23

BOYFRIEND, SONGWRITER, MUSICAL CITIZEN

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE SUCCESSFUL REOPENING of Strike Up the Band in mid-January 1930, Gershwin received a warm letter from a young woman with whom he had been keeping company. Rosamond Walling was a student at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia and far enough from New York to make their encounters sporadic. But they bridged the gap by writing letters; more than sixty survive from 1928 to shortly before her marriage to Rafit Tirana in June 1932. The letters trace a relationship between a man and a woman who, although twelve years apart in age, were linked by affinities of interest and personality and, it seems, by the confidence that a sense of personal worth can foster: for him, musical talent that had already won international fame and success; for her, the pedigree of an affluent, cosmopolitan family, at ease in the company of high achievers in politics and the arts.

Walling wrote the letter, dated January 29—her twentieth birthday—in her dormitory room, after glancing up from the book she was reading to look “at You”:1

Your picture just came to life and smiled at me—and I put down my book and had quite a long talk with you. You were really darling—and we both had a grand time.—except that I did far too much of the talking. . . . I really think that your Picture-self just gave me an excuse to write to you, because I wanted to tell you that I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately, and I’ve wanted very much to be with you. You know I’m not in my ’teens any longer, and to-night I’ve discovered several secrets about myself. I feel so old, and so very wise! Many things that you discovered in me I have found too, at last.

Walling, a first cousin of Emily Paley and Leonore Gershwin, was the daughter of novelist and Socialist activist Anna Strunsky—who had once been linked artistically, and romantically, with author Jack London—and William English Walling, a wealthy Kentucky-born political activist who championed Socialist causes and in 1909 helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rosamond and George first met at Emily and Lou Paley’s wedding in 1920, when he was twenty-one and she ten years old.2 “After a while George decided that as I was the closest he could get to our adored Emily, I might turn out to be the right wife for him,” she later related to an interviewer. What he was looking for was “a good girl, preferably at least half Jewish, and with sense, like his mother. . . . ‘It’s nice about your father, because I like the English and Southerners and Westerners,’ George said. ‘But thank God your mother is Jewish.’ . . . He liked the idea of the combination.”

Walling had enrolled at Swarthmore in the fall of 1927. She wrote her family that October that Ira and Lee had taken her to see Funny Face, just then beginning its tryout run in Philadelphia. “Leonore has been WONDERFUL to me—I spent a night with them and saw the show—George is so sweet and modest—I can’t imagine anyone more deserving of the sort of fame he’s getting.—his music for this show is great. ’S’wonderful, ’S’marvelous’— . . . I laughed pains into both my sides.”3 The next June, she happened to be visiting her Strunsky cousins in Greenwich Village on the day they were meeting the ship carrying the Gershwins back from Europe;

We all went to 103rd Street afterwards. There were many groups that I didn’t know: a pinochle game of Mr. Gershwin’s downstairs, pianos and noises upstairs, eating, greeting everywhere. Feeling very much a country cousin, I rode myself up and down in the elevator cage. George got in too, eventually.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said. Then, as always, because he admired my capacity, “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Perhaps some pickles?”

“With a touch of pastrami and salami and two or three pounds of raw beef, a quart of milk and an onion. Come, we’ll find something to nibble on. And then there’s a surprise for you. I brought you a present from France. In fact, two presents.”

The first present was the first “modern art” object in my life. It was a fine cigarette case, in black and white, with an eggshell inlay in cubist design. I was thrilled, especially at the recognition of my dignity—a cigarette case!

He fastened the second treasure on my left wrist. It was very delicate—emeralds, rubies, and little pearls set in old gold.

“I found it in an antique store in Paris. It reminded me of you—it looks as if it has a Russian soul.”

“George was always the youngest of the young to the whole world,” she continued, “but there were twelve years that made him seem very old to me then.”4

Soon after this meeting, Rosamond left for summer school at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I wish that I could come down to New York,” she told him, “and stand at the door to your music-room armed with a fly-swatter or some other worthy implement to keep out the annoyances”—to keep out anything preventing him from his work on An American in Paris and Treasure Girl. In another fanciful touch, she closed her letter with a cartoonish drawing of a bone for Tinker, George’s dog.5 In mid-August, Walling joined her family on vacation in the Adirondack region of New York State, where she typed a confident and playful letter showing that, although claiming no predilection for music, she had the empathy and background to appreciate the stakes that a musical career held for him:

I had most uncollegiate hysterics over Ira’s Gilbertian rhyme—I’m dying to hear the tunes that could have inspired the titles—they’re simply apple.6 I’ll bet that the new show [Treasure Girl] is the best yet—and whatever the heat does to Walter Catlett, you have the inimitable and perfect Gertrude, so who cares? . . . Are you going to California? Its a tremendous offer, but what will happen to your study and to the possible “Porgy” or “The Debouk” if you do? I cant help hoping that someday you will write a most wonderful Opera.7

On January 19, 1929, Gershwin let Walling know that “the new show & the apartment [on Riverside Drive] are keeping me very busy these days, but I seem to thrive on it as I haven’t felt better in a long time. . . . I’ve chosen all the materials & colors for the apartment & also the silver. All that remains now is to choose the china. It is really exciting, all this business. I went to the factory yesterday & saw my furniture being made. The detail of the whole thing amazes me.”8 Gershwin had recently sent Rosamond a desk set. “Is the writing set I sent you a practical one,” he asked, “or is it a peacock—Just there for looks?”9 Her reply, started ten days later, must have pleased him: “My room has turned Peacock entirely: but who wants Bread when she can have Cake—if you see what I mean.” That teasing response—part of the letter written on her twentieth birthday—led into her acknowledgment of what he had just sent her, his own drawing of a likeness of himself: “Dear Artist: I think that Mr. George Porgy Gershwin should keep to one art: your portrait, George, is an exact image—but a little something is lacking. It’s much better than the darn Times picture of a few weeks ago—that was a crime I thought. You wait till I paint you!”10

Gershwin’s relocation to Riverside Drive coincided with his burgeoning interest in drawing and painting, and Walling’s encouragement likely played a role. Soon after his move, the two of them went on a shopping spree:

George went nuts in the paint store. He bought a huge empty box and filled it with a complete assortment of Grumbacher or Malfa oils, whichever cost most, in the biggest tubes. Then he chose sable brushes, a palette, and some big canvas boards. We walked all the way back to his new apartment. . . . I had always painted and, as I knew absolutely nothing about music, was very happy at George’s deep interest in painting.

In fact, she revealed later that she “nearly married him” after his move “because he said I could have the downstairs apartment and we’d make an inside staircase; so I would have privacy and could paint.”11

Courting a college student like Rosamond also gave Gershwin a link to the world of books. On February 2, she quoted a passage she had discovered in a new novel called Mamba’s Daughters by DuBose Heyward. “Someone is talking about a marvelous new Negro musician,” she explained. Another character objects:

“For Heaven’s sake don’t label it. That’s the trouble with us. What we can’t label we damn. Can’t you see its new—different? Can’t you feel that it’s something of our own—American—something that Stallings and Harley got a glimmer of in ‘Deep River’12—that the Theatre Guild caught the pictorial side of in Porgy; that Gershwin actually got his hands on in spots of his ‘Rapsody in Blue’? It’s epoch making, I tell you.” Read the Book, George dear—you’ll like it. This is page 302.13

Letters written in the coming weeks seem to affirm the pair’s mutual attraction. In Cincinnati, after the evening performance on February 28 of his newest orchestral work, the composer repaired to his hotel room to write Rosamond about it. “I have just come from Emery Auditorium, where the symphony played ‘An American in Paris.’ Fritz Reiner conducted it & it seemed to go over with a bang. It made me very happy.”14 In her reply she confessed that she had felt “terribly depressed” that evening, but then “I locked my door and turned off the lights and played your Rhapsody. George dear—it brought me such happiness and comfort!”15

Come spring, the pleasure Gershwin was taking in drawing and in his living quarters—“The Hudson River & the sunsets over the Palisades, the little tugboats & the ocean liners, the funny looking phut-phut-phutters, the graceful birds & the imitating aeroplanes—an ever changing picture”—remained fulfilling, but still he looked to her to add something more. “I have already drawn Lou, Emily, Pop Gershwin, Bill Daly, Mabel & Bob Schirmer, Martin Loeffler, cousin Botkin & a dozen others. How about you? Enclosed is a picture of my first lesson on the penthouse roof.”16 A few weeks later, when preparations for Ziegfeld’s Show Girl were “so far behind that we are not even ready for pandemonium”: “I am very keen to do a picture of you in water color & try & capture your lovely face with its rosey colors. That would be quite a task but there is nothing like trying.”17

Gershwin’s correspondence with Walling brought out a personal side he was not in the habit of revealing. In early October, he told her that her letters

have a way of making me happy, and, for a long time after receiving them the feeling persists. For example, the other morning I awoke, not feeling too ‘hot’ & was handed a stack of mail. One after another I opened the letters with the mechanical precision and expression of a robot. Then your letter loomed up and then—a smile—a sitting up in bed—a slight quickening of the pulse—a careful reading of your sweet letter and the day was made for me. . . . Now that you know how to make a fellow happy, what will you do about it? love, George.18

Several weeks later, after Rosamond had visited New York to watch him conduct, Gershwin reported that “the market has gone sensible again, everything seems to be settling back to normal, Ira is working, Lee is playing rummy, Mother is going to Lakewood for a stay, Frankie feels fine & still sees Leo Godowsky, Arthur is in good shape, Pop’s still playing pinochle and I miss you.”19

In April 1930, Rosamond and George together attended a Philadelphia concert including both Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and music by Arnold Schoenberg. Her letter a few days later, on Easter Saturday, describes her room, now filled with flowers and the sound of music emanating from the radio George had given her for her twentieth birthday. “Isn’t a world that creates Radios and Roses and Easter quite wonderful?,” she muses, relishing her good fortune at having heard on the same program both Schoenberg (“fascinating”) and Stravinsky, who “created real beauty.” She continues,

Reading, exercise out-doors, painting. I don’t resent lon[e]liness: at this time in my life I love it.

Oh, this music is lovely. . . . I’m now listening to [Saint-Saëns’s] “the Swan”—a most delicate, sad thing from some French composition. I must learn more about music! George dear, someday could you send me a little list of books on musicians—criticism—of course I realize how little music can be taught, and no one could love just listening more than I no matter how much they read—but I’d like to have a deeper understanding. . . . With all this glory of flowers and music I really don’t care if I never leave this room!20

A few days later, Gershwin sent a reply that “I hope will contain some of the warmth my visit to Philadelphia & your last letter made me feel for you.” Her “response & understanding of the extra modern music you heard” had left him “more than delighted. . . . You looked your beautiful self, & my friend Hammond kept reminding me (needlessly) how nice you were. And the talk afterwards. . . . I felt you knew me much better because of it. Did you?”21

That summer, however, his travels and working schedule, and her sojourn with her family in New England, kept them apart. In July, a rhapsodic letter from Rosamond arrived in George’s mail from Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod:

Truly this is a corner of Paradise: a crazy colorful, ancient little Sailor-town; three wonderful, changeful faces of the magic ocean; vast sand-dunes, most lovely; forests, lakes, flowers and All Loveliness. The other night I walked over the miles of dunes in the moonlight. It was like walking on the strange, silver face of the moon itself—misty pale sand, reaching Forever away in the distance, to the silver-grey ocean. . . . I’ve painted and drawn, and written a few poems. In the evening we talk to friends, or read, or I walk alone.22

He met her lyrical report playfully, with a missive from an invented hamlet of his own.

Every morning when I walked to the village I would stop at the post office & inquire for mail. “Any mail from Miss Walling?” Old Jenkins, who knew me when I was born, would look over his glasses & say in a very old, kind voice “Nope. Guess she’s havin’ too good a time with those artist men up thar in Provincetown to write to an old fogy like you. Heh, heh. You know she’s a durn purty gal, full o’ life & she’s kept busy with adorin’ males around her & she’s so busy adorin’ nature herself you’re lucky if she sends you s’much as a post card. Heh heh. Nope. Nothin’ today. Come ’round day after tomorrow when next mail comes in, maybe better luck then.”23

But Gershwin’s correspondence with Walling declined during her last year at Swarthmore, 1930–31. If the matter-of-fact signoff of his summer letter—“So long Rosamond. George. Regards to your family”—signals any cooling in their relationship, his plans for the upcoming theatrical season may help to explain it. He and Ira were committed to spend much of the fall and winter in Hollywood, writing the music for the Fox studio’s film Delicious. That assignment also gave him an opportunity to draft a new classical work, the Second Rhapsody for piano and orchestra. After returning to New York in March 1931, it seems to have taken him some time to resume his connection with Rosamond, and by the time he did, she had decided to mark the end of her college days with an extended stay in Europe. Her departure marked the end of their romantic relationship. Traveling that summer with a friend named Anna Friede, she moved from London to Paris and then Geneva, and by fall was settled into the life of a student in London.

The two remained on friendly terms, however. On September 26, Gershwin celebrated both his thirty-third birthday and the publication of Isaac Goldberg’s biography, George Gershwin: A Study in American Music. He sent Walling a copy soon after, and on October 21 she wrote to thank him:

How sweet of you to send me the Book and to inscribe it so beautifully! I read it last night—in front of my fire, in my charming-flower-filled sitting-room. I had many thoughts about you while I was reading the book—some even severe ones. It’s pages showed such a picture of your life, the entanglements about you! What has your Fate in store for you—your promised fulfillment, Opera, your own great music,—or Memories, and parties and Shows? Maybe Both?? No one is wishing the Highest for you more than I, George!24

Six months later, Rosamond wrote to express concern for the precarious state of Morris Gershwin’s health, conveyed to her by a mutual friend. The letter ends with news of her upcoming wedding, which she delivers with affection and humor:

Do come soon: I’ve a new friend for you whom you’ll adore—Rifat Tirana. If you can keep a secret (ssh—!)—I’ll whisper something grand—I’m going to marry him. . . . !!! You win all the bets we made about my ’eart and ’ead, George dear. I won’t try to describe him—only I can promise you that you’ll love him (not a Pansy!) and thank me for bringing him into the Holy Family! You’re all sorts of Bum for not hav[ing] written for so long, but I love you anyhow.25

Not long before her wedding in Paris, Rosamond reached out to George again, upon his father’s death on May 14, 1932. “I wish I could go to you and tell you how much I feel for you all in your great loss. . . . It’s terrible to realize how little we can say or do to help those we love! You’ve always been the one to give, so that often I longed for you to need something I might do for you. Now when there might be the chance of showing you my understanding there is an ocean between us!”26

Decades later, in an interview published in 1973, Walling revisited that same issue:

We made hay in separate fields while the sun shone, waiting for me to acquire some sense and years. We spent what time we could together and we wrote letters in between. But I did not marry George Gershwin. Despite his heavenly eyes, he never made me feel needed. He didn’t need me. He had reached the dizzy heights of fame and fortune without me. He would go on to always greater achievement. Sometimes I wanted to dedicate my life to helping him; but often I did not like the idea of missing romance. “It’s your Russian soul,” he’d say. “You want a poor painter or poet or scholar to suffer with.” He knew that a poor painter or poet or scholar my own age seemed more glamorous to me.

By Rosamond’s testimony, sex was never part of their courtship.

Whenever I could get away from Swarthmore College, I’d join George in New York, or Atlantic City, or Philadelphia. I would stay with Leonore and Ira, as George was always absolutely correct in his behavior—in fact, fastidious. When he felt romantic—which did happen as time went on and I grew older and we were alone in various paradises—he never in any way tried to influence me. Given a moon, June, and myself in blue (because of the Rhapsody, of course), we might go for a long walk, holding hands, and sometimes dancing—he’d tap-dance at the slightest provocation—conversing on all sorts of subjects in delicious agreement. George might stop me and say, “You could be good for my stomach,” or “My friends like you,” or “If you could learn to keep your stockings straight and get those run-down heels changed, you might be glamorous. But not in that dress. It’s terrible. The skirts are longer now, haven’t you read?”27

One subject on which no agreement was reached was marriage. “Let’s have four children to begin with,” George would propose, “and bring them up in the country. You can teach them to ride. . . . We’ll get six horses to start with.” But for Rosamond, this notion “absolutely lacked charm: I hoped never to see Westchester County again and didn’t get around to wanting children for a good ten years.” A striving for accomplishment, knowledge, and enrichment of personal experience is hard to miss in Walling’s letters. Perhaps the goal of that striving was to make herself a powerful feminine force—akin to that of her mother?—on which the man she would marry could rely. Had she become Mrs. George Gershwin, Rosamond might well have sought to steer him in the direction of the enduring (opera, “the Highest”), rather than the more heralded ephemeral, during the five years of life that remained to him.

IN FEBRUARY 1930, with Strike Up the Band running smoothly—it would log almost 200 Broadway performances in a shaky economy—Gershwin took a brief vacation in Florida, splitting his time between Palm Beach and Miami, where his mother Rose was sitting out the north’s winter cold. Then he flew back to New York to take part in an unusual radio broadcast: a joint recital with Jesse Crawford, organist at New York’s Paramount Theatre. The program, heard on New York’s WABC, was broadcast from the Paramount Building on Sunday, March 2, at 10 p.m. Devoted to Gershwin’s music, it presented a medley of tunes from Strike Up the Band and hits from earlier shows, some sung by tenor Paul Small, and the Rhapsody in Blue, played as a piano-organ duet.28

The Rhapsody all but took over Gershwin’s life in early May, when for a fee of $5,000 he took part in a blitz of live performances that many tens of thousands attended. He described the project to Rosamond on April 24: “I have agreed to play at Roxy’s Theatre for the week of May 2nd with Whiteman’s orchestra. The picture ‘The King of Jazz’ will have its premier on that day. The feature of the picture is ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ which is the why & wherefor[e] of the hook up. Means I’ve got to start practicing the piano again.” The film, a biopic about Paul Whiteman, opened on May 2 with five showings, each followed by a live stage show featuring Whiteman, the Roxy Theatre’s orchestra and chorus, and the composer’s performance of the Rhapsody.

Gershwin’s scrapbooks include a New York Sun backstage interview after one performance that stands out for the spontaneity of his remarks alone. The reporter seems to have caught him fresh from the keyboard, with applause ringing in his ears, and savoring the thrill of having dodged another bullet. “Gee! But it’s hard to play,” he admitted. “I don’t set myself up as a pianist, although I’ll bet I can play that piece better than anybody you can name. But what I have to do! I have to practice ten minutes before I go on. That’s to get my fingers limber.” (According to Oscar Levant, Gershwin’s custom was to warm up with “endless repetitions of the first Cramer study,” from a well-known book of piano etudes.) When the interviewer asks about the meaning of the piece, Gershwin replies that it’s “so abstract in my mind that it can mean almost anything to anybody.” Then he takes off in another direction entirely: “It is all New York, all America. It is a picnic party in Brooklyn or a dark-skinned girl singing and shouting her blues in a Harlem cabaret. I try to depict a scene, a New York crowd.”29

Yet what may have loomed largest in Gershwin’s mind in that moment was what he was learning from his pianistic marathon. Playing that work five times a day for a week, “before twenty or thirty thousand people daily,” and to see and feel the audience responses, was proving to be a “wonderful” experience. The Rhapsody was growing on him, too, and he didn’t really know why, “unless it is because people seem to give it back to me in a mysterious way.” The Rhapsody in Blue remained the best example of Gershwin’s ability to attract listeners who rarely attended concerts, and during the half-dozen years since the work’s composition, he had played it countless times in public. His back-to-back-to-back at the Roxy that week, in the service of publicizing The King of Jazz, gave further proof of the Rhapsody’s undiminished power to hold the attention of a vast and diverse audience, not to say the veneration of the man who composed it.

During that same week, on May 4, the New York Sunday World carried an article about songwriting by Gershwin called “Making Music,” in which he explained why he preferred to write serious music:

A serious composition is either a success or a failure because of what the composer does to it. I may write a good score for a musical comedy, but if the book or cast is poor my work registers a flop. A symphony, on the other hand, lives or dies according to its real worth. While popular music may be tricked very easily, serious music offers so many more interesting problems in construction, in orchestration, in other details. For a long time—as far back as my eighteenth year—I have wanted to work at big compositions. I am glad I can do it now.30

Even so, he judged that the abundance of songwriters on the present scene made it a good time for an experienced practitioner like himself to address the subject of popular music. On the face of it, writing a thirty-two-bar aaba refrain should be simple, he explained, but it isn’t. “There are times when a phrase of music will cost me many hours of internal sweating. Rhythms romp through my brain, but they’re not easy to capture and keep.” In the public imagination, composers are thought to conquer creative challenges through inspiration (“an unconscious something that happens within you which makes you do a thing much better than if it were done self-consciously”), but in real life that rarely happens. Two or at most three songs may emerge fresh from his unconscious in the course of a typical year; but with such odds in play, he has learned to rely on “invention”:

I see a piece of music in the form of a design. With a melody [i.e., a song] I can take [in] the whole design in one look; with a larger composition, like a concerto, I have to take it piece by piece and then construct it so much longer. No matter what they say about “nothing new under the sun,” it is always possible to invent something original. The songwriter takes an idea and adds his own individuality to it; he merely uses his capacity for invention in arranging bars his own way.

To Gershwin, the study of musical technique was indispensable. “Many people say that too much study kills spontaneity in music, but I claim that, although study may kill a small talent, it must develop a big talent.” He advises the aspiring composer to “write something every day, regardless of its length or quality.” Failure is the norm, and facing failure down is part of the songwriter’s daily lot. “Perhaps the tenth—or the hundredth—song will do the trick.”

GERSHWIN’S SCHEDULE in the spring and summer of 1930 included another August concert with the New York Philharmonic in Lewisohn Stadium, where he played both the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F and conducted An American in Paris—the first time he had conducted a symphony orchestra in a concert.31 The concert was also heard on the radio, marking the growing presence and influence of a medium that had barely existed a decade earlier.

During the runup to the previous December’s opening of Strike Up the Band, Gershwin had taken the affirmative side in a “debate” over the impact of radio—upholding the medium’s virtues as the putative “King of Jazz,” while a “Progressive Woman Educator,” Dr. Blanche Colton Williams, head of the English Department at Hunter College, deplored the effects of the broadcast medium. No judges were there to declare a winner, nor was an audience present—just Gladys Oaks of the New York World. The exchange was held in a nearby theater during a rehearsal of Gershwin’s current show.

The composer began the conversation on an unambiguous note:

I think that the radio is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the American household. Look at the little backwater towns from Kankakee to Oskaloosa. What could they know of the gorgeous rush of new things, which is the most important gift of our modern civilization, except for the radio? . . . Think of all the people in the cities, too, who can’t afford what the cities have to offer. There is a new kind of culture in the world, and particularly in America. A culture of abundance, of many quick entertainments—ball games, prize-fights, jazz, preaching, science, symphonies, the sharing of adventure with men like [Admiral Richard E.] Byrd and [Charles] Lindbergh. And the voice, the instrument, the supreme interpreter of this new culture is the radio, without which few of us could acquire it!

BCW: You may call it culture, but I feel the word is a little high-falutin. Children trying to study over the clamor, people attempting to sleep while competing, loud-speakers blare in neighboring apartments. In many families the instrument is left on from the time papa comes home, sometimes from the time mama gets up. I was a guest the other night at a home where the radio “went” all evening. Conversation was simply impossible. After a few shrieking interludes, I gave it up. It becomes—

At this point, reported Gladys Oaks, “with the most graceful gesture in the world, Mr. Gershwin interrupted her.”

That’s simply bad manners, . . . not anything wrong with the radio. Of course we don’t expect people to keep it going in the children’s study hours, or while their guests are discussing the universe. The beauty of the thing is that you can have just as much of it as you want by merely shifting a dial! . . .

BCW: The thing I really object to most about it is that it standardizes the American audience and the American youth, which is the hope of our future art and our future evolution. . . . Taste is not the product of Gilbert and Sullivan in snatches, political speeches that are indistinct, both in thought and enunciation, symphonies and static. . . .

GG: You should get a good radio. Speeches over my loud-speaker are distinct as possible. And personality comes over with the words, as you’d never get it in a newspaper. When Al Smith says “boid,” for example, it does not come out “bird.” And suppose it does standardize! Isn’t a high standard of citizens better than a low one with a few great minds? . . . The art that represents us must be, I think, a crowded art, an art that expresses the dozens and hundreds of things that are always knocking at us and inviting. The radio is the very symbol of this life-enriching.32

Gershwin’s remarks on this occasion were consistent with the common sense and clarity that underlie his published articles. Finding modern life rich as well as distracting, he welcomed that quality in modern art, at least in principle. Phrases that evoke modernity—“crowded art,” “dozens and hundreds of things that are always knocking at us and inviting”—shed light on his attitude as an artist. And they complement his equally strong belief that artists must study and learn from masters of the past.