Early Childhood Education, Dollars, and Sense

I am delighted that the folks in Washington are thinking of educating very young children. I anticipate pilot programs, multi-million dollar projects, and oodles of red tape, followed by reports on hard-to-quantify improvements. Do we really need all that to teach tots to have a bigger vocabulary and enjoy music, art, flowers, and all of the rest of the wonderful world that surrounds them and us? What about informal homeschooling programs for toddlers?

More than half a century ago, even before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, my friends and I decided to form a playgroup. Each morning, a different mother hosted our three-year-olds for a few hours in her home, consisting in this case of large, old-fashioned apartments in a had-been upscale New York City neighborhood. Each mother had her specialty—one mom was a trained kindergarten teacher, another a professional dancer, and I was a budding writer. However, we did not actually need these skills to provide the group with interesting activities.

Though there were no official evaluation forms, our “school” was a success. The children formed loyal, sometimes lifelong friendships, did well when they entered public school and all became successful professionals. It was hard work, and at times it was difficult for my son to share his mom and his toys with four other children.

Our motives in forming our playgroup had been a bit selfish. We all had professional ambitions, and we did like to have four mornings a week with uninterrupted time. For us, the school represented a bridge to a post-intense-motherhood career. The playgroup also provided me with lifelong friends. This Saturday I am taking Doris, the kindergarten teacher, out for her birthday lunch.

A playgroup is not the only way to enrich childhood. Young children do not have to be taught by professionally-trained adults. Child-loving adults have always transmitted vocabulary and life-skills to the next generation. Grandparents are prime candidates. They often have more patience and free time than their own harassed, hardworking children.

It is very easy to come up with suitable activities for small children that both teach and educate. You may come up with your own activities. It is important to have a regular plan. Baking teaches arithmetic (3 eggs, 4 tablespoons of sugar or 8 teaspoons…how many cookies does each member of the family get, if you have a total of 13 cookies?); making cards to celebrate our endless holidays teaches lettering and painting; and telling them a story or having them tell one fires the imagination.

But books are best. Most of us remember one or more picture books that filled us with joy eons ago. These and others can be found at your library, which also has storytelling hours.

And, you don’t have to leave your house to get free books. It is of great interest that today, when the death knell seems to have sounded for print books, the Internet helps us obtain free print books. A rapid search of the Internet reveals sources for free books for all ages.

E-books and digital books on the Internet are easy to obtain. There are dozens of sites that let you download e-books or interact with them on your computer. Here are a few suggestions, classified according to type:

Downloadable e-books, and downloadable other file formats

• An extremely comprehensive list of downloadable e-books and website-books for children K-12
• Free kids’ books - colorful PDFs of children’s books
• Best Free Kindle EBooks for Children - A GoodReads list of free Kindle e-books, K-12 

Website Books – for reading and interacting on the web

• Oxford Owl - A well-designed interactive site. Click on a book and choose “Read eBook.”
• Magic Keys Children’s Storybooks Online - Some of these books feature animation or audio.
• Kids’ World Fun - Colorful books, with a PDF download option.

App Books – for iPhone, iPad, and other tablet devices

• An interactive book from Disney about Toy Story. 
• An interactive Dr. Seuss reading app.
• An app featuring picture books and an option to record yourself reading it to your child.

Free Book Mailing Services

• Governor’s Books from Birth Foundation mails one free book a month to any Tennessee child under five.
• PJLibrary (PJ stands for pajama because they are meant to be read at night) sends out free books with a Jewish theme. These lovingly illustrated books don’t proselytize and promote universally accepted ethical principles.

**A note on file formats and e-reader device compatibility, especially for the iPad, Kindle, and Nook: With the exception of Kindle and Nook-specific file formats, all of these can be transferred to a regular e-reader or converted to a compatible format using a program such as Calibre or Adobe Digital Editions – check with your device manufacturer for details. E-book formats tend to be more dynamic and book-like, though many .pdf picture books feature advanced design.

Guide to common e-book file formats: 

.PDF - Short for Portable Document Format, this is most universally used to transmit text and images. A useful free alternative to downloadable picture books.

.TXT, .DOC - Generic, plain-text document formats. 

.EPUB - Open standard e-book format. Often used for non copyrighted books (see Project Gutenberg for a great resource); the Nook-specific e-book format is a copyrighted .EPUB (DRM .EPUB). Must use a converter program to load onto a Kindle.

.MOBI - Kindle-specific e-book format.

Sargent at the Brooklyn Museum

Need cheering up in this season of abysmal news, when even the weather can no longer be taken for granted and Spring can’t make up its mind whether to be here or not? Sunshine prevails in the stunning 93 John Singer Sargent watercolors now assembled at the Brooklyn Museum. The fact that the Brooklyn Museum and the Massachusetts Fine Arts Museum (MFA) own the lion’s share of the artist’s watercolors is a miracle. According to Teresa A. Cabone of Brooklyn and Erica E. Hirshler of the MFA, who co-curated the exhibit, during the first decade of the twentieth century Sargent wanted to free himself from the heaviness and formality of oil, and instead concentrated on watercolors. He had no intention of selling them, but his friend and fellow watercolorist Edward Boit convinced him to mount a joint exhibition at Knoedler’s. At the exhibit the Brooklyn Museum bought all the Sargents. The two friends continued to paint watercolors and two years later they had another joint exhibition. This time the MFA bought all the Sargents before the exhibition opened.

By their very nature watercolors look spontaneous. Unlike oils, watercolor cannot be over-painted or scraped. Most often watercolors are done in a single sitting. Perhaps because of their immediacy Sargent took great care to arrange his models—often family members and friends—and his props. He used underdrawings and applied wax to spaces he wished to leave white. The wax also reflected light.

The watercolors, many done in Venice, Florence, the Carrara quarries, North Africa, and the Alps, are exquisite. Each one of the sites had its special charm. The Venetian ones enhance the beauty and luminosity of the magical city. The North African ones served as a basis for the Triumph of Religion, the murals commissioned by the Boston Public Library Sargent was working on when he died in 1925. The watercolors done in the Alps depict a family holiday, during which his traveling companions relaxed under parasols or played chess; those done in the Carrara marble quarries allowed the painter to explore the uses of whites, endowing the watercolor with an almost cubic style.

The Sargent watercolors will stay in Brooklyn until July 28, 2013. Thereafter they’ll travel to the MFA (10/13-1/20/214); and then to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hurry, it is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

And what, you may wonder, happened to the watercolors of Edward Boit? Today his biggest claim to fame is that he was the father of the girls in The Daughters of Edward Boit, one of Sargent’s best known paintings and a proud possession of the MFA.

The Armory Show at a Hundred

If there was one past event that I am sorry to have missed, it is the International Exposition of Modern Art, now known as the Armory Show, which ran from February 17 until March 15 1913. My regret is that I will never know whether I would have sided with the press and the general public and laughed at Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Stairs No 2., renamed by one American critic Rude Descending A Staircase (also Rush Hour in the Subway), or would have recognized the genius of Henri Matisse, Picasso, Derain and the other artists whose work I love now?

The 1300 paintings, sculptures and decorative objects included works by Seurat, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Though it was the Europeans who caused most of the ire, two-thirds of the art works were by rising Americans.

The exhibit included twenty-four works by Matisse, including his Blue Nude and Red Madras Hat, both borrowed from the expatriate Stein family. There were also works by Georges Braque, JAM Whistler, Edvard Munch and many, many others whose works are now the pride of American museums.

The show, housed in an Armory located at Lexington Avenue and 25^th Street in Manhattan, was organized by a group of avant-garde American artists headed by Arthur Davies, a then popular but now neglected painter. He had many friends among similarly-minded socialites including Lillie Bliss, John Quinn and Abby Rockefeller who contributed to the cost of the show; still, Davies actually used his own farm, his family’s residence, as collateral. After New York the exhibition traveled to Boston and Chicago, where the students and faculty of the Art Institute of Chicago hung up the effigies of Matisse and Constantin Brancusi.

The Armory show had its champions. Lillie Bliss, one of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) future founders, is said to have visited every day. Stephen C. Clark, who would be a president of the board of that museum bought the exhibition’s most expensive work, Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Standing Woman, for $1,620 and later gave it to MoMA. Duchamp’s The Nude Descending the Stairs is now owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Matisse’s Blue Nude is at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

World War I erupted in 1914 and concern about art retreated into the background. In 1929, when MoMA opened, the press that had been so scathing of the Armory show actually welcomed the museum before it opened. The New York Evening World of September 7 exclaimed that the museum was badly needed. It was. Even though many critics and old-time visitors bemoan the size of the present institution, the crowds that clamor for admission attested to the fact that it is one of America’s most popular attractions.    

Lunch at Le Bernardin

In 1986 when siblings Gilbert and Maguy le Coze arrived from France and opened a seafood restaurant in midtown Manhattan I rejoiced, especially after it became the talk of the town. Eight years later chef Gilbert died of a heart attack. Gourmets and Francophiles like me wept. Fortunately Maguy managed to entice talented Eric Ripert to take over her kitchen.

I had not been to Le Bernardin in decades, but I am happy to report that lunch there surpassed my expectations. As a matter of fact I had not eaten such excellent and refined good food since I fulfilled another life-long desire of eating at the Taillevent in Paris some ten months earlier. The restaurant deserves its status among the world’s fifty best.

The menu at the Bernardin is imaginative and super-sophisticated. Though everything is “fishy,” many items derive their names from classic meat dishes. We started with an amuse-bouche of meat-tasting rillette de saumon.  Traditional rillette is a paté made from shredded pork. Ripert’s version consists of an equal mix of cooked and raw salmon.

Warm Scallop “Carpaccio” Snowpeas and Shiitake Lime-Shiso Broth followed. Scallops are my favorite seafood, and ordering them in a restaurant is usually a mistake because they are over-aged, over-soaked, over-cooked, or all three. Not here. The slivers of scallops, enhanced by bits of shitake mushrooms and snow peas, were barely cooked and spiced to perfection. They had an ideal consistency and tasted of the ocean. When will American restaurants serve scallops with their roe as they do in Europe? However, I had a tough time deciding on the main course, but finally opted for the Poached halibut: “Black Truffle Pot-au-Feu.” It came with two sauces, the first a simple fish broth, the second a velouté of mushrooms. My “server” (the term “waiter” is no longer P.C.) managed to pour one sauce around the halibut, the other on top of it, and they maintained their individuality.

My husband’s Layers of Thinly Pounded Yellowfin Tuna; Foie Gras and Toasted baguette, Chives, and Extra Virgin Olive Oil was perhaps the best food on the menu. I still marvel at the thinness of the toast and the complexity of its flavor. The Poached Skate and Warm Oysters Brussels Sprouts-Bacon Mignonette Dijon Mustard Sherry Emulsion was also extraordinary, though neither of us could have vouched whether the dishes contained all the listed ingredients. Dessert too was delicious, but more standard. Since this was our anniversary we got an extra serving of a chocolate mousse, and vanilla ice cream.

The restaurant, decorated in subdued shades of gray, silver, and brown is both spectacular and restrained. A large part of the space is paneled in honey-colored wood. A mural depicting a moderately agitated ocean dominated the dining room. Another wall is covered with molded strips of aluminum suggestive of a waterfall. On our visit calla lilies filled huge glass vases and a single white spider mum—a stand-in for a water lily—stood on each table.

It was a wonderful lunch and I can’t wait to go back.

Wishing Upon A Star

The eve before his birthday, my son David and I would imagine him flying to a magic star where every wish of a four, five, or six-year-old…would be granted. As appropriate the star would be stocked with favorite foods, limitless TV-watching, extravagant toys, a no-homework school and no bedtime.

My son was a big kid, and even later, whenever we were able to share his birthday we would play the magic star game. The accoutrements of the star kept changing. There were sports cars, and luxurious vacations, and designer clothes, and glamorous new boyfriends. From 1987 on, the star grew darker. Though worldly goods still stocked it, our main wish was that it would supply him with a cure for AIDS.

Twenty years ago, February 19^th 1993 was the last birthday I shared with David. I had flown out to San Francisco where I cooked a big dinner for him and his many friends. We were happy, laughed, and toasted each other. I remember “the kids” rolling around on a big exercise ball that somehow had materialized in the apartment I had rented for my visits. The month after his visit David flew to South America and developed pneumocystis pneumonia. Three months later he died.

If the magic star had been real, I would have wished for gay liberation to have come a generation or two earlier. My child’s gayness may have contributed to our being so uniquely close. My having been a child of the Holocaust taught me how much discrimination binds you to people who see and love you with unbiased eyes, and I have always had plenty of friends. However I also know all too well that it is not always easy for them to stand up for those whom society considers “unfit.” I remember the veil of pity that passed over the face of sympathetic others to whom I told that my son was gay. I learned to share cautiously.

Prejudice never dies completely, even when the laws change. Jews have fought for equality for over two thousand years, African Americans since the settling of the colonies, gays from the time Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

I wonder how different it would have been for David and me to live in a less prejudiced world? Would I have turned out to be less compassionate? Would I have worked less hard for my place in the sun? Would I have been less appreciative of the many good things that came my way?  Most importantly, I know that the U.S. government neglected to fight the novel fatal disease because it emerged amidst male homosexuals and intravenous drug users two discriminated against groups. If it had first affected an upscale group of citizens, I still might have my son.

Even though David is no longer here, February 19^th is still a good day for me. He loved life and took such a childlike pleasure in small things, that his family, his friends and I will still feel his warmth enveloping us all, especially on his birthday. Maybe I’ll even revisit our magic star. I never run out of wishes: a green earth, gun control, a more equitable distribution of wealth…David, happy birthday.

The Scream: Or On Almost Owning A Munch

Currently the Museum of Modern Art in New York is exhibiting a version of The Scream  by Edvard Munch. Leon Black, a member of the Board of Trustees, who paid $119.9 million for it at a Sotheby’s. The price is presently the highest ever paid for a painting at an auction.

A few other insightful and disturbing works by the Norwegian master surround the painting in the small gallery on the museum’s fifth floor. I had come an hour before the museum closed, so the crowd that comes to “listen” to the painting’s almost audible scream had thinned. I savored the extraordinary reds, pinks, and oranges of the Oslo sunset, and wondered at the egg-shaped head and the gaping, round mouth of the central character, who had covered her ears to avoid hearing her outburst. The two other Munch’s in the gallery were equally beautiful and troubling. One is a version of Munch’s Madonna and the other, entitled Storm, is of a house with a large hipped roof. Its windows brightly lit, the trees of the desolate landscape are bent by the wind, while a disconsolate family of five stands in front of their threatened abode, all shielding their ears with their hands.

In 1963 my family, including Judy our nine-year old daughter and David our seven-year old son, traveled to Oslo as part of my husband’s year-long European sabbatical. We had spent the day at the then new Munch museum and were completely enchanted by the symbolist painter, so we dragged our poor children to the nearby art gallery run by the painter’s daughter. It turned out that our children charmed the lady, especially after she discovered that she and our son shared their February 19^th birthday. We looked at the prices of the drawings and my husband told me that we could possibly afford a print. Our visit to the gallery turned serious. Should we buy a version of the Scream, or of The Sick Child, or …

As I tackled this serious but pleasant decision, my husband poked me in the ribs.  By converting Norwegian into Dollars he had made a mistake by a factor of ten. After all, we could not afford a print.

Years later we discovered that the Munch museum in Oslo was running a raffle. By buying a rather pricey chance we were given a shot at winning a genuine Munch print. We eagerly mailed in our money and lost. The museum mailed us a reproduction of The Vampire, which we had framed and continue to admire. All said and done, we probably enjoy it as much as we would have the genuine article.

Inventing Abstraction: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art

Fittingly, New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened the centennial exhibition of Inventing Abstraction before the end of 2012. It is a very handsome show, full of varied and vigorous pictures celebrating a new medium that since has swept the world. I enjoyed the show thoroughly and learned a lot. I never realized how powerful these early art works were and I will return to the show before it closes in February.

Upon entering the exhibition visitors view a big chart detailing the interconnection between artists involved with the creation and rapid dissemination of this new art form. There were well-known names like Vassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, as well as many lesser-known ones.

One of the latter includes Kurt Schwitters, who is represented by two rather nice collages: Das Kreisen (The Revolving)  of 1919 and Merzbild (The Cherry Picture) of 1921. I rather liked both. Like my parents, Schwitters lived in Hanover, Germany. He was a casual acquaintance of my mother, a small time art collector. One evening my parents decided to attend a masked ball, a fundraiser of Hanover’s Modern Art Museum, the Kestnergesellschaft. They decided that each was going to spend the evening with a blind date. My father ended up with a cute secretary and my mother with Kurt Schwitters. As the evening wore on my father treated his date to lavish refreshments, while my mother enviously watched the refreshment stand. Finally she approached my father’s table. He proceeded to order some food for my mom, whom he introduced as his neighbor. Smelling the treat, Schwitters too sat down, profiting from my father’s largesse. At the end of the evening, much to the secretary’s regret, for she had apparently expected a romantic end, my father insisted on offering his “neighbor” a ride home.

Half a century later, when I asked my mother why she never bought one of Schwitter’s collages she said: “No, after he was so rude to me?  Besides, I did not like his art work.”