired of it. “As executive producer of this show, I get to ask my character to do whatever I want,” he said. Among other things, the character has so far visited troops in Baghdad; bottled and branded his own sperm; dueled light sabers with George Lucas; sung with Barry Manilow; sung as a trio with Willie Nelson and Richard Holbrooke; appeared on the Jimmy Fallon show, along with Taylor Hicks and the Abominable Snowman, in a big production of the hit song “Friday”; harmonized on the national anthem with Toby Keith; and danced a passage from “The Nutcracker,” in suit jacket, tights and codpiece, with David Hallberg.

So why wouldn’t the character — this third Colbert, performing an extended improv in the real world — want to run for president again? The last time I spoke with Colbert, before he left for his Christmas break, I brought this up. He looked at me for a moment, and then his eyes twinkled, and he underwent the same metamorphosis he does every evening. “I don’t think you ever say ‘never,’ ” he said. “That’s a discussion I’ll have to have with my family. I’ll need to pray on it.”

Charles McGrath is a writer at large for The Tim

The entrance courtyard at the Camino Real Hotel, Mexico City, 1968

By Associated Press, Published: December 30

MEXICO CITY — Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta has died at the age of 80.

Legorreta’s best-known work is Mexico City’s Camino Real hotel, which was built in 1968. He also oversaw the remodeling of Los Angeles’ Pershing Square in 1993.

The hallmark of Legorreta’s work was the use of color. He placed a 10-story purple bell tower in the middle of Pershing Square and covered the Camino Real’s front exterior walls in pink and yellow.

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department and National Arts Council said Legorreta died Friday, but did not give the cause of death.

Legorreta continued the tradition of architect Luis Barragan, who died in 1988. Like Barragan, Legorreta used bright colors, massive solid walls, courtyards and geometric cutout windows to interact with Mexico’s abundant sunlight.

via

Helen Frankenthaler, ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ (1973)

By ERIC GIBSON
The Wall Street Journal

In 1953 Helen Frankenthaler, who died this week at age 83, received a visit from Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, two artists from Washington who were stuck in an Abstract Expressionist rut. In her studio they saw “Mountains and Sea,” of the year before, a characteristically abstract work painted by pouring pigment onto a canvas laid on the floor.

The poured-paint technique had been pioneered by Jackson Pollock a few years earlier, but in this work the 24-year-old Frankenthaler made it her own. In place of the older artist’s looping and whipping lines of gray, black and tan, her imagery consisted of spreading pools and washes of luxuriant pinks, blues and greens nudged here and there with a sponge. The painting was a revelation to the two men—a “bridge between Pollock and what was possible,” Louis later said. Her novel technique, combined with a chromatic freedom and mastery unprecedented in recent American art, helped launch them, and others, on their own paths of color abstraction, thus ultimately changing the course of American art.

It’s an oft-told tale and one that’s true in every respect. Except that, to the extent that it’s used to sum up Frankenthaler’s achievement as one of the most important American artists of our time, it tells only part of the story. For over the course of a six-decade career, Frankenthaler jump-started American painting not once, but twice.

Frankenthaler belonged to the second generation of the New York School, whose guiding light was the critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg held that the essence of modern painting was the expunging of all references to the visible world and an emphasis on painting’s purely formal elements—the flatness of the canvas support and the colors arrayed across it.

Frankenthaler’s works were true to this so-called formalist aesthetic. You can’t emphasize the painting’s support more emphatically than she did with her technique of staining, which bonds the pigment to the warp and weft of the canvas. Yet she was never limited by formalism’s dictates, unlike some of her colleagues.

For example, there were audible gasps in 1977 when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened a retrospective of Noland’s work. Along the ramp were arrayed a selection of the artist’s signature abstractions—multicolored targets, chevrons, stripes and the like. Time had not been kind to these icons of 1960s and ’70s art. They were beautiful, to be sure, yet suddenly they seemed plagued by a decorative emptiness. Overnight, it seemed, heroic American abstraction had devolved to nothing more than college-dorm eye candy. Greenberg was a brilliant critic, but his view that the proper subject of art was art itself was too narrow and insubstantial a foundation on which to erect an enduring vision.

Frankenthaler herself sailed dangerously close to this aesthetic reef. This was particularly true in the ’60s, when paintings consisting of a few simple forms and a heavy use of primary colors created a kind of Marimekko effect—works that made attractive backdrops but didn’t compel a long gaze.

But three things saved her. One was her engagement with nature. Art needs to be about life; otherwise, it’s just occupational therapy. For all its abstractness, “Mountains and Sea” is fundamentally a landscape painting, and nature—its forms, its moods and above all its unbridled power—remained a recurring metaphor in Frankenthaler’s art.

Then, beginning in the early ’70s with “Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” her work began to change. Basso notes appeared with the introduction of deeper tones—dark purples and umbers, grays and even black. This adjustment amounted to a kind of adult supervision of her otherwise boisterous and flighty palette. Her paint handling became more nuanced and textured. These combined changes made her work more emotionally resonant and visually absorbing. Rather than simply reveling in color’s hedonistic pleasures, she seemed to be striving to express profounder truths. In this way she rescued abstract painting, making it once again an instrument of meaningful expression rather than an end in itself.

Frankenthaler did not limit herself to working on canvas. A retrospective of her prints at the National Gallery in the 1990s showed her to have been as innovative in this medium as she had been in painting. She even tried her hand at sculpture. And she remained on top of her game well into her 70s. Her extraordinary “Warming Trend”—nature again—from 2002 in the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Mo., is a seven-by-eight-foot work consisting of diaphanous veils of blue and lavender, here and there inflected with the smallest touches of red and pink. The effect is of looking into a pool, as if Frankenthaler were painting her response to one of Claude Monet’s water lilies.

Frankenthaler’s achievement is to have put the language of abstraction to the service of art’s historic need to address large ideas. As such she occupies an enduring place in the pantheon of American masters. Yet her legacy already seems in peril. There hasn’t been a full-dress retrospective in more than 20 years, and her gallery, Knoedler & Co., suddenly closed last month, leaving no forum for the regular exposure of her work. She deserves better. Greatness abhors a vacuum.

Through February 19, 2012

ICA Philledelphia

Thanks to Tony Beauvy

By PICO IYER
NY Times Published: December 29, 2011

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

Arthur Ou, Untitled (Primer 8), 2011, gelatin silver print, 11 x 13″

organized by Loring Randolph
January 5 – February 11, 2012
Opening Thursday, January 5th
6:00 – 8:00pm

Étienne Chambaud, Isabelle Cornaro, Julia Dault, Jose Dávila, Jason Dodge, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Andrew Kuo, Mateo López, Benoît Maire, Arthur Ou, Marlo Pascual, Pietro Roccasalva

Casey Kaplan

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 29, 2011

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

They should have known better even at the time: the alleged historical examples of “expansionary austerity” they used to make their case had already been thoroughly debunked. And there was also the embarrassing fact that many on the right had prematurely declared Ireland a success story, demonstrating the virtues of spending cuts, in mid-2010, only to see the Irish slump deepen and whatever confidence investors might have felt evaporate.

Amazingly, by the way, it happened all over again this year. There were widespread proclamations that Ireland had turned the corner, proving that austerity works — and then the numbers came in, and they were as dismal as before.

Yet the insistence on immediate spending cuts continued to dominate the political landscape, with malign effects on the U.S. economy. True, there weren’t major new austerity measures at the federal level, but there was a lot of “passive” austerity as the Obama stimulus faded out and cash-strapped state and local governments continued to cut.

Now, you could argue that Greece and Ireland had no choice about imposing austerity, or, at any rate, no choices other than defaulting on their debts and leaving the euro. But another lesson of 2011 was that America did and does have a choice; Washington may be obsessed with the deficit, but financial markets are, if anything, signaling that we should borrow more.

Again, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We entered 2011 amid dire warnings about a Greek-style debt crisis that would happen as soon as the Federal Reserve stopped buying bonds, or the rating agencies ended our triple-A status, or the superdupercommittee failed to reach a deal, or something. But the Fed ended its bond-purchase program in June; Standard & Poor’s downgraded America in August; the supercommittee deadlocked in November; and U.S. borrowing costs just kept falling. In fact, at this point, inflation-protected U.S. bonds pay negative interest: investors are willing to pay America to hold their money.

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

The good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity — and he seems to be winning the political battle. And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes’s advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was 75 years ago.

The 340-ton granite boulder is supposed to be the focus of an exhibit by the artist Michael Heizer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Monica Almeida/The New York Times

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: December 27, 2011

LOS ANGELES — There was a time when what has become known here simply as the Rock — the 340-ton boulder that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is installing as a major piece of outdoor art — was supposed to begin its nine-day trip from a quarry in Riverside, Calif., in August. With little fanfare, that date slipped until September. And then October. And now …

Well, Happy New Year. The boulder that is at the center of “Levitated Mass,” the work by Michael Heizer, a California sculptor, is all packed up — swaddled in white plastic — and ready to go, but remains stranded in its granite quarry 60 miles away from the museum’s campus. Art, so far, has been unable to overcome the bureaucratic tangle that is greater Los Angeles in the 21st century for an admittedly complicated task: moving a 21-foot-high boulder, set on top of a 196-wheel transporter built for this purpose, through 100 miles of roads in one of the biggest municipalities in the country.

The problem arose in September when, at what was just about the last moment, engineers determined that a bridge in Pomona might not be able to accommodate the weight of the rock. (And why take chances?) That meant redrawing part of a route that had been a year in the making. And that, said Michael Govan, the executive director of the museum, meant taking the rock through three new cities in Los Angeles County, requiring three new sets of negotiations, pleadings and applications for various permits.

“It’s quite a significant reroute,” Mr. Govan said.

“We traverse 21 cities and three counties over a 100-mile route,” he added. “You can’t think of another place in the country where it’s that densely covered. The real heavy lifting here is the bureaucracy and the permissions.”

The three new cities are Diamond Bar, Chino and Chino Hills. “They are very nice,” Mr. Govan said, referring to those cities and the officials who run them. “I’ve gotten to know them all. The roads are nice.”

The delay, if a bit of an embarrassment, hasn’t exactly set off major protests here; no one is at present occupying the grounds of the museum. Yet some people — interested in seeing both the installation and the ceremony of its elaborate street-closing arrival — are clearly perplexed, as evidenced by comments posted on the museum’s Web site in response to the last official progress report on the big move, dated Oct. 17.

“Dear Lacma or whomever is in charge of this Blog,” Damon wrote on Nov. 22. “OK … Seriously, what is going on with this rock? What’s going on? Why has the rock not left the quarry? Which city is holding up the works? We are really shocked at the complete lack of information coming from the museum or local news for that matter. Could you please give us some idea of what is happening.”

At 11:47 a.m. on Dec. 2, when Damon’s query had still not drawn an answer, Rocky weighed in with a one-word comment on the museum’s silence: “Crickets.” That worked.

“Progress on the transport is happening, but slowly,” the museum wrote in a comment posted that very afternoon. “We will definitely make an announcement as soon as the transport becomes imminent.”

Museum officials said that permissions were now mostly in place, and Mr. Govan said he hoped the rock would begin rolling within the month. Understandably, after these past six months, he would not allow himself to be pinned down beyond that.

“Assuming this is going to be here for thousands of years, a few months don’t matter,” he said.

The artist Helen Frankenthaler in her studio on Contentment Island in Darien, Conn., in 2003, with her work, “Blue Lady,” acrylic on paper. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

By GRACE GLUECK
NY Times Published: December 27, 2011

Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrically abstract painter whose technique of staining pigment into raw canvas helped shape an influential art movement in the mid-20th century, and who became one of the most admired artists of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.

Her longtime assistant, Maureen St. Onge, said Ms. Frankenthaler died after a long illness but gave no other details.

Known as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Ms. Frankenthaler was married during the movement’s heyday to the painter Robert Motherwell, a leading first-generation member of the group. But she departed from the first generation’s romantic search for the “sublime” to pursue her own path.

Refining a technique, developed by Jackson Pollock, of pouring pigment directly onto canvas laid on the floor, Ms. Frankenthaler, heavily influencing the colorists Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, developed a method of painting best known as Color Field — although Clement Greenberg, the critic most identified with it, called it Post-Painterly Abstraction. Where Pollock had used enamel that rested on raw canvas like skin, Ms. Frankenthaler poured turpentine-thinned paint in watery washes onto the raw canvas so that it soaked into the fabric weave, becoming one with it.

Her staining method emphasized the flat surface over illusory depth, and it called attention to the very nature of paint on canvas, a concern of artists and critics at the time. It also brought a new open airiness to the painted surface and was credited with releasing color from the gestural approach and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism.

She more or less stumbled on her stain technique, she said, first using it in creating “Mountains and Sea” (1952). Produced on her return to New York from a trip to Nova Scotia, the painting is a light-struck, diaphanous evocation of hills, rocks and water. Its delicate balance of drawing and painting, fresh washes of color (predominantly blues and pinks) and breakthrough technique have made it one of her best-known works.

“The landscapes were in my arms as I did it,” Ms. Frankenthaler told an interviewer. “I didn’t realize all that I was doing. I was trying to get at something — I didn’t know what until it was manifest.”

She later described the seemingly unfinished painting — which is on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington — as “looking to many people like a large paint rag, casually accidental and incomplete.”

Unlike many of her painter colleagues at the time, Ms. Frankenthaler, born in New York City on Dec. 12, 1928, came from a prosperous Manhattan family. She was one of three daughters of Alfred Frankenthaler, a New York State Supreme Court judge, and the former Martha Lowenstein, a German immigrant. Helen, their youngest, was interested in art from early childhood, when she would dribble nail polish into a sink full of water to watch the color flow.

After graduation from the Dalton School, where she studied art with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, she entered Bennington College in 1946. There the painter Paul Feeley, a thoroughgoing taskmaster, taught her “everything I know about Cubism,” she said. The intellectual atmosphere at Bennington was heady, with instructors like Kenneth Burke, Erich Fromm and Ralph Ellison setting the pace.

As a self-described “saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington,” Ms. Frankenthaler made her way into the burgeoning New York art world with a boost from Mr. Greenberg, whom she met in 1950 and with whom she had a five-year relationship. Through him she met crucial players like David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Franz Kline.

In 1951, with Mr. Greenberg’s prompting, she jointed the new Tibor de Nagy gallery, run by the ebullient aesthete John B. Myers, and had her first solo show there that year. She spent summers visiting museums in Europe, pursuing an interest in quattrocento and old master painting.

Her marriage to Mr. Motherwell in 1958 gave the couple an art-world aura. Like her, he came from a well-to-do family, and “the golden couple,” as they were known in the cash-poor and backbiting art world of the time, spent several leisurely months honeymooning in Spain and France.

In Manhattan, they removed themselves from the downtown scene and established themselves in a house on East 94th Street, where they developed a reputation for lavish entertaining. The British sculptor Anthony Caro recalled a dinner party they gave for him and his wife on their first trip to New York, in 1959. It was attended by some 100 guests, and he was seated between David Smith and the actress Hedy Lamarr.

“Helen loved to entertain,” said Anne Freedman, former president of Knoedler & Company, Ms. Frankenthaler’s dealer until its recent closing. “She enjoyed feeding people and engaging in lively conversation. And she liked to dance. In fact, you could see it in her movements as she worked on her paintings.”

Ms. Frankenthaler’s passion for dancing was more than fulfilled in 1985 when, at a White House dinner to honor the Prince and Princess of Wales, she was partnered with a fast stepper who had been twirling the princess.

“I’d waited a lifetime for a dance like this,” she wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed article for The New York Times. “He was great!”

His name meant nothing to her until, on returning to her New York studio, she showed her assistant and a friend his card. “John Travolta,” it read.

Despite the early acknowledgment of Ms. Frankenthaler’s achievement by Mr. Greenberg and by her fellow artists, wider recognition took some time. Her first major museum show, a retrospective of her 1950s work with a catalog by the critic and poet Frank O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was at the Jewish Museum in 1960. But she became better known to the art-going public after a major retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969.

Although Ms. Frankenthaler rarely discussed the sources of her abstract imagery, it reflected her impressions of landscape, her meditations on personal experience and the pleasures of dealing with paint. Visually diverse, her paintings were never produced in “serial” themes like those of her Abstract Expressionist predecessors or her Color Field colleagues like Noland and Louis. She looked on each of her works as a separate exploration.

But “Mountains and Sea” did establish many of the traits that have informed her art from the beginning, the art historian E. A. Carmean Jr. suggested. In the catalog for his 1989-90 Frankenthaler retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, he cited the color washes, the dialogue between drawing and painting, the seemingly raw, unfinished look, and the “general theme of place” as characteristic of her work.

Besides her paintings, Ms. Frankenthaler is known for her inventive lithographs, etchings and screen prints she produced since 1961, but critics have suggested that her woodcuts have made the most original contribution to printmaking.

In making her first woodcut, “East and Beyond,” in 1973, Ms. Frankenthaler wanted to make the grainy, unforgiving wood block receptive to the vibrant color and organic, amorphous forms of her own painting. By dint of trial and error, with technical help from printmaking studios, she succeeded.

For “East and Beyond,” which depicts a radiant open space above a graceful mountainlike divide, she used a jigsaw to cut separate shapes, then printed the whole by a specially devised method to eliminate the white lines between them when put together. The result was a taut but fluid composition so refreshingly removed from traditional woodblock technique that it has had a deep influence on the medium ever since. “East and Beyond” became to contemporary printmaking in the 1970s what Ms. Frankenthaler’s paint staining in “Mountains and Sea” had been to the development of Color Field painting 20 years earlier.

In 1972, Ms. Frankenthaler made a less successful foray into sculpture, spending two weeks at Mr. Caro’s London studio. With no experience in the medium but aided by a skilled assistant, she welded together found steel parts in a way that evoked the work of David Smith.

Although she enjoyed the experience, she did not repeat it. Knoedler gave the work its first public showing in 2006.

Critics have not unanimously praised Ms. Frankenthaler’s art. Some have seen it as thin in substance, uncontrolled in method, too sweet in color and too “poetic.” But it has been far more apt to garner admirers like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler’s gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions.”

Ms. Frankenthaler and Mr. Motherwell were divorced in 1971. In 1994 she married Stephen M. DuBrul Jr., an investment banker who had headed the Export-Import Bank during the Ford administration. Besides her husband, her survivors include two stepdaughters, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell, and six nieces and nephews. Her two sisters, Gloria Ross Bookman and Marjorie Iseman, died before her.

In 1999, she and Mr. DuBrul bought a house in Darien, on Long Island Sound. Water, sky and their shifting light are often reflected in her later imagery.

As the years passed, her paintings seemed to make more direct references to the visible world. But they sometimes harked back to the more spontaneous, exuberant and less referential work of her earlier career.

There is “no formula,” she said in an interview in The New York Times in 2003. “There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”

She never aligned herself with the feminist movement in art that began to surface in the 1970s. “For me, being a ‘lady painter’ was never an issue,” she was quoted as saying in John Gruen’s book “The Party’s Over Now” (1972). “I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.”

Sori Yanagi is credited with paving the way on the international stage for younger Japanese designers. He also supported Japanese traditional art throughout his life.

December 27, 2011
The Los Angeles Times

Sori Yanagi, whose designs for stools and kitchen pots brought the simplicity and purity of Japanese decor into the everyday, has died. He was 96.

The pioneer of Japan’s industrial design died Sunday of pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital, Koichi Fujita of Yanagi Design Office said.

Yanagi’s curvaceous “butterfly stool,” evocative of a Japanese shrine gate, won an award at the Milan Triennale museum and design exhibition in 1957 and helped elevate him to international stature.

The work — made of two pieces of molded plywood fixed together with a brass pin — later joined the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre museum in Paris.

Another typical Yanagi design was the stackable plastic stool, humorously called the “elephant stool,” because of its resemblance to the animal’s chunky feet.

The lines and curves of Yanagi’s designs were as distinctly Japanese as they were universal, winning him fans — and a place in homes not only in Japan but around the world — for his teapots, ceramic cups and even the lowly whisk, which became artwork with his touch.

“Things that are easy to use survive, regardless of what is fashionable, and people want to use them forever,” Yanagi said in a 2002 Japan Times article. “But if things are created merely for a passing vogue and not for a purpose, people soon get bored with them and throw them away.

“The fundamental problem,” he added, “is that many products are created to be sold, not used.”

Yanagi was born in Tokyo on June 29, 1915. He chose design for his career after falling in love with the work of architect Le Corbusier while studying oil painting at the National University of Arts in Tokyo. He opened his own industrial design office in the early 1950s after working in a Tokyo architect’s firm.

Credited with paving the way on the international stage for younger Japanese designers, Yanagi also took up more monumental pieces, such as bridges and the Olympic torch for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games, as well as a motorcycle and toys.

He supported Japanese traditional art throughout his life and served as director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo. The museum was founded by his father, Soetsu Yanagi, who led the “mingei” movement celebrating Japanese folk craft.

“I try to create things that we human beings feel are useful in our daily lives,” the younger Yanagi said in the Japan Times story. “During the process, beauty is born naturally.”

He is survived by his wife, Fumiko, and four children.

By NANCY FOLBRE
NY Times Published: December 26, 2011

The blond prince hasn’t renounced his throne, but now criticizes the system that put him there. The superstar capitalist Richard Branson, founder of the global Virgin corporate empire, announced in November that the “short-term focus on profit has driven most businesses to forget about the long-term role in taking care of people.”

His new book urges businesses to embrace morality through “philanthrocapitalism.”

He does have a point. If all owners, bankers and corporate executives were virtuous souls, capitalism might function flawlessly. Adam Smith outlined a similar argument in the mid-18th century, in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” The pursuit of economic self-interest, he explained, would generally be tempered by natural morality. The economist Russell Roberts offers a modern version of this argument in his novella “The Invisible Heart.”

Socialists are usually the ones accused of having an overly optimistic view of human nature. Today, some capitalists have started to sound utopian.

Most economists, whatever their political stripes, generally put more emphasis on incentives than on virtue. And most ordinary people understand that the incentives built into the global capitalist system tend to reward some very bad behaviors.

Large corporations can often squelch their competition. They can minimize their costs by dumping waste products into the environment, contributing to pollution and global warming. They can use their profits to buy political influence. If they don’t like the regulatory policies of one nation-state, they can simply shift their operations to another.

Not all capitalists engage in bad behavior. But those who do often outcompete those who don’t. The structure of corporate ownership and governance allows short-term profits to trump long-run efficiency.

Recognition of these problems helps explain why the term “capitalism” doesn’t poll nearly as well as other terms describing our economic system. A Gallup poll conducted last January found that 33 percent of Americans had a negative image of capitalism, but only 10 percent had a negative image of free enterprise or entrepreneurship and only 4 percent a negative view of small business.

Big business and big government were essentially tied for disapproval (49 percent and 51 percent, respectively) – not surprising, since they currently enjoy a symbiotic relationship.

Republicans and Democrats differ far more on their images of capitalism (and socialism) than on free enterprise, entrepreneurship or small business.

More than a third of Americans but more than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents have a positive image of socialism.

The poll results suggest the political potential to develop a better hybrid system. Can we do something to minimize the perverse incentives that our current form of capitalism creates and move closer to our free enterprise ideals?

In his new book, “America Beyond Capitalism,” and in a recent opinion article in The New York Times, Gar Alperovitz makes a strong case for promoting cooperatives and worker-owned businesses.

A group of essays published during the summer in The Nation provides a longer list of strategies, asking, “If you had the ability to reinvent American capitalism, where would you start?”

Answers ranged from putting public directors on corporate boards to taxing financial transactions to promoting full employment. Overlapping Mr. Branson’s priorities, Jamie Raskin calls for changes to articles of incorporation that would allow companies to pursue social missions without fear of shareholder litigation.

Readers also weigh in with a remarkable variety of suggestions.

Maybe we should get some reinvention under way, just in case Mr. Branson fails to convert all his fellow capitalists to his cause.

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Editorial

NY Times Published: December 26, 2011
Editorial

Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote.

Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.

Seven states have already passed strict laws requiring a government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote, which many students don’t have, and 27 others are considering such measures. Many of those laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting.

It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.

Republicans usually don’t want to acknowledge that their purpose is to turn away voters, especially when race is involved, so they invented an explanation, claiming that stricter ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. In fact, there is almost no voter fraud in America to prevent.

William O’Brien, the speaker of the New Hampshire State House, told a Tea Party group earlier this year that students are “foolish” and tend to “vote their feelings” because they lack life experience. “Voting as a liberal,” he said, “that’s what kids do.” And that’s why, he said, he supported measures to prohibit students from voting from their college addresses and to end same-day registration. New Hampshire Republicans even tried to pass a bill that would have kept students who previously lived elsewhere from voting in the state; fortunately, the measure failed, as did the others Mr. O’Brien favored.

Many students have taken advantage of Election Day registration laws, which is one reason Maine Republicans passed a law eliminating the practice. Voters restored it last month, but Republican lawmakers there are already trying new ways to restrict voting. The secretary of state said he was investigating students who are registered to vote in the state but pay out-of-state tuition.

Wisconsin once made it easy for students to vote, making it one of the leading states in turnout of younger voters in 2004 and 2008. When Republicans swept into power there last year, they undid all of that, imposing requirements that invalidated the use of virtually all college ID cards in voter registration. Colleges are scrambling to change their cards to add signatures and expiration dates, but it’s not clear whether the state will let them.

Imposing these restrictions to win an election will embitter a generation of students in its first encounter with the machinery of democracy.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 25, 2011

Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get smarter, too?

Surprise: I got my wish, in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power plants. These rules are long overdue: we were supposed to start regulating mercury more than 20 years ago. But the rules are finally here, and will deliver huge benefits at only modest cost.

So, naturally, Republicans are furious. But before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what a good thing the E.P.A. just did.

As far as I can tell, even opponents of environmental regulation admit that mercury is nasty stuff. It’s a potent neurotoxicant: the expression “mad as a hatter” emerged in the 19th century because hat makers of the time treated fur with mercury compounds, and often suffered nerve and mental damage as a result.

Hat makers no longer use mercury (and who wears hats these days?), but a lot of mercury gets into the atmosphere from old coal-burning power plants that lack modern pollution controls. From there it gets into the water, where microbes turn it into methylmercury, which builds up in fish. And what happens then? The E.P.A. explains: “Methylmercury exposure is a particular concern for women of childbearing age, unborn babies and young children, because studies have linked high levels of methylmercury to damage to the developing nervous system, which can impair children’s ability to think and learn.”

That sort of sounds like something we should regulate, doesn’t it?

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is “quantifiable”: E.P.A.’s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.’s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn’t know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal.

And it’s a deal Republicans very much want to kill.

With everything else that has been going on in U.S. politics recently, the G.O.P.’s radical anti-environmental turn hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. But something remarkable has happened on this front. Only a few years ago, it seemed possible to be both a Republican in good standing and a serious environmentalist; during the 2008 campaign John McCain warned of the dangers of global warming and proposed a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Today, however, the party line is that we must not only avoid any new environmental regulations but roll back the protection we already have.

And I’m not exaggerating: during the fight over the debt ceiling, Republicans tried to attach riders that, as Time magazine put it, would essentially have blocked the E.P.A. and the Interior Department from doing their jobs.

Oh, by the way, you may have heard reports to the effect that Jon Huntsman is different. And he did indeed once say: “Conservation is conservative. I’m not ashamed to be a conservationist.” Never mind: he, too, has been assimilated by the anti-environmental Borg, denouncing the E.P.A.’s “regulatory reign of terror,” and predicting that the new rules will cause blackouts by next summer, which would be a neat trick considering that the rules won’t even have taken effect yet.

More generally, whenever you hear dire predictions about the effects of pollution regulation, you should know that special interests always make such predictions, and are always wrong. For example, power companies claimed that rules on acid rain would disrupt electricity supply and lead to soaring rates; none of that happened, and the acid rain program has become a shining example of how environmentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand.

But again, never mind: mindless opposition to “job killing” regulations is now part of what it means to be a Republican. And I have to admit that this puts something of a damper on my mood: the E.P.A. has just done a very good thing, but if a Republican — any Republican — wins next year’s election, he or she will surely try to undo this good work.

Still, for now at least, those who care about the health of their fellow citizens, and especially of the nation’s children, have something to celebrate.

The steel punch used to produce a 120-point capital A in the Romain du Roi typeface, which was designed and manufactured by the Imprimerie Royale — the French royal printing house — in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
NY Times Published: December 23, 2011

There was a day when type had weight. Not as in bold or extra bold; as in 7 pounds 8 ounces.

That is the weight of the steel punch that was used to produce a 120-point capital A in the typeface Romain du Roi. The roi in this case was the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, under whose reign the typeface was begun in 1694 at the royal printing house, the Imprimerie Royale.

A punch is a precise sculpture — a three-dimensional letter form in reverse — that is struck into a small copper slab known as a matrix to create a mold. From this mold, individual pieces of type can be cast, again and again, in molten lead. It took about 65 years to make all the punches and matrices that are needed in the 21 fonts that compose Romain du Roi: each a different size, from 4 to 120 points, with upright and slanted letters, capital initials, numbers and punctuation.

Hundreds of historical punches and matrices of various typefaces and dozens of books are on view at the Grolier Club in “Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale.” (It ceased being Royale in 1789, as did everything else in France.)

This is the first time these exquisite artifacts have been shown outside France, said H. George Fletcher, a club member who is the curator of the show. Their arrival could not be more timely.

They offer a reminder, in the ethereal era of bitmapping, that type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media. To make a C with a cedilla, for example, involved a lot more effort and thought than holding down the Option key on your Mac. A comma-shaped steel appendage had to be lashed with string to the bottom of the C punch to produce a new matrix.

“People are practically printing books with their smartphones,” Mr. Fletcher said, in a tone suggesting that he did not think this was such a good idea. “It’s much more gratifying to be able to touch something and find out it’s real, rather than a matter of bits and bytes.”

Mr. Fletcher, 70, is a former curator at the Morgan Library & Museum and the retired director of special collections at the New York Public Library, so his assessments carry special weight. He paused appreciatively before a copy of “De Imitatione Christi,” the first book printed by the Imprimerie Royale in 1640. “It suits the grandeur that is France,” he said.

James Mosley, an eminent scholar of printing, identified the type in “De Imitatione Christi” as the work of Claude Garamond, or Garamont. That name ought to be familiar to anyone who has ever pored over type specimens. It is one of the many faces named for type founders, punch cutters and designers: think Baskerville (John), Bodoni (Giambattista), Caslon (William) or Gill (Eric).

Garamond was such a valuable brand, it was even applied to faces he didn’t design, like 17th-century types now called Romain de l’Université or Caractères de l’Université, by Jean Jannon.

“During the 19th century, the glamorous name of ‘Garamond’ was given to these types,” Mr. Mosley said in an e-mail. “It was ‘glamorous’ because he was an almost mythical historical figure.”

Typography, glamorous? Philippe Grandjean, the punch cutter responsible for Romain du Roi, probably didn’t see it that way, despite — or perhaps because of — the royal warrant. “He was working for a committee,” Mr. Fletcher said, “so you know what kind of responses he got.”

Grandjean’s punches were repeatedly rejected and destroyed, while his design drawings were being altered constantly. When his type was first used in 1702, for a history of the Sun King’s triumphs, Grandjean was named in the preface. That text was removed. “The suppression of the preface ensured that only one name remained prominent: that of the king himself,” Mr. Mosley wrote.

Politics claimed other victims. The Romain de l’Empereur was designed by Firmin Didot at the time of Napoleon’s ascension. “You had a new emperor, you needed a new typeface,” Mr. Fletcher said.

It was used only once, to print the coronation album. After Waterloo, there wasn’t much call for it.

But the punches and matrices for Napoleon’s typeface survive. They underscore just how little printing changed for centuries and how profoundly it has been transformed in recent decades. Seventeenth-century copper matrices have much in common with the brass matrices found in Linotype machines, which were used to set this newspaper until 1978.

At The New York Times, nothing physical remains from the days of hot type. It is miraculous that the Imprimerie Nationale has preserved a patrimony dating to the dawn of the French Renaissance, including 230,000 steel punches, 151,000 copper matrices and 224,000 Chinese ideograms that were carved in boxwood during the regency of Philippe II, some of which are at the Grolier Club.

The club, founded in 1884, is devoted to the art of the book. It is named for a 16th-century French bibliophile, Jean Grolier.

The letterpress catalog for the show was printed by the Imprimerie Nationale and composed at its Atelier du Livre d’Art et de l’Estampe. In Garamond, of course. The impressions made by the letters are so deep, you can feel them when you run your hand across the pages.

It is the emphasis on the physicality of type that makes the Grolier show so useful and — in the words of Nelly Gable, a punch cutter working for the Imprimerie Nationale — so lyrical.

Describing the creation of a ligature combining g and y, one of many such ligatures on display in the show, she wrote, “What plenitude of forms — the slopes, polished like mirrors, the gentle inclines that safeguard a particular angle, the fragile but vigorous swelling curves — monumental, a thing of beauty: a type founder’s punch.”

“Printing for Kingdom, Empire & Republic: Treasures From the Archives of the Imprimerie Nationale” runs through Feb. 4 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, Manhattan; (212) 838-6690

An installation view of the exhibition, which includes a varied collection of American Indian materials.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: December 22, 2011

“Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art” at the Peter Blum Gallery in SoHo closes out the New York gallery year with a great group show. This superb yet fraught exhibition creates a vortex of history, visual culture, language and ideas that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating. It seems almost impossible to straighten out, but that may be what makes it so valuable.
ArtsBeat

At the heart of the show is a shatteringly beautiful array of American Indian material, most of it from the Southwest, in which organic and geometric forms mingle effortlessly and with great variety. There are chalky white Mimbres burial bowls, one with an image of a bird catching a fish as it stands on its own elongated beak, and Navajo chief’s blankets, whose combinations of bold and fine bands and patterns in red, black and white seem to capture the very electricity of life.

There are Panamint, Western Apache and Yavapai baskets punctuated with the alert silhouettes of horned animals and stepped, radiating lines suggestive of lightning; Arapaho ledger drawings and a Lakota Sioux box made of hide and decorated with a vivid accordionlike arrangement of reds, yellows, blues and greens. There are Zia, Zuni and Acoma earthenware pots whose decorations — variously geometric, zoomorphic, floral and calligraphic — simply dazzle, and a Navajo drawing for a sand painting and a weaving based on one, dominated by swastikas achieved by adding semi-abstract, postlike figures to the four arms of large plus signs.

Dispersed around these extraordinary works is a varied mass of material — books, prints and photographs and the work of modern and contemporary artists — that attests to several generations of contact between indigenous peoples and government forces, sympathetic observers, trained scholars and aesthetic “kindred spirits.” Hand-colored aquatint engravings by the German artist Karl Bodmer from around 1840 depict Indians hunting bison. Edward Curtis’s turn-of-the-20th-century photographs of weary, wise-looking Indian chiefs give a hint of lost lands, lives and traditions (as do their words, quoted in the show’s excellent catalog). Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is captured in a photograph by Adam Clark Vroman in 1900 and in another by Ansel Adams from around 1947.

As for 20th-century art, Georgia O’Keeffe is represented by a small abstraction, in which a field of blue is divided by a jagged span of black that suggests a horizon line, a flock of birds and a Navajo weaving. Two marvelous drawings from the 1940s by Jackson Pollock suggest his awareness of Indian sand painting and rock petroglyphs. “Arizona Rouge,” a small painting on wood from 1955 by Max Ernst, captures something of the essential abstractness of the Southwestern landscape, as do works by Agnes Martin. The Swiss artist Helmut Federle pays tribute to Navajo weavings with small works in gouache and oil.

More originally, Josef Albers layers together planes of color into reverberating distillations of adobe architecture that also suggest ghostly, distended masks. There is also a video by Bruce Nauman, “Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor),” which shows him, working alone, setting three fence posts. In this context his actions suggest an austere and arduous ritual, and the posts evoke abbreviated totems.

One of the most affecting works is one of the tiniest: Paul Strand’s “Ranchos de Taos, Church, New Mexico,” an exquisite vintage photograph from 1931 in which the adobe architecture, a small symphony of graduated grays, has the delicate solidity of flesh. It looks great next to the Ernst, and some of its organic earthiness is bodied forth in a miniature sculpture of a pueblo by Charles Simonds that nestles in a nearby corner upside down, as if protected from gravity by the gods.

The modern and contemporary art in the show struggles to hold its own against the Indian objects. It seems hopelessly romantic to say that it lacks their spiritual connection to nature, although that may be an issue. More urgently, the 20th-century works seem plagued by a kind of physical deficiency, a failure to integrate motif and material into a seamless whole. In the Native American works this integration is always in force, although it is understandably most intense in the woven blankets and baskets, where there is no distinction between image and process, or art and craft, or front and back. The weaving forms a completely efficient, irreducible whole: figure and ground are one and visible to the same degree from both sides. In a seemingly monochromatic Hopi weaving from around 1875, the power of the work comes not just from subtle shifts among tones of black, brown and deep blue, but also from weaving techniques that set off diamond-pattern borders against a field of diagonal twill.

While much of the work by non-Indian artists lacks this kind of physical integrity, Nicholas Galanin, the Alaskan Tlinglit artist who works in various Conceptual Art modes, does muster some of it by wittily appropriating the rock-art technique especially favored by the Native Americans of the Southwest. Into the sidewalk in front of the gallery he has incised the silhouette of a small horned animal like those found on several objects inside, as well as the word “Indians” rendered in the distinctive script used by the Cleveland baseball team, but without the Indian caricature of the logo. Redolent of tattoos and graffiti, these works bring the fuel-efficient unity posed by the Native American works in this show squarely into the present.

“Kindred Spirits: Native
American Influences on 20th
Century Art” continues through Jan. 28

Peter Blum

From the brochure collection of Steve Hayes

THREE LITTLE PIGS Detroit’s homegrown subcompacts included the 1973 A.M.C. Gremlin, above, along with the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega

By JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN
NY Times Published: December 16, 2011

ADDRESSING a group of 450 civic leaders at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Oct. 3, 1968, the chairman of General Motors, James M. Roche, did something almost sacrilegious for an auto executive: he talked about a future product.

Roche boldly announced that in the fall of 1970, G.M. would begin producing a small car designed for the American market and priced from $1,900 to $2,300. Developed under the code name XP-887, the subcompact would be about a foot shorter than G.M.’s smallest offering at the time, the Chevrolet Corvair.

And it would, no doubt, be better than that star-crossed and litigation-plagued import fighter from a decade earlier.

Roche’s plan was largely a reaction to the commercial threat presented by import brands, which were increasingly attracting young buyers. In 1968, the domestic automakers sold nine out of 10 new cars in America. But import sales were expected to top a million in 1969 — a number even Detroit couldn’t ignore.

But in answering that challenge, American automakers were by the end of 1970 producing three of the most notoriously awful cars ever built — the American Motors Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto — and opening the door for the Japanese onslaught of the 1970s and 1980s.

The new models were so terrible that even 40 years later, some shoppers still won’t consider Detroit’s brands. Their flaws made for cars that comedians would savage, liability lawyers would chase and crestfallen owners would try to pawn off on unsuspecting victims.

“Led by General Motors, the giant domestic auto industry was going to flex its muscle and swat the pesky fly of imported cars off its shoulder,” John Z. DeLorean, the former Chevrolet general manager, said in J. Patrick Wright’s 1979 book, “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors.”

The Gremlin, Vega and Pinto were small enough to compare directly with the import standard bearer of the time, the Volkswagen Beetle. All three of the domestic entries were conventional designs — shrunken versions of the era’s gargantuan sedans — with their engines in front driving the rear wheels.

G.M.’s ambitions for the XP-887, which would become the Vega, were huge. Instead of being developed by the engineering staff of a single brand, the Vega was designed by the corporate engineering staff under the direction of Edward N. Cole, an executive vice president. It was then handed to Chevrolet’s managers to sell.

The Vega would be an all-new car unrelated to any other in G.M.’s portfolio, using an all-new engine, and it would be built at the company’s newest, most automated plant, in Lordstown, Ohio. “The Vega came just as the bean counters were rising at G.M.,” said John Heitmann, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, about G.M.’s changing corporate culture.

“From the first day I stepped into the Chevrolet division, in 1969, it was obvious that the Vega was in real trouble,” DeLorean said. “General Motors was pinning its image and prestige on this car, and there was practically no interest in it in the division.”

Chevrolet had proposed its own small-car design and was turned down; as production approached, the Chevy staff’s disdain for the corporate model — heavy for its size and more costly to produce — grew.

Worst of all, its 4-cylinder engine was an unfortunate mix of innovation and archaic design. The cylinder head was made of cast iron, a conventional practice for the time, but a special aluminum alloy was chosen for the engine block.

“What resulted,” DeLorean said, “was a relatively large, noisy, top-heavy combination of aluminum and iron, which cost far too much to build, looked like it had been taken off a 1920 farm tractor and weighed more than the cast-iron engine Chevy had proposed, or the foreign-built 4-cylinder engine the Ford Pinto was to use.”

The engine wasn’t particularly powerful; breathing through a one-barrel carburetor, it produced a piddling 90 horsepower; with a two-barrel carburetor, that rose to 110. When the ratings were revised in 1972 to net power output — from the gross horsepower rating used previously — those figures dropped to 80 and 90 horsepower.

“To pass a vehicle going 50 miles an hour,” wrote John S. Radosta of The New York Times in a test of a 1971 model, “a Vega with the 90-horsepower engine and automatic or 3-speed manual transmission needs at least one-third of a mile and 20 seconds. That’s a long time to be sitting in the left lane of a two-lane road.”

Ford, meanwhile, rushed to ready the Pinto in light of Roche’s announcement and was further pressured by the ascension of a small-car advocate, Lee A. Iacocca, to the company’s presidency.

“The Pinto was the first real ‘world car,’ ” Mr. Heitmann said, noting Ford’s production strategy. “It was innovative in the sense that Ford set up a global assembly line with the engines and transmissions made in Europe and the car itself assembled in the United States.”

Like the Vega, the 1971 Pinto was engineered to a tough $2,000 price point with an equally tough 2,000-pound weight goal. The base engine was a 1.6-liter 4-cylinder rated at 75 horsepower; a 100 horsepower 2-liter 4 was optional.

“The Pinto is rolling proof of an economic fact of life,” a 1971 car test in The Times observed. “In building an American car for the $2,000 market something has to give. Pinto disappoints in acceleration, braking, ride quality and rear-seat comfort.”

American Motors, though much smaller than Ford and G.M., decided that despite its scant resources it needed a small car to retain the budget-minded buyers who had been loyal Rambler owners. It was forced to punt.

Instead of engineering a new car, the company’s design chief, Dick Teague, took the existing Hornet compact car, knocked 12 inches out of its wheelbase (down to 96 inches) and eliminated virtually all of the sheet metal beyond the rear wheels. The awkwardly proportioned result was named the Gremlin.

The biggest advantage for American Motors of this simplified product development scheme was that the Gremlin reached the market in April 1970, about five months before the Vega and Pinto. Lacking the resources to develop a 4-cylinder engine, A.M.C. resorted to installing either 3.3- or 3.8-liter versions of the Rambler in-line 6 in the Gremlin.

Weirdly unbalanced, the nose-heavy Gremlin was primitive even in the context of the early 1970s. It was noisy and handled poorly — and like every A.M.C. product suffered from haphazard quality control. But it was never the disaster the Pinto and Vega would prove to be.

The Vega went on sale on Sept. 10, 1970, as a 1971 model, but labor strife at the Lordstown plant initially kept the car in short supply. Even before the model year was through, reliability complaints emerged.

Its major problem was an inadequate engine cooling system and the fragile marriage of an iron cylinder head with an aluminum block. The metals expanded at different rates as they heated up and the head gasket couldn’t keep things sealed. Much of the time, the engines were ruined. Beyond that, by 1972 the Vega was also subject to three major safety recalls, and owners were noticing the appearance of rust in cars just a few months old.

While more reliable, the Pinto, which went on sale the day after the Vega, would earn a terrifying reputation. In 1977, while the car was still in production, a scathing article by Mark Dowie in Mother Jones magazine asserted that Ford had knowingly and cynically produced a car prone to bursting into flames in rear-end collisions — even at low speeds.

Citing an internal Ford memo he said was in his possession, Mr. Dowie claimed that Ford had put a value on each life lost in such an accident at $200,000. For that reason, he wrote, the company decided that modifications to better protect the fuel tank from rupturing — and possibly prevent as many as 180 deaths a year — was, at $11 a car, uneconomical.

The problem wasn’t that the Vega, Pinto and Gremlin didn’t sell. Kept alive by their makers through the ’70s fuel crises, they sold by the millions over long production lives that covered much of the ’70s. The disaster was that they let down so many Americans.

In 1968 Toyota, Datsun and VW were more of a nuisance than a threat, and Honda was still a year away from selling its first car in the United States. But by 1980, partly because of the door left open to them by the failed Detroit subcompacts, those imports were firmly established as value leaders.

“The Pinto, Gremlin and Vega represented everything that Toyota was not,” Mr. Heitmann, the historian, said.

Four decades later, Detroit is still fighting the perception that it doesn’t take small cars seriously. But with tougher fuel economy rules coming, getting past the stigma of the small ’70s cars is more important than ever.

Vincent Fecteau, Untitled, 2006

Vincent Fecteau, Untitled, 2006

Through February 12

Hauser Kunst

TATE CAFÉ 7
2011
Acrylic on Linen
200 x 300 cm, 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

Through December 21, 2011

Simon Lee

via