The World of Donald Evans

My copy of The World of Donald Evans is one of my most cherished books. In addition to being a beautifully produced record of a short but luminous art career, it was also surprisingly hard to get. Used copies were not especially expensive when I looked for them online, but the first two or three times I ordered one, I was told the book wasn’t available after all. Maybe the book dealers decided they couldn’t part with them.

Donald Evans was an American artist who lived in the Netherlands and died in a fire when he was in his early thirties. His specialty was the creation of postage stamps from imaginary countries, which he rendered in watercolors and often marked with custom-designed cancellations. Bruce Chatwin wrote a tribute to Evans that appears in the collection What Am I Doing Here:

His colour sense was as faultless as his draughtsmanship. A set of his stamps sits on a page like butterflies in a case. And, needless to say, he loved butterflies and came up with a country for them — Rups, which is the Dutch for ‘caterpillar’. He himself said he had no originality, and that he preferred to work from photographs or given images: yet one flat panorama of Achterdijk has the ‘breathed-on’ quality of a sepia-wash landscape by Rembrandt. His art was so disciplined that it was patient of receiving anything that happened to attract him — zeppelins, barnyard fowls, penguins, pasta, a passion for mushroom hunting, Sung ceramics, shells, dominoes; drinks at the Bar Centrum; windmills that were ‘abstract’ portraits of friends; the vegetable market at Cadaques, or a recipe for pesto from Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Cooking: his way of recording the pleasures of food and drink reminds me, somehow, of Hemingway.

Tom Otterness

My life revolves around the C line, and one of the highlights of that line are the rotund little bronze people that populate the 14th Street station. Little capitalists shaped like money bags (a more benign version of Thomas Nast’s Boss Tweed) perch contentedly on the benches, or play tug of war with giant pennies, or fall victim to toothy crocodiles that emerge from manhole covers.

On my first visit to Roosevelt Island I was pleased to see Otterness’s Marriage of Real Estate and Money: a several-part morality tale perched on pilings in the shallow water. More recently, I was tickled to see Large Covered Wagon installed near the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge. When you walk to the back of the wagon, you see the heads of a pioneer couple who are getting the maximum enjoyment out of their bouncy ride.

Boggs by Lawrence Weschler

My colleague Steven Lydenberg, author of Corporations and the Public Interest, recommended this entertaining and thought-provoking book about an artist who draws money. In some ways, Boggs reminds me of the work of Donald Evans, who created beautiful imaginary stamps from imaginary countries.

Boggs is not a counterfeiter — he’s just fascinated by the artistry of currency and by the value we ascribe to it, now that the U.S. dollar, for instance, is no longer backed by gold or silver and has value mainly because we agree it does.

Boggs draws Swiss francs and British pounds with very fine-tipped pens, but that’s only the beginning. The artwork is not complete, in his view, until he is able to use it to purchase something. That is, rather than sell his work he uses its face value to buy something, which is only possible when the seller agrees that its value as an artwork is at least as much as the note that it imitates.

Finding someone who agrees to the transaction is often the hardest part. Another hard part was Bogg’s prosecution by the Bank of England, and his persecution by the U.S. Secret Service.

New York Times photography

It’s obvious from many a feature story that the New York Times is home to a lot of frustrated novelists. But the photographs in the Times, especially since the advent of color in 1997, also show more artistic talent than most daily papers can demonstrate. One photo from the pre-color days made a haunting impact on me at the time, and I recently looked it up again.

The photo shows Jimmy Carter on a blasted lot in the South Bronx. He is stepping out confidently enough, with an inquisitive expression on his face, but there is something sinister in the long dark shadows that he and his entourage cast, and the man at the left is twisting around as if checking for snipers in the windows of the gutted buildings. 

Margaret Drabble and Marcel Proust

One of my grad-student instructors in college once tried to reassure a few of us English majors who were feeling discouraged because nonliterary types often outperformed us in English classes. The real benefit, said our instructor, would come around senior year, when we had absorbed enough English and American literature that we would start to make interesting connections between things.

I thought of this after starting to reread The Needle’s Eye, a 1972 novel by one of my favorite authors, Margaret Drabble. I hadn’t read it in many years, and when I got to page 17 I got an unmistakable echo of Marcel Proust: the close attention to clothing, especially female clothing; the patient examination of emotional subtleties; the comparison of living people with archetypes from the art of the old masters; and the sinuous sentences:

There was nothing dowdy or ugly about her dress: on the contrary, he had to recognise, once he noticed it at all, that she had a certain private elegance, an elegance so unworldly that it made the whole room, and all the other beaded dresses and peacock feathers and gold slippers in it, look suddenly too new, too bright, too good: too recent imitations of the gently decayed image that she so unostentatiously presented. She looked, because of age and softness, authentic, as ancient frescoes look in churches, frescoes which in their very dimness offer a promise of truth that a more brilliant (however beautiful) restoration denies. And yet it was almost impossible to resent her curious distinction: impossible even for him, so schooled in resentment: because she carried with her such an air of sadness, of lack of certainty, that to resent it would have been not an act of self-defence, but an act of aggression, of violent reproach.