Labor Issues are Still With Us

 On May 19, as a member of the Oakland Symphony Chorus, I participated in the spectacular (if I may brag!) world premiere of Bodies on the Line, an oratorio commissioned by the Symphony's late director Michael Morgan, about the 1937 auto workers sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan.  I've been rehearsing that for almost 6 months.  It's full of facts about what happened in the old GM auto plants, and what the strikers wanted, and every time I turn around these days, I hear echoes of those lyrics.  

For example, the first of the strikers' eight demands was the end of piecework pay, to be replaced by a daily salary.  A few weeks before performance, there was an article on NPR about the law, passed by California in 2022, banning piecework pay in the garment industry in California!  In 2022 they were still paying garment workers piecework!  And of course we regularly hear that Starbucks workers are trying to form a union, and the workers at Trader Joe's in Rockridge (a little over half a mile from my house in north Oakland) are trying to organize a union.  And on and on.

Today I heard another story on NPR that brought the oratorio lyrics back to me with a bang.  It was a story about a ceremony in (I think) Stratton, Ohio, where the W. H. Sammis coal plant will shut down in mid-July.  It sounded kind of like a memorial, if not a funeral, for the plant, which has operated in the area since 1959.  The plant had employed the people of Stratton (population under 300) for most of their lives.  And listening to this story, another lyric came back to me.  Late in the oratorio, during the strike, the chorus sings about it, and everyone but the altos was in favor of the strike (I sing alto).  The altos sang, "What would we do without GM?  It's GM who feeds us, who feeds the people of Flint."  And you know, I listened to the story of the memorial to a dying coal plant in Stratton, Ohio, and those words ran through my mind; and I cried.  I'm crying now.  These are stories about human beings, and sometimes we're not as much in control as we think.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond

We saw the second exhibition from the Musée d'Orsay today at the DeYoung Museum. We saw the first one last summer.  I can't recommend it strongly enough, there are some astounding works on display.  The most fascinating part of it was watching the slow change in styles across both shows. 

The first show started with the classic "Academy" style, where the art authorities said, this is what you have to paint and this is how it has to look.  Then it moved on to the Impressionists, who said, we want to paint what we see.

The second show begins as the Pointillist style developed, based on scientific color theory:  science says that if we paint in this way, our paintings will glow!  The weird thing about that was that, with one exception, every Pointillist piece I saw there appeared absolutely static, no sense of motion at all, even in a painting which showed a skirt blowing in the wind.  Only Théo van Rysselberghe's Man at the Tiller gave me an actual sense of motion.  (If you look it up on line, be aware that the colors do not reproduce correctly!)  Still, a woman told me that her husband felt that, when he walked past another Pointillist landscape, the light shifted with him.  Maybe that's what they were about.  But most of them didn't give me much sense of light direction.  There's a very short distance from some of the Pointillists to Roy Lichtenstein.

After the Pointillists they showed four little Toulouse-Lautrecs. I generally like Toulouse-Lautrec, but wasn't terribly impressed with the one they chose to put in the audio tour.  I was blown away by one that wasn't:   Woman in a Black Boa!  Fabulous portrait of an amazing face!

Then we came to Van Gogh, who of course was in a class entirely by himself!  I see him as the extreme extension of the Impressionists rather than a "post" movement, but what do I know?  From Van Gogh they move to Cezanne and then Gauguin, both of whom quit trying to paint what they saw and began interpreting what they saw in terms of shapes, masses, and blocks of increasingly pure color.  A group following Gauguin worked from Pont-Aven and developed a style that looks cartoonish to modern eyes - static, stylized forms, pure unshaded colors.

After the Pont-Aven school the exhibition moves to the Nabis and their Symbolist movement.  The Nabis considered themselves a secret society, and their paintings were moving toward abstraction.  Frankly, I thought they came across as rather full of themselves.  One or two pieces reminded me of William Morris' romantic pseudo-medieval imagery. By now we're a very long way from those Academy portraits, and the artists are just experimenting to see what they can do.

The exhibition ends with two astounding Henri Rousseau pieces I hadn't seen before (War and Snake Charmer), and at least one painting I can't believe was ever hung in public in 1900 - Man and Woman, by Pierre Bonnard - both nude in a bedroom!  The early 20th century accepted nude women, but not nude men with nude women!  Finally, some of the Nabi painters moved into pure decoration, painting big panels and murals for private houses. 

It was a fascinating exhibition, and I just wanted to put down some of my thoughts about it.  If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and haven't see the show, it's well worth the trip.