On grief and beauty
Plus, comings and goings in the museum world.
There is a story that I tend to tell when I find myself building the case for my favorite composer. It’s one I recount every holiday season: that Tchaikovsky’s beloved younger sister died while he was composing The Nutcracker. This is why, we may presume, the second act of the relatively brief ballet is tinged, at times, with an almost imperceptible melancholy.
My cat died suddenly, at home—a cardiac event that could not have been anticipated—a week after Valentine’s Day, and I’m thinking about why grief draws so many of us to create beautiful things.
The sadness in Tchaikovsky’s score comes in through his use of the celesta—a haunting instrument that also comes in at the very end of Shostakovich’s fourth—and his surge of strings in the widely admired pas de deux. It’s not a sad ballet, at least not until you think about what it represents: a departure, a transformation, a place to which you can never return.
Clara (or Marie) departs from the Land of the Sweets every time, but every year I come back to watch her do it again. It’s in this way that the magic stays alive. It could be that in creating something beautiful, the artist not only captures an object of loss, but gains control over it.
“Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning?” Julia Kristeva writes in her 1992 meditation Black Sun. “Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destruction and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?” A beautiful object seems to be a creation so often born through death—figurative or literal—which exists because of devastation, rather than in spite of it. “…beauty,” Kristeva says, “emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.”
I wish I could remember more from the college course I took my final semester on the poetry of mourning, but I was 21 and yet to be inured to the various shapes of grief I’d later encounter. I remember, though, “Lycidas” and “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”—elegies which have, in effect, served as indurate monuments.
How many works of art are unassuming effigies? “According to many accounts,” Peter M. Sacks writes in The English Elegy, “the origins of architecture, sculpture, and even dance are essentially funerary. So, too, traditional narratives point to loss as the mother of the following, more specifically poetic, inventions: Orpheus’s introduction of song, in mourning for the dead Linus, the blinded, love-torn Daphnis’s invention of pastoral poetry; Apollo’s frustrating derivation of the laurel, sign of poethood. The list could be longer, but it should at least include the invention of that most elegiac of instruments, the pipe or flute, by Pan, the patron god of pastoral and of elegy.”
When I am holding my cat’s body I feel we are a Pietà. This is perhaps a dramatic, even sacrilegious comparison that comes to mind but the long hours I’ve spent in art museums have provided me with this reference to graft to my shock and pain. It is helpful, sometimes, to have a model for suffering, which finds in its contours a few passages for light.
Comparison is something I seek when I ask Claude, in a moment of stark emotional isolation, if there are any works of literature about the sudden loss of a beloved cat. I am desperate to find someone who has put into words more beautiful than mine the grief I’ve only recently been bestowed. I don’t find much but instead think of Sigrid Nunez’s inversion of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “The cat came in on little fog feet,” in her novel What You Are Going Through, a novel about loss. Then, the opening passage of The Friend, another Nunez loss novel, describing women who cried so much they psychosomatically lost their vision. Then, the epigraph of that novel, from my other favorite author, Natalia Ginzburg: “You have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing.”
This is, of course, what I’m trying to do here. Instead, I know I must live with it, and find, in the beautiful things I actively seek, how the depth of this sadness permeates walls which may not have previously seemed porous. I am the one who is changed, transformed, and can no longer return, and I step into my new self with hesitation and tenderness.
Here’s what you need to know in the world of art and culture.
Louvre boss Laurence des Cars has officially resigned, and in her place Christophe Leribault has been appointed to the position. This is not the first time that Leribault has taken on de Cars’s role; in 2021, he took over her post at the Musée D’Orsay (which she left to become president of the Louvre). He’s an 18th-century art expert who was most recently the head of the Château du Versailles. Le Monde speculates that French president Emmanuel Macron, who personally selected Leribault for this role, views him as the country’s cultural fireman; after all, when he took up the helm at Versailles in 2024, his predecessor’s reign there had “raised concerns.” Good luck to him!
London’s Barbican is also losing a major figure as Devyani Saltzman, the center’s director of arts and participation, has been ousted, her role reportedly made redundant after she was hired just in February 2024. She told The Art Newspaper that her departure was “due to an organizational restructure.” Her role will not be refilled.
Over the summer she had unveiled a big, five-year plan for the Barbican, reimagining programming through “ideas-led seasons that find synergies across its many artforms.” The timing of her dismissal is interesting: it was just in December that the City of London Corporation approved the Barbican’s renovation plan, which will cost more than £191 million (funded primarily by the City Corporation) and close the center from the end of June 2028 to June 2029.
The Barbican’s new CEO, Abigail Pogson, also just started her role in January. More than 170 cultural figures, including the writer Salman Rushdie, have since signed a letter expressing concern about Saltzman’s departure. “The apparent removal of a South Asian woman cultural leader from a key artistic leadership role, so soon after her appointment…sends a troubling message to racially minoritized artists, producers and audiences who saw her appointment as a rare and hopeful sign that leadership might finally begin to reflect the city the Barbican serves,” the letter says, in part.
Here’s another reason to get mad at Robert Moses. The infamous urban planner—and Power Broker—is the reason many of sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s most ambitious dreams for public artworks in New York City never became realized. Among them, a city block-sized “monument to communal, open-ended play” called Play Mountain. Visitors to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City can learn more about these quashed dreams in the exhibit “Noguchi’s New York,” which runs through September 13, the New York Times reports.
Timothée Chalamet…come on now. In a Variety interview with Matthew McConaughey, the actor said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore.” Ironically, Chalamet, whose mother was a trained ballerina, previously said that his knowledge of this art form was integral to his performance in Marty Supreme. “It just felt like a nice mixture: to try to have the spirit of a Mike Tyson or Michael Jordan, but the physicality of a George Balanchine or Mikhail Baryshnikov,” he told USA Today.
I get what Chalamet means, but it’s unfortunate wording for someone in a position of power—or at least fame—to knock two art forms that funding challenges and other barriers to entry. If anything, it’s a juvenile kind of comparison.
You know who does seemingly care about ballet?* That would be Trump-appointed Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell, who is pissed off that San Francisco Ballet pulled out of its spring Kennedy Center engagement, after a growing petition calling for the company to do so. “Professional artists should perform for everyone — not just for people they agree with politically,” he told the New York Times (*not really). American Ballet Theatre wrapped up its production of The Winter’s Tale at the Center in February, but several other dance companies, including the Martha Graham Dance Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, have canceled forthcoming shows. “SF Ballet looks forward to performing for Washington, D.C., audiences in the future,” the company’s board of trustees said in a statement.
Tristan und Isolde is the buzziest thing at the Met Opera now, thanks to Yuval Sharon—who you may recall recently departed the Detroit Opera—and his bold vision. I am missing this one (tickets were expensive and I did not have faith in my ability to handle a five-hour evening show…I yearn for a matinee) but we’ll have plenty of other opportunities to see his work; this is just the start of his five-year partnership with the Met. It’s a big bet by the opera house, which seems to have paid off: the NYT reported that three weeks before the show opens on Monday, most of the seven performances were sold out. You can also see its simulcast in select movie theaters on March 21.
Later this Met season, I am looking forward to (and need to secure my tickets for) Innocence, an opera by the late Kaija Saariaho, which focuses on the aftermath of a school shooting. It clocks in at an hour and 50 minutes long with no intermission and opens April 6. Tickets start at just $35.
The Met’s 2026/2027 season was also recently announced. Notable works include Jenůfa, a bold Czech opera that’s a co-production with London’s Royal Opera House, a new production of Macbeth by director Louisa Proske, and Lincoln in the Bardo, an opera based on George Saunders’s book by the same name, by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek. I’m also really excited for Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delila; this production will feature the buzzy mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, known for her Carmen.
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