The Wall Street Journal - 16.03.2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, March 16, 2020 |A

LIFE & ARTS

poverished Chinese immigrant

named Bebe (Huang Lu) left her

baby outside a fire department in

the snow. The baby is put up for

adoption. A white couple is about

to adopt her. The bio-mom wants

her back. So begins the tiny civil

war of Shaker Heights.

“Little Fires Everywhere”—

which opens with a big fire, one

that burns Elena’s McMansion to

ash—has no heroes. It does, how-

ever, boast an abundance of coinci-

dence: How does Bebe find out

where her baby is, after months of

looking? She happens to work at

the local Chinese restaurant with

Mia, who rents an apartment in a

property owned by Elena, who is

best friends with the adoptive

mother, Linda McCullough (Rose-

Kerry Washington as Mia Warren and Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson in ‘Little Fires Everywhere’

were curiosities. We see an image

of a horizontal windmill resembling

one he built; it was demolished in a

single gale. A horse moves a boat

by walking on a treadmill con-

nected to its paddle-wheel; Fulton

had that beat. Others are more fan-

ciful. Were they useful? Were

forces and tensions calculated?

Were costs and benefits? Porter’s

cross-country-flying hydrogen-

filled “aeroport” was mocked

partly because nothing practical

was demonstrated.

One brilliant idea: a percussion

cap revolving rifle Porter designed

in 1826 (made by a Portland ma-

that “the American public” (like

Porter) had an amateur’s hunger

to understand, to improve, to

manufacture, to invent, and to live

according to guided principles. For

a long time, that spirit defined the

magazine. It may have been his

most lasting invention.

Rufus Porter’s Curious World: Art

and Invention in America,

1815-

Bowdoin College Museum of Art,

through May 31

Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s

Critic at Large.

chinist and seen here). Porter sold

all rights for $100 to Samuel Colt,

we learn, who then made a fortune.

But the implication is misleading.

Colt knew many predecessors had

created similar mechanisms. At

least two revolver patents pre-

ceded Porter’s proposal.

Porter was really a kind of folk

scientist-artist. Like Edison per-

haps, with less perspiration and

lesser inspiration. Or like

Grandma Moses with ADHD. In un-

der a year, he even sold Scientific

American for $800 (after which it

became a success). Yet he also em-

bodied in that journal the notion

Brunswick, Maine

WHEN RUFUS PORTER

(1792-1884) died in West Haven,

Conn., the local headline about his

sparsely attended funeral read

“Few Present.” It took the greater

part of a century before this in-

ventor, painter, publisher and

proselytizer was considered wor-

thy of full attention. Jean Lipman,

editor of Art in America, helped

canonize him. In 1970 he was

hailed in Time magazine as a

“Yankee da Vinci.” In 2005 the Ru-

fus Porter Museum was founded in

Bridgton, Maine (open June-Octo-

ber). And now, as part of “the first

scholarly inquiry into Porter in

nearly forty years,” as the catalog

puts it, we have “Rufus Porter’s

Curious World: Art and Invention

in America, 1815-1860,” at the

Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

The exhibition, with more than

80 paintings, inventions and publi-

cations by Porter and his contem-

poraries, is a celebration but also

an assessment. This “polymath,”

the catalog notes, had the habit of

“repeatedly falling short”—some-

thing proved here, perhaps more

successfully than intended.

Porter grew up on a farm in

what later become Maine. He may

have had no more than six months

of formal education. By his own ac-

count, as a boy he learned mechan-

ics, invented devices and “excelled

in drawing and music.” Later, he

began a peripatetic career as an

itinerant painter, a dance-school in-

structor, an inventor, and the

founder, most notably, of Scientific

American in 1845. Along the way,

he fathered 15 children with two

successive wives.

The show was curated by Laura

F. Sprague, senior consulting cura-

tor, and Justin Wolff, who teaches

art history at the University of

Maine. They make it clear how in-

complete the biography is. Only a

handful of Porter’s letters have sur-

vived; three Rufus Porters lived

then in Maine, causing confusion;

works once attributed to him are

now assigned to others. His inven-

tions (built and unbuilt) range from

the mundane to the fantastic—from

a chair that folds into a cane, to a

flying ship he asserted would allow

prospectors during the California

Gold Rush to cross the continent in

three days. But his patents are now

numbered at 24, fewer than once

imagined. They include such curi-

osities as a cheese press and a life

preserver with ankle floats.

This exhibition opens by placing

Porter in the tradition of the Amer-

ican Enlightenment and offers two

stunning examples of American

artist-inventors. In an 1818 self-

portrait by Samuel F.B. Morse, the

telegraph’s inventor illuminates

himself with intelligence and paint-

erly skill; and Robert Fulton, inven-

tor of the first commercial steam-

boat, seems a wellspring of

compressed energy in Benjamin

West’s 1806 painting. Nearby is

Fulton’s own watercolor-on-ivory

portrait of his wife.

Unfortunately, so strong are

these works and so transformative

these inventions, that Porter pales

in comparison. He painted walls of

middle-class homes with land-

scapes, bays and mountains, aided

at times by his son Stephen Twom-

bly Porter, often using stencils.

Two near-full-size reproductions

here show 1838 murals salvaged

from the now-demolished Francis

Howe House in Massachusetts.

They are pastoral, lovely, stiff and

static. They seem composed from a

menu: hills, elms, houses, ships,

fences. An iPad shows black-and-

white images of the original home,

the murals offering the easygoing

charm of folk art. But was Porter

really, as is said here, a “brilliant

muralist” with “masterful tech-

nique and perspectives”?

I have similar qualms about his

miniatures (some are on display),

created using a camera obscura

that projected profiles for tracing.

Most seem correctly described in

Porter’s 1820 advertisement here.

“CHEAP MINIATURE PAINTING,”

it heralded, “Correct likenesses for

two dollars each, at Mr. Pollard’s

Tavern.” His promise: “No like-

ness, no pay.”

What of the inventions? The ex-

hibition ends with an engraving of

Christian Schussele’s 1862 “Men of

Progress,” showing 19 inventors

and industrialists who transformed

the nation. Colt and Morse are

there. Porter is not. His “principal

limitation,” it is explained, “was

that he could not manage the fi-

nancial and human resources nec-

essary for incorporation and large-

scale production.”

Too generous. His inventions

EXHIBITION REVIEW

‘Rufus Porter’:

Products of a

Failed Polymath

The endeavors of the eccentric inventor, painter,

publisher and proselytizer rarely succeeded

‘Joseph S. Adams’ (c. 1833), attributed to Rufus Porter, above; and ‘The Travelling Balloon,’ from Scientific American,

Sept. 18, 1845, by Porter, below

BYEDWARDROTHSTEIN

A horse-powered boat

and cross-country-

flying ‘aeroport’ were

among his ideas

FROM TOP: PRIVATE COLLECTION; AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY

BASED ONCeleste Ng’s bestsell-

ing novel of 2017, “Little Fires Ev-

erywhere” is Hulu’s response to

HBO’s popular “Big Little Lies,” an-

other star-powered soap opera

with a literary pedigree, feminist

leanings and Reese Witherspoon. A

story about class and race that

strenuously avoids saying “class”

or “race,” the adapted “Little Fires

Everywhere” does contain enough

bad behavior to make it a guilty

pleasure. Even if guilt is the princi-

pal ingredient that the show is

missing, and to a fatal degree.

What is it, exactly, that differen-

tiates misbehaving heroes from

misbehaving villains? Remorse.

You don’t really expect any from

Elena Richardson—lifetime inhabit-

ant of Shaker Heights, Ohio, dilet-

tante journalist, mother of four,

and a showcase for Ms. Wither-

spoon’s gift for narcissistic/privi-

leged characters (Elena being a di-

rect descendant of Tracy Flick).

Elena is awful, and self-absorption

is her thing. But given that the

miniseries is an actorly face-off be-

tween Ms. Witherspoon and Kerry

Washington, one might expect

something else from the latter’s

character, especially given Ms. Ng’s

literary aspirations/pretensions:

Ms. Washington’s strong, indepen-

dent Mia Warren, mixed-media

artist and co-protagonist, has a

daughter of uncertain paternity

named Pearl (Lexi Underwood) and

an artistic mentor named Haw-

thorne (Anika Noni Rose). Is there

a scarlet letter among all these

“Scarlet Letter” machinations?

Yes, and it’s an “A”—not for “adul-

tery” this time, but “adoption.”

It takes til episode 3 to get to

the central conceit of Ms. Ng’s

story, which is interracial/interna-

tional foster-parenting as a meta-

phor for colonialism: A year or so

before the action begins, an im-

marie Dewitt). Elena hires Mia to

work at the baby’s birthday party.

There, Mia puts two and two to-

gether and instigates a scorched-

earth campaign to return the baby

to its “rightful” mother, with the

rest of the community taking sides.

Why is Mia so passionate about

Bebe’s alleged bio-rights? That

would be a spoiler, but suffice it

to say that the big reveal flies in

the face of the messaging else-

where in the show about children

finding their own parents, to para-

phrase the teleplay by Liz Tige-

laar. Elena’s daughter Izzy, whom

Megan Stott makes the most in-

teresting character in the pro-

gram, is an artist by nature, who

gravitates to Mia because of their

similar artistic dispositions. Pearl,

meanwhile, is seduced by the pop-

ulation and economic plenty of El-

ena’s officiously run household,

having been brought up more or

less on the run, with Mia pleading

a poverty that wasn’t quite true

and never giving her a straight

story about her origins.

What keeps a viewer from em-

pathizing with any of the lead

characters is their utter lack of in-

trospection. Mia never suffers re-

gret No. 1 about how she’s treated

Pearl; Elena hasn’t a clue about

her rampant megalomania and its

effect on her quartet of teenage

children (or her benumbed hus-

band, played by Joshua Jackson).

Bebe? The thought that she might

have committed child abuse and/or

relinquished her parental rights—

by leaving her baby to be frost-bit-

ten outside a firehouse in the mid-

dle of a winter’s night—never

seems to cross her mind. A court

might rule in Bebe’s favor. Audi-

ences won’t.

Little Fires Everywhere
HULU Wednesday, Hulu

TELEVISION REVIEW| JOHN ANDERSON

Bio-Rights Spark Controversy