Cute As A Button (Mushroom)
A deep dive into Marsden Hartley's strangely charming portrait of "Mushrooms on a Blue Background," complete with a recipe for fall mushroom tartlets!
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Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
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Before we get to the (vegan) meat of this week’s issue, some big life news: I’ve just started a new position as Interim Director of the Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University, in sunny (and sometimes foggy) Malibu, California! The views on campus are sublime — I seriously have to pinch myself that I need only walk a few steps outside my office to be face-to-face with the Pacific. On top of that, everyone here is spectacularly nice and welcoming. I have never felt so appreciated in the first week of a new job, and I think this goodwill might be contagious! If I get considerably sappier from here on out, you’ll know why.
As you might expect, taking on a directorship is going to keep my plate pretty full, but I am not abandoning Weekly Special. Issues might be a bit more sporadic, but they will keep coming. I’ve watched so many promising newsletters wither away after a short while, like the Tamagotchi Eggs that I failed to keep alive in middle school through sheer negligence, and I am not going to let that happen. I am going to start experimenting a bit with format and content, however, and as always, I welcome your feedback in the comments or by email.
Ok, now let’s dig in!
This Week’s Special
Marsden Hartley
Mushrooms on a Blue Background, 1929
Oil on masonite
Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art
An American artist probably best known for his World War I painting Portrait of a German Officer, Marsden Hartley is something of an enigmatic figure. Born in Maine in 1877, he trained first at the Cleveland School of Art (represent!) and then in New York around the turn of the century. Like so many of his peers, he moved to Paris in 1912, where he hobnobbed with Picasso and Matisse and soaked up all of that delicious avant-garde energy. He was living in Berlin when WWI broke out, and developed a close relationship (likely romantic) with a young German officer named Karl von Freyburg; when von Freyburg died in October 1914, just a few months into the war, Hartley memorialized him in what would become an iconic portrait, laden with collective and personal symbols.
Hartley’s work is generally a bit moody, with dark outlining that makes even ostensibly joyful subject matter — flowers, seascapes, still lifes — sit heavy. Some artists seem to literally embody their work (like people who look like their dogs), and sure enough, Hartley looks like he stepped off the set of a German Expressionist horror film:
Given what I knew of Hartley’s life and work, it was with true surprise that I encountered his charming painting of mushrooms from 1929:
Now at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (yes, that one), Mushrooms on a Blue Background serves up exactly what its title advertises, but with flourish. Hartley’s group of button mushrooms (or baby bellas?) occupies a relatively high position on the canvas, appearing to cascade down a vibrant, variegated blue background that eludes concrete description. Is it fabric? A tabletop? A cutting board? Or just the product of Hartley’s imagination? Whatever the backdrop was in real life, it’s rendered here such that it behaves like an impossibly thick current of water, pulling the shrooms, which resemble little buoys, swiftly downstream, toppling and colliding into one another.
But the shrooms sit distinctly on top of the background — except for one stray brushstroke on the far right, there’s no overlap of blue on shroom, no water lapping up the sides of the shroom-buoys. What it actually looks like, in a delightfully anachronistic way, is a Slip ‘N Slide, that very 90s piece of flimsy backyard equipment that my parents refused to buy because it was a sure way for me or my sister to bust a limb. (If you were allowed to have one, I’m deeply jealous.) More plausible for 1929: the shrooms could be sliding down a tea towel, plopping into a bowl or straight into a hot skillet. Or, more to the point, I need to give up on reading the work so literally and accept that it’s a composition toggling between abstraction and representation, or at least between naturalism and fauvism. But flights of fancy are hard to resist, especially when a work that seems so simple as to foreclose interpretation turns out to be confounding.
What drew me to this painting initially was how utterly cute the mushrooms are. Not cute in an over-the-top, doe-eyed Japanese manga kind of way, but cute as in, sorta dopey and pathetic, with their blunt, phallic stems and blobby heads. Hartley’s mushrooms don’t strike me with an awe of nature, the way some of Phyllis Ma’s technicolor photos of shrooms do; they instead make me want to pluck them from this awkward, upturned composition and put them in some semblance of order on a cutting board so I can chop them up and drown them in butter on the stove.
If it sounds like I have murderous tendencies, that’s because cuteness and homicide are strangely entangled. (Also I watch way too many murder shows.) “Cuteness,” writes Sianne Ngai, in her fabulously rich book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, “is not just an aestheticization but an eroticization of powerlessness, evoking tenderness for ‘small things’ but also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish them further.” According to Ngai’s analysis, drawn from examples of avant-garde poetry, literature, and contemporary art, the inverse is also true: “cute things evoke a desire in us not just to lovingly molest but also to aggressively protect them.”
That’s pretty much how I feel about Hartley’s mushrooms. Pulled up from the cozy spots where they were growing and scattered unceremoniously against an inhospitably blue background, they’re crying out to be rescued and devoured simultaneously.
That sounds kinda nuts, but the more I look at the work, the more convinced I am that it’s not me who’s pathological — Hartley himself has constructed an especially intimate relationship between the painting and its viewers. At first I thought he was giving us an overhead view of the mushrooms, creating a composition where we, as viewers, would be lording over the shrooms as we would at the kitchen counter. But the mushrooms are shown straight on, as if posing haphazardly for a very up-close studio portrait — a position reinforced when the work is hung, as it is now, at eye level. Hartley locks us into a vacuum where there’s nothing but mushrooms, searing blue, and our gaze, where we are subsumed by the current right along with the unmoored shrooms. In a reversal of the dynamics of cuteness, it’s not we that have power over the mushrooms; it’s the mushrooms that have power over us.
For Further Eating
For some people, the first sign of fall is the reappearance of the abomination that is the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, which seems to pop up on their menu earlier and earlier every year. (They’ve apparently sold 500 million PSLs since the drink debuted in 2003, so I guess I can’t blame them for capitalizing on liquid gold.) For me, the dawn of my favorite season is instead announced by the restocking of puff pastry in the frozen aisle at Trader Joe’s, where it takes its rightful place alongside a rotating cast of pies.
One of these days I’ll get around to starting a Change.org petition to get TJs to stock puff pastry year round, but until then, I’ll just hoard it every fall. I realize I could also finally learn how to laminate dough, but I have neither time nor patience at present, and don’t expect that to change until my toddler’s in college. For now, I’m happy to make good use of the frozen stuff, which, if you can remember to defrost it in the fridge overnight, can be the base for a pretty easy weeknight dinner or a simple (but fancy-looking) weekend brunch. (Or an Apfelstrudel!)
The idea for this issue’s easy mushroom tartlets comes in large part from Melissa Clark’s asparagus tart recipe, published in her lovely cookbook Dinner in French: My Recipes by Way of France. (It’s also on NYT Cooking, paywalled, and on Chowhound for free.) Clark’s tart looks elegant and tastes great, the richness of the pastry balanced nicely by the bitter earthiness of the asparagus. With a few tweaks, I thought it might work equally well with mushrooms, as a sort of open-faced version of Smitten Kitchen’s Mushroom Strudel. I kept the tarragon because I happen to like it (even though I don’t have much love for anise), but feel free to sub in thyme or another hearty herb that suits your taste. If you really must omit the mushrooms, I think this would be great with zucchini, butternut squash, or pumpkin. Gluten-free and vegan folks are out of luck when it comes to most brands of pre-made puff pastry, but anyone trying to limit dairy can use a vegan cheese here instead. Lastly, if you want to make a lunch or dinner of these tartlets, they’re nicely complemented by an unfussy arugula salad (or a slightly fussier one), and/or a creamy butternut squash soup. You could also make the tartlets much smaller and turn them into cute lil’ Thanksgiving hors d’oeuvres! So many possibilities, friends, and a whole season ahead of us to explore them.
Easy Mushroom Tartlets
Serves 4-6
Defrost one sheet of frozen puff pastry overnight in the refrigerator, or for about 45 minutes on the kitchen counter. Set your oven for 425 degrees. While your PP is defrosting, get your mise en place ready: sweat some thinly sliced shallots in olive oil or butter, with a dash of salt. Separately, sauté about a half pound of sliced mushrooms (oysters, portabello, baby bella, button) in olive oil until they give off their moisture and then reabsorb it; finish with some unsalted butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Chop a handful of fresh tarragon leaves and crumble a log of goat cheese into a small bowl. Now, with your PP thawed but still cold, use a floured rolling pin (or a wine bottle) to roll out the pastry on a floured surface, aiming for an 13-by-11-inch rectangle (though exactness isn’t super important). Cut the dough into four or six smaller rectangles, depending on how big you want your tartlets to be, and transfer to a baking sheet lined with parchment. Spread mushrooms, shallots, chopped tarragon, and goat cheese evenly onto each tartlet, leaving at least a 1/2-inch border on all sides. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, then bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until the pastry turns golden brown. Let the tartlets cool for 10 to 15 minutes on the baking sheet, then enjoy right away.
Congrats on the new job! Looking forward to future newsletters in any format.