Excerpt:
Her eye was extraordinary, conjuring an Edwardian era through its tiniest features: the brocaded wallpaper, the finely tiled kitchen floors, the thin brass faucets, the plush upholstery.
James Thurber, in an introduction to “This Petty Pace” (1945), the sole published collection of the artist’s work, describes the young Petty as a “slip of a girl.” Like her husband, she initially preferred to mail in her submissions, but by the nineteen-forties she had become a “common sight” at the magazine’s office, “sitting, cool and almost undismayed, on the edge of a chair.” Thurber reports that she would spend three weeks on a drawing; when she was done, she would say that she hated it and herself. “Everybody else, of course, loves it and her,” Thurber adds, observing that what Petty offered in her work was “not a trick, but a magic. . . . She catches time in a foreshortened crouch that intensifies her satirical effects.”
Time in a foreshortened crouch — is anyone catching that anymore?
Example:
ADDED: Ware notes that Petty seems to have influenced Edward Gorey. And I'll just note that the book title — "This Petty Pace" — is a reference to a Shakespeare soliloquy, from "MacBeth," which also has something to say about time.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time;And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more. It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare saw time creeping, but not, as far as I know, in a foreshortened crouch.
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31 टिप्पणियां:
What the fall of a society looks like. History shows interesting patterns. Men build civilizations. Women take the comfort and space they are given and destroy them.
The problem for me with the "foreshortened crouch" is that it sounds good but I can't seem to make it mean anything. Foreshortening implies seeing a thing - a horizontal thing works best - head-on, but a crouch is a vertical motion. All I can come up with is a picture or photo of a baseball catcher, in which his knees and outstretched glove look abnormally large. And that tells me nothing about time.
Tomorrow creeping in its petty pace from day to day tells me lots.
That is a great picture. Three weeks well spent.
That said, I like the example cover. It's graceful and empty and resigned, all the life contained in the portrait.
And THAT said, I wonder what it means to be "almost undismayed." A little dismayed? Just a touch dismayed? About what?
Tomorrow comes in on little cat feet. But it's always a day away.
Oh those are great. Feeling a little bit like Mrs Peabody myself.
"November 6, 1948."
It reminds me of an experience I had. We were staying at the Sherry-Netherlands in Manhattan, and were at the front desk of the narrow and dark reception area when a couple walked in, a hidden door slid open in the wall behind us, and there was a party going on in there that looked a little like that for the short glimpse I had of it, and then the door closed and we were back in the dim little reception area among our own kind.
I don't think that the rich have "declined," they are just gone from our sight, since they can travel to their hidden Adirondack retreats, or zip out the the Hamptons, or whatever, and do not rely on horses anymore. Too many tourists at Newport, don't you know.
"That said, I like the example cover. It's graceful and empty and resigned, all the life contained in the portrait."
And it rewards reflection: You realize that the man at the table is the woman's son.
Grok: “a foreshortened crouch” evokes an image of someone or something poised in a compressed, intense stance, perhaps ready to spring or act. Metaphorically, it could mean she condenses time—making it feel shorter, denser, or more impactful.
In summary, the phrase suggests that the subject has a unique ability to manipulate or compress time in her work, which amplifies the power and incisiveness of her satirical commentary.
1.
To me, the picture on the wall is a picture of the diners when they were young.
2.
A foreshortening crouch is a specific kind of perspective drawing which is generally is an action pose according to Google; we recognize it as a comic book hero or villian pose as here:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eRI8eQVv_Iw/maxresdefault.jpg
So, Thurber was saying that in a Petty picture, time springs on us like an action hero (or villian, really) - as one might conclude from seeing where the boy and his mother began and where they are.
The clock is smack in the middle.
Time is not crouching or creeping but forthrightly dominating.
I think the foreshortening in the crouch conveys that the crouching thing is coming toward you and positioned to spring. Time is a cat that will one day pounce.
"Thurber reports that she would spend three weeks on a drawing..."
I think that must mean that she did many sketches in pencil and ink and watercolor until finally getting to the one she liked, not that she fussed over this one thing that long, even if she did meticulously draw all those little patterns.
Boy, that Shakespeare passage is chock full of cli·chés!
In the painting the boy with the sailboat is looking at his mother longing for permission to be free which the mother never gives him. Although she frees herself with the books she reads.
There's a ghost in the 3rd chair.
"I think that must mean that she did many sketches in pencil and ink and watercolor until finally getting to the one she liked"
Same difference.
A time capsule of what was once one of the great elements of NYC.
Those are lovely. I like the way the characters recur so they kind of tell a story. Reminded me a little of Downton Abbey.
I can't get past the pay wall but "New Yorker + Mary Petty" (key words) brings up a lot of her covers. There was talent! You look at current covers ("New Yorker + Sept. 8 2025" - key words) which feature cartoonish, decayed-American-elite attacks on Trump and Elon Musk and you see time in a foreshortened crouch relative to the New Yorker.
January 2, 1960
The domestic staff sits in the basement, finishing off the champagne left over from the big New Year's Eve party.
My first house was built in 1920, and had a furnace just like that. It started as coal, was converted to heating oil, then converted to natural gas. It was probably 20% efficient, and everything was covered in asbestos. Good times.
I went to the Edward Gorey house a couple summers ago. Very interesting place to kill an hour or two. If you're ever on Cape Cod, check it out.
And it rewards reflection: You realize that the man at the table is the woman's son.
Yes! And I get the sense that everything that ever actually happened to him happened in the era of the portrait.
And thank you to those who did my homework for me to explain the "foreshortened crouch" metaphor! Time doesn't behave that way for me (so far), but I can see now what Thurber meant.
This day is starting on a rather gloomy note...
Randomizer @8:36 - our first house, in Seattle, was built in 1910 and also had that furnace, and had also followed the trajectory of yours. When we moved in, we had to abandon the heating oil tank in the gravel driveway (which, fortunately, we knew how to do ourselves as we were both working in environmental consulting at the time).
Ours was painted banana yellow, for some reason - the furnace and the ductwork. We called it the Behemoth.
"Shakespeare saw time creeping, but not, as far as I know, in a foreshortened crouch."
Time has a habit of leaping up at you like a 600-pound Burmese tiger when you think you're safely up a tree and out of reach, usually on your 40th birthday.
The decayed elite which Mary Petty pictures was the Hudson River elite to which Roosevelt belonged and which went back to the colonial founding of New York. But there's always a new older generation of the elite and these days that older generation is the group that sold American manufacturing to China in the 199o's because they couldn't be bothered to do the work of keeping a company going. They took a lump cash sum on which they are living well as they condemn capitalism but either it isn't enough for the grandchildren or there are none, just as in the case of the Hudson River elite. Trump is working to undo the damage and this decaying elite is watching his efforts with haughty disdain. This, I think, is the frame within which current New Yorker covers will be seen in the future - or, let's be honest, this is how I, personally, see them right now.
Did she pass away at 125 years old or so? Or is Rich/Mary finally transitioning? Or is this part of the "New Yorker's" continuing self-celebration and self-mythologization? The New Yorker crowd sort of are like an incestuous, old money family in a drafty, decaying, old mansion telling stories about their illustrious past, and like the progs are always telling us about America, they yearn for a past that never was.
But since we are roaring through the twenties again, this might be time to rediscover John Held, Jr. or the cover artists of the original "Vanity Fair."
1. I live in a foreshortened crouch. I understand what it means.
2. I can spend far too much time examining the brocade and filigree (what words!) in the chilly dinner time portrait. In another forty to fifty years, what will they make of our ubiquitous phones, our white walls, our shades of gray and beige? More interesting - which of dese? I think we come up short, tbh.
Fantastic images; there goes my plan for the morning. Also, I'm tempted by the Thurbers I see on my bookshelf, Lanterns & Lances, and Collecting Himself. Recommended.
"Did she pass away at 125 years old or so?"
The article ends: "The couple continued to live at 12 East Eighty-eighth, with [her husband] Dunn contributing to the magazine [as a cartoonist] until his death, in 1974. Petty met a more tragic end. In early December, 1971, she disappeared, and was found by Dunn in a hospital, having been badly beaten in a violent assault. Permanently brain-damaged, she lived the remainder of her life in a nursing home, dying five years after the attack, alone."
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