Harry Van Der Weyden: An American Tomalist Abroad

October 22, 2017, 3:59 pm

≪ Previous: The Garden Is The Center Of The World

The first question most art-minded people ask about Harry Van der Weyden (1868-1952) is whether he was descended from the great Flemish painter Rogier Van der Weyden (c. 1399-1464). Art historians answer with a resounding "Maybe."

He was born in Boston, won a scholarship to the Slade School in London at age nineteen, and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1890-1891. Until World War I, he lived near Etaples at Montreuil-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast. During the war Van der Weyden worked as a camouflage officer with the British Royal Engineers from 1916 to 1918 when Etaples was a major transit point and storage depot for the British. He died in London in 1952. Most of Van der Weyden's paintings are in private collections and tonalism, although a small part of his work, showed him at his best.
The sun was almost below the horizon on the evening in 1898 that Van der Weyden set out to paint. In the shadow of the cliffs at left, two men anchor a boat while another man rows toward shore and into the shadows. Looking closely, you find a varied palette of tones has went into the making of this lavender-blue image. The affinity with early photography is obvious in tonalism's monochromatic effects. James McNeill Whistler and George Inness are the two American artists best known for their atmospheric paintings (and in Whistler's case, also prints).

For further reading, visit a review of the exhibition American Tonalism.

Image: Harry Van Der Weyden - Landscape, 1898, Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt.

↧

Bacchus In Autumn

October 23, 2017, 5:31 pm

≫ Next: Fly-Over Season

≪ Previous: Harry Van Der Weyden: An American Tomalist Abroad

What a melancholy sight Bacchus and his four little satyrs make on a cold November day. You can see ice crystals on the grapes so it must be early morning. Imagine the temperature of the lead underneath the gilded plomb dore. Until March, when the women will gather in secret to celebrate the rituals of wine and liberation, the party's over.

The Marsy brothers, Balthazar (c. 1624-1681) and Gaspard (1628-1674) were sculptors employed by King Louis XIV. They created the Fountain of Bacchus for the King's gardens at Versailles, along with the Fountain of Latone, mother of Apollo and Artemis, and the Fountain of Enceladus, the grand trumpeter. If Bacchus was a god of excess, Louis XIV was his fervent acolyte. Fully a third of the cost of the renovations to Versailles was spent on the waterworks to supply its 50 fountains. Thanks to Louis XIV, water is a problem at Versailles to this day.

For furthers reading: Thomas Hedin, The Sculpture of Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1983.
Image: Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le bassin de Bacchus en automne -Chateau de Versailles, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

↧

Fly-Over Season

February 21, 2017, 12:58 pm

≫ Next: Le monde de la douceur

≪ Previous: Bacchus In Autumn

In the world of aerial photography the flyover season is about to begin. Thanks to the unusually warm winter temperatures in the Northeastern United States, snow on the ground is already patchy or the ground is bare, and the leaves will not come out on the trees for some time. Under these conditions, the lines etched on the land by human travail are at their most visible.

More than a century ago much of upstate New York was farmland, cultivated and sectioned off; but the combination of easy farming on the flatlands of the Midwest, improved transportation (think: connecting waterways and railroads) and industrialization in the Northeast left fallow fields, ripe for reforestation. Now some of the old farms that lie south of the Erie Canal are being taken up again, often by Amish and Mennonite families who have moved up to New York from neighboring Pennsylvania. Drive along the Cherry Valley Turnpike (U.S. Route 20) or N.Y.S. Route 80, both roads running more or less from east to west and you can identify these houses by the lack of electrical wires running from the roadside poles.

By the time President Thomas Jefferson took office in 1800, the American farm had already assumed the outlines still in evidence today. The best farms were situated on hillsides facing south, with barns and other sheds forming a screen around the house, the kitchen garden located nearby for protection from the elements, and a wood lot located to the north to act as a windbreak. There were trade-offs, of course, between the richer soil in the valleys versus the longer growing season on the sun-soaked hills. Farms on the north slope of hills often failed to prosper because of the shorter growing season and even today these lots are more likely to be timberland than farmland. A sheltered site for the house also lessened the need for firewood. A farmhouse was located near the top of hill so that a well with pure water would be protected from farm water runoff.

Avoiding the cold was uppermost in the minds of European settlers accustomed to milder winters, followed closely by the belief that the fog and mist that hung over the valleys carried disease. Charles Estienne, author of the popular manual Maison rustique or The Country Farme (London, 1616), certainly thought so. "If ever there be a hill, build upon the edge thereof,making choose to have your lights toward the east but if you be in a cold country, open your lights on the south side, and little or nothing toward the north ....recoup the liberty of the air and a goodly prospect..."

The land is a palimpsest, written on again and again, written over until details of previous times are obscured. By comparison with cities and suburbs, rural areas still offer a rich visual story for those who take the time to look. Now is a good time to take a ride in the country.

John Pfahl (b.1939) is an American photography, a graduate twice from Syracuse University, who now lives and teaches in Buffalo, New York.
For further reading: Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 by John R. Stilgoe, New Haven, Yale University Press: 1983.

Images:
1. John Pfahl - Nursery Topsoil - Winter + Lancaster New York, 1994, Janet Borden Gallery, NYC.
2. John Pfahl - Blue X, Pembroke, New York, 1975, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
3. John Pfahl - Pingry Hill Road, Andover, New York, 1979, Joseph Bellows gallery, NYC.
4. John Pfahl - The Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile, 1994, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

↧

Le monde de la douceur

February 14, 2017, 12:09 pm

≫ Next: Linda Nochlin Looks At Art. Art Looks Back At Her.

≪ Previous: Fly-Over Season

It's not exactly what you may be thinking about today. However, there is a phenomenon the French call le monde de la douceur, meaning a world of gentleness and sweetness, a phenomenon they associate with the new year. Superficially it seems similar to Valentine's Day but its meaning extends to the romance of everyday life, something as real as our darker thoughts, even in the middle of winter. A boy regarding a dandelion puff with singular concentration for instance, or blowing soap bubbles through a wand.

A little harder to see, perhaps, is the harmony in a landscape that humans share with waterbirds and grazing animals (just visible on the hillside).

Two different photographers with two different ways of showing us this douceur (the French word is more expressive than the English translation.) French photographer Daniel Boudinet composes an expansive landscape, an exercise in the symmetry that we can see in the natural world; in contrast the American Sharon Core's recent series of photographs of found compositions in nature, the things we pass by without noticing, draws our attention to the charms of asymmetry.

Images:

1.Vincenzo Balocchi - Young Boy Looking at a Dandelion Puff, c.1960, Museo de Storia della Fotografia (Museum of the History of Photography), Florence.

2. Daniel Boudinet - untitled, a wide view of water and animals before a mountain horizon, 1988, photograph from the series Voyage en Asie (Travels in Asia), Mediatheque, Paris.

3. Sharon Core - Untitled #3, 2015, archival pigment print from sharon core

↧

Linda Nochlin Looks At Art. Art Looks Back At Her.

November 2, 2017, 3:16 pm

≫ Next: Bacchus In Autumn

≪ Previous: Le monde de la douceur

Kathleen Gilje's Linda Nochlin in Manet's Bar at the Olympia is a tribute to a great historian that is as layered as Manet's original; a young woman stands in the public eye, meeting the gaze of all comers. As an aspiring scholar, Nochlin looked beyond the popular Impressionists to their forebears, the Realists, who offered a revolutionary reinterpretation of art history: 'II faut etre de son temps'[“It is necessary to be of one’s time.”] In her studies of the French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), Nochlin saw more than just a magnificent recording eye but more, an encyclopedic knowledge of visual prototypes. Like Courbet, Nochlin would make her mark on history by reinventing it. Gilje began her career as a conservator at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples Italy. From restoration to reinterpretation seemed a natural progression; her 'revised' version of Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Wedding would bring a smile to the face of all but the most hardened aesthetic sensibilities.

She was born Linda Weinberg to a family of secular Jewish intellectuals living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And lucky to grow up just as New York City was becoming the center of the art world, usurping the place long held by Paris, then recovering from the twin devastations of war and Nazi occupation. Vassar College, even in 1947, was no artistic backwater on the Hudson; its campus galleries were hung with paintings by artists as various of Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Kay Sage, Florine Stettheimer and Veira da Silva. Just as important for a developing aesthetic awareness was the presence on campus of women teachers and the school's brilliant background as a feminist institution.

When Nochlin posed the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in Art News (January, 1971), she was already moving beyond its stated premise toward a visioon more complex and more exciting than any previously dared. Nochlin knew that she was creating a new version of art history that would require new materials as much or more than a new theory

Nochlin, together with Ann Sutherland Harris, curated Women Artists 1550-1950, an exhibition that premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1976, followed by a satisfying appearance on Nochlin's home turf at the Brooklyn Museum the following year. If ever an exhibition deserved to be called earth-shaking, this was it. The doubters were forced to take notice. "The history of Western art will never be the same again" wrote John Perrault in Soho Weekly. Even the reflexively misogynistic Robert Hughes, averred called it "one of the most significant thematic shows to come along in years." Museums that had been asked to loan works for the exhibition began to brnig them out of storage for display more often after Women Artists was so enthusiastically received by critics and public alike.

Her interest in art history made Deborah Kass obviously keen to the ways Linda Nochlin turned art upside down and gave it a salutary shake. A cursory look at images from The Warhol Project might lead the viewer to include Deborah Kass in the category of art appropriators that Andy Warhol perfected with his Brillo Boxes. In place of Warhol's cool detachment, Kass offers up heartfelt admiration for her subjects. Orange Disaster - Linda Nochlin is, like others in The Warhol Project, a series of variations on her chosen theme; its title is Kass's smiling critique of Andy Warhol's dead-ended irony. Thank you. Linda Nochlin, you turned us upside down and made us infinitely more than we would have been without your work.

Read an obituary for Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) at New York Times.

For further reading:
Realism by Linda Nochlin, New York, Penguin Press: 1971.
Women, Art and Power by Linda Nochlin, New York HarperCollins: 1988.
Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: the visceral eye by Linda Nochlin, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press: 2006.
Courbet by Linda Nochlin, New York, Thames & Hudson: 2007.

Images:
1. Kathleen Gilje - Linda Nochlin in Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere, 2005, courtesy of the artist.
2. Deborah Kass - Orange Disaster - Linda Nochlin, 1997, Paul Kasmin Gallery, NYC.

↧

Bacchus In Autumn

November 7, 2017, 12:31 pm

≫ Next: A Sapphire Blue Sea

≪ Previous: Linda Nochlin Looks At Art. Art Looks Back At Her.

What a melancholy sight Bacchus and his four sleepy little satyrs make on a cold November day. The enigmatic smile on his face resembles no one so much as the Mona Lisa. The party's over and even morning's natural light is low. Until March, when the Maenads will gather to celebrate with rituals of wine and liberation. As for the ice crystals on the grapes, they suggest this early morning followed a night of serious drinking.

This Bacchus was sculpted in lead and gilded with plomb dore by the Marsy Brothers according to a design by Charles Le Brun, court painter to Louis XIV, a man the king described as "the greatest French artist of all time." And who would dare to argue with a king? Be that as it may, the quartet of fountains depicting the four seasons were among the glories of the first progress of water features to be installed at Versailles. If Bacchus was a god of excess, Louis XIV was his fervent acolyte. Fully a third of the cost of the improvements to Versailles was spent on the waterworks to supply its fifty fountains. And the town that gave the palace its name has been the sole supplier of water ever since. Thanks to Louis XIV, water is a recurring problem at Versailles to this day; the fountains can be turned on for visitors only one Sunday each month.

The Marsy brothers, Balthazar (c. 1624-1681) and Gaspard (1628-1674) were among dozens of sculptors employed by Louis XIV. Along with the fountain of Bacchus (Autumn), they executed Basins for Flora (Spring), Ceres (Summer), and Saturn (winter).

Like the devastation Jupiter rained down on the giants who attempted to storm Mount Olympus, a hurricane swooped down on the palace of the Sun King on Christmas night of 1999. Morning revealed that some 100,000 trees had been felled including many of the oldest specimens dating from the 17th century. Initial fears that the gardens would never recover were proved untrue thanks to heroic efforts by the French government, led by an army of helicopters that landed even before power could be restored. And then, just as in the Sun King's day, once again Versailles became a construction sight, full of dirt and noise.

For his stewardship of the restoration, Alain Baraton, head gardener of Versailles then and now, received so many awards from a grateful nation that he wrote "I have more decorations than a Christmas tree." Baraton's memoir of his life in the world's "grandest garden" was a best seller in France and its charm is evident in translation. A middle child in a family of seven children, Baraton did not excel at school; he recalls his time at horticultural school as being more servitude than liberation. An impromptu visit to Versailles in the summer of 1976 resulted in the dream job he hadn't even imagined: gardener to the Gods.

For furthers reading:
1. Alain Baraton - The Gardener of Versailles: My Life in the World's Grandest Garden, translated by Christopher Brent Murray, New York, Rizzoli: 2014.
2. Thomas Hedin, The Sculpture of Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1983.
Image: Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le bassin de Bacchus en automne -Chateau de Versailles, c.1672-75, photo from the collection of Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

↧

A Sapphire Blue Sea

November 14, 2017, 10:00 am

≫ Next: Stagedoom

≪ Previous: Bacchus In Autumn

“The most beautiful country in the universe inhabited by the most idiotic species.” – Marquis de Sade from Voyage d’Italie, 1775-76.`

The Marquis wrote these words from exile while under threat of imprisonment at home in France, Voyage d'Italie beingthe best face he could put on his scandalous predicament. The peripatetic Stendhal (1783-1824), who served as the French consul to Trieste, wrote that only Naples had "the true makings of a capital." As for the other cities on the Italian peninsula, they were merely "glorified provincial towns like Lyon." Rather mean-spirited commentary to heap on one of the world's oldest cities; when the Greeks arrived in the 8th century BCE they gave the name Neapolis (Greek for 'new city') to their place of exile.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, legends persist that Horace and Virgil wrote there. Beauty does that to people, inspiring poetry and bending the evidence. An old Neapolitan superstition has it that the Possuoli Bay is so beautiful that when moonlight strikes the water even fish fall under its spell. The usually rigorous W.H. Auden insisted, without much evidence, that the German poet Goethe finally lost his virginity in Naples, at the age of thirty-seven.

Would there have been the mass influx of artists in the 18th and 19th centuries without an expanding international art market and the taste for exotic travel writing? Voltaire, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Thomas Jones of Wales, were just a few who came and were beguiled the scenery - and the chance to witness an eruption by Mt. Vesuvius. Although most artists were not so fortunate (!) and had to rely on historical accounts, notably that of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, written, to be sure, before he died on August 24, 79 CE, choked by ash and smoke when he sailed across the Bay of Naples to get a closer look at the eruption that buried Pompeii. Still, it comes as a disappointment to discover that a great and upright painter like J.M.W. Turnerfabricated his Vesuvius From Naples from the accounts of other lesser artists.

Veduta, an Italian word meaning view, has come to be associated with paintings of grand urban vistas, which include large expanses of water. And mountains are helpful, too. Naples has both, including one of the most mythologized and ill-tempered of mountains, the volcano Mt. Vesuvius. One impressive example is The Bay of Possuoli Off the Coast of Naples by the German artists August Wilhelm Julius Ahlborn (1796-1857); it dazzles the viewer with the intense lavender blue of the water, and is typical of its origins. The veduta appears to have sprung from the paintbrushes of northern Europeans struck by the sublimity of beauty and terror in close proximity. Even spare and unromantic images, like Rooftops of Naples by Thomas Jones, of ordinary vernacular buildings that are now familiar from a million photographs, seem to hint at thrilling vistas just out of sight.

Images:

1. August Wilhlem Julius Ahlborn - The Bay of Possuoili Off the Coast of Naples, 1832, National Gallery, Berlin.

2. Thomas Jones (1742-1803)- Rooftops in Naples, Aprile (sic) 1782, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.

↧

Stagedoom

November 21, 2017, 1:25 pm

≫ Next: Threads Of Feeling

≪ Previous: A Sapphire Blue Sea

"El si pronuncian y la mano alargan/
Al primero que llega."

"They swear to be faithful yet marry the first man who proposes."

Sometimes the way in to a picture begins with an emotional frisson. Aesthetic appreciation or historical underpinnings may add layers to the experience but the visceral response never lets go. Stagedoom by Bob Thompson (1937-1966), one of several works the artist made based on Francisco Goya's Los Caprichosof 1795-97, is that kind of work.

In Goya's original (below), all the participants are morally compromised, from the nubile woman offering herself to the highest bidder and the church fathers who guide her, to the watching crowd. Thompson made significant alterations to the image for Stagedoom. Her nakedness emphasizes the young woman's vulnerability at the same time that the mask she wears dehumanizes her by hiding her facial expression. The priests offer no comfort; their teachings imprison her. And who could doubt the evil intentions of the hovering bird-like creatures, a frequent feature in Thompson's paintings. The smiling death's head gives the game away.

Stagedoom, painted in 1962, the year Thompson visited Spain, exhibits a marked understanding of the painful road to womanhood with its potential for physical and emotional violation. In Goya's acerbic prints, Thompson recognized "the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual " he had experienced during his Kentucky childhood.

In an alternative history of post-war art the paintings of Bob Thompson would occupy a prominent place. Though only thirty-nine when he died from a heroin overdose, Thompson (1937-1966) left behind more than a thousand paintings and drawings. Based in New York during the 1960s when the city was the undisputed center of the art world, he was also close to avant-garde jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden, whose likenesses appeared in his works.

Stagedoom, typical of the intimate scale of his watercolors, is reminiscent of such 19th century predecessors as Granet or Harpignes, while his oil paintings combine the influences of Abstract Expressionism with the saturated colors of Pop Art. Unlike Andy Warhol, whose appropriation of advertising images constituted a poke in the eye to all but a knowing few when they were made, Bob Thompson worked in utter, bold seriousness. The artists he revered, Piero della Francesca, Titian, and Nicolas Poussin, all masters of classical European art, gave him a symbolic vocabulary. Their compositions provided Thompson a ready scaffolding for his technicolor nightmares where humans and animals interact, often interchangeably, to illuminate human folly.

“I began to think, my god, I look at Poussin and think he's got it all there. Why are all these people running around trying to be original when they should just go ahead and be themselves and that's the originality of it all...You can't draw a new form... [the] human figure almost encompasses every form there is...it hit me that why don't I work with these things that are already there...because that is what I respond to most of all.” - Bob Thompson

“I think...painting should be like the theater, a presentation of something...To relate, like painters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance... painters were employed to educate the people...they could walk into a cathedral, look at the wall and see what was happening...I am not specifically trying to do that...I have much more freedom, but in a certain way, I am trying to show what' happening, what's going on,,,in my own private way.” - Bob Thompson

Images:
1. Bob Thompson - Stagedoom, 1962, opaque watercolor and charcoal on woven paper, approximately 21 x 18 inches, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica.
2. Francisco Goya - El si pronuncian y la mano alargan, plate number 2 from Los Caprichos, c. 1795-97, intaglio print, Brooklyn Museum.

↧

Threads Of Feeling

December 3, 2017, 5:44 pm

≫ Next: Mary Hiester Reid: Can A Working Girl Ever Win?

≪ Previous: Stagedoom

A swatch of fabric attached to an official form can be a window to another world. Arlette Farge, author of The Allure of the Archives, is aFrench historian of the 18th century, who has used just such unremarkable items to unearth stories of the lives of the poor, usually the least known or regarded actors on the historical stage.

Threads of Feelings, an exhibition based on documents from the archives of the Foundling Hospital of London, used admission registers on abandoned children to reveal lives of desperation - and hope through bits of cloth.

From 1741, the year of its creation, to 1760, each admission registration included a piece of tissue from garments of mother or child for purposes of future identification. Sixteen thousand children were left at the Foundling Hospital during that time. We cannot rely on the caricatures of prostitutes and fishwives familiar from the cartoons of Hogarth (who was a governor of the hospital!) to explain the poverty, illness, or uncertainty that dogged poor families. Its founders hoped the hospital would provide a safer environment for infants who were being left on the streets by their desperate mothers.

A third of the women left swatches from their own precious clothing in the hope that they would be able to reclaim their children in time. Even ribbons, an expensive quantity usually reserved for courtship gifts, were included, along with drawings of hearts and birds, symbols redolent of love. In the event, apparently only 152 children were reunited with their mothers yet we may hope that the optimism of the mother of little Florella Burney proved true. ("Pray let particular care be take of this child. It will be called for again.")

These snippets of cloth have provided a valuable resource to historians. Their survival uncertain; their usual fate was to be reused in making bedclothes or diapers. And no museum wanted the clothing that survived; only the clothes of the wealthy or costumes retained their interest. Mass production of cotton fabric in the early days of the industrial revolution gave the poor access to fabrics full of color and pattern, offering pleasure and pride, values that this exhibition recalls to us.

For further reading:

The Allure of the Archives by Arlette Farge, translated from the French by Thomas Scott-Railton, New Haven, Yale University Press: 2013.

Images:
1. a register for a child left at the Foundling Hospital.
2. register of Florella Burney, linen or cotton printed fabric.
3. register for Maria Widlow, white cotton and pink ribbon.

↧

Mary Hiester Reid: Can A Working Girl Ever Win?

March 13, 2017, 12:57 pm

≫ Next: Rain Blossoms: The Waters Of March

≪ Previous: Threads Of Feeling

What is it about accomplished women that makes them disappear like the Cheshire Cat, leaving behind their works to be sure, but barely a trace of a shadow?

Consider the case of Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921). She was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the same place where novelist John Updike was born. Updike, whose interest in art was kindled by childhood drawing lessons, became an art critic for The New York Review of Books in the 1980s. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where Mary Hiester studied and where she met her future husband, the Canadian painter George Agnew Reid, also exerted a decisive influence on Updike's experience of art. Yet I can find no mention of Hiester Reid's work anywhere in Updike's writing.

Although women were not not encouraged or even allowed to study art during the 19th century, and although they were denied access to the all-important anatomy classes, Mary Hiester, persevered. Not only did she graduate from the Academy but she became an accomplished painter in the then avant-garde Tonalist style, paintings characterized by the subtle use of color to create intimate moods, even in broad landscape vistas.

Furthermore, after Hiester Reid moved to Canada with her husband, she was not confined to the world of home and children. One of the first women to have her work included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, her paintings were admired by critics and earned her a good. living during her lifetime. The Reids eventually made their home at Uplands Cottage in the Wychwood Park section of Toronto, an enclave similar to Roycroft in East Aurora, New York; they spent their summers in northern New York State at Onteora and traveled frequently around Europe.

Hiester's painting of her Wychwood studio contains the flowers and light-capturing objects that so impressed viewers in her work. There is no way to denigrate her mastery of such subjects as 'women's work.' After all, no one apologizes for such flower painters as Pierre-Joseph Redoute and Henri Fantin-Latour. The year after Hiester Reid died, a retrospective of more than three hundred paintings was mounted at the Art Gallery of Ontario in her adopted home of Toronto.

Recent decades have seen such renewed interest in Tonalism that its origin has even become a subject of debate. Do the French get to claim it for the Barbizon school or the Americans lay claim through James McNeill Whistler? May someone soon lay claim to Mary Hiester Reed> she deserves the accolades.

Images:

1. Mary Hioester Reid - The Inglenook in My Studio, c.1905-15, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

2. Mary Hiester Reid - At Twilight - Wychwood Park, c.199, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

3. Mary Hiester Reid - Chrysanthemums - A Japanese Arrangement, 1895, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

↧

Rain Blossoms: The Waters Of March

March 26, 2017, 11:21 am

≫ Next: Cecilia de Madrazzo: Portrait Of The Artist's Wife

≪ Previous: Mary Hiester Reid: Can A Working Girl Ever Win?

Drops of water pearled on pale blue flowers ... rain blossoms. In March all flowers drip with rain but capturing the phenomenon in photographs requires a deft touch. The Viennese photographer Ernst Haas (1921-1986) was an early enthusiast of color photography, a medium he discovered shortly after he moved to the United States in 1951. Haas became a member of the Magnum Agency in 1949, the same year as that other underappreciated photographer, the Swiss Werner Bischof (1916-1954).

Unlike some of his contemporaries who turned their noses up at color, considering Kodachrome a dirty word, Haas quickly became adroit at catching temporary effects, becoming the first photographer to receive a solo exhibition of his color work at the Museum of Modern art in New York City in 1962; there would not be a second such show for another fourteen years. Prejudices, however baseless or silly, fade slowly. Just look at the Cosmo (below), its rain-drenched petals mimicking the shape of an iris for a moment.

The Errant Aesthete, subtitled Essentials for the Cocktail-swilling Set,was a website that often featured the work of Ernst Hass, and although the website no longer publishes, you can still explore Suzanne's archives.

Images:
1. Ernst Haas - untitled, date not given, Ernst Haas Estate.
2. Ernst Haas - Cosmos, California, 1981, Ernst Haas Estate.

↧

Cecilia de Madrazzo: Portrait Of The Artist's Wife

December 11, 2017, 2:16 pm

≫ Next: Mary Hiester Reid: Can A Working Girl Ever Win?

≪ Previous: Rain Blossoms: The Waters Of March

This charming portrait of the artist's wife, like the better known portrait of their two children, was painted just a few month's before Mariano Fortuny's untimely death at age thirty-six. Although the finished picture shows evidence of elaborate planning, the effect is restrained. It is not clear whether the location is outdoors (is that a patch of blue sky reflected in the glass of the window above the door?) or in a salon or somewhere between, say a patio. The placement of the potted plant behind the seated woman appears as perfectly natural as it is deliberate, as are the folds of her striped skirt. The splash of bright blue provided by her sash helps to anchor the palette the artist chose. Like John Singer Sargent, with whom he has frequently been compared, Fortuny preferred to lavish attention on details such as fabric, thereby creating an impression of greater spontaneity in his subject's features. The trope of a space opening into another space is also familiar from a number of Sargent's Venetian paintings. How curious then to remind ourselves that the influence flows in one direction - from Fortunty to Sargent.

When the paintings of the young John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) were first exhibited in Europe, viewers were reminded of the recently deceased Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. Fortuny had died unexpectedly from malaria in 1874; already he was the most renowned Spanish artist on the international stage. One reason he may be less well known today is because of that very brevity. Also, his short life was bookended by two giants of Spanish art: Goya had died ten years before Fortuny was born while Picasso would be born seven years after Fortuny's death.

His contemporaries prized the elegance of Fortuny's work, his command of elaborate detail, and the insinuations of the exotic, characteristics that are now collected under the catchall term Orientalism. Spain's Orientalism was a secondhand acquisition, acquired through centuries of Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula. For Fortuny, as for Sargent after him, realism was more a philosophy than a technique and, in its service, he was on his way to developing a style that we now think of as Impressionism. Cecilia de Madrazzo (1846-1932), survived her husband by almost six decades.

Image:
Mariano Fortuny y Marsal - Cecilia de Madrazzo, 1874, British Museum, London.

↧

Mary Hiester Reid: Can A Working Girl Ever Win?

March 13, 2017, 12:57 pm

≫ Next: A Day Of Rain

≪ Previous: Cecilia de Madrazzo: Portrait Of The Artist's Wife

What is it about accomplished women that makes them disappear like the Cheshire Cat, leaving behind their works to be sure, but barely a trace of a shadow?

Images:

1. Mary Hioester Reid - The Inglenook in My Studio, c.1905-15, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

2. Mary Hiester Reid - At Twilight - Wychwood Park, c.199, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

3. Mary Hiester Reid - Chrysanthemums - A Japanese Arrangement, 1895, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

↧

A Day Of Rain

February 28, 2017, 12:31 pm

≫ Next: Luminance

≪ Previous: Mary Hiester Reid: Can A Working Girl Ever Win?

"I am not in front of nature, I am inside it."
("Je ne suis pas devant la nature, je suis dedans.")
- Pierre Tal-Coat, (translation JL)

Rain trickling down an invisible window in white rivulets intensifies the green world on the other side, or so it appears. Among abstractions in art - and almost anything can become an abstraction if you look at it from a certain angle - the French called their version Tachism for its lyrical qualities and to distinguish it from the crudely testosterone- and alcohol-drenched productions of the American Abstract Expressionist painters.

Tal-Coat (1905-1985), born Pierre-Louis Jacob in Finistere, (the end of the land) the westernmost part of the French mainland, was a self-taught artist who worked in a pottery factory in Quimper. It was only when he was obliged to go to Paris for his military service that he found a group of supportive fellow artists for the first time and absorbed the dominant cubist style. Tal-Coat's portrait of Gertrude Stein won a prize in 1935.

Everything changed when he encountered the antique Chinese landscape paintings from the Song Dynasty (900-1279). Here, centuries before landscape emerged from the background of religious and court paining in Europe, was a fully developed genre that used the technqiues of the brush to express human emotions. Under its influence, Tal-Coat turned from portraying nature through visual perception to using paint to record his immediate emotional responses to nature's ephemera, foam breaking on a rock, raining running down a hillside. In contrast to the unrelenting pessimism of Samuel Beckett, who saw nothing but negations in the artist's later work, I am reminded of some lines from The Outermost House, the naturalist Henry Beston's bestseller first published in 1928. "The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach."
In 1961 Tal-Coat moved to a building at a Carthusian monastery in Normandy where he worked and lived quietly until his death.

Image:

Tal-Coat - Jour de pluie (Day of Rain), 1965, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Quimper.

↧

Luminance

December 25, 2017, 1:22 pm

≫ Next: A Thousand And One Nights - More Or Less

≪ Previous: A Day Of Rain

"No matter what Vermeer may suggest or summarize of the outer world or invite the spectator to imagine, wisdom begins and ends in the room, conceived as a cube of shining space in which the figures and their transitory actions seem forever suspended in light." - Frederick Hartt, in A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall: 1993.

Even bad Presidents make good appointments. When Warren G. Harding, the scandal-prone 29th President of the United States, appointed Andrew W. Mellon to be his Secretary of Treasury in 1921, he was looking for someone to rationalize the recently instituted national income tax system through something Mellon called "scientific taxation." He did not bargain for Mellon, the art collector, who used his tenure at the Treasury Department to lay the foundation for a national gallery of art, to be located in the nation's capitol, and to fill it with his personal collection of Old Masters (Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Botticelli - and Vermeer), to go to the nation at his death. Mellon and, ultimately, all of us, benefited from his perspicacity in choosing his friend Henry Clay Frick to advise him on the finer points of assembling a collection. His choice to purchase Vermeer's Girl With A Red Hat from the Knoedler Gallery in 1925 was entirely his own. Mellon fell in love with the little painted panel just as countless others have before and since; he hung it in an intimate place of honor over his piano.

Although not so obviously based on the delicate glazes that mesmerize viewers of Girl With A Pearl Earring, their cunning use in Girl With A Red Hat harmonizes the muted colors of the tapestry that provides the background for the young woman in her theatrical red hat. And what a hat the artist makes it: feathery strokes of orange shade gradually to vermillion, the underside of the hat definitely deep purple, reflecting light onto her face through flecks of white paint. This is what luminance does, it makes us see light where it is not but ought to be. Luminance is the term of art for the relative brightness that enables us to interpret three-dimensional space in two dimensional representations.

In his own lifetime Vermeer (1632-1675) was a moderately successful painter although his portraits and other commissions were sorely stretched to support the fifteen children Johan and his wife Catharina produced. So it may be unsurprising that no documents in Vermeer's own words have come down to us. Considering the silliness of some of the speculations that have been committed to paper about the origins of Vermeer's paintings, critics might do better to follow Vermeer's own example.

Image:
Johannes Vermeer - Girl With A Red Hat, c. 1665, dimensions: 9 1/8 x 7 1/8, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

↧

A Thousand And One Nights - More Or Less

January 2, 2018, 1:41 pm

≫ Next: Disturbing The Universe: Guido Gozzano

≪ Previous: Luminance

   THE SWALLOWS
in refreshing capes of black satin
they're typing out the new aubade
daybreak just dictated

   WHAT FUN
to see how the gasping train
climbs the ladder of frail ties
to get to the mouth of the tunnel
and be sucked in like a licorice stick

   GIGI
I'm queasy this evening
bring me on of those 7-colored
cocktails like they drink in Paris
I wanna go somewhere over the rainbow

--- three poems by Farfa, translated from the Italian by Fred Chappell, from The FSG Book Of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux: 2012.

Stile Liberty, as Art Nouveau was called in Italy, began more or less as a movement in decorative arts that proved too delectable to be ignored by painters or poets. The English had adopted the French term nouveau from the French, the Italians borrowed the name of Liberty Prints from the English- each thought they had coined the better name for an all-encompassing phenomenon. What is obvious is that the Italian style was more colorful than its northern cousins, and that color lent itself to movement more than to languor. Not to mention smiles and a sly joke or two.

Farfa was the nome di arte of Vittorio Ossvaldo Tommasino, a polymath from Trieste (1879-1964) Futurist who made poetry, pottery, and paintings. These short poems, as translated by the American Fred Chappelle, are typical of the Futurist aesthetic, wringing irony out of compression. He died - accounts differ - after being hit by a car or a motorcycle, not bad for someone who was named a "national champion" of Futurist poetry in 1932.

Discouraged by the drabness and lack of imagination he encountered at the Venetian Art Academy, Vittorio Zecchin took an eight year detour as a civil servant, before having a second try at the art life. It took five years (1909-14) and a dozen panels to complete the commission for The Thousand And One Nights, Zecchin's interpretation of the story of Aladdin. Intended for the lobby of the aptly named Hotel Terminus, the ensemble was split up by the upheavals of war. Zecchin wisely set up his own hybrid laboratory/gallery where he could pursue painting, tapestry, and glass-making all at once and without interference. Zecchin's stylistic debt to Gustav Klimt needs no underlining at this point.
.
Recently the Musee d'Orsay in Paris was fortunate to acquire one of the panels (above) however, like Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (MoMA - NYC and The Philips Collection-Washington, DC) it remains split, some pieces in private collections and some at Ca'Pesaro in Venice,

Image
Vittorio Zecchin - The Thousand and One Nights, 1914, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

↧

Disturbing The Universe: Guido Gozzano

January 10, 2018, 8:21 am

≫ Next: Read Like An Irish Woman

≪ Previous: A Thousand And One Nights - More Or Less

I.
With its unkempt garden, its vast rooms, its fine
seventeenth-century balconies decked with greenery,
the villa seems cribbed from certain verses of mine,
a model villa, a piece of postcard scenery ...

It thinks of its past to ease its present gloom,
of jolly gatherings under ancient oaks,
of legendary feasts in the dining room,
and dances in the great hall, now stripped of antiques.

For where, in better times, the Ansaldos called,
or the d'Azelglios, or this or that contessa,
some motorcar now jerks up, its tires bald,
and hirsute foreigners batter the Medusa,

First comes a bark, then footsteps, then the lazy
creak of the door ... In that hush (think cloister or tomb)
lives Toto Merumeni with his ailing mum,
a grizzled great-aunt and an uncle who's crazy.

excerpt from "Toto Merumeni" by Guido Gozzano, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock, from The FSG Book Of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux: 2012.

"Toto Merumeni", taken from his second collection I colloqui (The Talks, 1911), looks in the rear view mirror like a precursor of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." (I should point out that although T. S. Eliot was working on his "Prufrock" at the same time, it did not appear in print until 1915.) Whereas Guido Gozzano (1883-1916) spent most of his life in his native Turin, tried to study law at the university but dropped out, more attracted by evening literature lessons (Crepusculari Torinesi), There he found an alternative to the pervasive and baneful influence of conservative poet Gabriel D'Annunzio through immersion in Dante, Petrach, and Leopardi. From these illustrious examples he crafted a pessimistic but spiritual vision of a vaguely socialist future. He died at age thirty-two from tuberculosis.

T.S. Eliot called "Prufrock" (1911) his first perfect poem; leaving aside any quibbles about that definition, it is still a poem most poets would be happy to claim as one of theirs. It was "Prufrock" that attracted the attention of another - already successful - American expat - Ezra Pound.

These two men, Toto Merumeni and J. Alfred Profrock, are decidedly older than their fledging creators (Prufrock worries that women will ridicule him for his baldness) but both share a wariness in the face of material progress accompanied as it is by changes in social relations, not least between women and men. If no one has yet done a doctoral thesis comparing these two poems...

My favorite catch-all definition of free verse has been attributed to the Englishman Richard Aldington (1916) who described it a based on cadence, that is "(I)t is the sense of perfect balance of flow and rhythm. Not only must the syllables so fall as to increase and continue the movement, but the whole poem must be as rounded and recurring as the circular swing of a balanced pendulum." That last bit really ups the ante on a poet. While Eliot admired, with some reservations, Walt Whitman's versification, he was deeply moved by the example of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), a short-lived poet (Laforgue was born in Uruguay to French expatriates but moved to France as a child). Laforgue was the first French translator of Walt Whitman so there is simpatico at work here. Both the Symbolists and the Impressionist schools of French poetry have argued over custody pf Laforgue for several times longer than Laforgue's own life.

As for our two imaginary gentlemen, they appear like the Roman god Janus, fated to look both ways, to the future and the past.

Image:
Fortunato Depero - Cavalcata Fantastica, 1920, prate collection - Geneva, courtesy Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

↧

Read Like An Irish Woman

January 17, 2018, 7:45 am

≫ Next: La maison de Biala

≪ Previous: Disturbing The Universe: Guido Gozzano

It begins again. Or it never ended. Take your pick. The recently released Cambridge Companion To Irish Poets covers four plus centuries of Irish poetry but finds room to include only four women along with twenty-six men. So far, more than Irish 250 women writers have signed a pledge that begins: “The Companion is part of a larger process by which the significance of works by women is attenuated as they become inaccessible or obscured, simply by virtue of their absence from canonical textbooks.” This state of affairs is not unique to Ireland, of curse. Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright credits the #MeToo movement for stoking the head of steam powering this action. “Prejudice against women is a universal crime with zero perpetrators. Irish men are lovely, Irish poets are especially lovely – what on earth could be the problem? There is an amazing series of defences between men and this conversation,” Enright notes wryly.

Anne Enright became the inaugural Laureatefor irish Fiction in 2015. Her most recent novel The Green Road (2015) was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize; she won the prize in 2007 for The Gathering.

I offer a few suggestions from my own recent reading for your delectation and look forward to yur responses.

"For two days people have been coming and going and now there is something near. She wishes everyone would go home and let the house be quiet again. The summer is gone. Every days the leaves fall off the trees and blow down the avenue." - excerpt from Academy Street

Tess Lohan is a little girl living in rural Ireland whose world is irrevocably bent when her mother died from tuberculosis. Mary Costello's debut novel Academy Street takes its title from the street where Tess Lohan finds a home when she emigrates to New York City. A nurse, Tess is a quiet character, often overlooked by others, yet her seven decades are full of acute observation and passionate emotion. Her lonely childhood has made it difficult for Tess to connect with other people, especially men. She has a child but as he grows up they grow apart. Costello compels us to acknowledge how homesickness and unattended sexuality shadow a life.

"There now. There now. That was just life. And now." - excerpt from A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing

What Anne Enright calls "bog gothic" is the trio of a mentally troubled mother, disabled brother, and a pervert of an uncle who form the cast of Eimear McBride's novel. Told through the brother, whose brain damaged condition is the cause of the girl's guilt as well as her only solace, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing is a succinct, difficult book to read, but never less than riveting. According to fellow author Anne Enright, it took Eimear McBride nine years to find a publisher for this startling first novel. McBride, born 1976, is from a generation that knows it stands on the achievements of Edna O'Brien and says frankly, "I'm sick of having to live the agenda of angry men."

"On the 6th of April 2012, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces, 11, 521 red chairs were laid out in rows along the eight hundred metres of the Sarajevo high street. One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425 days of siege. Six hundred and forty-three small chairs represented the children killed by snipers and the heavy artillery fired from the surrounding mountains." - excerpt from The Little Red Chairs

Even writers you think you know well can surprise you. In her first novel in a decade, Edna O'Brien, Ireland's most famous living writer, creates an undisputable masterpiece (there, I used that word!). The Little Red Chairs is large, but no larger than need be, spectacularly plotted, and has a central character who shifts shape as the novel unfolds. A war criminal who has fled his home in the Balkans, he washes up on the shore of Ireland. The local garda don't quite manage to arrest him, a nun offers to test his claim to be a holistic healer, and a lonely woman named Fidelma challenges him to give her a child.

O'Brien's sharp eye for the telling details of modern life is no surprise, as is her clear-eyed assessment of the grittiness of Irish life. That she moves between rural Ireland and cosmopolitan London we take for granted from the author of The Country Girls Trilogy from the 1960s. What is dazzling is the way that she moves between the minds of her characters with utter conviction a conviction we marvel at as we accept it. Leavened with mordant humor that may seem surprising but is utterly true to life.

Read the article "A Tipping Point " at The Guardian.

For further reading:
A Woman Without A Country by Eavan Boland, New York, W.W. Norton: 2014.
Academy Street by Mary Costello, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux: 2015.
The Green Road by Anne Enright, New York, W.W. Norton: 2015.
A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press: 2014.
The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien, New York, Little, Brown and Company: 2016.

Images:
Alan Betson for The Irish Times - Anne Enright, 2015
unidentified photographer for The Irish Times, Mary Costello, 2014
Eric Luke for The Irish Times - Eimear McBride, 2016
Bryan O'Brien for The Irish Times - Edna O'Brien, 2015

↧

La maison de Biala

January 26, 2018, 1:37 pm

≫ Next: Joan Murray: Poet From New York

≪ Previous: Read Like An Irish Woman

There is no better time to revel in gorgeous color than in the middle of winter.

"I always had the feeling that I belong where my easel is." - Janice Biala.

Biala (1903-2000) was born in Biala Podlaska in Poland; her given name was Schenehaia Tworkovska but she took a name from her birthplace as her professional name. Curious perhaps, given her peripatetic life and her lack of ties to any single place, or maybe an affectionate nod to her childhood home.

"I have always Matisse in my belly." - Janice Biala

So Lloyd Goodrich, writing in The New York Times in the 1930s, was early to sense a connection between Biala and the Fauve painters, although I think he picked the wrong Fauve when he named Andre Derain. In retrospect, Henri Matisse is the obvious choice. But that may be because Biala subsequently formed so many friendships with artists of the New York School, those exuberant users of color in abstract compositions, who were also indebted to Matisse's example. After all, Matisse was still alive and paintings.
Biala seems not have been bothered by any demarcation lines between realism and abstraction, but then she was not only a New Yorker. She was French, and European, and before that she was Polish. Or, again as in the later paintings of Pierre Bonnard, the picture plane is there to played with. In Canaries in Their Cages, the birds are spectators to the real show - strips of venetian blind and sunlight traversing two separate spaces with compositional mastery.

There is a playful intimacy in Biala's paintings that never lapses into sentimentality. Wilted tulips or a kitchen that looks to be a utilitarian, even unisex, room in a modern apartment rather than the workshop of an immiserated housewife, take the place of the sensuous odalisques that appear, sometimes incongruously, in Matisse. But then nudes have a way of doing that in the works of painters in any style you can name. On a more technical note, Biala using more shading than Matisse and the white areas of her canvases are not fetishized, either. Art historians still argue over the relationship between Fauvism and Abstract Expressionism, the bridge being the bold use of color. Biala brought a unique intelligence to the orchestration of color and form, as you can see.

The Tworkowska family immigrated to the United States in 1913 because of political unrest in Europe. Biala and her older brother Jack Tworkov, also a future painter (in the Abstract Expressionist style) both studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Arts Students League in New York. The two also hitch-hiked together from New York to the Provincetown art colony in Massachusetts where they became friends with Charles Demuth and William and Marguerite Zorach. It was William Zorach who suggested that Biala alter her name to differentiate it from her that of brother Jack. Was this a hint of the difficulties that his wife Marguerite had in keeping her work - and her name - distinct in the public mind?

On a visit to France in 1930 Biala met and fell in love with British novelist Ford Madox Ford and that was that; she stayed in France until 1939, by which time Ford had died and there was political unrest roiling Europe once again. In the meantime she received several much admired gallery exhibitions in New York. Although she eventually married an Alsatian artist in New York and moved back to Paris in 1947, she always maintained a studio in the United States.

Biala’s paintings are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Images:
1. Biala - Horse and Carriage, 1983, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.
2. Biala - Canaries in Their Cages, 1986, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.
3. Biala - Five Tulips, 1997, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.
4. Biala - Blue Kitchen, 1969, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.

5. Biala - La maison de Biala, 1985, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.
6. Biala - Vase fond noir - faude rose en haute - la rose, 1976, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.

Janice Biala

↧

Joan Murray: Poet From New York

January 30, 2018, 2:56 pm

≫ Next: Gaslight: Jozsef Rippl-Ronai's Park At Night

≪ Previous: La maison de Biala

We old dudes. We

White shoes. We

Golf ball. We

Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We

Palm Beach. We

Vote red. We

Soon dead.

- "We Old Dudes" by Joan Murray, Poetry Magazine, July 2006

Joan Murray (b.1945) is an American poet whose verse novel Queen Of The Mist

is based on the true story of the first person to go over the Horseshoe at Niagara Falls and survive, a woman named Annie Taylor who dared the feat in 1901. Although this has been known for more than century, most school children still learn about the first man to duplicate Taylor's feat. Even Wikipedia can only bring itself to state that Taylor is known for "falling down Niagara Falls in a barrel on October 24, 1901. The words we use matter; that's why poetry can be so powerful, I think.

Find more about The Visitor: Poems From the Eastman House by Joan Murray with photographs by Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934).
Murray has also been a poet in residence at Olana, the historic home, now a museum, to the painter Frederic Edwin Church (18261900).

For further reading:
Swimming For The Ark: New and Selected Poems, Buffalo, White Pine Press: 2015
Dancing On The Edge, Boston, Beacon Press: 2002
Looking For The Parade, New York, W.W. Norton: 2000
Queen Of The Mist: The Forgotten Heroine of Niagara, Boston, Beacon Press: 1999
The Same Water, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press: 1990

Images:
1. Gertrude Kasebier - Amos Two Bulls, Dakota Sioux, c.1900, Library of Congress.
Gertrude Kasebier - Dorothy, 1903, private collection, courtesy of Artnet.

↧

Latest Images