GLR November-December 2024

While it’s not completely necessary to have read the first novel, doing so con tributes essential back stories and clarifies the emotional maelstrom of the residents in this melancholy, bittersweet sequel with hopes for a trilogy. R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK AMERICAN APOLLO Des Moines Metro Opera Fes ti val and Blank Performing Arts Center, Indianola, Iowa July 13–19, 2024 When John Singer Sargent’s nude portrait of Thomas McKeller was revealed to the world in 2020, it incited speculation about the artist’s sexuality and his relationships with his male models. Ignacio Darnaude, who wrote about the painting in this maga zine (Sept.-Oct. 2021 issue), characterized it as the pièce de résistance in a trove of “inti mate, sensual, voyeuristic, and openly ho moerotic male nude drawings [that] surfaced after [Sargent’s] death.” For many,

the painting betrays Sargent’s romantic feel ings for McKeller, a young African-Ameri can bellhop whom Sargent used as the body model for his classically-themed murals at Boston’s MFA. Sargent and McKeller’s relationship is the subject of American Apollo , a new opera composed by Damien Geter with a libretto by Lila Palmer, which had its world pre miere at the Des Moines Metro Opera Festi val on July 13, 2024. The opera dramatizes the possibility that Sargent and McKeller had a years-long love affair, albeit one strained by racial and class differences— and by the fact that McKeller’s personal and racial identity is erased in the murals. The result was a poignant, tender opera, an chored by rising star baritone Justin Austin, who sang the role of McKeller with capti vating intensity. Geter’s eclectic musical score, which ranged from classical impres sionism to blues jazz, sonically charted McKeller’s constant movement between Sargent’s rarefied studio and the African American spaces of early 20th-century Boston. Although the stage was typically domi nated by life-size versions of Sargent’s fa mous paintings, it soon became clear that this is McKeller’s opera, not Sargent’s. “He wants me to be a god,” McKeller says about Sargent after one of their early meetings, subtly hinting at his awareness of Sargent’s complex, and ultimately untenable, feelings toward his favorite male model. J OSEPH M. O RTIZ

WHERE THE FOREST MEETS THE RIVER by Shannon Bowring EuropaEdi ti ons. 336 pages, $18. Shannon Bowring follows her absorbing, award-winning The Road to Dalton with Where the Forest Meets the River , another stellar, gimlet-eyed gaze at living in a small town and wrestling with family, memory, love, and identity. It’s the summer of 1995, five years since the devastating unexpected death of 26-year-old Bridget Theroux. A cloud of residual grief and guilt still shrouds the close-knit community. Having used Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as a template for a series of linked short stories, Bowring brings back many of the characters from the first novel. After his first year at the University of Maine, nineteen-year-old bisexual Greg Fontin returns home to be the best man at his sister’s wedding and to work at the fam ily hardware store. He is reluctant to do both, still harboring the secret of his sexual identity and not wanting to be trapped in a job he hates. His overwhelming desires are to be a horticulturist and allowed to “love who you love.” His closest friend, a forty something married librarian named Trudy Haskell, understands his subverted passions because they resemble her own “longtime best friend” of more than twenty years, Beverly Theroux, a married woman. Trudy and Bev share a love “so much deeper and more complex than a friendship, or an af fair, or even a marriage. Maybe especially a marriage.“

Publicity photo for American Apollo .

Russell Cheney

land in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the early 1940s, Cheney’s career stalled, largely due to his alcoholism. He was in and out of several sana toriums for about three years, including Baldpate Hospital, where he would set up his easel and paint in the hospital kitchen at night. During this time, there were still a few exhibitions of his work, and while the critics didn’t enthusiastically greet him as they had in the 1920s, several readily acknowledged his tal ent, including Margaret Breuning in the New York Journal American , who felt that each of Cheney’s paintings reflected “a new experience, a swift response to a pleasurable emotion.” Perhaps the value of this exhibition is captured by Matthies sen in a review titled “Our First National Style,” of a book about Greek Revival architecture. In the piece, Matthiessen notes that the Greek Revival movement was not characterized “by the dominance of a few big Easterners, nor of a few big cities, but by the simultaneous flowering of hundreds of local centers.” Years later, the message for us is that smaller, regional institu tions like the Ogunquit Museum of American Art can bring to light regional artists like Russell Cheney who capture the real ity of our collective cultural experience in a way that great mu seums in New York or Los Angeles may not. At a time when American culture is deeply divided or fragmented, artists and in stitutions that help us find common ground along these sec ondary roads are to be cherished.

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words, of “a marginalized viewer.” Another important theme in Cheney’s work that the Ogun quit show brings out clearly is his penchant for portraying work ing men, sometimes homoerotically. Kenneth Hill and Howard Lathrop illustrate this point. Both men are quite handsome, and Kenneth Hill is especially sexily presented, with a cap pushed back on his head that’s cocked to one side, crossed legs, and a cigarette between two slender fingers of one hand. Howard Lathrop depicts a Portsmouth fisherman who holds his gloves rendered in a phallic shape just above his waist. But Cheney goes beyond romanticizing working-class men. He and Lath rop were friends. They went to boxing matches together (Ch eney was fan), and they once took a road trip together along the Maine coast. Another strong portrait in the show is Nelson Cantave (1940), who was born in Haiti, also quite handsome, and worked for Cheney and Matthiessen, cooking and cleaning. In the painting, Cantave sits at a table slicing carrots in the town house on Beacon Hill where Cheney and Matthiessen shared another home. Cantave casts a sidelong glance at something or someone outside of the frame. With this one gesture, Cheney brings a sense of unease into the domestic setting, a feeling that may have been very familiar to a person of color in New Eng

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