My taste in television is lamentably lowbrow. So I favored comedian Louis CK’s older show, Lucky Louie, over his new one, Louie, that’s been so highly acclaimed. The older show is a dimmer, grittier version of a standard network sitcom, like Good Times with a white family. I found the new series pretentious formally, filled with too many artfully composed frames, meaningful silences, and dramatic close-ups. Each time I watched I wanted to say to Louis CK, actor/writer/director/editor, You’re a comedian, so just concentrate on being funny. Nonetheless I kept watching, encouraged by the occasionally outright hilarious bits like Blueberries.

And then, this season, came the gorgeous surprise of David Lynch guest starring as a network television executive who guides Louie through an important audition. Lynch is playing an exaggerated version of himself, a show business old-timer with a quivering bouffant, flat western accent, and off-kilter timing, and he looks like he’s simply reading (and shouting) his lines off cue cards. But his presence is both indelible and satirical; you can’t turn away. This titanic character (as well as the three-episode story arc it’s part of) tips the tone of the goings-on from comedy to something a little bit deeper. And, in the director’s presence, the show’s visual design becomes charged with Lynchian meaning. It is, finally, believable that the entire series unfolds from Louie’s specific, sometimes strange, point of view. The face of his boy-manager looks like that of a carnival freak. Three hooks on the back of his dressing room door shimmer with menace. The doorbell in his apartment sounds like it’s ringing from outer space. It all makes Louie’s dithering, ordinary-guy cluelessness enormously touching. It’s hard for sitcoms that are trying to do something fresh strike the right visual and emotional tone. (Watch how The Mindy Project is struggling right now.) Louie nailed it.

October 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses

It was with considerable reluctance that I moved off my couch on Friday evening to see the exhibit of Josef Albers drawings at the Morgan Library. I had little interest in seeing more of the artist’s canonical, clinical square-on-square (Homage to the Square) compositions that I felt I already knew too well. So I was taken aback at the work on display, which included studies for those square paintings, and wells as more robustly figural works that I’d never seen before. These drawings revealed a warmth and workmanship that, for the first time, brought the artist’s work to life for me.

Most remarkable were a series of studies Albers made while living in Mexico from 1947 to 1948 called Variant/Adobe. Based on the serene, severe geometries of a native house facade, they’re painstaking investigations into the alchemy of color and form. In each panel the artist constructs the same basic figure – an oblong house front with two windows – from different color schemes. There’s a gorgeous hesitancy to these pieces. The shapes are outlined lightly in pencil on rough blotter paper. Then Albers takes a color, straight from the tube, and, after applying some daub of it, selects another to try right alongside. It doesn’t look as if he’s always working incrementally, trying to pin down the exact right shade of yellow within a spectrum, but following crazy hunches, doing everything he can to allow the correct color, whatever it is, to reveal himself. Albers had always seemed like the most tiresome of painters, a pedagogue who painted what was already known to him in order to make it perfectly clear to everyone else. These drawings, that show him searching and struggling, show otherwise.

September 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses

After seeing the rooms of the Winter Palace, two Leonardo da Vinci canvases, and twenty-six Rembrandt canvases, museum fatigue set in and I was ready to leave the Hermitage. Just then our guide dropped us off on the third floor, where the modern paintings are, and my energy level exploded. The thirty-seven small galleries here are crammed with pieces from Picasso, Chagall, Cezanne and other masters. They rival the selection of modern paintings on display at MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the heart of the collection are a number of groundbreaking works by Henri Matisse, including Dance and Red Room. Seeing Dance for the first time, after knowing it from reproductions, was convulsive. It’s huge, like a mural, and rendered in sour, unpretty reddish hues. Seen at this scale, practically life-size, the flatness of the rendering is incredibly brazen. It’s not pictorial really and not graphic really and yet it depicts a world that is, dramatically and spatially, complete. The canvas was coursing with energy, as if it would burst from the wall. (It would certainly benefit from being moved to a larger gallery.) My favorite Matisse was Game of Bowls, a smaller canvas that shows three boys playing on the lawn. The composition is simple, strange and calm. There is something primal about the means – smears of color – with which the boys are rendered, and with which their joy is captured. Standing in front, I felt the jolt that turn-of-the-century Parisians must have felt when encountering modern painting for the first time.

July 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses