Gaslight: Jozsef Rippl-Ronai's Park At Night

February 7, 2018, 11:26 am

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"Paris will be very beautiful in autumn...The town here is nothing, at night every thing is black. I think that plenty of gas, which is after all yellow and orange, brightens the blue, because at night here the sky looks to me - and it's very odd - blacker than Paris. And if I ever see Paris again, I shall try to paint some of the effects of gaslight on the boulevard."

- Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, in a letter #500

Ethereal and atypical, this delicate pastel by Jozsef Rippl-Ronai is suggestive of much that is specific to the period when it was created (c.1892-95). If you think of the works being created at the time by the Belgian symbolists, you can imagine its atmosphere is vaguely anxious. The cluster of tree trunks appear as insubstantial as a group of hovering ghosts. Rippl-Ronai creates this effect by making them appear as they would in a photographic negative: they are pale against the dark night. And speaking of the Belgian, we will see similar trees in the 20th century paintings of a another Belgian, Leon Spilliaert (1861-1946), their (primarily) vertical lines suggesting interpretations as various as their individual trunks.

Like William Degouve de Nuncques' pastel Nocturne in the Parc Royale, Brussels, also in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Rippl-Ronai's Un parc la nuit is a love letter to artificial illumination. We moderns may think about light pollution or the Dark Sky Society that supports the mission of astronomers but to people of the 19th century, gaslights offered the tantalizing prospect of nightlife, the nocturnal excitement offered by theaters, cafes, clubs, and bars. We enjoy Un parc la nuit for the evanescent aesthetic it embodies but it can enrich our experience if we understand some measure of what its contemporaries saw in it.

Although the artist does not identify a location, he was living in Paris at the time and the cast-iron lamp posts peppered the French capitol; there were many thousands of them in place by the 1890s. Robert Louis Stevenson, an enthusiast of the new lamps, called them "domesticated stars." When they were superseded by arc lights, he mourned their passing. The lights hint at the presence of houses and roads in the distance, or maybe just more gaslights

Jozsef Rippl-Ronai (1861-1927) was from Kaposvar, Hungary. He arrived in Paris in 1888, where he lived until 1901. His painting My Grandmother attracted the interest of Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, who invited him into their group Les Nabis (Hebrew for Prophets), where his nickname was, naturally enough, the Hungarian Nabi. When Rippl-Ronai returned home to Hungary he brought back with him the latest developments in art. Nothing the Hungarian artist ever did rivaled the glitter and magic of Un parc la nuit.

While in France he also became friends with the sculptor Aristide Maillol. His portrait of Maillol won a gold medal at Vienna in 1914. In 1925, Rippl-Ronai was invited by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to contribute a self-portrait to their gallery of self-portraits.

To read more about the friendship between Jozsef Rippl-Ronai and Aristide Mailloll.

Image:
Jozsef Rippl-Ronai - Un parc la nuit (A Park at Night), c.1892-185, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

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Patricia Chidlaw: Space,Time

February 13, 2018, 9:20 am

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Wonderful is this wall of stone,
wrecked by fate.
The city buildings crumble,
the bold works of the giants decay.
Reefs have caved in, towers collapsed.
Barred gates have gone,
gateways have gaping mouths,
Hoarfrost clings to the mortar.
- anonymous poet, from The Battle Of Malden And Other Old English Poems, edited by B. Mitchell, London: 1965

Caught between the Romans and Christians; caught between a thousand year old organization of space and a new one taking form that we are too immersed in to fully comprehend, we are of (at least) two minds about the vernacular landscape we have made.

Superficially, they may look like street photography, but the paintings of Patricia Chidlaw are the creations of a different sensibility in a different medium. A photographer may choose among negatives for the best one and that one may implicitly refer to moments before and after the picture was taken, whereas a painter works - and reworks - a single canvas until it satisfies her intentions.

In the current exhibition Patricia Chidlaw: The Moving Picture Show at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery in Santa Barbara, California, the show in the title is often viewed from the vantage point of an implied passerby, possibly on foot but more likely inside a car. This immediately gives us a sense of the familiar, that we have seen these places before. But look longer at many of the paintings and you notice that time is just as much their subject.

The clock was introduced in Europe circa 1300 and the coordination of times from place to place was a byproduct of the demands of modern transportation, specifically of the railroads. Paul Tillich, theologian, defined tragedy as coming from the gods of space, whereas justice belongs to "the God who acts in time an through time, united the separated spaces...."

And so the question arises: do we value a sense of space more than a sense of freedom, which is temporal, because we can see it with our eyes (actually, scientists have the brain as the seat of sight). Whichever side of the question one comes down on, there is widespread agreement that roads disturb the peace and cause radical change by muting the distinction between the private and the public.

In Under the 280 an elevated highway casts a mammoth shadow over its surroundings and also functions as a de facto proscenium framing the view of a low rise street from an earlier era. The woman in No Vacancy stands inside a "vintage" and rare phone booth stands under a motel sign that announces their rooms have cable television. It may be titled Sunrise at the Palace but the Art Deco style theater looks as though its best days were over when the Deco style became passe.

The pedestrian ordering of life that goes back hundreds of thousands of years has only recently been forced to live side by side with a new type of road and a myriad of new metaphors. Easier to impose on the sparsely settled North American continent by newcomers than on Europe, where most of them came from, the freedom to move from place to place and the freedom to use space as you see fit are not necessarily harmonious.

Streets are not just for movement from place to place; they are also places of work and socializing, sometimes they are even used for a refuge of privacy and solitude, uses that became problematic once humans got behind the wheel. I'm guessing that The Red Chair is not a castoff but rather a seat for sociability. And I fancy the idea that the goldfish in Fish Bowl, looking out the window may have the red chair in view.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1991), was a pioneer in the study of cultural landscape and founder of the magazine Landscape in 1951. He was known for his complex and humane stance on the state of what we call the environment than some radicals of recent decades, commenting that "death is seen as merely the first step in the producing of compost," a credo that resembles an early but short-lived Christian heresy. Jackson, who was born in Dinard, France, taught at Harvard and lived in the American southwest for several decades, His peripatetic life supplied the intimate familiarity with both new and old landscapes that characterized his writing. Jackson had a toleration and, more than that, a taste for the contradictions in human actions.

Although she was born in San Francisco, Patricia Chidlaw's childhood was, like Jackson's a peripatetic one; her father was a military officer who was stationed in Germany and then in France, where Patricia first encountered art in its museums, cathedrals, and even flea markets. When she began her university art education in 1969, she settled in Santa Barbara, where she now lives.

Images: by Patricia Chidlaw, 2017, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara
1. Under the 280
2. Sunrise at the Palace
3. No Vacancy
4. The Red Chair
5. Fish Bowl

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Consider The Olive Tree

February 25, 2018, 1:41 pm

≫ Next: Georges Le Brun: The Man Who Passed By

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"Nobody knows how long it takes to kill an olive.
Drought, axe, fires, admitted failures. Hack one down,
grub out a ton of mainroot for fuel, and next spring
every side-root send up shoots. A great frost
can leave the trees seedless for years; they revive.
Invading armies will fell them. They return
through the burnt-out ribs of siege machines.

Only the patient goat, nibbling its way down the ages
has malice to master the olive. Sometimes, they say,
a man finds an orchard, fired and goat-cropped
centuries back. He settles and fences;
The stumps revive. His grandchildren family prosper
by the arduous oil-pressing trade. Then wars
and disease wash over. Goats return. The olives
go under, waiting another age.

Their shade lies where Socrates disputed.
Gethsemane's withered groves are bearing yet."

- "The Olive Tree" by Mark O'Connor, Collected Poems, Alexandria, (N.S.W.), Hale & Iremonger: 2000.

Perhaps it was because I had been thinking about olive trees, but when I looked at Robin Gowen's painting Shades of Shadows VI, I thought what a civilized landscape. The trees and, even more, the hedgerow in the background at right are signs of a well tended meadow. And the light washing over everything could easily be the light in Provence although it is not.

Writing to his editor, Richard Olney, an American expatriate painter and cookbook author, gave his reasons for living in France and the penultimate one was "the presence of olive trees in the landscape." A civilized answer

Lost in the labyrinth of history, the Olea europea, or edible olive, was first collected in the wild, probably in the Levant; certainly it is one of the earliest cultivated crops that we know of. Evidence that the olive tree was farmed successfully on the island of Crete dates back to c. 3500 B.C.

The oil of the olive has been sacred to many cultures. By the time of Homer (c. 900 B.C.), olive oil had become a luxury good, used to anoint the human body for ceremonial occasions. (An olive tree appears in Book XXIII of The Odyssey,being the center post of the marriage bed). In The Odes (c. 13 B.C.) the Roman poet Horace testified to the olive's delectable qualities as food: "As for me, olives, endives, and smooth mallows provide sustenance." According to the Bible, it was an olive leaf that the dove brought back to Noah's ark.

Mark O'Connor (b. 1945) is an Australian poet who has collaborated on projects with nature photographers.

Robin Gowen (b. 1957)is an American artist who was raised in New Hampshire and Nigeria. In recent years she has moved around the western United States.

Image:
Robn Gowen - Shades of Shadows VI, 2017, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.

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Georges Le Brun: The Man Who Passed By

March 14, 2018, 7:52 am

≫ Next: Spring Violets And A Perfect Poem

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The triptych is a familiar form in painting, long associated with Christian religious subjects. What we have here in Georges Le Brun's La ferme de la Haase (The Haase Farm) is something quite different, his affectionate rendering of his native Flemish countryside and a rich source of inspiration. And we know that Le Brun had seen his nation's most famous triptych.

Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece ( completed in 1432) is arguably the greatest work of art in Belgium, one that has inspired generations of visitors to make a pilgrimage to this Flemish city. To grow up surrounded by the glorious works that artists created during the period when the Burgundian royal court sat in Flanders and not be affected by them would be difficult to imagine, especially for aspiring artists. What originated as a painterly arrangement of the metaphysical world became an organizing principle in paintings by Fernand Khnopff. (1858-1921).

Roughly contemporary, the artist Georges le Brun (1873-1914) felt the pull of those early Flemish primitive painters, too. "I remain convinced that being able to draw consists not so much in making no mistakes; but rather in revealing the individual psychological character of people and things by a judicious accentuation of every typical irregularity. There is more art, more feeling and more poetry in one realist work done in the style of the primitive or one of the minor Dutch artists than in the stuffy compositions of the great masters."

There are other similarities, too. Le Brun used the combination of charcoals and pastel to create a personal symbolism, notable for excellent draftsmanship. Although Le Brun traveled, spending three months in Italy in 1900, the landscape he became attached to emotionally was the high fens (Haut Fanges) of the Ardennes in eastern Belgium. During his times in Brussels, the lawyer/collector Octave Maus helped to advance the young artist's career, commissioning articles from Le Brun for his magazine L'Art Moderne. And Le Brun, as much as Khnopff, was a master of ambiguity.

Although Le Brun's symbolism never quite gives up its meaning, it is situated in the everyday world. His depictions of quiet interiors and the unreachable aura that attaches to his human figures have invited comparisons to his contemporary, the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi. The reading woman in The Vestibule reminds me of Seuart's charcoal drawing of a floating woman (Art Institute of Chicago), found at last. Le Brun had married Nathalie de Rossart of Brussels in 1904. The couple bought a house in Theux, a small town in the Ardennes, where they had two children: Andre, born 1905 and Joan, born 1907. In Le Brun's interiors, even empty rooms suggest domestic life in progress, if only by the sight of a coffee pot warming on a stove.

The elaborate geometry of the vestibule is suggestive of some greater significance than its emptiness as is the wash of light where we might expect shadows.

A similar image whose title gives a different emphasis, The Man Who Passes directs us to regard its human as its subject. Technically, what makes these images appear odd is that the artist placed his focal point in the center of the image, violating a basic precept of composition. As a result, the viewer's expectations are upended. A scene that appears at first ordinary may be the artist's intimation of time and space stretching and curving before our eyes.

Le Brun heightened the symbolism in his pictures by using a limited palette Le Brun works with. Compared to them, the mural (at top) La ferme de la Haase uses the same media to more realistic ends; we can imagine ourselves looking out a window at the fen lands.

Born in Verviers in 1873, Georges Le Brun grew up in a privileged environment. His life was marked by regular changes of of scenery and incessant journeys between Verviers, Brussels, and the Ardennes. His love of nature found no outlet in medical school so he resigned and after a few months he registered at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels.

Belgium in the nineteenth century was at the forefront of industrialization and for several years Le Brun apportioned his time between painting and working as a representative for a steel company although he deplored its effects on the countryside and the peasants who bore the brunt of its upheavals. In 1899 he exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Ghent and participated in the group La Libre Esthétique. From 1903 to 1908, he collaborated on the magazine L'Art Moderne where he defended the works of the Nabi artists in France.
While on combat duty with the Belgian Army, Georges le Brun disappeared near the Ysaer on October 28, 1914. His body was never found.

1. La ferme de la Haase, 1913, water and pastel, private collection, Belgium\
2. The Vestibule, c.1909, charcoal and pastel, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. The Man Who Passes, 1900, pastel and charcoal, Musee Communale de Verviers.

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Spring Violets And A Perfect Poem

March 21, 2018, 4:53 pm

≫ Next: Robinson Jeffers: On The Nature of Nature

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In this little urn is laid
Prudence Baldwin, once my maid,
From whose happy spark here let
Spring the purple violet.

- "Upon Prue, His Maid" by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), from The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Edition, ed. Arthur M. Eastman, New York, W.W. Norton: 1970.

Like the wood violets (and the daffodils) of March, this perfect little poem moves beyond the dichotomy of life and death to the transcendent vision of regeneration.

A child of Cheapside and one of seven children, Robert Herrick's father died when the boy was only a year old. Apprenticed to an uncle at sixteen, Herrick went on to graduate from Cambridge University in 1617 and was ordained as a minister of the Church of England in 1623. Ousted from his vicarage in 1647 during the English Civil War, he campaigned for his own restoration after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Herrick never married. Hesperides, published in 1648, is a collection of some 1,200 of Herrick's lyric poems.

Image: Jean-Francois Miller - Narcisses et violettes (Narcissus and Violets), 1867, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

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Robinson Jeffers: On The Nature of Nature

March 29, 2018, 11:16 am

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The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.
- "Fire on the Hills" by Robinson Jeffers, from The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, Palo Alton, Stanford University Press: 2001.

A hillside, a landslide. How easily one becomes the other when the elements move. Wind and fire, then rain, caused the recent mudslides near Santa Barbara. Devastation of a kind that has happened before, as "Fire on the Hills" by Robinson Jeffers reminds us. Beauty, the poet warns, is another face of nature's cruelty.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet whose favorite subject was the natural world of the central California coast. Educated in France, Germany, and Switzerland before he landed at UCLA, Jeffers settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea in the 1920s. He coined the term "inhumanism" to describe the self-centeredness that blinds humans to the beauty of the natural world; for this he prescribed learning to "uncenter" ourselves. Uncentering seems akin to panpsychism, the belief that the human mind is part of everything in the universe, an idea that goes back to the ancient Greek only to reappear episodically throughout history. His opposition to U.S. participation in World War II damaged his poetic reputation but concern for the environment has brought renewed interest in his poems.

Alexis B. Many (1878-1937) was a transplanted Hoosier from Indianapolis who lived most of his adult life in Washington, D.C. and spent many summers painting in California. Enamored by the bright light and dramatic colors of the landscape, Many even became a member of the California Art Club. The family name is French; both of his parents were born in Paris.

Image:
1. Alexis B. Many - Laguna Bluffs, 1921, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.

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William Henry Hunt: A Master Watercolorist

April 6, 2018, 12:43 pm

≫ Next: Exploding, Melting. Ceramics Of Takuro Kuwata

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Primroses and Bird's Nest, the flora and fauna of early spring. I had a close look at a bird's nest when a robin built one atop the air conditioner on my balcony a few years ago. The south-facing balcony provided warmth and shelter from the wind and air conditioner stayed mute until the nest was vacated.

At first glance you could easily take Primroses and Bird's Nest for a photograph. But it is a watercolor painted by William Henry Hunt and it is a startling yet altogether typical example of his work. The Englishman was known for the marvels of his technique in this notoriously tricky medium, combining transparent washes of color to tint the paper with opaque areas of gouache sitting on the paper like acrylics or oils, sometimes scraped to create texture, as you can see in the velvety primrose leaves. And there is his unerring eye for color evident in those robin's eggs.

John Ruskin, arguably the most influential art critic in 19th century England, described William Henry Hunt as the finest still life painter the country had ever produced. Hunt (1790-1864) lived a long and apparently uneventful life in London, only uneventful if you discount his paintings.

Image:

William Henry Hunt - Primroses and Bird's Nest, 1840s, Tate Gallery, London.

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Exploding, Melting. Ceramics Of Takuro Kuwata

April 15, 2018, 11:57 am

≫ Next: The Cottagers: Camillo Inocenti

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Two ceramic tea bowls. The yellow bowl embellished with gold seems to whirl in psychedelic space while the ice cream pink bowl could be melting like a limp Salvador Dali watch. They were created by Takuro Kuwata (b. 1981 in Hiroshima) a Japanese artist who has been described as a punk ceramicist. Other ceramicists see in him a mysterious potter who has perfected techniques unknown to most. Drawing on the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi Kuwata often emphasizes instability in a medium with a long-standing tradition. Kuwata himself studied with masters of classical Japanese ceramics at Kyoto Saga University of Arts.

The Japanese term for the tea ceremony, cha no yu, meaning "hot water for tea," points to the lack of handles on the bowl; the drinker is meant to cup the tea bowl in the hands to feel the warmth of the tea with. The tea ceremony became popular in Japan during the 15th century, two centuries before the development of glazed embellishment. A custom celebrating refinement was bound to reconsider its humble earthenware implements when a new decorative technology appeared.

Ceramics are among the oldest objects recovered by archaeologists. A direct transformation of earth into new objects by human hands, ceramics is a combination of utilitarian design and fine art, a topic for endless debate. In most countries potters have a hard time earning a living but not in Japan where ceramics has been a vibrant art for millennia.

Peter Voulkos, an American ceramicist who began working in the 1950s, was influenced by abstract expressionist painting at that time but it took awhile for the fine art world to notice. A connection is also apparent in Takuro Kuwata’s work. The fine art word doesn’t know much about kiln firing or how the amount of grog in a clay or a glaze affects the outcome; if asked, most would say a grog is a hot alcoholic drink.

Images:
1. Takuro Kuwara - Tea Bowl, Salon 94, NYC.
2. Takuro Kuwara - Tea Bowl, 2017, porcelain, glaze, pigment, steel, Salon 94, NYC.

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The Cottagers: Camillo Inocenti

June 9, 2017, 9:26 am

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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 from the outside 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 - to decamp during 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 Innocenti'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 while 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. 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 academic rules. 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. 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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The Prodigious Michele Cascella

June 20, 2017, 10:14 am

≫ Next: Luigi Ghirri: An Anthropologist Of The Metaphysical

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He was a prodigy, there was no 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, Michele 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 the 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 the visual bits he took from each of 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 working together but not in the usual academic way. Cascella is fearless in using bright colors (his debt to Van Gogh) 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 were often Cascella's subject but seldom more effectively than in Orangerie. He usually depicts orchards as pure landscape, absent their human gardeners. Here he shifts the focus to a young girl at work, staking and pruning, his subject, underlining the domestic element that makes a landscape out of nature. Her pose appears, appropriately, reverential in this Edenic setting.

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. That Michele far outstripped his younger brother appears to have caused not too much rancor.

When Basilio judged that the boy was ready to exhibit in public, he arranged a show 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 Michele Cascella was ready to take his place among the cultural set in the city.

In another prodigious move, the twenty year old artist began an affair with 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 those of some who succeed early. He 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. Cascella 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: An Anthropologist Of The Metaphysical

July 3, 2017, 9:48 am

≫ Next: Spring Rounds: Takahashi Rikio

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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 the photographer is - and where exactly is he in relation to the other elements in the picture? Has he risen like Neptune from some watery deep just beyond the frame? And when you learn that his name is Luigi Ghirri, do you wonder why that name is not more 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 he was moved 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 that became a signature of his photographs. He brought the eye of an anthropologist to bear on the seemingly unremarkable sights that surround us everyday but with an intensity that has been described as metaphysical, a word often applied to artists of his native Emilia-Romagna region, like Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. Ghirri called these works 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 northern Italy, a temperate area of broad fertile plains fed by the Po River, created millennia ago when the sea retreated, leaving marshlands behind. The aspiring artist moved to Modena, a small city but no backwater, located near Bologna, the regional capitol and proud home to 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 impact on the public. His first book Kodachrome, published in 1978, featured the tightly cropped images that would become his signature.
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 represent what he saw 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.

↧

Spring Rounds: Takahashi Rikio

May 28, 2018, 2:19 pm

≫ Next: Odilon Redon's Renaissance Portrait

≪ Previous: Luigi Ghirri: An Anthropologist Of The Metaphysical

Early Spring is a remarkable work on its face, a combination of realistic and abstract elements for the eye to feast on and the imagination to wonder at. A dash of a primary color that may be a feather and a large thumb-print like black stroke leading off the edge of the paper are the strong marks in a composition of delicate pinks, lavenders, yellows, and amber.

Takahashi Rikio (1917-1991) was admired by his peers for his use of these delicate hues associated with the Kyoto practitioners of sosaku hanga or 'creative prints.' Takahashi maintained a consistent luminosity, difficult to achieve in woodblock prints, that has been likened to yayoi, the aspect of calm and elegance of the Japanese spirit. He achieved this difficult feat by printing in extremely thin layers while, at the same time, adding irregular blocks of color that look as though they had been applied with a paint brush.

When a wood block is printed on, the texture of the wood grain will appear as if it had been sprayed on the block's surface. This evanescent appearance becomes the background for cuts made by a knife or burin. When two or three colors are overlapped in this manner the grain takes on the look of a layer of gauze.

Takahashi began working with abstract forms but the intensity of his concentration always suggested possible layers of meaning. Just so, the longer we look at his images the more we convince ourselves of the inevitability of incident.

Takahashi was born in Tokyo: his father was an artist and by the age of seventeen the young man was the assistant manager of the father's photographic studio. In 1944 he was conscripted into the Japanese Navy as a war photographer. After spending two years, 1962-63 at the California Institute of Art, Takahashi's work became known in the West. His own words are worth remembering as we admire Early Spring. "It is impossible to speak about my work while looking at a book or a photographic reproduction of it. It is like scratching an itch while wearing an overcoat. Flat reproductions are different from the actual work."

Image:
Takahashi Rikio - Early Spring, 1963, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Odilon Redon's Renaissance Portrait

June 12, 2018, 12:15 pm

≫ Next: Frieze: The Renaissance Art of Marcia Marcus

≪ Previous: Spring Rounds: Takahashi Rikio

She could be descended from a Renaissance woman, or at least the portrait of one. Odilon Redon's Madame Arthur Fontaine (Marie Escudier) was made in 1903 but its subject is presented with all the signifiers of an unusual Renaissance painting that Redon and his contemporaries had seen and studied at the Louvre. Here is an obviously well-born woman, beautiful and virtuous as well can see by her modish dress and elegant profile as she bens studiously over he needlework. The left-facing profile and the arabesque-like arrangement of flowers as a framing device are part of a fascinating story told by David Alan Brown of the National Gallery of Art in the book Virtue and Beauty. Mme Fontaine was the wife of a wealthy French industrialist and a patron of the arts whos circle included such forward-thinkers as the writer Andre Gide, composer Claude Debussy and several painters including Redon.

Antonio Pisanello's Ginevra d'Este had no precedent in the style of 15th century Florence. Rather than adorn his subject with precious jewels to suggest the wealth of her family he chose to portray Ginevra virtues otherwise: situating her in a virginal garden (hortus conclusus) where he surrounded her with shimmering spring leaves, perfumed carnation flowers and fluttering butterflies (symbols of the human spirit).

We may wonder whether Redon was partaking of a no-classical moment in French art, as evidenced by contemporary paintings by Cezanne and particularly La belle Angele by Paul Gauguin (1889, Musee d'Orsay). edon makes an appearance in a painting by his friend Maurice Denis, member of the once secret brotherhood of artists known as the Nabis (Prophets, in Hebrew). Although Gauguin was not included in the picture himself, it is a painting he owned by Cezanne (Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples) on the easel that the other artists are gathered around. Redon stand a little separately from the group at their left, in the painting as in life.

Redon's early graphic works in black and white are a virtual dictionary of bad dreams, and now as familiar from reproductions as the philosophical oddities of Rene Magritte.

What makes Redon's pastels outstanding is his sure feather-light touch with the chalks themselves. The nameless blue flowers, interspersed with tiny starbursts of white and yellow seem to hang weightlessly in the air, with no other reason than to frame Mme. Fontaine's person as the white lace collar frames her face on her yellow dress. For Redon nothing in his work was ever merely decorative, it was part of a visual language to translate the mysteries inherent in the natural world for our eyes. Flowers, opined the artist, are "admirable prodigies of light" and, perhaps like Monet, Redon, rendered sensations in response to the contemplation of visible objects through invisible light.

For further reading:

Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci: Renaissance Portraits of Women by David Alan Brown, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press: 2001.

Images;

1. Odilon Redon - Madame Arthur Fontaine (Marie Escudier), 1903, pastel on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

2. Pisanello - Ginevra d'Este, c.1435-49, Louvre Museum, Paris.

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Frieze: The Renaissance Art of Marcia Marcus

June 23, 2018, 4:58 pm

≫ Next: Small Worlds

≪ Previous: Odilon Redon's Renaissance Portrait

The end of World War II unleashed energies pent up by years of Depression and war, and not just marriages, babies, home buying,college education, and even commercial aviation on a large scale. That was all expected but also and suddenly New York became the center of the art world; artists from all over converged on the city where everything was fresh, exciting, and controversial. The contrast with the pre-war years was stark: before WWII American galleries rarely displayed American artists. Abstract Expressionism influenced even the figurative painters of the period. In retrospect, some of the most interesting work being done melded aspects of both: flattened forms and an ambiguous relationship with pattern and decoration.

Frieze: The Porch (1964) gets it title from Marcus' encounter with Byzantine art and Renaissance frescos in Florence when she studied there in 1961. Florentine Landscape (1961) features a reclining semi-nude Red Grooms in the foreground, a male odalisque. We take this to be an Italian locale thanks to the woman in a toga standing in the background, more clearly grounded in the landscape than Grooms who appears as convincing as the nude in Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe. (Florentine Landscape is now in the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase.)

Looked at from left to right -
Jill Johnston (1929-2010), wearing a red bowler hat and holding an equally dapper cane, was born in England to an American mother and a British father; she grew up on Long Island.

Having earned an MFA, Johnston became dance critic for The Village Voice in the 1960s. Her column gradually expanded into a diary of her adventures in the New York art world.

In 1971 Johnston took part in a panel discussion at Town Hall "Battle of the Sexes" that, in retrospect, was bound for notoriety. Johnston was by then an announced lesbian, her fellow panelists included Australian author Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) who had only just been dubbed "saucy feminist that men love" by the mainstream American press, and Norman Mailer who was - well - Norman Mailer. Johnston became an early contributor to MS. magazine after it was founded in 1972 and her best known writing is contained in the book Lesbian Nation, published in 1973. Johnston published a number of other books and was one of the more intriguing practitioners of the New Journalism but her boldness was too much for most of her male colleagues and even editors at The Village Voice expressed qualms about her activism and her outspokenness.

Barbara Forst studied at the Art Students League in New York City where she would spend most of her adult life teaching theater and producing plays off-Broadway. She died in Washington, D.C. in 1998.

Marcia Marcus (b. 1928, New York, NY), looking over her shoulder at the viewer and wearing a patterned cape that suggests a familiarity with Gustav Klimt's portraits, also studied at the Art Students League and also at Cooper Union where her contemporaries included Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, also figurative painters during the high tide of Abstract Expressionism. Their work shared similarities, flattening forms, strongly articulated figures and attention to pattern. All these characteristics are represented in Frieze: The Porch painted by Marcus in 1964, three years after her stay in Florence where she immersed herself Byzantine art and Renaissance fresco painting.

At the far right is a grisaille image (in black and white) that Marcus painted from a photograph of herself as a child and her father.

Although Marcia Marcus no longer paints, as Frieze: The Porch demonstrates, she deserves the attention that has been lavished on her close contemporaries and fellow downtown art luminaries: Allen Kaprow, with whom she collaborated on Happenings in the late 1950s, Red Grooms and Bob Thompson whose Delancey Street museum featured her self-portraits (they received highly favorable reviews). Also, for a quarter of a century from the early 1950s until the late 1970s, Marcus spent her summers painting in a shack on the dunes near Provincetown. MA, another intensely art-centric locale. Marcus can claim an impressive list of exhibitions at such galleries as Pace, yet her name and her paintings have become invisible.

Image:
Marcia Marcus - Frieze: The Porch, 1964, Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC.

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Small Worlds

June 28, 2018, 2:56 pm

≫ Next: The Rivals: Diego Rivera

≪ Previous: Frieze: The Renaissance Art of Marcia Marcus

Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging
bristles. Don't get sentimental
about your discarded skins. Grow
quickly. Develop a yen for nettles.
Alternate crumpling and climbing. Rely
on your antennae. Sequester poisons
in your body for use at a later date.
When threatened, emit foul odors
in self-defense. Behave cryptically
to confuse predators: change colors, spit,
or feign death. If all else fails, taste terrible.

-"Advice from a Caterpillar" by Amy Gerstler from Dearest Creature, New York, Penguin Books: 2009.

The word enjambment comes from the French where it means to step over or to put legs across. In poetry, its function is similar; it means to break a phrase, a sentence, or a thought between two lines without benefit of punctuation. This sends a mixed message, increasing the attention of the reader/auditor. Who started the practice? The Elizabethan poets made much of it and, like many other things poetic and historic, it seems to date back to the catchall answer that was

Homer.

The caterpillar, curled in upon itself is like the painter. It seeks perfection through its solitary efforts. Like the artist leaning over his easel at night, the caterpillar will achieve a magical transformation. As you can see in Charles Seliger's Caterpillar with Sky, although the subject and the scope of the picture may be small, the artist's intentions are expansive, and no more sentimental than poet Amy Gerstler's imagined Lepidopteran monologue.

Charles Seliger (1926-2009) was an early abstract expressionist but, like a number of others I have mentioned in these columns, not so abstract as all that. Although it is not obvious from reproductions, Seliger worked with small canvases, eschewing the gigantic proportions of so many of his contemporaries, the better to achieve a sense of intimacy with his subjects.

Although he did not complete high school or attend art school, his interests encompassed biology, natural history, and physics. "My work, even when most abstract, reflects the natural world," Seliger wrote. His technique attracted the attention of New York artists in the 1940s; his paintings were shown at Peggy Guggenheim's famed "Art of This Century" gallery when he was just nineteen. Nevertheless, he worked at ordinary jobs during the day throughout his adult life.

For further reading: a tribute to Charles Seliger by Addison Parks at Artdeal magazine.

Image:
Charles Seliger - Caterpillar with Sky, 1949, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica.

↧

The Rivals: Diego Rivera

July 4, 2018, 4:33 pm

≫ Next: Museum Of Man

≪ Previous: Small Worlds

A festival in Oaxaca, an occasion for music and dance with roots in indigenous folklore. Diego Rivera's chromatic colors are so vivid and saturated that they seem to emit light from the canvas. Of course, light and color go together naturally in southern Mexico. We know by the way Rivera used color here to create layers of pictorial planes that he is a modern artist. We can also admire the distinctness he brings to each figure, an affectionate recognition of this gathering. If the lavender and green decorative border reminds you of Matisse, it is curious to note that Diego Rivera was only the second artist to be given a solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art - the first was Henri Matisse.

It sounds like the pitch for a novel or a screen play. She is the daughter of an influential United States senator and the wife of one of the nation's richest and most powerful businessman. He is a young Mexican artist and one of the leading artists of his generation and, by the way, an outspoken member of the Communist party who has visited Moscow on a number of occasions. His wife, also an artist, paints unconventional self-portraits that combine elements of Mexican folk art and surrealism.

She was Abby Aldrich, a Quaker from Rhode Island and the dynamo behind the founding of New York's Museum of Modern Art and her husband was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (think: Standard Oil).
He was Diego Rivera, founder of a union of artists and the painter of murals in Mexico City that brought revolutionary ideas to the people, ideas as strikingly modern as his modernist aesthetics. His wife was Frida Kahlo, a painter who drew on the popular culture in her work: she met Rivera in 1927 when she joined the Communist Party.

Rockefeller had seen Rivera's work when she traveled to Mexico and, liking what she saw, she decided to commission a painting from him; the result was The Rivals. Rivera painted The Rivals on board ship as he and Frida were on their way to New York to meet the Rockefellers. They were also looking forward to Rivera's New York debut, a solo exhibition at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art. Rivera was just the artist that Rockefeller and museum director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. hoped the museum would introduce to the nation and the world, a modernist a s well as one whose work embodied the Americas.

When Rivera and Kahlo visited the Rockefeller home on Park Avenue, Abby's son David was impressed: "He was a very imposing and charismatic figure.." As for Abby Rockefeller, she was so pleased with The Rivals that she gave it as her wedding gift to her son David when he married Peggy McGrath in 1940. The young couple gave the painting a prominent place in the living room of their summer home in Maine, where it remained until David's death in 2017. The Rivals has rarely been seen by the public since then; the last occasion was a Rivera exhibition at MoMA in 2012.

As for the Rivera - Rockefeller connection, what most people remember is how Abby Rockefeller's next commission, a mural for her husband's own major project, the construction of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, went very wrong. Originally intended as an uplifting fresco highlighting cooperation and scientific advancement ...into a more of a political statement by the artist, including a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and evidences of the evils of unchecked capitalism. When the artist and the millionaire could reach no compromise, the mural was destroyed yet Rockefeller bore no personal animus toward Rivera. "The mural was quite brilliantly executed but not appropriate." (Memoirs by David Rockefeller, 2002)

Image:
Diego Rivera - The Rivals, 1931, David & Peggy Rockefeller Collection, courtesy of Sotheby's, NYC.

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Museum Of Man

July 11, 2018, 10:09 am

≫ Next: Artichokes & Ardor

≪ Previous: The Rivals: Diego Rivera

At the Museum of Modern Art you can sit in the lobby
on the foam-rubber couch; you can rest and smoke,
and view whatever the revolving doors express.
You don't have to go into the galleries at all.

In this arena the exhibits are free and have all
the surprises of art - besides something extra:
sensory restlessness, the play of alternation,
expectation in an incessant spray

thrown from heads, hands, the tendons of ankles.
The shifts and strollings of feet
engender compositions on the shining tiles,
and glide together and pose gambits,

gestures of design, that scatter, rearrange,
trickle into lines, and turn clicking through a wicket
into rooms where caged colors blotch the walls.
You don't have to go to the movies downstairs

to sit on red plush in the snow and fog
of old fashioned silence. You can see the contemporary
Garbos and Chaplins go by right here.
And there's a mesmeric experimental film

constantly reflected on the flat side of the wide
steel plate pillar opposite the crenellated window
Now objective taxis surging west,on Fifty-third,
liquefy in slippery yellows - dusky crimsons,

pearly mauve - an accelerated sunset - a roiled
surf,or cloud curls undulating - their tubular ribbons
elongations of the coils of light itself
(engine of color) and motion (motor of form).
- " At the Museum of Modern Art" by May Swenson from To Mix With Time, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons: 1963.

If everyone who works in the art world shares one belief, it is that nothing is more important than art itself. Some really believe it, some merely pay lip service, but a correlative belief is that the social elements of the art world are irrelevant. Never mind that Jean Stafford's famous short story "Children Are Bored on Sunday" which appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 is about the "children," young single adults named Emma and Alfred. Emma is at the Metropolitan Museum on a mission of self-improvement. Emma grew up where children played hide-and-seek behind lilac bushes and now, having moved to New York, she realizes that urbanites like Alfred have an advantage "because they had grown up in apartments, where there was nothing else to do but educate themselves." This story of girl meets boy did not go well and now Alfred, the witness to her previous embarrassment, turns up and, what is more annoying, he is blocking her view of the very Botticelli painting she was hoping to study.

Stafford, perhaps sooner than most, intuited that contemporary art has become a substitute for religion. One possible explanation for the popularity of conceptual art and one made plausible by historical precedent: western art of the medieval period was a tool for teaching used by the Church. Another theory that art has become mass entertainment as it has become monetized - and we are talking here about vast sums of money that bear no relation to the aesthetic or social value of the art work itself - is of more recent vintage. Money, power, beauty - how to tease apart these sticky threads?

Poet May Swenson uses the language of aesthetic description applied to the exhibitions and events the Museum of Modern Art is known for to suggest that people watching is not only an event that brings visitors to the museum but can be viewed as an exhibition itself. Those "strolling feet" making "gestures of design" have all the frisson of art plus something extra, a sense of performance with all its human contingencies.

Humor helps, too; the French certainly seem to think so. Looking at Francois Boisrond's Museum of Man we cannot see the face of the sketcher although we assume he is looking at the artworks assembled in the cases before him but the artist leaves us in no doubt that the creatures are looking at him, with what thoughts we are invited to imagine. This notion is made explicit in David Prudhomme's delightful book Cruising the Louvre. On one page we see a crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa as seen from the viewpoint of La Joconde herself. In another panel, a group of museum visitors struggles to stay upright on a bench before Delacroix's Raft of the Medusa, making them appear physically in synch with the struggling sailors in the painting. Prudhomme's book is full of amusing and bemusing moments as museum-goers attempt to position themselves in relation to the art works. As Prudhomme observes, "We try to hold onto what cannot belong to us" by which I take him to mean experiences.

Note on the artist: Francois Boisrond was born in 1959 in the western suburbs of Paris and was a student at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris when he made Musee de l'Homme in 1980. His mother Annette Wademant (1928-2017) was born in Brussels, Belgium and became the screenwriter of such well known films as The Earrings of Madame de (1953) and Lola Montez (1955). His father was the Frenchman Michel Boisrond (1921-2002) whose debut film as a director was Naughty Girl (1955), a musical starring the young Brigitte Bardot.

For additional reading:

Cruising Through the Louvre by David Prodhomme, translated from the French by Joe Johnson, Paris, Louvre Editions: 2016.

Image:
Francois Boisrond - Musee de l'Homme (Museum of Man), 1980, Pompidou Center, Paris.

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Artichokes & Ardor

September 7, 2017, 1:41 pm

≫ Next: The Woman On The Seawall

≪ Previous: Museum Of Man

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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The Woman On The Seawall

July 17, 2018, 5:07 pm

≫ Next: Hammershoi's Darker Shades Of White

≪ Previous: Artichokes & Ardor

Hours ebb. The horizon
sags into sea. Not much left of the day:
towels that checkered the beach

folded away. No children
tumbling from castes like pawns. Last
walkers leave: a man and his mutts,

the woman who clutched
her shoes to her chest for hours -
all chased away by the night tide exhaling

- excerpted from "Night Tide at Ostend" by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from Small Gods of Grief, Rochester, BOA Editions, Ltd.: 2001

This is a strange night world where seabirds fly and the docks and beaches are so many stripes illuminated by a mysterious source, backlit like a Hollywood movie yet painted a century and more ago by Leon Spilliaert of Ostend (Ostende in French, Oostende in Flemish), an important distinction in his native West Flanders.

Similarly poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar paints in words a visual equivalent to Spilliaert's world. For both, the night and the sea become seemingly fathomless and static, unlike the usual characteristics of night and sea. Both Bosselaar and Spilliaert are true Oostendenaars, fluent in both Flemish and French, their imaginary worlds are split at the root, as Luc Sante described it in The Factory of Facts, "Belgian art, the id of the nation, manages to be extravagant and tight-lipped at once..."

In art the beach at Ostend is as familiar to Belgians as the beaches of Normandy are to lovers of French Impressionist painting and for the same reason: during the late 19th century swimming and sun-bathing became popular pastimes for a growing middle class with newly acquired leisure.

Ideas, applied indiscriminately as they almost always eventually are, prompt a reaction. As the German philosopher Hegel put it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Well, maybe the first two but in art synthesis is no sure thing. At the end of the 19th century European arts were marked by a fascination with irrationality in response to philosophical positivism with its claims to explain every phenomenon by scientific and rational means.

Symbolism was a literary movement first: the poet Jean Moréas published what became its manifesto Le Symbolisme in Le Figaro in 1886. Symbolism's attraction for visual artists was immediate, followed closely by the critics. In Le symbolisme en peinture and other books, Albert Aurier defined symbolist painting as one that would "clothe the idea of a sensitive form" in suggestion and mystery. It would be subjective, it would have its own recognizable language of forms, and it would have decorative elements. Although Aurier was only twenty-seven when he died (from typhoid fever) he had not only made a reputation as an astute critic but had assembled a considerable personal art collection. His Van Goghs were acquired after his death by another astute collector, Helene Kroller-Muller for what eventually became the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands

In Brussels and in Paris, Leon Spilliaert, painter, frequented literary circles. He particularly admired the French-speaking Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. Verhaeren was so highly regarded that he was considered for the Nobel Literature Prize but considered a long shot after his countryman Maurce Maeterlinck won the prize in 1911. Although it is difficult to pin his poetry in modern terms, Verhaeren was close to the art of Fernand Khnopff and the expressionist James Ensor, two Belgian painters whose works he analyzed.

Spilliaert was a night walker; he came by his deep feeling for the quiet atmosphere that attends theouble to hear it. restless ocean for those who take the tr

Laure Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium where she worked for radio and television stations there and in Luxembourg before moving to the United States in 1987. She also taught French poetry and published a collection of her own poems, Artemis, in French. She is the widow of a fellow poet, editor, an translator Kurt Brown. Bosselaar currently lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

For additional reading:
The Factory of Facts by Luc Sante, New York, Random House: 1998.

Image:
Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) - La femme sur la digue (The Woman on the Sea Wall), 1907, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

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Hammershoi's Darker Shades Of White

July 28, 2018, 2:53 pm

≫ Next: Danish Moderns

≪ Previous: The Woman On The Seawall

They've started a discussion:
What is it to be Danish?
I must admit the question
Has almost turned me Spanish.
How could I ever answer this,
What is it to be Danish?

- excerpt from "Being Danish" by Kaj Munck (1898-1944) from A Second Book of Danish Verse, translated by Charles Wharton Stork, Freeport, NY, Books for Libraries Press: 1968.

The cliche of the melancholy Danish temperament hovers over the enigmatic art of Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916); his work has been compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet or a setting for an Ingmar Bergman movie. And yet it stands out in company with other art of Danish Golden Age (approximately 1830-1870), work that can be as bright and boundless as the preternaturally blue summer nights of the north. Hammershoi stood apart from other artists of his day; he chose to paint portraits only of people he knew and his palette was one of tones rather than colors.

Was his art cold and repressed or tranquil and intimate? I incline to the latter interpretation but understand the impulse to try to wrest from these paintings stories, whether made-up or drawn from the artist's own life, that justify our strong responses. Surely, there must be much ado about something.

In Dust Motes Dancing In Sunbeams), painted in 1900, the artist offered a bravura demonstration of visual sensation by subtracting all the furnishings from a wood-paneled room with a door leading to an interior courtyard. Even the round knob on the door is unnece In Dust Motes Dancing In Sunbeams), painted in 1900, t ssary to his aims. But oh, those shades of white, mixed with bits of color, described by a friend who saw the artist's palette as resembling "oyster shells."

Photographs, on the other hand, provide evidence of the accouterments of everyday life in the Hammershoi home: paintings hang on the walls, curtains flutter at the windows, and china is laid out on the table. The Hammershois possessed some aesthetically pleasing furniture, a white Hepplewhite chair gracing several paintings.

Ida Ilsted wrote to a friends that Hammershoi "had always wanted to live" in the apartment at 30 Strandgade after the couple moved there in 1898. A large apartment dating to the 17th century that connected two buildings in the old Christianhavn section of Copenhagen, 30 Strandgade comprised a series od connecting rooms that had the air of a gallery intended for art or as art itself in Hammershoi's pairings. Hammershoi himself wrote in a letter "Personally I am fond of the old, of old houses, old furniture, of that quite special mood that these things possess." No surprise then that Hammershoi was attracted to archaic Greek sculpture that he painted in the museums of Paris and Rome that the couple saw on their honeymoon tour.

Hammershoi was fortunate in being supported by wealthy patrons who eagerly snatched up his domestic interiors and his scenes of old Christianhavn. Carl Jacobsen was a brewer whose family business underwrote the establishment of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek to house the family collections, and tobacco manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung donated his collection to the state which built it a museum in Copenhagen finished in 1911. Ironically perhaps, Hammershoi, a smoker, died of throat cancer five years later.

I wish I could remember
whether I've done anything
the letter you received
was full of hidden meanings
the burning bush
did not burn me
this morning I got up too late

I wrote the letter
and never did send it
I lay at the stake
but never was burned
you sit in your chair
and nothing has happened

I wish I could remember
whether I've done anything

- "Father - Son" from Light by Inger Christensen from Light (1962), translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied, New York, New Directions: 2011

Images:

1. Vilhelm Hammershoi - Interior, Strandgade 25, 1914, 85 x 70.5 cm, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen.
2. Vilhlelm Hammershoi - Dust Moats Dancing in The Sunbeams, 1900, 23.2. Ordruppgaard, Copenhagen.
3. Vilhelm Hammershoi - Interior, Strandgade 30, March 1904, 55.5x 460.4 cm, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

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