[Originally booked for 31 August; to be rescheduled because of New Orleans hurricane disaster]
Rachel Cohen spent a year driving across the country with a trunkful of books for company. Nineteen thousand miles later, the writers themselves — not just their writing — had gotten under her skin. As they lived in her imagination for the next ten years, she wrote A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, an account of the artistic cross-pollinations that resulted from the intertwined friendships of these artists.
So, taking a page from Cohen’s book, it’s time to examine artistic relationships and encounters that pass on and continuously re-shape our culture.
Rachel Cohen
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Author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.
Teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Here’s a cool site that links the artists in Cohen’s book.
Whatever happened to this program?
Artistic cross-pollination in my case has been with musicians, specifically guitarist Manuel Barrueco and pianist Leon Fleisher.
For a profile of Barrueco, I attended a summer master class. A student would take the stage and play before an audience of the other students, while Barrueco sat beside him and listened. After one kid finished, Barrueco asked him, “What’s the musical idea behind the first note?” Poor kid probably always thought the first note was simply what you needed to get to the second note. Barrueco’s point was that every note has to be played with intent and imbued with meaning, meaning that the musician has carefully thought about. This has been had significant influence on my writing, and what I teach my graduate students. Every word, every sentence has to accomplish something, and the writer has to know what it is. (My Barrueco story is online at http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0901web/gospel.html.)
In the case of Leon Fleisher, the influence has been different, more of attitude and philosophy. Fleisher was one of the world’s great pianists when an injury rendered his right hand all but useless. What does an artist do when he can’t do the one thing to which he wants to devote his life? In Fleisher’s case, he because a great teacher, and a conductor. And he never quit trying to restore his hand, which, after more than 30 years, he seems to have done. I’ve heard him play with two hands again and it’s marvelous. His example is one of extraordinary grace and determination. (My Fleisher profile is, unfortunately, not online.)
I’m glad that Dale Keiger has brought up the life of Leon Fleisher in this context. Leon Fleisher’s life story has always struck me as tragic. It’s not difficult to see why he has touched the lives of so many other musical co-travellers. He is in the possession not only of an amazing talent but of a towering intellect with which he seems to have wrestled as much over the years as with his right hand. He has a son Julian who is also in the business. Perhaps it would be interesting to expand the show’s concept into an inqury into cultural and artistic identity.
For the visual arts may I mention:
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz
They were married but also artistically intertwined.
There are many more: Rodin and Camille Claudel, Van Gogh and Gauguin for a period
I think you mean one on one- not groups that hung out together and exchanged ideas and produced manifestos etc.. This would be another whole topic.