Il Divisiionismo: A Museum In Tortona

June 1, 2017, 9:16 am

≫ Next: Camillo Innocenti: The Cottagers

The little town of Tortona is off the regular tourist path that runs through the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. True, it was the oldest Roman settlement in the Po Valley, established more than one hundred years BCE. But today, it is also home to Il Divisionismo Pinacoteca Fondazione, The Art Foundation for Divisionism, housed in a defunct bank building. Because few of the artists shown here have been collected outside Italy, their work comes to us with an unexpected freshness.

Divisionismis the name given to a group of artists active in late 19th and early 20th century Italy, during and after the time of Italian unification, a period known as the Risorgomento. It is a group in a looser sense of the term than historians are comfortable with; many of the artists were committed to the betterment of society and the alleviation of poverty but style and emphasis varied. Some of the best-known of them were Vittorio Grubicy de Dragon (1851-1920). Angelo Morbelli (1853-1919), Plinioi Nomellini ((1866-1943), Emilio Longoni (1859-1932), Giueseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907), and Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899). What they knew, mostly, about their French contemporaries came through reading about them in the French press, rather than seeing their paintings. It fell to Grubicy de Dragon to become explicator of the new art to his countrymen. This has the happy effect of allowing a variety of styles to be shown side by side, in harmony - a fascinating visual dialogue.

You can explore the collection in full here (in Italian).

One of the best known works in the collection and, indeed, one of the most representative of the Divisioinist movementis Emilio Longoni's Reflections of a Hungry Man. Its colors and its mood are reflected in another Longoni wokr, this one the landscape Winter Melancholy.

To read more: Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters, 1891-1910, Simonette Fraquelli et al, National Gallery, London: 2008.

Images:
1. Victor Grubicy de Dragon Quando uccelletti vanno a dormire (When the little birds go to sleep), c.1891-93.
2. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo - L'Albero (The tree), 1892.
3. Emilio Longoni - Malinconia Invernale (Winter melancholy), c.1894.
4. Emilio Longoni - Riflessioni di un affamato (Reflections of a hungry man), 1894.
5. Plinio Nomellini - Mattina in officina (Morning at the workshop), 1894.
6. Giovanni Segantini - Malven / O Malvoni (Hollyhocks), 1881.

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Camillo Innocenti: The Cottagers

June 9, 2017, 9:26 am

≫ Next: Michele Cascella: Youthful Prodigy

≪ Previous: Il Divisiionismo: A Museum In Tortona

Poor Camillo Inoocenti (1871-1961). Unlike some of his fellow painters, Innocenti gets no entry in the Grove Dictionary of Art, even in the wake of the ground-breaking 2008 exhibition Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters, 1891-1910 at London's National Gallery. One reason often given for the neglect of the Italian painters is their lack of group cohesion, sometimes also know as self-promotion. Of course, some of the cohesion attributed to other groups of artists has been applied to them by critics, the artists themselves being busy with more pressing concerns like where to apply the paint brush.

In The Cottagers Innocenti painted something he had seen frequently while growing up. Before air-conditioning, it was the custom among the bourgeoisie for the wives, children - and even pets - of to decamp from the heat of the summer months in the cities to the countryside in search of cool air and relaxation. Still, women and girls were careful to shield their skin from the effects of the sun, hence the hats and stockings; relaxed though their postures may be as they lounge on lawn chairs, to our eyes they are dressed for company more than for an intimate family tete-a-tete. Innocente was known for his portrayals of women, turning from the conventional female figure in elegant déshabillé, to more sensitive and nuanced images. The Cottagers, an inter generational gathering, is one of Inncenti's finest meditations on the stages of women's lives, captured in the doldrums between the defining seasons of education and marriage. An element of that fineness is how the artist managed to rise above his own rather conventional ideas about women with his brush: " ...woman is mysterious, fragile, mutable, impassioned and also artificial ."(translation by JL).

Like innumerable other aspiring artists, the young Innocentei was encouraged to pursue a less uncertain career. His father thought the classics would be a more suitable field for the son of successful architect, but at age twenty-four, Camillo realized that he preferred drawing, working as an assistant to the decorator of the Candelabra Gallery at the Vatican. Three years later he was admitted to the Rome Institute of Fine Arts Rome. Disappointed by his academic studies, he began searching for a fresher style. In 1901 in Spain, he encountered the paintings of Goya and Velazquez, but it was as much popular scenes and landscapes that attracted him as the old masters.

Back home in 1903, Innocenti gravitated to the divisionist painters, their youth and their sense of liberty from the old rules of paining. Following World War I, he did set decoration in the up and coming Italian film industry on such projects as Cyrano de Bergerac and Ben Hur. Had he not detoured to Cairo for a fifteen year stint as director of its School of Fine Arts (from 1925 to 1940), he might not have been so easily forgotten by his countrymen. As for them, the next years of war were a time of poverty and uncertainty. Innocenti showed his work at the 1905 Venice Biennial and in 1909 he introduced a solo show of his works as well as participating in the Biennial group showing. His work is the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, and in several other Italian museums.

Image:

Camillo Innocenti - The Cottagers, 1912, National Gallery of San Luca, Rome.

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Michele Cascella: Youthful Prodigy

June 20, 2017, 10:14 am

≫ Next: Luigi Ghirri: Mixing Anthropology And Metaphysics

≪ Previous: Camillo Innocenti: The Cottagers

He was a prodigy, there was not doubt; certainly his father believed in him from the beginning. He did poorly in school, being the kind of student that teachers described as being adrift with the clouds. When one of his art teachers humiliated him in class, Cascella stopped going to school entirely. This caused a crisis in the family: the boy's mother wanted him to make a religious vocation but his father, who supported the boy's artistic ambitions, won out.

As an adult, Michele Cascella (1892-1989) credited Vincent van Gogh and Raoul Dufy as his artistic influences and, while it makes a good parlor game to tease out visual bits he took from them, no influence is sufficient to explain his skills in painting, drawing, lithography, and ceramics. When I look at Orangerie, painted when Cascella was just eighteen, I see the lines used to describe the girl's skirt as coming straight out of Dufy, the lines and the colors work together but not in the usual academic way. Cascella is fearless in using bright colors (blue, purple, yellow, orange) without ever letting them overwhelm this tranquil, workday scene. The house in Abruzzo, clad in stucco, is shown here in stark white, probably an indication of the midday sun. The country house and the orange grove was a subject Cascella often returned to, but seldom more effectively than in Orangerie.

Caseclla was born in Ortona, a city on the Adriatic Sea, in 1892. His father Basilio, a polymath, was an engraver, ceramist, lithographer and illustrator, was the boy's first teacher. Basilio's career was given a boost when he given a plot of municipal land to build a laboratory and art studio for his lithography business. Michele's first job at his father's business was the painstaking task of filling in backgrounds on lithographic stones. But his father also gave him more traditional art projects such as copying drawings of the old masters. Unable to draw well himself from nature, Basilio sent Michele and his brother outdoors, supplied with a box of pastels, chocolate and cheese, to paint for the day.

Basilio judged that the boy was ready to exhibit in public and so a show was arranged in Milan for the fifteen year old (this was in 1902), followed by a show in Paris the next year where Michele sold his first painting. At eighteen he had already taken his place as a regular among the cultural set in Milan.

In another prodigious move, the now twenty year old artist began an affair with the thirty-eight year old Sibilla Aleramo, one of Italy's most famous writers and already the author of the feminist classic A Woman (1906). (I read the novel in college but confess to only a vague memory of it at this point.)

Cascella's career would be long and varied, not a footnote to youthful achievement as are some who succeed early. Cascella won a gold medal for painting at the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle, where Raoul Dufy created a sensation with his multi-panel mural La fee electricitee. He made his first visit to the United States in 1959 and thereafter spent six month of each year at Palo Alto, California. In 1977 the City of Ortuna re- dedicated their art museum to Cascella; more than five hundred works by three generations of the family are included in its collection. When he died at age ninety-seven in Milan, he was buried in his hometown of Ortona.

Image: Michele Cascella -Orangerie, 1912, Cascella Museum, Ortona.

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Luigi Ghirri: Mixing Anthropology And Metaphysics

July 3, 2017, 9:48 am

≫ Next: "They Told Me I Should Go To Rehab....."

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It is the kind of tromp l'oeil picture that many an amateur has accidentally produced, but in this instance the result is so perfectly achieved that you want to know who is the photographer - and where exactly is he in relation to the other elements in the photo? Has he risen from some watery deep just beyond the frame? And when you learn that his name is Luigi Ghirri, you wonder why that name is not familiar.

Luigi Ghirri began his career with a sense that everything that could be done with photography had already been accomplished. He spoke often of how deeply affected he was by the view of Earth photographed from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. "It was not only the image of the entire world, but the image that contained all other images of the world." From this, Ghirri extrapolated the idea of the image-within-image, a framing technique he would use in his photographs. He brought the eye of an anthropologist to bear on the seemingly unremarkable sights that we see everyday but with an intensity that has been described as metaphysical, a word often applied to artists of Emilia-Romagna region, like Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. Ghirri called them his "sentimental geography" but that does not exhaust the interest of, say, those yellow traffic lights bobbing in the fog

Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) grew up in the northern province of Emilia-Romagna. A temperate area of broad fertile plains, fed by the Po River, it was created millennia ago when the sea retreated, leaving marshlands as it retreated. The young Ghirri moved to Modena, a small city but no backwater, located near Bologna, the regional capitol and home of the oldest university in the world. His studies in surveying and graphic design coalesced in a new hobby - taking pictures - that quickly became his chosen work.

Conceiving his photographs mostly in series, Ghirri presented them in books more often than in exhibitions which may have limited their initial impact. His first book Kodachrome, published in 1978, featured the tightly cropped images that would familiar in his work.
Ghirri's last home was at Roncosesi, not far from where he was born. Although he traveled, he found all that he needed for his work there. Formal, cerebral, witty, Ghirri always intended his photographs to explore rather than merely represent what was before him.

“Everything has a blighted, faded quality about it now. Still, if you look at it for a long time, the old charm reemerges. And that is why I can see that I will lose absolutely nothing by staying where I am, even by contenting myself with watching things go by, like a spider in its web waiting for flies. You need to look at things for a long time…” – Vincent van Gogh
Ghirri copied this quotation from a letter written by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo in his own journal.

Although admired during his lifetime, Ghirri's work has only grown in importance since his untimely death from a heart attack at the age of forty-nine. "...(N)ow, in their faded and aging present state, Ghirri’s prints from the 1970s and ’80s signal themselves as relics of the first wave of the then-new colour photography, carrying with them both prescience and nostalgia.." Christy Lange wrote for Frieze in 2011.

In 2009, the Aperture Gallery in Manhattan hosted the retrospective It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It?, devoted to the work of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992). Then, in 2013, Matthew Marks Gallery, also in New York, devoted an exhibition to Luigi Ghirri: Kodachrome. This exhibition coincides with the republication of Ghirri's much admired book Kodachrome, by MACK, London, UK: 2012., a book he originally published himself in 1978.

Images: The estate of Luigi Ghirri is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC.
1. Paris (self-portrait in reflection), 1976, reprinted from Kodachrome, 1978, reprinted London: 2012.

2. Valli Grandi - Veronese, undated.
3. Fagnano Olona - elementary school designed by Aldo Rossi, 1985, Pompidou Center, Paris.
4. Reggio Emilia, 1973, Pompidou Center, Paris.

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"They Told Me I Should Go To Rehab....."

July 6, 2017, 12:01 am

≫ Next: Writing The Book On Love: From Alcman To Jessica Fisher

≪ Previous: Luigi Ghirri: Mixing Anthropology And Metaphysics

...so that is where I will be for now, not a vacation but more like out for repairs. In recent months my gait has been less of a walk and more like am old Tuscan dance, the saltarello; the name means "hopping step."
While I'm away from the keyboard,I hope you will explore the archives here and, if you find something that interests you, please comment and I promise to respond to each one as soon as I am able.

In the meantime, for summer reading I can recommend nothing funnier than American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis. Ellis is a southern transplant to New York City who, when her writing career stalled after the publication of a novel some fifteen years ago, became a housewife/ professional poker player. Beginning with "The Wainscoting War," a tale of decorative mayhem in an upper east Side co-op, to "Dumpster Diving With The Stars," a reality show run amok in the Hudson Valley's antiques alley, and ending with a woman who rescues pre-pubescent beauty contestants in "Pageant Protection," the fun never abates. Published by Doubleday & Company: 2016.

Image:
Original photograph by Peter Librizzi, restoration by Renee Ing Akana at 28moons

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Writing The Book On Love: From Alcman To Jessica Fisher

July 28, 2017, 2:12 pm

≫ Next: Ethel Sands: Not So Cozy After All

≪ Previous: "They Told Me I Should Go To Rehab....."

"The thread
runs thin.
The need
runs hard.
Hard."
- "Fate And Necessity" by Alkman, from Lyra Graeca, Vol. I, # 142.

:Not Aphrodite, no. But like a child,
Wild, Love comes down,
Almost as though walking on flowers -
But should not touch them,
Should not,
No."
- "Not Aphrodite, No" by Alkman from Lyra Graeca, Vol. I, #6
excerpted from Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, translated by Burton Raffel, New York, The Modern Library: 2005

Most of us were taught in school that Ovid's Art Of Love, published near the beginning of the Common Era, was the first major treatment of humankind's favorite subject but that turns not to be the case. Six centuries before the Roman began writing his books on love there lived a pagan poet on the Greek peninsula who love poetry was a much admired feature of public occasions.

I. Alcman, or Alkman, was a lyric poet of the 7th century BCE. That he was a native of Sparta was something the ancients found hard to believe and so did scholars for most of the intervening centuries. His light touch and amorous nature did not harmonize readily with the dominant image of the battle-hardened warrior although, as you can see from the verses printed above, for Alcman, love was a serious business.

Contained in the Suda, a 10th century Byyzantine lexicon, is this description of Alcman as a man "of an extremely amorous disposition and the inventor of love poems." His longest and most famous poem is the Partheneion, a choral song intended to be sung and danced to by young girls as a rite of passage into womanhood. Only fragments of his works have survived; three stanzas describing the initiation of a girl named Agido, are contained in a papyrus cataloged as Louvre e 3320. From Aristotle we learn that Alcman died of a disease caused by pediculosis, contamination by lice that caused lesions. to the skin, an ignominious death but not uncommon in his day.

Alcman's poetry was renowned for its grace and simplicity, and it doubtless benefitted from technological advances embodied in the Greek language; its clean-cut syllables and its efficient graphing of sound celebrated by the Canadian classicist Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet.

"When my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think is grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du Plaisir en a, and so it
when he couldn't sleep in that long still night
you sensed it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it us
promised you, even when he goes -
- excerpt from "The Right To Pleasure" by Jessica Fisher, from Frail-Craft, New Haven, Yale University Press: 2007

II. Jessica Fisher (b. 1974) is an American poet who teaches at Williams College in western Massachusetts but her connection to the ancient Greeks, particularly to Alcman, is more than fanciful. In her first collection Frail-Craft (2007) the poems resemble choral songs from an unknown Greek tragedy: pure, absolute, unbowed by the violence of the world, asserting the right to pleasu

For further reading:
1. Philippe Brunet, La Naissance de la littérature dans la Grèce ancienne, Paris, Le Livre de Poche: 1997
2. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Champaign, Dalkey Archive Press: 1998.

Image:
Anonymous artist, Women In The Orchard (titled ascribed), no date, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA.

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Ethel Sands: Not So Cozy After All

January 13, 2017, 10:36 am

≫ Next: Homage To Martin Luther King, Jr. - Alfred Manessier

≪ Previous: Writing The Book On Love: From Alcman To Jessica Fisher

Ethel Sands (1873-1962) is one of those artists whose paintings have always impressed me as being very well executed (they should be; she studied in Paris with Eugene Carrere and was deeply imprinted by the early works of Edouard Vuillard) but rather too amiable, content to portray the interiors of comfortable homes with few overt signs of the world outside. The sort of paintings you might expect from one who took her position as a London society hostess as seriously as any of her other many interests. Sands was born into money in Newport, Rhode Island and moved easily between France and England, sharing multiple homes with another woman for most of her adult life.

In recent decades, critics have begun to detect the filaments of tension in Vuillard's domestic scenes, based on biographical material that had been revealed since the artist's death in 1940. No matter how guarded Vuillard and those around him were, his life was not "marked by not a single external incident." The romantic/erotic aspects of Vuillard's life may be encoded in his paintings, and who better to have recognized this than a woman who, by the standard of today, would be described as a lesbian? And who might prefer to present scenes from her own domestic life indirectly?

But then there is this anomalous Ethel Sands painting Still Life With a View of a Cemetery. It is painted in "early" Vuillard, that is the style he was painting in the 1890s when Vuillard was admired as the leader of the Nabis (or Prophets of a new art) and Pierre Bonnard was his sidekick. It is all pattern and flat surface, but Sands uses the primary colors (blue, red, and yellow), unlike the muted tones Vuillard favored or her own preferred pastels. The room that is the still life appears to be a bathroom and the cemetery outside, what we can see of it, seems that of a poor church yard, not the sort of place where the offspring of haute Newport would have been buried. Sands had nursed wounded soldiers in France during the war and this painting may allude to the intrusion of the outside world on her domestic life. And yet this interior, with its tactile curves in the blue and white bowl and pitcher counterpointed by the glass bottles filled with yellow and red liquids, sparkling in the sunlight, is a complete story in itself if we choose to spend time with it. Disparate shapes are organized around a shelf, with curves below and verticals (the bottles, the curtains, the crosses, above). Let your eyes move around the canvas, following the directional lines and colors embedded by the artist. A good still life, Sands shows us, can be more than an arrangement oif objects, it can offer a story to the viewer who gives it enough time. by On its own terms, this is quite brilliant I think.

Image: Ethel Sands - Still Life With a View Over a Cemetery, 1923, Fitzwilliam Museum, London.

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Homage To Martin Luther King, Jr. - Alfred Manessier

January 16, 2017, 8:59 am

≫ Next: Johanna Grussner: Out Of This World

≪ Previous: Ethel Sands: Not So Cozy After All

A tribute from an expected quarter. Blue and red, water and blood, bursting with life., a force that moves the spirit and the world.

The late Alfred Manessier (1911-1993) is not a familiar name to most Americans. When Sonia and Robert Delaunay were commissioned to decorate air and rail stations with murals for the Paris International Exposition in 1937, Manessier and three of his friends who were also students at the executed the designs.

After going on retreat in a Trappist monastery in 1943, Manessier experienced a spiritual awakening. Pondering the connections between the monks' spiritual practices and the nature of the cosmos, he changed his practice of painting, jettisoning the decorative elements he had absorbed from the Nabis via his studies at Academie Ranson and the Delaunays in favor of stronger colors (as seen here) and more dramatic forms. He also left teaching to paint full time. Manessier held the unusual belief that the abstract and the figurative were merely two sides of the same coin in art. He went on to receive many commissions for public art, from theater costumes to tapestries and stained glass windows Where we may see vaguely familiar shapes, Manessier often intended crosses and crowns for churches.
Manessier painted this homage to the American Civil Rights leader in 1964 when King became the youngest person (at that time) ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Image:

Alfred Manessier - Homage a Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964, Pompidou Center, Paris.

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Johanna Grussner: Out Of This World

August 10, 2017, 6:08 pm

≫ Next: Happy New Year

≪ Previous: Homage To Martin Luther King, Jr. - Alfred Manessier

"You're clear out of this world
When I'm looking at you
I hear out of this world
The music that no mortal ever knew

You're right out of a book
The fairy tale I read when I was so high
No armored knight out of a book
Would find a more enchanted Lorelei than I

After waiting so long for the right time
After reaching so long for a star
All at once from a long and lonely night time
And despite time, here you are

I'd cry, out of this world
If you said we were through
So let me fly out of this world
And spend the next eternity or two with you

After waiting so long for the right time
After reaching so long for a star
All at once from a long and lonely night time
And despite time, here you are

I'd cry, out of this world
If you said we were through
So let me fly out of this world
And spend the next eternity or two with you"
- Out Of This World, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harold Arlen.

It feels odd to have to introduce Johanna Grussner to American audiences considering the warm reception her Naxos release No More Blues received from both the critics and listeners. Grussner who lived in the U.S for eight years, attended the Berklee School of Music on scholarship and then earned a Master's degree in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music in 1998. She then taught at Public School 86 in The Bronx where she developed a program of vocal and instrumental instruction and music theory. Oh, and she was born on the Aland Islands, off the east coast of Finland in 1972. She returned home in May 2001 when she brought a group of fifth grade students to perform gospel concerts in Helsinki. Since 2001 Grüssner has lived in Stockholm, Sweden.

Her musical ambitions are expansive. As a child, Grussner and her sisters Ella and Isabella formed a folk group Daughters Of The Wolf. The year before graduating from Berklee she recorded her first cd; the year after she formed her own nineteen piece jazz orchestra which toured Scandinavia, performing at jazz festivals and clubs, sometimes joined by the New York Voices. Since moving to Sweden, Grussner has recorded not only jazz but Swedish and Finnish folk songs and even a record of Moomin songs for children based on the popular characters of author Tove Jansson.

Out Of This World is usually classified as a ballad because it lacks a pronounced rhythm. Grussner turns this received wisdom upside down. Her agile vocal technique and near perfect command of English paired with accompanist Ulf Karlsson, whose work on both six and twelve-string guitars is impeccable, combine to give a rhythm to the song that it has not had before, something between a walk and a bossa nova-ish lilt. Unlike some singers with crystal clears voices, Grussner is also capable of deploying colors in her phrasing. Thanks to her version, I will never think of Out Of This World as a standard again. It lives.

The song is structured without a verse; it has four sections – A, a variation of A, B, and back to the A variation in conclusion. The elegance of the lyrical conceit demands it: The Lorelei of Germanic legend was a beautiful maiden who threw herself into the Rhine River in despair over a faithless lover. In recompense, the gods turned her into a siren whose voice was irresistible to all who heard it. Alec Wilder (in his History Of American Popular Song, 1972) heard in its melody echoes of the mixolydian mode of Gregorian chant. Mixolydian was the seventh of eight modes (similar to key signatures ) in medieval church music. Arlen also used melisma in Out Of This World, scoring two notes for the word “knew.”

Melisma is a technique familiar to us from its use in gospel music; its use originated in early Christian plainsong. Unlike syllabic singing where each syllable is accorded one note, when a singer moves from one note to another on a single syllable, that’s melisma. When Johnny Mercer came to write this lyric in 1944, he had been working in Hollywood for almost ten years and it shows in its style; this was no Tin Pan Alley show tune to be belted to the rafters for applause. Rather, it existed on an altogether more intimate emotional plane. Wilder was certainly right to describe Out Of This World as not being typical of Harold Arlen's songs, but then it is not typical of anyone else's that I can think of either.

P.S. Other standouts on No More Blues are a sultry version of Hallelujah, I Love Him So and Desafinado.

Listen to Johanna Grussner sing Out Of This World.
Visit Johanna Grussner's website.
No More Blues, a recording by Johanna Grussner, Naxos Jazz: 2005.

Image:
Photograph of Johanna Grussner, 2010, courtesy of Allaboutjazz.com.

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Happy New Year

December 31, 2016, 1:25 pm

≫ Next: The Long View: Victor Segalen

≪ Previous: Johanna Grussner: Out Of This World

Stir up some fun, and economically, too, for the New Year. In the frugal spirit of old Cape Cod living, the local red berry overwhelms any pretensions the vodka may have, so go for the cheap stuff. The red color is reliably deep and gorgeous. Cocktail mixing doesn't get any easier than the Cape Codder. I was introduced to the non-alcoholic version as a little girl living in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Trying to pick out which stirrer would make the drink taste better is the kind of decision that can occupy a child for quite some time. These stirrers, appropriately for a New Year's celebration, came with a glass holder in the shape of a stork.

The basic Cape Codder recipe is as follows:
2 ounces vodka
3 ounces cranberry juice
1/4 lime perched on the rim of the glass, to be squeezed
club soda to taste

The children's version substitutes ginger ale for the vodka and club soda.
Image:
Czechoslovakia - Glass cocktail stirrers, c.1920-1930, blown glass, Geffrye Museum, London.

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The Long View: Victor Segalen

January 4, 2017, 10:46 am

≫ Next: Ethel Sands: Not So Cozy After All

≪ Previous: Happy New Year

This quiet field is more than it appears, as so many photographs turn out to be when you dig into the particulars. . Sixty years after a Frenchman, Victor Segalen, took this photograph of a farm field in northern China, some local farmers digging a well made an astonishing discovery. What they unearthed among the meandering watercourses were larger than life-size figures, thousands of soldiers carved from terracotta, that had gone undetected for two thousand years, the funeral army of China's first Emperor, accompanying him to the afterlife. The Terracotta Warriors, as they are now known, have become one of the wonders of the world, a comparable feat of the imagination to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.

Segalen would surely have been delighted by the excavation of the terracotta warriors, and the afterlife they brought to his photograph. Even so, the significance of the site did not escape Segalen. He led a band of archeologists that visited the site in 1914 to make drawings and measurements of tumulus, mounds of earth and stones, that are often placed over graves. These burial mounds have counterparts around the world, known as cairns, menhirs, etc.

An obsession was born when Segalen arrived in Peking in 1909; he immediately adopted it as "my capital,' only returning to France at the outbreak of war in 1914. For Segalen, as for the ancient Chinese, the Middle Kingdom became the center of the world, "the country that epitomizes harmonious difference, the diversity of the world in a nutshell."

Rene Leys, Segalen's novel published in 1911, is a kind of spiritual adventure story, in which a young foreigner becomes obsessed with the mysterious Forbidden City and and the Imperial Palace at the heart of Peking. Day after day the novel's protagonist circles the perimeter, looking and listening for signs of intrigue, clues to the destabilizing politics that followed in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion of 1905. Another foreigner, Rene Leys, becomes his guide, weaving threads of historical events and magical tales together, leaving the reader to wonder what kind of book they have in their hands, a detective story or an allegory. The book, like the Forbidden City and the field in Lintong guard their secrets well.

The afterlife of Victor Segalen (1870-1919) has been longer than his time on earth. Segalen, born in Finistiere (end of the land), at the western-most point of the Atlantic coast, grew up to become a naval doctor, but no single profession could contain him. He wrote novels, poetry, and literary criticism, and on his travels around the globe he made topographical maps, took photographs, and made archeological excavations. For all these accomplishments, Segalen's name is inscribed on the wall of the Pantheon in Paris.

Revised: 01/07/2017.
An extensive biography of Victor Segalen (in French)
About the novel Rene Leys (in English)

Image: Victor Segalen - Lintong, Shaanxi Province, China, 16 February 1914, Musee Guimet, Paris.

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Ethel Sands: Not So Cozy After All

January 13, 2017, 10:36 am

≫ Next: The Single Petal Of A Rose: Jay De Feo

≪ Previous: The Long View: Victor Segalen

Image: Ethel Sands - Still Life With a View Over a Cemetery, 1923, Fitzwilliam Museum, London.

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The Single Petal Of A Rose: Jay De Feo

August 20, 2017, 3:31 pm

≫ Next: Ernst Haas: Photographing Intimate Space

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"The White Rose is a fact painted somewhere on a slow curve between destinations. This is all I remember. This is all I know." - Jay De Feo, 1965

"I first saw the rose in De Feo's top-floor apartment on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. It was in a bay window - the only thing in the room - and the windows on either side of it were splattered with pint, so that light came in softly. Paint encrusted floor and walls, giving the impression of a kid of primordial cave, in which the panting was an apparition, a flower, a great female symbol. the power of the work was overwhelming." - Walter Hopps, curator, Pasadena Art Museum

Can all the wonder of nature, of life itself, be expressed by the single petal of a rose? Jay De Feo thought so.

Jay De Feo (don't be confused by her name) worked on the Rose for eight years; it was all literally touch and go, adding layers and daubs, not by chance but in search of a revelation akin to the emergence of life itself. As a student in Florence, Italy, De Feo had spent hours in communion with the frescoes of Biblical scenes she saw in its churches and would try, through a variety of media, to reach the transcendence she had experienced then. In De Feo's work, whether painted or photographed, light seems to emanate from the very petals of the rose. She could not bear to let the Rose go, even when it was listed in the catalog for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. Fortunately, several other works did make it to "Sixteen American Artists" where De Feos shared a gallery with works by two other young artists -Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns

Her eviction from the Fillmore Street apartment forced the issue in 1965 and Hopps arranged for the painting (which by then weighed over a ton) to be transported to Pasadena, where it remained unseen and neglected for two decades, entombed behind a wall at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art. Hopps recounts how, when he finally had to tell De Feo that the painting was done and she needed to return home to San Francisco, she lay down on the street next to the bus and began to cry. Thanks to Hopps, The Rose was finally rescued from behind that wall in California and sent to the Whitney Museum in New York where it has undergone three restorations.
Standing somewhat apart from her male Abstract Expressionist counterparts, Jay De Feo's work looks startlingly modern today. Her use of photo-hybrids, collage, and especially her striving beyond the "thingness" everyday, demonstrate " an irrepressible need for spirituality." (quoted by Eileen Berkovich) In making The Rose De Feo broke the boundaries between painting and sculpture in a way that is not unlike the dissimilar work of her female contemporary, Eva Hesse. De Feo is more like her contemporary, Helen Frankenthaler in having her art reconsidered since her death. (Frankenthaler is currently the subject on two simultaneous exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.)

Jay De Feo was born in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1929, studied art at Berkeley and lived in the Bay area for most of her adult life. She was forced to move from her Oakland studio shortly before her death in 1989 when it was damaged in the Loma Prieto earthquake.

For further reading:

The Dream Colony: A Life In Art by Waler Hopps, with Deborah Treisman, New York, Bloomsbury: 2017.

Visit Jay De Feo website here.

Images:
1. Jay De Feo - untitled rose photograph - gelatin silver print - torn paper, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
2. Jay de Feo - The Rose, 1958-1966, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.
3. unidentified photographer - Jay de Feo in front of The Rose, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Ernst Haas: Photographing Intimate Space

August 27, 2017, 4:31 pm

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"What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,

In which you see all Forms intensified.

(In the Open denied, you would lose yourself,

would disappear into the vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things:

to become the very essence of a tree,

throw inner space around it, from that space

that lives in you. Encircle it with restraint.

It has no limits. For the first time, shaped

in your renouncing, it becomes fully free."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, (the favorite poet of Ernst Haas), translated from the German by Gabriel Caffrey

Alfred Eisenstadt, Yousef Karsh, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon - and Ernst Haas. Haas belongs in their company as one of the great photographers of the 20th century but Ernst Haas has been, if not neglected by the critics, then somewhat overshadowed by the photographic avalanche we now live with. The Viennese-born Haas, who was a member of the Magnum Photo Agency, and later its fourth president, gradually moved from photojournalism to an increasingly personal art.

It is this element of Haas's work that I want to look at. The photos here were included in a book, The Creation, published in 1971, as Haas visualized the natural world to the accompaniment of texts, mostly drawn from the Old Testament. (The book became a surprise bestseller, making for the largest print run ever for a photography book.) Although Haas was captivated by the possibilities inherent in color film, you can see that he deliberately avoided the high contrasts that caused the word 'garish' to attach to Kodachrome. A heap of petals or an intact hydrangea and what difference does it make in this world of intimate space? And what marvelous coincidence led Haas to an ice formation that resembles a design from the shops of the Wiener Werkstatte or the spermatozoa that Gustav Klimt flung across his "decorative" portraits of the wives of Viennese aristicrats?

Ernst Haas (1921-1986) did not always want to be a photographer; he vacillated between a painter or an explorer, wishfully looking for a way to combine the two. But World War II came to Europe and everything, including the education of a young man from Vienna. It was his introduction to the photography of Werner Bischof in Bischof's native Switzerland after the war that set him on course at last. It was thanks to sponsorship by the Magnum Agency that Haas finally obtained a rare visa to come to the U.S.

Images:

1. Ernst Haas - Hydrangeas

2. Ernst Haas - Ice formation

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Artichokes & Ardor

September 7, 2017, 1:41 pm

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The nubbed leaves
come away
in a tease of green, thinning
down to the membrane:
the quick, purpled
beginnings of the male.

Then the slow hairs of the heart:
the choke that guards its trophy,
its vegetable goblet.
The meat of it lies, displayed
up-ended, al-dente,
the stub-root aching in its oil.
-"Artichoke" by Robin Robertson

That is one tumescent flowering artichoke, you may be thinking after reading this poem by Robin Robertson. I thought of furniture, specifically the old custom of decorating the four posters of a bed with finials shaped like artichokes, as a symbol of hope. What makes the pairing of this poem and that woodblock print uncanny is that both Robertson and the artist Mabel Allington Royds share Scottish roots; Robertson was born there and Royds moved there to teach at the Edinburgh College of Art.

It turns out that Robin Robertson is far from the first person to connect the artichoke with male potency. In the 16th century, for a woman to east an artichoke was scandalous; this aphrodisiac thistle was reserved for men. It was Catherine de Medici who married King Henry II of France at the age of fourteen in 1533 who announced a change in mores: " If one of us had eaten artichokes, we would have been pointed out on the street. Today young women are more forward than pages at court."

And if you decide to enjoy an artichoke, why not prepare it as the ancient Romans did, with a combination of honey, vinegar, and cumin.

Image:
Mabel Allington Royds (1874-1941)- Artichoke, 1935, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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From A Box Of Old Photographs

September 18, 2017, 1:04 pm

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As you can see, these are very old photographs. If the little blonde girl with the Mary Jane shoes sitting at the left end of the front row is four years old then the date is 1920. Her name is June Williams and she was my mother. She was named for June Tolliver, the heroine of a Broadway play that my grandparents saw at the New Amsterdam Theater on West 42nd Street. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine had been adapted from the wildly successful novel (1908) of the same name by John Fox, Jr. Florence Williams, or Billie as she was affectionately known, decided that if she ever had a daughter, June would be her name, and so it was. Florence is the woman standing at the left end of the back row in this picture.

Billie was an apt nickname for this woman, I think, although she died before I was born so I never think of her as my grandmother; she had her own kind of insouciance and her daughter adored her for that. She knew what forms of birth control could be found in the city, she liked to make gin in the family bathtub during Prohibition, and she sent Norman, her husband, scrambling around a movie theater to search for bugle beads when one of her sheath dresses popped a thread. Her friend Kay married a wealthy bootlegger named Ray from the north shore of Long Island, a location that allowed rum runners to ply their trade with relative impunity and lots of nice chateaux to be had, especially after the movie industry migrated to Los Angeles.

The tennis courts in the background were part of the summer home at Lake Success, in the Town of Great Neck. The name Lake Success is not a descriptor as I once imagined; it is a corruption of the name Sukut, taken from the Lenape Indians along with their land by people like my ancestors. There are no men in this picture because they were back in the city working during the week while the women and children enjoyed a respite from the heat, a custom of the time before air conditioning among the fortunate classes.

Speaking of whom, William K. Vanderbilt purchased the land around Lake Success in 1902 for a summer home for himself and his new bride. Vanderbilt was an enthusiastic yachtsman but by 1904 he had become smitten with anything motorized, be it bicycle, motorcycle, or racing cars, and he set a land speed record at Daytona Beach. He infuriated his Island neighbors with his noisy drag racing ways. One of my mother's uncles was killed in an automobile accident; newly married in 1904, he was thrown from a car he was driving on Christmas Eve of 1905 and hit his head on the curb. Such accidents were not yet common when most people didn't have cars; his bride Rose never got over the shock.

Something about the children in this next photograph has always reminded me of John Singer Sargent's painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Yes there are four children here and only two in Sargent's painting but for me the two children, June at right holding a bouquet of wild flowers and her cousin Ruth at the left, a year older and taller are the story in this picture. Both girls would narrowly escape death from thyroid cancer as adolescents and their relationship was so close that Ruth, who died first, was the last person my mother called for on her own deathbed. This early summer day must have meant something special to the girls; all the photographs taken that day are precisely dated June 28, 1919.

Although this last picture is not dated, on the visual evidence June appears to be about eight years old. This was taken at home in West Orange, New Jersey, in the house built by Norman for his family, and these are Billie's sisters, Lottie and Lillie posing with their niece. Lillie was the caboose baby of the family and the story is rather sad and typical for its time. After begetting two daughters, their father deserted the family for eleven years, indulging his wanderlust for sailing around the world, while knowing that his wife and children would have to return to her parents' home for support. When he reappeared, they made her take him back and there are no photographs ever after that show a smile on her face, and yet Lillie was, by all accounts, a delightful person and her niece's favorite. June was nicknamed Chick for her yellow hair; I still have an envelope of it and after all this time the hair still glows. As for me, I still hope to learn someday what kind of touring car that is parked in the driveway.

Images: from the author's personal collection.

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Elusive Brenda Bullion

September 24, 2017, 5:42 pm

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When I walked into the Corners Gallery last October I had no idea that the owner would turn out to be related to an artist who had made a vivid impression on me on a visit to Ithaca eight years before, a long time to remember an image with no information other than a dry wall text. A single watercolor drawing, the untitled one at left, had been included in an exhibition of prints and drawings Shared Experience at the museum at Cornell University in November, 2008.

The charm of this romantic figure resides in her specificity as much or more than in her self-consciousness and introspection. How the horizontal movement of the scarf softens the otherwise relentlessness of the multiple verticals.

The charm of both drawings and watercolors is their customary intimate scale. They are suited to domestic spaces and invite the viewer to live comfortably with them at length. The gigantism of many recent paintings renders them more suitable to public spaces; how to relate to something that pushes the viewer away, maybe even out the door, makes them arrogant companions.

During the intervening years I made occasional efforts to learn about Brenda Bullion (1939-1992) to no avail. Her early death and the undervaluation of drawing and watercolor when Bullion was working were woven into the scrim obscuring her work.

Ariel Bullion Eklund, the gallery owner, is the daughter of Brenda Bullion.

Visit Corners Gallery

Image: Brenda Bullion - untitled, 1973, crayon and watercolor, Steven Barbash Collection, Herbert F. Johnson Museu, Ithaca, NY.

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Essex Moonrise

October 1, 2017, 6:20 pm

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I've written about this landscape before, one of the much loved and still missed landscapes of my childhood: the coastal marshlands of Essex County, Massachusetts. The Great Marsh, as it fittingly called, enchanted me long before I saw it through the eyes of the artists Arthur Wesley Dow and Martin Johnson Heade.
To name the towns and beaches that border the Great Marsh is, for me like fingering a string of beads, each one more beautiful than the last" Newburyport, Plum Island, Ipswich, Crane Beach, Essex, The Dragon. Moviemakers concur: The Thomas Crown Affair was filmed at Castle Hill in Ipswich and The Witches Of Eastwick at Crane Beach, while The Crucible was shot on nearby Choate Island.

Salt marshes are nature's lungs, their grasslands and tidal estuaries filter out storm water and pollution, thus protecting the fish, insects, mammals, and sea birds that live there and, not incidentally, their human neighbors. But more than that, they are beautiful to behold; the air really does shimmer with a luminance I have seen nowhere else.
John Leslie Breck (1859-1899), who was born at sea near Hong Kong and spent his final years in and around Ipswich, made his most evocative paintings of the littoral zone, that restless, shape-shifting place between land and sea, a objective correlative to his favorite time for painting - the crepuscular hour between day and night. And so it is that the blue marsh estuaries have turned violet and pink. I wonder if Breck had ever had the twilight experience of seeing the earth's shadow in the eastern sky as the sun sets in the west, a demarcation between blue and violet that is a product of particles of the earth's atmosphere. I first saw this as a child living in Newburyport one evening when my parents pointed it out to me from our backyard.

Claude Monet settled his family at Giverny in 1883, just beginning to enjoy some commercial success in his forties, thanks to the efforts of his Parisian dealer Durand-Ruel. He began by renting the house at Giverny, only becoming able to purchase it seven years later when he turned fifty. It was no part of his intention to establish an art colony in the picturesque Norman village but by 1887 the first group of his American admirers had descended on him for the summer: Willard Leroy Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and John Leslie Breck. Breck became an especially close friend of the artist. However a romance with Monet's stepdaughter Blanche ended badly and sent Breck home in 1890. But Breck returned an altered painter, his colors brighter, his brushwork looser, having cast his lot with the plein air or outdoor painters, He died, an apparent suicide, at thirty-nine years old just as critics reckoned that he had come into his own as an artist.

Image:
John Leslie Breck - Essex Massachusetts Moonrise, Breck family estate, courtesy of Boston Center for the Arts.

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The Georgics Of Charles Daubigny & Childe Hassam

October 8, 2017, 2:12 pm

≫ Next: The Garden Is The Center Of The World

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This little beauty, Sunrise-Autumn by Childe Hassam (1859-1935) is not in a museum but how well it would look paired with one that is - Charles-Francois Daubigny's Fields in the Month of June at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University. At the time he painted Sunrise-Autumn Hassam was still a young artist under the influence of the Barbizon School, fresh from his first trip abroad in 1882 and not yet ready to immerse himself in study in Paris at the Academie Julian. In contrast, the Daubigny comes from the last years of a long, successful career, one that has been curiously overlooked until the recent exhibition Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape.

I had never thought much about Daubignyuntil I saw Fields in the Month of June. But there it was and I came to relish the times I sat on a bench in front of it, absorbing it or being absorbed into it, the light coming down from a window high above, my own personal floating world of meadows and agriculture, made seamless by the drive to Ithaca through other similar meadows. It hardly matters whether Hassam painted his meadow in England or the United States, any more than that Daubigny's meadow is French; there is something charming and familiar in this vision of agriculture as human handwriting on the land.

From a family of artists, Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878) had his first lessons at home with his father. Like Hassam after him, Daubigny apprenticed with an engraver; indeed his first exhibited works were prints. His attentiveness to landscape was intensified by the year Daubigny spent with his friend Jules Breton aboard Le Botin, a houseboat converted into a movable studio; the two artists floated along the rivers of northern France, the Seine the Marne, and Oise, on an unmatched peripatetic painting trip.

Without Daubigny, the man who inspired Claude Monet to establish a studio in 1872, the development of Impressionism would have been different. In his day, Daubigny's landscapes were often dismissed as "mere impressions" for his use of rapid brushstrokes to depict fleeting aspects of light. Theophile Gauthier, the author doubling as critic lamented, "His pictures are no more than sketches barely begun." Understanding backward, the specialty of art historians, we now think of Daubigny and his cohort as being more romantic and less naturalistic while it is the Impressionists who are considered more objective in light of what we have since learned of visual perception.

You can read The Georgics by Virgil courtesy of MIT.

Images:
1. Childe Hassam - Sunrise - Autumn, 1884, oil on canvas, 12in. x 18in. Sullivan Goss: An American Art Gallery, Santa Barbara.
2. Charles-François Daubigny, Fields in the Month of June, 1874, oil on canvas, 88in. x 53in., Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY.

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The Garden Is The Center Of The World

October 21, 2017, 4:10 pm

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This is the garden; when you look it's far
too bright and burns your eyes
and so you turn away, although you know
that everything is real, everything you see
is real, and through time life unwinds
and is complete

- Claudio Damiano, excerpt from Il giardino del me amore (The Garden of My Love), Abete, Fraterno, Rome: 1987, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris.

In the beginning was a garden, and not just in religious traditions. The garden, the farm, those places where the human creates a world in an image of the divine, these are the places that capture te imagination.
It is no accident that Horace is the poet who most readily comes to mind when reading Claudio Damiani's verses, full of green enchantment and youthful candor. The lyrics of Horace, poet of Rome's Augustan age, have their corollary in the garden. Horatian scenes of houses, trees, and animals reappear in the garden as a modern Arcadia where ancient moral precepts are made visible in the tug of war between the morality of rules (deontology) and the morality of outcomes (consequentialism). Italian critics have compared his poems to utterances by Francis of Assisi for their freshness. Unfortunately, there are few English translations as yet to judge by.

This problem also hampers us in reading the stories of Giulio Mozzi (b. 1960), iauthor of more than two dozen books, including This Is The Garden, Rochester, NY, Open Letter Press: 2005, and winner of the Premio Mondello when it was originally published in 1993. Only when you have finished reading these very European stories, full of expansively introspective sentences ( “You might say that in some letters, maybe all letters, the important thing is only said after the final sentence, in the silence that follows.”) do you realize how each story is also about a garden, as well as about its human characters, about the pickpocket, the apprentice, the first-time author, etc.

Louis Francois-Philippe Boitte (1830-1906) was a French architect who was appointed official state architect for the Fontainebleau castle in 1877. The drawings here part of a portfolio Boitte at the Villa Medici executed during a stay in Florence, a young architect's heaven in 1860. His portfolios made in Italy and Greece are considered among the finest artistic records made by an architect during the 19th century.

Another memorable Italian garden is a character in Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Images:

1. Louis Boitte - View of the Villa along the tree-lined walkway to the park.

2. Louis Boitte - View of the gardens and the portico.

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