July 22: Biden Bows Out

Harris and Israel; What was "Biden"?; Cheatle testifies

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The Big Story

In our last edition, we wrote that we still expected President Joe Biden to stay in the 2024 race. As this year’s Republican nominee might say: Wrong! 

Just before 2 p.m. on Sunday, Biden posted a letter to X announcing that he would not seek reelection. In a separate statement posted roughly 20 minutes later, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to secure the Democratic nomination. Bizarrely, for so momentous an announcement, the president did not appear on television or even release a video. As of the time of our writing, he had not been seen in public for several days.

Not that it matters all too much at this point—the selling point of the Biden presidency having been, for some time now, that aides, staffers, cabinet secretaries, and party elders are the ones really running the show. As if to make that assumption explicit, shortly after Biden posted his resignation from the campaign, Barack Obama rushed to praise the president’s decision on Medium as an example of an “extraordinary public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own.” Having thanked the man he just stabbed in the back, Obama conspicuously avoided endorsing Harris, but our sense is that that’s more a nod to the party’s need for the appearance of an open “process,” as opposed to a simple coronation.

Harris does not have the nomination locked up yet, and at least some top Democratic donors are now demanding an open convention. But she has secured the endorsement of Biden, Pelosi, and most of her major would-be challengers, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Online betting market PredictIt now has Harris with an 88% chance of securing the nomination. Tied for second are Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, at 6% each. 

So the race is now, probably, between Harris and Trump. Judging by the initial media reactions, Democrats are newly energized. Harris is relatively young, at 59, has good relations with Democratic donors in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street (her campaign is reporting more than $80 million in donations since yesterday), and is likely to enjoy favorable press coverage. Republicans crowing about her poor initial poll numbers will likely be in for a rude awakening once the Harris campaign gets going in earnest. 

But Harris has her own liabilities. She got her start in politics as the mistress of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and has shown little ability to win elections outside of deep-blue California. Her 2020 Democratic primary campaign was an abject failure, and as vice president, she has been plagued by high staff turnover, allegations of being a lazy and abusive boss, and insinuations of incompetence from the Biden camp.  

The biggest advantage of Harris is that the Democrats can now attempt to shed some of the baggage of the Biden administration, from the nakedly authoritarian censorship of the COVID-19 pandemic years to inflation, immigration, and chaos abroad. As PJ Media’s Richard Fernandez observed today on X:

The GOP strategy will be to try to tie Harris to the Biden legacy that voters were already beginning to turn against, even before Biden’s disastrous debate. Whether the charges will stick is anyone’s guess. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Frances Brent on the art of Sonia Delaunay

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The Rest

→And how would president Harris be on Israel? The specifics are unclear, although the answer, in a general sense, is probably “worse than Biden.” A Sunday article in Politico noted that several officials who resigned from the Biden administration in protest of its support for Israel were “cautiously optimistic” that Harris would do more to “curb Israel’s continued actions in Gaza and elsewhere,” and the same outlet reported in December that Harris had been internally urging Biden to be “tougher” on Benjamin Netanyahu and “more forceful” in pushing for a two-state solution. Earlier this month, in an interview with The Nation, Harris said that the young people protesting against Israel were showing America “exactly what the human emotion should be.” And Harris’ top foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, was an Obama National Security Council staffer who, along with Robert Malley, was one of the administration’s strongest advocates for the Iran Deal. 

→What was the Biden presidency? Writing today in Compact, Christopher Caldwell describes it as a version of what Tablet’s Tony Badran has dubbed the “Bouteflika Presidency”: government by the party’s constituent power centers and interest groups under a ceremonial, effectively powerless figurehead. Although Biden campaigned as a reassuring moderate, Caldwell writes:

[He] turned out to be the greatest gift to progressive political activists in half a century: He probably was a moderate at this point, but, in fact, he was not all there. The very need to put together a varied coalition to defeat Trump in 2020 required Biden to make unusually large accommodations to every wing of his party. … For the hawks he was a hawk; for the woke he was woke; for the greens he was green …

After inauguration, everyone could demand everything. There was no check on the ambitions of DEI, BLM, or ESG. They all got billions. There were hundreds of billions for students who had taken out college loans—at least, until the Supreme Court ruled Biden’s plan unconstitutional. There were hundreds of billions for those who wanted to continue America’s wars for “democracy” in Ukraine and elsewhere. And there were trillions for the industries from which Biden’s backers came: green energy, finance, and tech, above all. These, as it happens, include the donors who wound up pushing Biden out. 

In other words, the Democratic Party that Obama created—and of which he remains the symbolic master—relies on an uneasy alliance between the “kingpins of the information economy” (in Caldwell’s words) and the voting power of the Democrats’ client groups, cobbled together under the banner of “intersectionality.” The role of the president is not so much to manage this system as to sell it to the public. And that was the job that the ailing Biden could no longer perform.

Read the rest here.

→U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified before the House Oversight Committee today, fielding questions—and refusing to answer many of them—about the security failures leading to the assassination attempt against Donald Trump earlier this month. According to The New York Times, these are some of the questions Cheatle declined to answer, citing the agency’s ongoing investigation:

• Why did the Secret Service not station an agent on the rooftop used by the gunman?

• How many Secret Service agents were assigned to protect Trump?

• Why was Trump allowed to take the stage, despite Secret Service and law enforcement being aware of a suspicious person on the roof?

• How did the gunman get his rifle on the roof?

• What security steps did Secret Service take after learning of an Iranian plot to kill Trump?

Cheatle also said, in response to questioning from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about the timeline of events, that “I have a timeline that does not have specifics”—provoking audible laughter among the lawmakers and committee staff. Several House Republicans, as well as leading committee Democrats Jamie Raskin (MD) and Ro Khanna (CA), called on Cheatle to resign.

→Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington today to meet with … who, exactly? We’re not sure, the Israelis definitely aren’t sure, and we’re not sure the U.S. government is sure, either (frankly, we’re not sure what, or who, the U.S. government is right now). Bibi was initially supposed to meet with Biden on Monday. The meeting was then pushed back to Tuesday, but now it looks as if it won’t be happening at all, per a report today from Axios’ Barak Ravid, who quoted an official in Netanyahu’s office to the effect that they are “still waiting for an answer from the White House.” Netanyahu will address Congress on Wednesday, in what his aides have said will be a “bipartisan” speech, and is also reportedly seeking a meeting with Trump. If we were in Bibi’s place, we’d keep the speech short and sweet—there’s no need to remind the progressive media-activist-political complex of his existence now that their attention is finally turned inward. 

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A Mistress of Simplicity and Disguise

A recent show at the Bard Graduate Center illuminates the life and work of Sonia Delaunay, whose art of tasteful surfaces concealed the secret of her Jewishness

By Frances Brent

Many critics have talked about Sonia Delaunay’s work as an art of surfaces. When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, you could still find her block-printed and hand-finished scarves in some of the Chicago department stores. I remember her patterned sequences of circles, half-circles, diamonds, and zigzags, some in striking black and white and others with bold color contrasts—for instance, juxtaposing lilac, aquamarine, and cream.

Delaunay’s work was abstract, with a kinetic and painterly quality. Even though the designs were printed on silk, it seemed as though there were traces of the artist’s hand in the application. The aesthetic was art deco, which was considered, in those days, the pinnacle of good taste. Abstraction was unsentimental, it was modern and utopian; it had clean lines and was disconnected from the upheaval of the past. The design of those scarves, which were intended to be knotted tightly at the throat, also suggested an absence, as if they were telling a story in which something had been intentionally left behind.

Delaunay was well aware of this effect. In a diary entry from the war years she tersely wrote, “I shun descriptiveness.”

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, which just closed at the Bard Graduate Center, showcased Delaunay’s long career. She was born in Odessa in 1885 and died in Paris in 1979, working until the very end when she continued drawing with markers and sketching new designs even while she was propped up in bed. The show concentrated on her immense contribution to material culture, although she was also a superb painter. It did an excellent job of catching the commotion Delaunay generated in her youth and documenting the willed optimism of her later years.

With her husband, the French artist Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay developed a style that Apollinaire designated as Orphism and which the Delaunays called simultanéisme, saturating cubist forms—flat painted circles, arcs and blocks—with contrasting colors that seemed rhythmically to shift and change like the pieces of colored glass or paper in a kaleidoscope. In her memoir Nous irons jusqu’au soleil (We Will Go Right up to the Sun), published in 1978, the year before she died, she writes about how, together, they arrived at a new form of abstraction by releasing the forces of color and how art overflowed from her easel onto hats, a toy box, lampshades, and waistcoats because she rejected any distinction between fine and applied arts.

Just as Delaunay lived her art, she also fabricated her life, often speaking about her childhood in Russia and Ukraine but leaving out her Jewish origins. In the shadow of the Dreyfus affair, it was not uncommon to avoid talking about such things in public. Like assimilated Jewish emigres after World War II, Delaunay didn’t tell her son Charles that she was Jewish until he was well into adulthood. She maintained this habit until the very end of her life, preparing for her first American retrospective at the Albright-Knox Museum, she wrote for the catalog, “I am attracted by pure colors. Colors from my childhood, from Ukraine. Memories of peasant weddings in my country, in which the red and green dresses decorated with many ribbons, billowed in dance.” In old age she still held on to the secret of her Jewishness, not acknowledging that her eye was that of a Jewish child looking at peasant culture during the time of the Russian Empire.

Scant information exists about Delaunay’s early childhood, but what we do know is a complicated story. She was born on Nov. 14, 1885, in Odessa and her name at birth was Sarah Élievna Stern. She was the third child and only daughter of Elie Stern, who was a Jewish reserve soldier, and his wife, Hana Terk Stern. Because her father needed employment, the family moved to Gradijsk, a village on the Dnieper, 500 kilometers to the northeast, where he took a job as the foreman in a factory making nails. Her mother complained about the hardship of their circumstances and when their little girl was about 5 years old, they sent her to live in Petersburg with her maternal uncle Genrikh Terk, a prominent lawyer and banker, and his wife, Anna Sack (or Zak) Terk. In an interview Delaunay explained these circumstances matter-of-factly, “My uncle had no children because his wife had been operated on. It was common practice then; to replace a child with [sic] one that was never there.”

A surviving photograph from that time shows a gaminelike child wearing a fashionable lace dress and a bowed sash, looking thoughtfully straight ahead with large solemn eyes. She only saw her father once after that and never saw her mother again. Although she was not legally adopted, she took the name Sophia Terk and was called Sonia. Petersburg was a restricted city where only about 18,000 Jews had legal permission to reside (this would have been 3% of the population).

The Terks lived in a large, elegant home filled with fine furniture, albums of art books, and a collection of Barbizon paintings. They raised Sonia with generosity, as though she were their own daughter, hiring governesses to teach the child German, English, French, and Russian and a drawing instructor who “left her no hope of languishing in chance or vagueness. ”The family was modern and assimilated; they didn’t practice their religion. Like wealthy, established Jews in European capitals, social life was conducted in the network of their large, extended Jewish family. They had a summer home in Finland and traveled abroad, taking Delaunay to the great museums in Europe. At home, they adopted Russian Orthodox traditions, celebrating Easter with plums and pears, pyramid-shaped paskha, and decorated eggs.

There was a deep divide between the life Delaunay had been born into and the one she came to know. In a 1904 entry, one of the last in the journal she kept as a child, Delaunay describes troubled feelings evoked after reading the neorealist Semyon Yushkevich’s novel Evrei (The Jews) which was published that year. The novel lays out the harrowing cruelties waged against the Jews in Russia. “I read this narrative with great emotion,” she writes, “yet another incomprehensible thing, more questions, more tales of human suffering. And the people I belong to, but which I do not know at all, this universally despised people, is presented to me in a new light. They are able, talented, intelligent—that is how they are described here.”

The Terks must have been in touch with Sonia’s parents, and they were aware of the harsh conditions inside the Pale of Settlement. But they were part of an insulated and privileged minority. Sonia’s aunt was related to one of the most distinguished leaders in Petersburg’s Jewish community. Avraam Zak was her father’s brother, an economist and banker, first at Gintsburg’s Bank and then at Petersburg Discount Lending Bank owned by Leopold Kronenberg. Zak’s financial judgment was so esteemed that he was presented with the opportunity to take the governmental position of assistant minister of finance on the condition that he would agree to be baptized. He turned the offer down. He was a member of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among Jews and, after the pogroms of 1881, he was in the delegation sent to Czar Alexander III.

Most probably under political pressure to advocate for the status quo, Zak was also an integrationist, opposed to Jewish emigration out of Russia and equally opposed to the establishment of a Jewish homeland. It’s not surprising that Delaunay, as a child, picked up these ideas which we read, again, in her early diary: “To have one’s own kingdom is foolishness—we must not be isolated. Peoples should aim to unite, to amalgamate, they should not isolate themselves.” With some prescience, she concludes, “But we are moving further away from that, rather than closer to it.”

All of this was in the background when Delaunay, eager to escape bourgeois life, made her foray into adulthood, first going to Germany to study drawing at Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts and then, in 1905, to Paris where she took classes at Académie de la Palette in Montparnasse. Some of her aunt’s family lived in Germany and Paris and she was in touch with them but, for the most part, she spent her time in the exhibition halls and galleries where she soon learned about the post-impressionists and the fauves. You can see how she absorbed the lessons of their colorful surfaces in her early paintings, such as “Jeune finlandaise” where she composes the face of a young girl with patches of greens, oranges, reds, and a ravishing swipe of topaz that follows along the girl’s upper lip and down from her cheek to her chin.

In 1908, when her family expected her to return to Petersburg, she defiantly made a marriage of convenience to the German art critic, collector, and gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde, who was 11 years older than she was, and gay—and also probably of Jewish ancestry. They lived together with his butler who was also his lover until she met and fell in love with Robert Delaunay. She married him in 1910, just before the birth of their son.

Self-invention has always been fundamental for young artists. Sonia Delaunay’s friend, the visionary Swiss poet Frédéric-Louis Sauser, changed his name to Blaise Cendrars because he was intent upon immolating his past. “To write is to be burned alive, but it is also to be reborn from one’s ashes,” he wrote. When the stretch from childhood to early adulthood takes place under circumstances of greater instability, perhaps the need to sear away the last vestiges of one’s early life becomes even more essential.

Delaunay’s memoir begins in that spirit: “I was born the same year as Robert Delaunay, under the same sun, some 3,000 versts away.”

Sonia demonstrated several audacious spikes of invention during the first years of their marriage when she was very much in love and inspired by Robert’s poetic theories and enthusiasms. “Coffret à jouets,” a toy box she made for their small son with oil paint on wood, shows the influence of the toys and wooden objects that were part of Russian revival craft and connected Sonia to her childhood. On the box’s surfaces you can find a few recognizable shapes, like interlinked green and brown dogs and an arrow pointing in the direction in which the box lid should be opened, but the irregular rectangles, triangles, and circles also seem to have magically transferred from one of her abstract paintings. In a similar way, “Robe Simultanée” brings together aspects of Russian folk art and cubism. Using harlequinlike patches of silk taffeta, fur, crepe, velvet, and wool, Delaunay appliqued an abstract fabric collage and applied it to the vertical silhouette of a long straight dress. You can see from photographs in which the artist modeled her work, with its tight, narrow skirt, the dress would have been challenging to walk in, but was also a celebration of the artistic freedom to make art everywhere and with any material.

Perhaps the centerpiece of the show was “the first simultaneous book,” La Prose du Transsibérien, which Delaunay created in collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars. Using the pochoir technique of individually hand-coloring each printed edition, Delaunay illustrated her friend’s narrative with a 2-meter-long vertical picture of interlinking arcs and pools of color running parallel to the 445-line poem that unfolds accordion-style. The book was revolutionary in every way, filled with graphic pyrotechnics, incorporating 12 different typefaces printed in a variety of colors and all styles—bold, italic, serif, sans serif, aligning sometimes on the left margin and sometimes on the right. Most importantly it was bound as a leporello, a folded leaflet with accordion pleats, so it could be seen simultaneously in one glance.

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For the rest of her life, at every juncture, Delaunay returned to the habits of invention and self-invention that had shaped her life from early childhood on. During the First World War, living in Spain and Portugal, she fell in love with Iberian light and had an extraordinary period of productivity, painting as she said from morning until night. But after the Russian Revolution, when the property owned by her Petersburg family was confiscated and she no longer received money she and Robert had come to depend upon, she understood that responsibility for their livelihood fell on her shoulders. About Robert, she said, “His pessimistic nature was not suited to difficult times.”

Both Sonia and Robert worked on sets and costumes for ballet and theater design. Costumes of Ballets Russes’ exotic production of Cléopâtre, performed at the London Coliseum, were stunning with prima ballerina Lubov Tchernicheva’s sensual and ritualized performance. The costumes literally set Delaunay’s art in motion as the goddess and queen danced, adorned with vivid discs and colored bands encircling her breasts and torso. But such commissions were not dependable and there was a period of 17 years when Delaunay put all her energy into designs for fashion, fabric, and furniture and didn’t paint on an easel.

During the interwar period when so many creative people were displaced from the Soviet Union and German-speaking countries of Europe, Delaunay, who was known for her generosity, tried to help refugee artists and designers in Paris. Those who have gone through her correspondence and diaries tell us she may have mentioned the pain of exile but never Jewishness; it was never discussed, never written about. When war was at their own doorsteps, her first worry was about their finances rather than the more existential fact of her Jewishness.

A month before the German occupation, the Delaunays and their Turkish Angora cat, Minouche, fled south, their car filled with suitcases of rolled-up paintings. Robert died in Montpellier in October 1941. After that, like so many others, Sonia adapted day by day, sometimes living with friends, sometimes in a hotel or boarding house, often traveling by train. This took courage because she had always spoken French with a slight Russian accent and her passport showed her Jewish maiden name as Stern.

At one point, when a Gestapo agent questioned her document, she fearlessly told him she was Russian Orthodox. On another occasion, in Grenoble when she was strapped for cash and negotiating the sale of one of Robert’s paintings, a dealer said to her, “As an ‘Israelite,’ aren’t you afraid?” She understood that he was threatening to take advantage of her Jewishness to bring down the price of the work but it’s unclear whether she ever comprehended that her life was indeed in danger. Many of her aunt’s relatives died in the Holocaust but there’s no record of Delaunay’s reaction to her own family’s tragedy.

Delaunay experienced validation after the war when she was able to reestablish Robert’s reputation and her designs were internationally celebrated. In 1967 she was even commissioned to paint the Matra 530 sports car which she did based on their technical drawings, designing a sequence of race car checks in her signature blues, greens, orange, and red. Finally, having achieved financial security she was able to return to her own work as a painter. Her 1970 “Rhythm-Color,” a gift from President Georges Pompidou to Richard Nixon, was on view at the exhibition. A study of luscious color and layers of balanced shapes, it seems to be pulled together by the insinuated form of a backward S. Once again, the paint is applied with her characteristically sensitive touch, as distinctive as any form of identity.

One of Sonia’s old family friends, a man who had known her since his early childhood, attended her funeral in Gambais. The hamlet is about an hour and and 20 minutes west of Paris. Robert was buried there, and now Charles, as well. He said it took place in a church where there was a lady sitting at an organ and she was singing very out of tune. “It was what one calls kind of Catholic,” he remembered and then added, “This surprised me, because for me Sonia was Jewish. But it must have been someone’s wish, maybe just the family, but that was it. It was strange,” he said.