Power Corrupts

                                       

 “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely,” is an old saying that I’m sure is taken as gospel by most people whether conservative, liberal, progressive, or socialist. Nevertheless, why are so many politicians throwing their hats in the ring for next year’s Presidential election? Do they want to become corrupted, or are they already corrupt?

The latest to enter the list of Democratic candidates would appear to be former Vice-President Joe Biden. Headlines in yesterday’s papers indicated that he has told friends that he will enter the race and start raising money. Apparently, Biden has no respect for either the ability or electability of any of the previously announced candidates.  

Despite the qualifications and experience of Senator Elizabeth Warren, perhaps Biden thinks the country is not yet ready for its first Native American president. Perhaps he thinks that Senator Kamala Harris of California is too young and inexperienced despite the fact that she got her start under Willie Brown, the legendary former mayor of San Francisco. Perhaps in one of the debates Biden will turn to Cory Booker, the young Black Senator, and say, “Senator, I know Barack Obama, and you are no Barack Obama.”

Could it be that Biden believes that the Democratic party will need a white male to win in 2020?  It is true that upstart Robert Francis O’Rourke from Texas by way of New York is a white male but O’Rourke, who calls himself Beto, has publicly apologized for being a white male. I doubt that Biden will ever apologize for being a white male. He has never apologized for anything during his long and checkered career. 

Perhaps a better saying to apply to Biden would be the famous one from antiquity. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Biden will be 77 in 2020. He appears to be in good health but what is good health for a man in his late seventies? Moreover, Biden will not be running to head his local Senior center’s volunteer corps. He will be running for President of the USA, one of the world’s most difficult jobs. 

Ronald Reagan was 69 when he was first elected President and 73 when he was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1984. During his second term he was obviously failing. It was sad to watch. Donald Trump, whom most Democrats think is mentally incapable right now, was 70 when he was elected in 2016. He will be 74 in 2020. If he seeks re-election in 2020, he will still be younger than Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, the oldest of the three.

Personally, I will turn 80 this year and it is hard for me to understand what these aging baby-boomers are thinking. I retired a dozen years ago because I thought that I no longer had the physical and mental ability to handle the many needs of my financial planning clients. Moreover, I no longer had the drive to continue to keep up with the many changes coming into the industry. By fortunate coincidence, I got out in 2008 right before the financial crisis added a huge amount of stress to the lives of financial planners and their clients.  Fortunately, I was able to leave my practice in the hands of competent, younger advisors.

I know that readers of the above post might accuse me of ageism. But, at my age it is common to read the obituaries every day and find that someone who was lively and healthy a couple of years ago has just passed away. I play chess and run film programs at my local senior center, but still am saddened to see people who were active and alert, now stuttering or using canes and walkers. 

Polls indicate that Biden and Sanders, two old white men, have taken the early lead for the Democratic nomination in 2020. They remind me of mad Captain Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale who currently occupies the White House. I am not saying that seniors don’t have much to contribute but it is good to remember the saying from contemporary philosopher Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry): “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

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Titian: The Woman in White*

Titian: The Woman in White

In February on our annual winter visit to California, we visited the Norton-Simon Museum in Pasadena to view its current exhibition of Titian’s magnificent portrait, The Woman in White, on loan from its home in Dresden. The painting was given pride of place in a large room filled with other Old Masters from the Norton Simon’s permanent collection

The Museum’s notes indicated that in a 1561 letter Titian claimed that the young woman depicted was “the mistress of his soul.” Later, commentators took these words to mean that the young woman was Titian’s mistress even though the artist would have been in his seventies at the time. Others speculate that the woman could be one of Titian’s daughters, Emilia or Lavinia.

Whoever is depicted, the painting remains a striking portrait of a young woman in a beautiful white gown with elegant jewelry that includes a ring that could be a wedding band. She also holds a fan that is attached to a kind of chain around her waist. More than the clothing and accessories, it was the eyes and face of the woman that held my attention as I stood in front of the painting.

The young woman was looking directly at me. When I moved to the left, her eyes continued to look at me. The look on her face even seemed to change. The same thing happened when I moved to the right. She continued to look at me. If you’re reading this on a desktop, just move your chair and look at the image from left and right. If you’re using a handheld device, just hold it away from you first with your left hand, and then with your right to observe the effect.

Actually, I even walked a semi-circle from one side of the large room to the other, and the woman’s eyes followed me all the way. In traditional paintings, the viewer observes the subject but in this painting the woman observes the viewer. The tables have been turned.

I am not a student of female portraiture and I can’t imagine that I am the only one to observe this phenomenon. I do recall that while on a tour of the Renaissance collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum a few years ago, a docent pointed out that it was considered indecent in the early days of the Renaissance to portray a living woman in a painting. The earliest portraits only dared to portray them in profile. Eventually, the face might be turned in a 45- degree angle with the woman still looking off to the side. Even when the full face would be exposed the eyes would still be averted from the viewer. She would not make eye contact with the viewer. 

Lorenzo Lotto: Portrait of a Woman

The aversion of the eyes might just represent female modesty but I suspect that male sensitivity might have been at work. Could it be that back then men did not want other men looking at their women? Could that be the reason why a woman’s eyes are averted? I am sure that scholars have studied female portraits of the era extensively, and I could be wrong. But by the middle of the sixteenth century Titian’s woman in white certainly seems to reflect a departure from the typical female portrait. **

Titian employed this technique many years earlier in his famous Pesaro altarpiece in the Frari. In that painting the young boy in the painting looks directly out at the viewer, and while you walk around that painting, the eyes of the boy follow wherever you go. The boy acts as an “interlocutor” inviting the viewer to not only pay attention to what is going on in the painting, but also to participate. 

The Woman in white could also be an interlocutor but she only draws the viewer’s attention to herself, not as a shy object of desire but as a female in charge of all she surveys. The Norton Simon Museum suggests that rather than any individual woman, Titian's painting could represent the "beauty and spirit" of Venetian women." Modern feminists should love this painting.

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* This post originally appeared on Giorgione et al..., my art history blog.

** I am a big fan of the American film genre knows as film noir, those black and white films of the forties and fifties that are enjoying a revival right now. Titian’s painting brought to mind one of the earliest, I Wake Up Screaming, a film starring pin-up queen Betty Grable in a rare dramatic role. Grable played the sister of a famous model who had been murdered. The sister’s press agent, who had made her famous, was the prime suspect. Inevitably, Grable and the press agent, played by Victor Mature, begin to fall in love. At one point Grable asks Mature if he had been in love with her sister. He replies that he had been her press agent and that it was his business to place her image all over town in magazines and posters. “If I had loved her, I would never have done that, I would have wanted her only for myself.”