THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, February 24, 2020 |A
irksome at worst, leaving you
with no choice but to paste a
fixed half-smile on your face and
say something equally meaning-
less in response. But music is dif-
ferent, in part because it speaks
another, deeper language. When
Beethoven, who understood suf-
fering well, gave a copy of his
Missa Solemnis to Austria’s Arch-
duke Rudolf, he inscribed it as fol-
lows: “From the heart—may it re-
turn to the heart!” Moreover,
countless listeners have similarly
testified to the power of music to
miraculously bypass the greeting-
card banalities of reassurance and
help heal a shattered heart.
A piece by Beethoven that is of-
ten cited in precisely that connec-
tion is the Cavatina of his String
Quartet in B-Flat, Op. 130. A cho-
rale-like slow movement, its solemn
harmonies give way briefly to ahalting, almost stammering inter-
lude marked “ beklemmt ,” which is
German for “oppressed.” But then
the opening chorale returns in all
its gentle dignity, cleansing the air
of fear and trembling and remind-
ing us of how Beethoven told a
friend that this movement “cost the
composer tears in the writing and
brought out the confession that
nothing that he had written had so
moved him.” Rare is the listener
who can hear what the violinist and
conductor Angus Watson has called
“the most consoling melody that
Beethoven ever composed” without
being transported to a place of or-
der, reassurance and—yes—healing.
As it happens, Mr. Kennicott
himself leaned on music during his
mother’s last days. “Bach was the
only music I could listen to,” he
writes, “the only music that didn’t
seem trivial, insipid, or irrelevantMoira Dryer’s ‘Close Up’ (1989), top, ‘The Debutante’ (1987),
above, and ‘The Stripe’ (1986), left, now at the Phillips CollectionLIFE & ARTS
FROM LEFT: ESTATE OF MOIRA DRYER/THE MARC AND LIVIA STRAUS FAMILY COLLECTION; ESTATE OF MOIRA DRYER/COLLECTION OF MARGUERITE STEED HOFFMAN
ESTATE OF MOIRA DRYER/THE NEW SCHOOL ART COLLECTIONEDWARD GOOCH/GETTY IMAGESwhen she died of cancer.)
The artist—probably owing to
her brief career—is a semi-open
secret within the art world, lack-
ing the instant name recognition
of a Cindy Sherman or Jenny
Holzer. Having had solo shows,
nevertheless, at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston, the
San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, she’s hardly un-
known. Dryer’s gallery exhibitions
include two at Mary Boone in New
York; the first one, in 1990, made a
fan of me.
Where Dryer’s mentors Murray
and Schnabel went big, bright and
baroque, Dryer’s works remained
somewhat restrained in size and
her color stayed relatively toned
down. The graphic whimsy of
“Self-Portrait” (1985)—three long,curling black lines for the hair, a
green block for a face, and a silly
gray collar—makes you smile. An
untitled painting from 1987 is at
first glance just another vertical
stripe painting of a darkish cast,
but because it curves slightly out-
wardatthebottomitsuggests,
well, a theater curtain. Dryer said
at one point that it was nice that
abstract painting had become
“hated” once more so that artists
could make abstractions “which
weren’t all angst” and could be
“parodies, or expressive recombi-
nations of established vocabular-
ies.” This untitled work is a clever
inside joke told in the language of
abstract painting.
Dryer’s visual humor always
moves subtly and sideways, more
in line with Paul Klee’s than, say,
Saul Steinberg’s. “Portrait #124”the center of the bottom.
Words can’t prove the case for
an artist, especially one as aus-
terely weird as Dryer. The painter
said in 1988 that her paintings
were “props that put on plays,” a
statement that encourages viewers
to allow her not-quite-abstractions
to leach perceptually out into ref-
erences to the real world. Her
hints of theater curtains suggest
that paintings aren’t automatically
precious fine art; the portraits
leave you searching for a missing
face; and the absurd metal handle
in “Suburbia” loosely implies the
practicality of a kitchen drawer. A
vitrine filled with personal notes,
sketches and photos testifies to
Dryer’s seriousness and diligence
in her droll enterprise.
If there’s a weak point to the
show, it’s the sometimes leaden
language—occasionally coming
from the artist herself—trying to
explain what she does and why. So
what, in the end, makes Dryer’s se-
riously unserious paintings better,
more profound, and more touch-
ingly beautiful than other paint-
ings of the same period, such as
those of the “pattern and decora-
tion” school? The Phillips cites her
“concise and sensuous touch, and
succinct yet expansive use of
color,” both of which are certainly
extant in the installation in the
museum’s comfortable, almost in-
timate galleries. Dryer’s touch and
color are certainly different from
those of the “P&D” painters, but
what sets her apart and above is
her off-handedly intellectual quirk-
iness. Dryer’s work is enjoyably
hard to forget.Moira Dryer: Back in Business
The Phillips Collection, through
April 19Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer
in New York.(1989), for instance, is a knowing
back-and-forth riff between figura-
tive likeness (the central space
empty save for some brushy beige
and rust horizontal stripes) and
decoration (a surrounding of olive
green fancy-frame tropes). “The
Debutante” (1987) is more slap-
stick. It’s composed of two cut
halves of an anomalous red-orange
tondo brought together again so
there’s an over/under horizontal
relief. A central vertical oval is a
light and dark shade of green di-
vided horizontally. The darker
green half below echoes the actual
horizontal shadow cast by the
tondo’s bifurcation. My personal
favorite is “Suburbia” (1989), a
largeish blue-wash painting with—
again—a parody of a decorative
border made of a harsh black line
and a drawer handle attached atWashington
CASEIN IS a milk-protein-based
paint that’s quick-drying to a fault,
tends to crack on flexible surfaces
such as stretched canvas, and is so
smooth and matte it feels like it
might be harmed by human
breath. Few artists use it nowa-
days, but Moira Dryer (1957-1992),
perhaps drawn to its vulnerability,
made her quirkily engaging and in-
ventive abstract art with it.
A 22-work retrospective, “Moira
Dryer: Back in Business”—on view
through April 19 at the Phillips Col-
lection—is the first full-fledged sur-
vey of her art in nearly two de-
cades. According to the museum’s
press materials, it demonstrates
“Dryer’s development vis-à-vis her
participation and interest in theater
production,” and shows how her
work “progresses from recognizable
theater references such as curtains
and spatial representations to ab-
stract portraits that begin to move
toward sculpture.” What the mu-
seum doesn’t say is how oddly mov-
ing the exhibition is.
Dryer was born in Toronto. Her
mother was an architect and her
father a professor of philosophy
at the University of Toronto. She
moved to New York to attend the
School of Visual Arts, where she
was a student of the well-known
painter of sculptural abstractions
Elizabeth Murray. After graduat-
ing in 1981, Dryer worked briefly
as a studio assistant to Julian
Schnabel before becoming a set
designer for the experimental the-
ater company Mabou Mines. In
1982, Dryer married a former SVA
classmate, Victor Alzamora, who
died but one year later, at age 29,
of a heart ailment. (To say that
Dryer’s life in this respect was
star-crossed might seem a little
histrionic, but Dryer was only 34BYPETERPLAGENSto life....It kept
banal things at
bay, while bring-
ing profound
things close
enough to be felt
without being en-
gulfed by their
dread darkness.”
And Bach and
Beethoven are
not the only
kinds of music
equal to that
task. When Rich-
ard Brookhiser
was undergoing
chemotherapy,
for instance, he found that the
only music he could bear to hear
was the Goldberg Variations and
the records of Louis Armstrong:
“Bach said everything is in its
place; Armstrong said the sun
comes shining through.”
I quoted that sentence in
“Pops,” my biography of Arm-
strong, struck not just by the jux-
taposition of artists but also by
the simple eloquence of Mr.
Brookhiser’s tribute to the miracle
of music. How it does what it does
may forever be a mystery, but few
of those who have felt its awe-in-
spiring power are likely to doubt
that great music can soothe a
bruised soul.Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama
critic, is the author of “Satchmo at
the Waldorf.” Write to him at
[email protected].Bach and
Beethoven are
not the only
kinds of music
equal to the task.SIGHTINGS| TERRY TEACHOUT
A Quest to Find the
Sound of Comfort
with one of the most challenging
pieces in the keyboard repertoire, as
he explains in his new book, “Coun-
terpoint: A Memoir of Bach and
Mourning,” was “to test life again,
to press upon it and see what was
still vital.”
Anyone who has resorted to
music under like circumstances,
whether as a player or merely a
listener, will find much to ponder
in Mr. Kennicott’s reflections. One
of them, though, struck me partic-
ularly hard, not because it recalled
my own experience but because it
didn’t: “I bristle at the idea that
music is consoling or has healing
power. It is a cliché of lazy music
talk, the sort of thing said by peo-
ple who give money to the sym-
phony and have their names chis-
eled on the wall of the opera
house....Consolation helps us order
our thoughts so that life is less
painful. Very often these are cli-
chés like the ones I repeated my-
self while my mother was dying;
for some people they are bromides
found on calendars and inspira-
tional posters; for many others,
they are the wishful thinking that
grounds religion.”
I scarcely know where to start
disagreeing. To be sure, most of
the over-familiar words spoken by
those who sympathize by rote
with the plight of a mourner or
caregiver are ineffectual at best,ART REVIEW
A Semi-Open Secret More Fully Revealed
In Washington, the first survey in nearly two decades of Moira Dryer’s quirkily engaging and inventive abstract work
MUSIC IS THE MOST mysterious
of all the arts. Incorporeal and
seemingly without intelligible
meaning, it nonetheless has a pow-
erful effect on most of those who
hear it—though not all. Exactly
what does it do to and for us, and
why are certain people incapable of
responding to its power? While sci-
entists agree that music does some-
thing to the human brain that re-
sults in the giving of pleasure, there
is no agreement about its nature,
and the bald word “pleasure” fails
to come anywhere near suggesting
the overwhelming experience of lis-
tening to, say, “The Rite of Spring”
or Duke Ellington’s 1940 recording
of “Ko-Ko” (as opposed to his 1956
recording of the very same piece,
which isn’t nearly so powerful...and
why should that be so?).
Not the least of music’s mysteries
is that so many of us turn to it in
times of trial. That’s what Philip
Kennicott did a few years ago. A
once-promising pianist who is now
the senior art and architecture critic
of the Washington Post, Mr. Kenni-
cott decided to try to learn Bach’s
Goldberg Variations after the death
of his mother, a frustrated musician
who had longed when young to be a
violinist. Her failure to do so, he
says, left her “unfulfilled and angry
about what she sensed was a
wasted life.” Conversely, his own
purpose in grappling as an adult