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The Late Flowers Of Leon Dabo

April 30, 2013, 7:39 am
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 "We come like water, go like wind."

That's not an exact quote from the 28th verse of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam but, after reading Maurice Maeterlinck's The Intelligence of Flowers, it strikes me as the right epigraph for Leon Dabo's flowers.

Exactly what prompted Leon Dabo (1864-1960) to embrace flower painting around 1915 is unclear. He was already a successful artist (Theodore Roosevelt reportedly admired a Dabo landscape shown at the New York Armory Show in 1913), yet Dabo chose not to make a public display of this interest until 1933,  with  an exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. In the time-honored manner of a town crier, the gallery’s press release announced breathlessly: “…his studies of flowers have been hidden away….These flowers were not exhibited and never shown in his studio, with the result that not even his intimate friends had the faintest inkling that the painting of flowers constituted a secret and jealously guarded passion.”   Purple prose may have seemed appropriate to introduce these surprisingly vivid works by a painter of subtle landscapes but there is no particular evidence to support any of these claims.  And there was no need to hype these pictures; full of life and interest as they are.

Dabo, who was born in France and traveled there as a young man after his family moved to Detroit,  knew  the pastels of  Manet, Mary Cassatt,  and Odilon Redon,   Redon’s early watercolor landscapes from the 1870s prefigure the delicate colors  of tonalism.  In the late 1890s, the French symbolists would turn to pastel, reinvigorating a medium, that had been popular during the 18th century but had lately been  relegated to  school children and amateurs.
In Dabo's use of chalks and conte crayons, there may be the hint of a motive for his flower pictures.  Unlike in his large oil landscapes, Dabo used pastel  to  draw, sharpening his points to create contrapuntal effects against the characteristic shimmer and shadow.  La vie en rose, as the title implies, is a tonalist picture but what a riot of vivid colors and sharply defined spaces it contains.  In it, you can see a recurring feature of Dabo's flower pictures:  a background alive with movement, as though to remind us of the  water and wind that birthed  the blossoms. So Dabo uses shimmer to suggest a mis-en-scene for his flowers.  Cascade of Floral Fireworks (at top) positively glitters with movement, a virtuoso presentation piece for an underrated medium.   His use of asymmetrical arrangements suggests that Dabo .had looked at Japanese prints.   Arc-en-ciel and  La vie en rose look like he also knew ikebana (living flowers), the Japanese discipline of floral arrangement.


While Dabo was late to show his flower paintings to the public, Edouard Manet's flowers were late by necessity.  Manet created a group of sixteen flower paintings during the final years of his life.  Confined to home in the winter of 1880 by the ravages of syphilis, Manet concentrated his waning energies on the parade of floral bouquets brought to him by his friends.  (That the pre-eminent painter of the modern city was felled by a disease spread through the freedom that he had portrayed in his great works, was  ironic.)  In his flower paintings Manet used everything he knew about painting light to paint as much life as any small canvases have ever contained.  Two artists, for different reasons,  achieved the same results, works smaller in size but by no means diminished in art. 
 
Like Manet, Dabo  produced flower pictures in both pastels and oils. Dabo’s brushstrokes often recall the short, thick marks of Manet’s  lilacs.  Notice the similarities between Manet's Bouquet of Lilacs (Prussian State Art Museum, Berlin) and this early Dabo work titled Flowers in a Blue and White Vase.   Where they differ is in the backdrops; what is uninflected in Manet's pictures is invested with drama by Dabo.  He makes backgrounds that seem to speak, to be in conversation with the flowers through the medium of light.  The publication of The Pastels of Leon Dabo, admirably designed and executed, is long overdue.

ADDENDUM:  In this, the one hundredth anniversary year of the Armory Show, held in New York City, I should have mentioned that works by Leon Dabo were included in that important exhibition, including a  landscape of Canada in winter and Evening North Star.


 
The Pastels of Leon Dabo  by William Gerdts et al, is published by Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, Santa Barbara: 2012 in connection with their exhibition Leon Dabo: Toutes Les Fleurs.

The Last Flowers of Manet by Robert Gordon, New York, Harry N. Abrams: 1986.

Images: by Leon Dabo courtesy of Sullivan Goss Gallery.
1. Cascade of Floral Fireworks, ca. 1916, private collection
2. Abstraction Melancholique,  ca. 1915.
3. Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow), ca. 1915.
4. La vie en rose, 1916.
5. Flowers in a Blue and White Vase, 1899.
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Rene Vincent: May At The BNF

May 1, 2013, 11:02 am
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Bugatti, Peugeot, Michelin: all names associated with speed and all companies whose reputations were enhanced by their association with the Frenchman Rene Vincent (1879-1936).   Vincent began by studying architecture at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but soon  turned ti illustration.  His  success can be measured, in part,  by his many imitators.  In 1909 he illustrated Aeorpolis, a predecessor of today's graphic novels,  the story of Henry Kistemaeckers, an early stunt pilot.   Was  all this a coincidence or evidence of a fascination with acceleration?  It may be a stretch, but it is possible that the golf ball, shot by the woman in Golfe de Sarlabot,  traveled at a speed fast enough to pass a Bugatti.

Image: Rene Vincent - Golf de Sarlabot, 1930, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
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Searching For A. H. Fish

May 6, 2013, 11:53 am
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John Held, Jr. Miguel Covarrubias, A.H. Fish. All  illustrators,  all important contributors to magazines of the 1920s, all represented in anthologies of graphic art.  Held was the one who produced the humor of collegiate hijinks for the humor magazine Life.  Covarrubias was the Mexican-born transplant whose caricatures for Vanity Fair and New Yorker made Al Hirshfeld possible.  But who was A.H. Fish?

Anne Harriet Fish  was an illustrator,  writer and designer of porcelain figurines.   Conde Nast (1873-1942) was the  powerful magazine publisher whose name lives on in his signature publications:  Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and House & Garden.   Nast launched  Vanity Fair in 1914 and, with Frank Crowninshield as editor, the magazine  attracted not only the best writers and illustrators but also that important magazine metric: most advertising dollars in its first year.  Between 1914 and 1927, Fish was the cover artist for more than thirty issues of Vanity Fair.  She was the only artist to outpace Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), whose caricatures of the rich and famous became as well known as their photographs.  So why has she gone missing from history?
In his new book What Was Contemporary Art?, Richard Meyer of Stanford University pulls back the curtain to reveal just a bit about Fish - and then drops it once again.

The connection goes like this.  In 1927,  a  twenty-five year old was hired  to teach at Wellesley College for women.  Still a doctoral student himself at Harvard, he was  already a comer who had competing  offers but chose Wellesley because it was the only one to accept his proposal for a course on modern art.   His name was Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr.
 Art 305:Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting attracted only nine students but a lot of attention.  Barr's definition of art was eclectic, including objects from diverse sources as North Americans natives, African  Bakubas, and   Melanesian islanders.  By the following summer, word   reached the pages of Vanity Fair,  where its editor, Frank Crowninshield took note.  Crowninshield was also a member of the Board of the new Museum of Modern Art, where he would help to install Barr as its first director in 1929.
 Barr, who had subscribed to   Vanity Fair since his undergraduate years at Princeton, later identified the magazine as a seminal influence.  And A.H. Fish was one of Vanity Fair's signature artists.  "One can look back and I suppose down, upon these magazines as diletante, the one [The Dial] highbrow, the other [Vanity Fair] fashionable, but both succeeded in awakening in me, and many others of my generation, an interest in the work of living artists in various media - from painting and sculpture to movies and photography."  Barr wrote in 1940.

Information about A. H. Fish, including why she chose to obscure her identity is difficult to come by.    Born in Bristol, England in 1890, Anne Harriet Fish began publishing in Vogue and Vanity Fair during World War I, perhaps seizing her chance while her male competitors were away at the front.  Between 1914 and 1927 A Vanity Fair. Her gamines are as much exemplars of the gaiety of that era as Held's flappers. She married Walter Sefton, an Irishman, in New York City in 1918.   Fish died in 1964.
The Fish style was more versatile than Held's, which was basically a polished version of collegiate humor.  Fish introduced a different perspective, one that roughed up the dominant male version of events.  True, her lovers are oblivious to the envy they inspire in others, pets are openly skeptical of human emotions but, tellingly, husbands are never so much fun as boyfriends.   The little white dog of 1921 could have told her that those sweet words coming over the phone line would be replaced by indifference when it came time to pay the bills in 1923.

The earliest work that I uncovered (at archive.org) is  Behind the Beyond: And Other Contributions to Human Knowledge by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1913),  illustrated by A. H. Fish.  An edition of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubiyat Of Omar Khayam, with illustrations by Fish, was published by John Lane, London in 1922. Fish later produced her own books,  hard-boiled but humorous epistles from High Society: A Pictorial Guide To Lief In Our Upper Circles (1920) to  Awful Week-ends - And Guests (1938), becoming so well known that she was identified on their covers simply as "Fish."
The fate of A.H. Fish is a common one for accomplished women.   Although her work was admired while she was living, the guardians of reputation have found little room her for in their retrospectives.   She was there but she is not there now or, if she is, she is hidden in plain sight.  Sometimes, even being alive and well-connected is not enough.  Witness the current petition by architect Robert Venturi and supporters to have the Pritzker Foundation  amend its 1991 award to him to include his partner Denise Scott Brown.
It was while Alfred Barr was teaching at Wellesley that he first got the idea for his famous 1936 chart showing the interconnections in the development of modern art. Although much was included, some of the clusters that emerged from the spider web of lines looked more important, because more connected, than others.   Anne Harriet Fish,  British-born, comes readilyto mind.


Note: What Was Contemporary Art? by Richard Meyer, Cambridge, MIT Press: 2012.

Images: Conde Nast archives.
Vanity Fair - September 1924.
Vanity Fair -  January 1921.
Vanity Fair - January 1923.
Vanity Fair - February 1926.
Vanity Fair -  August 1927.



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Antonin Personnaz: Our Contemporary

May 11, 2013, 6:42 am
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Subtle washes of blue and pink are what we notice first, then the jaunty red hull of the little boat that steams along an unnamed  but strangely familiar-looking French river.   In spite of those muted tones a luminosity emanates from this century old image.  Autochrome, the first widely used color photographic process, was  notoriously  difficult to work with, its colors fixed but not stable, in grains of starch that migrated over time.  And yet, amateur photographer were eager to try. Antonin Personnaz   a wealthy Frenchman, was so keenly attuned to aesthetic values that his  photographic experiments achieved  exquisite effects that have survived the depredations of time and exposure. 
















Antonin Personnaz (1855-1936) was born in Bayonne, the capital of the Basque region in southwestern France.   He made his fortune as a professional exporter of goods. Through his friendship with Leon Bonnat,  a portrait painter in Paris and also a native of the Pyrennes.  Personnaz met the artists whose works he began to collect.   Their names are a roll-call of Impressionist masters: Mary Cassatt,  Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec.

Personnaz began taking pictures desultorily aorund 1896, after seeing  photographs by Constant Puyo, one of the first Pictorialists.  But there was something about color photography that clicked with Personnaz's own  imaginative capabilities.  As soon as  autochrome  was introduced by the Lumiere Brothers in 1907, Personnaz began taking pictures in earnest. 

For an ardent collector like Personnaz, the attraction of making his own images to correspond with the paintings he loved was irresistible.   These intimate associations acted as a force field as he trained his eye through the viewfinder.  With recent investigations into the deliberate staging used even by photographers as early as Gustave le Gray (Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before The Age Of Photoshop by Mia Fineman), we know that Personnaz was far from alone in creating his photographic equivalent for Alfred Sisley's wintry masterpiece La neige a Louvecinnes (1878, Musee d'Orsay).  The warm weather image (above) may well have been his version of Sisley's Louveicennes - the Path to the Hieghts of Marly (ca. 1873),  a painting Personnaz owned.



Monet's influence on Personnaz has quite natural, given the enduring friendship that grew up between the two men.  Personnaz often visited the artist in his later years at Giverny.  Nevertheless, Personnaz had a poetic sensibility of his own.  He seems to have been drawn to the individual subject, whether a person, an animal, or an inanimate object.  The woman holding a red parasol may be pure Monet but the young girl hoisting a hay bale comes from an earthier tradition in French art, perhaps by way of Berthe Morisot's Dans les bles a Gennevilliers (1875), another Personnaz acquisition.   The little packet boat plies its industrious way without the cheering crowds or waving flags of an Impressionist   regatta, but then Personnaz didn't own one of those pictures.  
















The impassioned amateur photographer became a proselytizer for the new  medium.  The lecture Personnaz gave, inaugurating  the Peligot Medal (named for chemist Eugenie Peilgot) helped to popularize the autochrome in France. Then, at the International Congress of Photographers held at Brussels in  1910, he presented a paper The Aesthetic of the Autochrome Plate in response to criticisms by painters that the colors produced by fixatives and grains of starch were "lacikng in exactness".  Personnaz replied with  a  comparison of the new process to pointillist techniques in painting, even employing a magnifying glass to illustrate his ideas.


In a footnote to the tale of the Personnaz collections, one of the Monets that became part of the Personnaz bequest to the Musee d'Orsay  - Le pont d'Argenteuil  - was in the news when, on October 6, 2007,  one of a party of drunken visitors struck the painting, making a four inch tear in the canvas.  The painting suffered more wear and tear than even his photographs.
 Personnaz served as the General Secretary to the Societe Photographie Francaise from 1911 to 1919, publishing several articles on topics close to his heart in the Bulletin: the technical aspects of autochrome practice and the relationship between painting and photography. A man fully engaged in contemporary art and technology his time and,  in his aesthetic predilections, prophetic.  The more we learn about early photographers and their relationships to painting, the more Antonin Personnaz becomes one of us, not a distant figure at all.
 A year after his death in 1936,  his widow donated the Personnaz photography collection to the SPF.  The Personnaz paintings were were donated at the same time to the Louvre.  As a result of the realignment of  national museums in Paris, they are now in the Museed'Orsay/

 Images:
1. Red-hulled Boat, 1908, SPF. 
2. A Street, c. 1907-1910, SPF.
3. Woman Carrying a Sheaf of Corn,   SPF.
4. Woman With A Parasol,  no date, SPF.
5. Claude Monet - Le pont d'Argenteuil, 1874, Musee     d'Orsay, Paris.
6. Fishermen, 1909.SPF.
7. Sun Rises Over the Fields in Winter, ca. 1910, SPF.
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"Everything Was Already There": Jan Groover

May 16, 2013, 6:57 am
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"I pretended I was  a painter, for awhile.  Almost as soon as I got out of school I started photographing - photographing the history of photography, repeating lots of things.  I was still pretending I was a painter, that way I could relax and make photographs, even make stupid  photographs, and it didn't matter.  I didn't have to take it too seriously....And then one day I had the thought that I didn't want to have to make everything up, so I quit painting.  Then I found out that you have to make everything up anyway."


The late photographer Jan Groover's work belongs to the type known as  formalism,  wherein the relationships between objects are implied through their formal properties. The older and more familiar Pictorialist photography told stories deliberately.    Paradoxically, Groover's concentration on the formal properties of objects  resulted not in dryness but rather in a rich visual experience.  

Like Daniel Boudinet in France, Jan Groover demonstrated that color and artistry in photography were not incompatible, an idea that was still debatable  in the 1970s.   In that struggle for recognition,  Groover's exhibition at the Museum of modern Art in 1978 was a milestone.  John Szarkowski, who curated the exhibition, wrote that "her works were good to think about because they were good to look at."    The public was dazzled and when Groover's forks appeared on the cover of Artforum, she was  vindicated.
Groover studied painting at Pratt Institute, inspired by the works of Morandi, de Chirico, and  Fra Angelicao, and the thrill of seeing Cezanne's painting of a lemon.  Around 1970, she turned to photography at the moment that a minimalist aesthetic looked fresh, after a decade of Pop Art.   With some success in New York under her belt, Groover received her first NEA fellowship  in 1978.  She bought a different camera anf tried photographing stille lifes of dried flowers but her efforts proved fruitless.  "They were disgusting" Groover later recalled.

 "You're having a hard time?  Why don't you go to the kitchen sink and take a look?' suggested her husband, the art critic Bruce Bois.
"So I did.  I was there for a long time, in one way or another, with those kinds of objects.  It was great.  I could deal with all the things that I knew about art."
Things like foreshortening and playing around with space. In her kitchen still lifes, Groover reprised the history of photography, calling up the ghosts of such French masters as Nicephore Niepce and Dauguerre.
The next year Groover began to work with platinum printing, a process used by many 19th century photographers.  Platinum prints were  known for their subtle tones, from silvery-greys to rose-browns, and were weel-suited to Groover's formal, restrained style.

"What does a lemon do?  A lemon lies down.  It can't do anything else but lie down.  an apple sits.  It doesn't lie down, it doesn't do anything but sit.  A pear lies down and stands up... So all these objects have these attitudes.  Now some objects have bigger attitudes.   An apple could have a big attitude, depending on what it sits with.  A lemon has somewhat of a private-language attitude to me because Manet did a beautiful painting of a lemon.  Then there are some objects like bottles that are containers, and its containership means something. ...So building up still life to have all these characters - I don't know what the sentences are, but I know the sentences make sense to me, when they make sense."    As for the plastic fish and little dog in the lower right corner, the viewer can only speculate.

On Fox Talbot: "His photograph of his dining room table with a ll that stuff on it just drives me nuts.  And I've tried to do that picture... It's such a great thing to have this round table with all these guys on it that don't touch other.  It's an odd little puzzle.  I''m just crazy about his photographs.  Well, he did everything - he mapped out the territory.   I mean, to have to fight today with the first guy to do photography is pretty amazing."    Groover's reaction to Talbot's table explains a lot about the droll aspect that we sense in her arrangements.  There is nothing inherently limiting in Groover's still lifes; it is more like a full table.

Jan Groover was born in Plainfield, New jersey, in 1943.  Groover and Boi move to France in 1991.  In 1994, Tina Barney produced the documentary Jan Groover: Tilting At Space.   Jan Groover died on January 1, 2012 in Montpon-Ménestérol, France. She was 68.

For further reading: Pure Invention: The Tabletop Still Life: Jan Groover by Constance Sullivan, et al, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. :1990

Images:
1. Jan Groover --untitled, 1988, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
2. Jan Groover - untitled, 2006, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
3. Jan Groover - untitled, 1979,  Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
4. Jan Groover - untitled (tabletop), palladium print, 1983, from Pure Invention, Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
5. William Henry Fox Talbot - Breakfast Table, 1840, photogenic drawing, Science Museum, London.
6. Jan Groover -  untitled, 1979, Galerie Paul Frehces, Paros.


                                                                                                        
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Chekhov, Our Contemporary

May 23, 2013, 7:39 am
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Sonya: "....it's incredibly interesting.  He (Astrov) plants new trees every year; he's already gotten a bronze medal and a certificate.   And he's a leader in the campaign to preserve the old-growth forests.  He says that trees are earth's most precious ornament, they teach us to recognize beauty!  Forests help to temper a severe climate, and in regions with temperate climates, people spend less energy trying to combat nature, so the people themselves are kinder and gentler.  And they're better looking, and taller, and more at ease with their emotions; even their speech and their motions have a natural grace.  Wherever there are trees, the arts and sciences flourish, and a positive attitude to life, and they treat women with respect - "

Vanya: "Bravo, bravo! That's a very lovely speech, dear, but it doesn't convince me.  So...(to Astrov) please don't hate me if I keep on cutting wood for the stove and timber to build a new barn."

Astrov: "You can burn turf in your stove and use bricks for your barn.  Look, I'm not against cutting wood, but why destroy the forests?"

Vanya: "Why not? To listen to you you'd think the only thing forests were good for is shade for picnics."

Astrov:  "I never said that.  But all our great woodlands are being leveled, millions of trees already gone, bird and animal habitats destroyed, rivers dammed up and polluted - and all for what?  Because we're too lazy to look for other sources of energy..."
          - excerpted from Act I of Uncle Vanya, translated from the Russian by Paul Schmidt in The Plays Of Anton Chekhov, New York, Harper Collins: 1997 (1897).
















Vanya is Sonya's uncle, which points to the importance of her character to her creator, in a play that points to her by indirection.   Idealistic, dedicated, struggling to reconcile the narrow confines of the estate where she lives with her large spirit, Sonya speaks for Chekhov's aspirations,  as Astrov, a doctor  (like his creator) whose experience speaks to their inadequacy.

In the background there was Russian  agriculture, using the most primitive means to the least productive ends in Europe during the late 19th century. Two thirds of the population worked the land that was owned by the wealthy few.  Living outside the cities, the landed gentry of Chekhov's play felt themselves marooned in a sea of dependents with whom they shared the land but little else.  The need for croplands and pastures was contributing to the destruction of forests, leaving ugly scars on what had appeared primeval.  With blinders on, we may think concern about the stewardship of nature is our  own enlightened invention.  Against that presumption of superiority, Chekhov created characters haunted at once by a sense of the insignificance of their actions and the calamitous consequences.  Chekhov, the poet of that which remains unresolved, is our contemporary.

Paul Schmidt (1934-1999) was the great Chekhov translator of his time, balancing the melancholy with humor,  giving a more fully rounded view of what it means to be a Chekhovian character.
His last published work was an anthology The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems  (New York Review Books:2007), discussed in  articles published  here dated 29 September 2011 (Scream When You Leave) and 30 April 2012 (Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Printmaker).















Images:
1. Grigoriy Myasoyedov- Forest Creek. Spring, 1890, courtesy of Wikipedia.
      Myasoyedov 
2. Ivan Shishkin  - Near the Dacha, 1894, Tatarstan State Museum of Fine Art, Kazan.
     Shishkin (1832-1898) was a Russian painter who studied in St. Petersburg and also abroad in Switzerland and Germany.  He belonged to a group called The Itinerants and was a painter, in oils and watercolors, of the forests of his native country.
3. Ivan Shishkin - Lumbering, 1867, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
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A Summer Landscape: Vilhelm Hammershoi

May 30, 2013, 11:26 am
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“We must never assume that artists did not see what they did not paint.” – E.H. Gombrich.

But how often do we look at a painting and not assume that it includes everything the artist saw?  Like the Belgian Fernand Khnopff, his near contemporary, the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi was the most deliberate of artists.  Nothing in the paintings is accidental and nothing is elucidated for the viewer. 





When Hammershoi (1864-1916) painted the lake at Gentofte (at top) in 1903, the small farming village was in the process of becoming a suburb of Copenhagen but for him and his wife Ida Ilsted Hammershoi, northern Zealand was a place for a quiet summer vacation.  There were new houses behind him as he painted and small farms nearby but Hammershoi chose instead  the light, and the water as his subject.  In Hammershoi's landscapes there is no discernible influence of the 19th century Romantic sublime with its mood of remoteness from the ordinary.  Hammershoi was perfectly capable of teasing sublimity out of the mundane.  His broad panoramas become, on close inspection,  carefully chosen and cropped.
In Hammershoi’s hands the road that gives the picture its name is its least noticeable feature.  Kongevejen, or the King’s High Road, was the main thoroughfare leading north from  Copenhagen.  The road had been laid out in the 1620s by order of  Christian IV, the king whose ambitious city building plans included the construction of Christianhavn, an artificial island bisected by canals,  where the Hammershois lived for most of their married life (at 25 Strandgade and 30 Strandgade). 


















At first glance, Jaegersborg Dryehave (above) is an ordinary forest landscape,  one of several that Hammershoi painted from the inside looking out.    Nordic painters often portrayed trees as something like symbolic humans in their vertical stance but Hammershoi draws our eyes to the spaces between the trees.   This  effect had been discovered accidentally by 19th century photographers, as a by-product of technical limitations.  In Hammershoi's paintings there are no accidents, and we are left to marvel at how he makes the trees and even the ground dematerialize before our eyes as he mesmerizes us with effects of light.














"When people who tumble about in the bustle of a big city think now and then -  perhaps with a little sigh of longing - of life in the country, there hovers in their mind the picture of an existence blessed with leisure.  They imagine  and endless series of quiet days in which every minute passes with the imposing serenity of a grandfather's clock that measures eternity in the parlor of an old farmhouse.
   And in reality, there is no place where time is more fleeting and where life seems shorter than in the country.  Even if the individual days may seem prosaic enough in their uniformity, the weeks are in a hurry - the years flee.  One fine day life is over and everything disappears like a remnant of s summer or winter nights' dream."
 - from  The Royal Guest (Der kongelige Gaest - 1908) by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated from the Danish by Phillip Marshall Mitchell and Kenneth H. Ober, University of Chicago Press: 1977.

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1917 for  his portrayals of everyday Danish life.  His novels and stories included the upheavals of modern life that Hammershoi left out of his paintings. 














Note:  English pronunciation of the name Hammershoi renders the third syllable as "skoy."

Images:
1. Vilhelm Hammershoi - View Of Gentofte Lake, also known as Sunshower, 1904, private collection.
2. Fernand Khnopff - In Fosset. Rain, 1890, Hearn family Trust, New York City.
2. Vilhelm Hammershoi -  Jaegersborg Dryehave (Deer Park), 1901, Danish State Art Museum, Copenhagen.
3. Vilhelm Hammershoi - Landscape From Lejre, 1905, Swedish national Museum, Stockholm.
Vilhelm hammershoi - From Nakkehoved Strand, 1910, private collection, courtesy of The Atheneum.
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Jozsef Rippl-Ronai: June At The BNF

June 2, 2013, 10:07 am
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If the history of art as we understand it is Eurocentric, that is hardly the fault of the French, who have long acted as though the entire continent is just an appendage to Paris.  Like every notion, this one has the virtues of its flaws and the career of Jozsef Rippl-Ronai (1861-1930) is an example of both. 
Born in Kaposvar, a small city southwest of Budapest, Rippl-Ronai came to Paris at age twenty-five to study art with a fellow Hungarian, Mihaly Muncaksy.  Once there, he was befriended by Aristide Maillol, also effectively an outsider who came  from rural southern France and Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom Rippl-Ronai liked to attend the bicycle races.
A stay in Pont-Aven in 1889 and the discovery of Gauguin's work led  the Hungarian to break with his fellow countryman and join  the Nabis (prophets or seers), who adopted Rippl Ronai as  le nabi etranger  (the foreign Nabi).  Although the group was short-lived,  the Nabis' 'new synthesis' of nature with personal symbolism  pointed the way to non-representational art.  
It was the japoniste dealer Siegfried Bing who commissioned the lithograph Woman Reading By Lamplight for the August, 1894 issue of La Revue blanche.  And a japoniste image this is.  With its lack of western-style perspective the everyday scene is rendered fresh, even mysterious.  The light from the lamp casts no shadow, as it surely would not in a ukiyo-e print.  The eye moves from the yellow lamp to the yellow cup and saucer, and from there to the woman - her face cupped in her hand - and the third element of this ingenious trinagular composition.

In 1900 Rippl-Ronai returned to Budapest in 1900, where he had a radicalizing influence on other Hungarian artists.  He had the misfortune to be visiting Paris when war broke out in the summer of 1914.  Taken into police custody as a possible enemy alien, Rippl-Ronai was released due to the efforts of  his devoted friend Maillol.  Had it not been for the dozen years he lived in Paris, most of us might never have been exposed to the art of Jozsef Rippl-Ronai.

Image:
Jozsef Rippl-Ronai - Woman Reading By Lamplight,  1894,  Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, original at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
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Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna

June 8, 2013, 12:56 pm
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“Of the artists who founded the Vienna Secession, Kolo Moser was unabashedly the boldest and one of those who caused Viennese philistines the most trouble in the early days of the Secession.  Wherever there was something to reform in Viennese arts and crafts – and where wasn’t that needed? – you could find Kolo Moser working away with persistence intrepidness,  taste, and astounding technical skill.” – Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration XXIII, 1913-14, translated from the German by Gabriele Fahr-Becker.

“We wish to establish intimate contact between public, designer and craftsman, and to produce good, simple domestic requisites. We start from the purpose in hand, usefulness is our first requirement, and our strength has to lie in good proportions and materials well handled . . . The work of the art craftsman is to be measured by the same yardstick as that of the painter and the sculptor . .  So long as our cities, our houses, our rooms, our furniture, our effects, our clothes and our jewelry, so long as our language and feelings fail to reflect the spirit of our times in a plain, simple and beautiful way, we shall be infinitely behind our ancestors.” - Koloman Moser & Josef Hoffmann,  1905.


















When the Neue Galerie opened a decade ago in New York City, it seemed that the museum might offer an alternative to the dominant  art historical narrative of modernism as told by the Museum of Modern Art. The art dealer Serge Sabarsky and his friend, collector Ronald Lauder, were well prepared to take on the ghost of  Alfred Barr,   MOMA's first director and a confirmed Francophile.  What followed was  a series of firsts in North America, exhibitions devoted to Josef Hoffmann's Interiors (2006), the drawings of Alfred Kubin (2009), and the paintings of Otto Dix (2010), 

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897, along with the painter Gustav Klimt and the architect Josef Hoffmann.   Today Moser's name is less familiar than theirs but, with Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna 1897-1907, on view at the Neue Galerie from May 23 to September 2, 2013, that will change, along with the idea that Hoffmann was the group's dominant creative force.

Moser, who began his career as an illustrator, was the obvious choice to design the Secession's journal Ver Sacrum(Sacred Spring).  Published for only five years in an unusual large square format, it is a touchstone among magazines. 
 Members of the Secession were united by their iconoclasm, not by a common style. As early as 1904, the journalist Bertha Zuckerkandl writing in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration,  noted Moser moving away from the curvilinear Art Nouveau style to a new idiom of lines and geometric shapes, one more suited to incorporating interior design into architecture.  She also identified Moser as the group's leader in developing a new vocabulary of forms.

What his contemporaries discerned, historians have overlooked.  Five years before  Gustav Klimt "discovered" the gold painted  mosaics  at Ravenna, Moser had used both in his design for the large planters that bracket the main entrance to the Secession Building in Vienna.  It was Moser who designed the  iconic black and white checkerboard chairs for Hoffmann's Purkersdorf Sanitorium.  Subtract Moser's contributions and influence to the book of 20th century design and it would be thin indeed. Creators of upscale crafts today, such as Mackenzie-Childs,  have mined the designs of  Moser, Hoffmann, and particularly the pastiche style of Dagogbert Peche.

With financial assistance from the  banker Fritz Warndorfer, Moser and Hoffmann founded the Wiener Werkstatte in 1903 to bring the Secession's vision of the total artwork or Gesamtkunstwerk toproduction. They shared a belief that social ills could be cured  by  example  and that good design was a harbinger of social progress.  We may regard their ideas as naive but  their decorative discipline achieved incomparable results, albeit exorbitantly expensive ones.  The way was prepared by Moser's 1902 interior design for the physician Dr. Hans Eisiler von Terramare and his wife Gerta Loew (who sat for her portrait by Klimt). The wallpaper used for the current exhibition was originally  designed by Moser for the master bedroom at Villa Terramare.

As it turned out, the Werkstatte's masterpiece of total design was created not  in Vienna but in Brussels.  The Palais Stoclet, which took six years to complete (1905-11,) is the closest the Werkstatte  ever came realizing the ideal put forth by Peter Berhens: a feast of life and art.  Adolphe Stoclet, a wealthy banker and his wife Suzanne Stevens Stoclet, daughter of a Parisian art dealer, were living in Vienna when they happened to meet the painter Carl Moll  in his garden.    The Stoclets were so taken with Moll's villa that they commissioned its architect, Josef Hoffmann, to design a house for them when they returned to Brussels. 

When the Palais Stoclet was completed, Josef Hoffman exulted that "this is only the beginning."   But there had been casualties along the way.  Moser  resigned from the Werkstatte in 1908.  Mismanagement of the group's finances and demanding clients had taken their toll.   Moser's final  decade was filled with painting,  theatrical productions, and postage stamp designs, a variety that points to his nickname of  tausendkunstler, the thousand-artist. 

Although the Wiener Werkstatte continued to operate until 1932, the year 1918 marked an end.   Klimt died in June of pneumonia after suffering a stroke at age forty-nine.  Moser died  in October from cancer of the larynx; he was fifty.  Ditha Moser (1883-1969) survived her husband by fifty-one years.  Josef Hoffmann died in 1956 at the age of eight-five. 














For further reading:
Carl E. Schorske's magisterial  Fin-de-siecle Vienna (New York, Alfred Knopf: 1979) is the ideal introduction.
Wiener Werkstatte by Gabriele Fahr-Becjer, Cologne, Taschen:  2008.

Images:
1. unidentified photographer - Koloman Moser, c. 1903, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
2. Koloman Moser - blue and white kitchen sideboard with installation for Designing Modern Vienna, 2013, Neue Galerie, NYC.
3. Koloman Moser - Silver-plated centerpiece, 1903, Galerie Yves Macaux, Brussels.
4. unidentified photographer - Koloman Moser, gold leaf and blue marble mosaic for Vienna Secessiongebaude, 1898, Worldartistshowcase.
5. Koloman Moser - Purkersdorg Armchair, c. 1904, Neue Galerie, NYC.
6.. Palais Stoclet Interior - Instituut Agnetendal, Peer, Belgium.
7.  Koloman Moser -draft of decoration for the Terramare bedroom, 1902, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
8.  Koloman Moser - shaded green dot glassware, c.1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
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Franz Werfel's Scenes From A Marriage

June 14, 2013, 11:35 am
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"Between too early and too late there is never more than a moment." - Franz Werfel, 1944.

Frnaz Werfel called it  an "intricate little tale of a marriage" and if that were all that Pale Blue Ink In A Lady's Hand was, that would be enough.  But, written  between February and April of 1940, Franz Werfel's brief novel was a unique Zeitroman, capturing the moment before Europe went into moral free fall.   Set  Vienna in 1936, the characters  are members of the haute-bourgeoisie and the Austrian civil service whose  easy accommodation to anti-semitism foreshadowed the Anschluss.    Werfel may have been drawn to write about acts of bad faith, having been conveniently out of Vienna on the island of Capri in 1938.   Critics accused him on occasion of being way too assimilated for their tastes.
In the event, Werfel finished the novel only a month before  Hitler's army invaded  France. The Werfels managed to flee to the United States where they settled in southern California, along with many other European exiles.  The  novel also became a casualty of war.   Too grim for American publishers, it first appeared in a German edition under the imprint of Editorial Estrellas in Buenos Aires.   An English translation was published in the U.S. in 1944 that altered the anti-semitic characters.  A restored version was published in  Europe in the 1970s and a new English translation appeared in 2012 from David R. Godine.  And about time, too.
The events of Pale Blue Ink In A Lady's Hand take place during the course of one day in the life of
 Leonidas Tachezy,  a self-made man and a darling of the gods.   Tall, blond, and powerful, Tachezy is a fifty year-old Austrian civil servant married to a younger woman.  Son of a high school teacher,  Tachezy earned the money for his university education by tutoring boys from wealthy families, boys he despised but envied.  Through the suicide of a Jewish friend, Tachezy secures his entree to Viennese society that enables him to meet Amelie Paradini, a beautiful heiress.  It is Amelie who chooses Leonidas over his rivals, elevating him through her love.

When we meet this couple, we recognize in her husband's attitude to Amelie,  familiar aspects of the 'trophy wife'.
 "...Amelie's bare shoulders and arms were immaculate, not one blemish, not one tiny hair.  The perfumed, marble white skin came not only from good breeding, it came from constant cosmetic care, which she took as seriously as divine duty.  Amelie wanted to remain  young and beautiful and thinfor Leonidas.  Thin above all else.  That required that she be hard on herself.  She strayed not from the sheer path of this virtue.    her small breasts showed pointed and firm under her black leotard.  They were the breasts of an eighteen year-old.
    We pay for those virgin breasts with childlessness, the husband thinks now.  And this notion took him by surprise for as the determined defender of his undivided pleasure he had never entertained a desire for children. "
Effectively, our escape is blocked from the safe perch of  autre temps, autre mores.

And Werfel allows his protagonist no escape.  Vera,  the writer of the  pale blue ink is not the great love of Tachezy's life.  She was fourteen years old when Tachezy tutored her brotherbut he remembered her.  Years later, while Amelie is away caring for a sick relative, Tachezy takes his first marital separation as the  opportunity to begin an affair with Vera,   which he terminates under false pretenses.     "He could see a handsome,seductive man, one who except for that passionate episode with Vera could only be blamed for nine, maybe as many as eleven gratuitous escapades outside of his marriage."   When he receives a letter in her hand after three years he thinks she has born his child and rips the letter up without reading it. "He had acted no differently than a god from antiquity who changes his form and bends down to a child of Man."  Fifteen years later, a second letter arrives.  This time he decides to open it and, read through the lens of his bad faith, he misinterprets her message.   What follows is a Nietzschean tale of 'recurrence of the same.' 

Born  to an assimilated Jewish family in Prague, the music-loving  Werfel (1890-1945) gravitated to Vienna where he became a successful playwright and fell in love with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Gustav Mahler.  Alma resisted marriage with the Jewish Werfel for several years until the two were wed in 1929.   In his youth, Werfel had dabbled with the occult and Theosophy.
It was at the Cafe Arco, a favorite meeting place for writers in Prague, that Werfel likely met the writers Franz Kafka and Max Brod.  The three-way friendship was an emotional roller coaster.  Kafka was envious of Werfel's wealth and his early literary success. Werfel didn't care for Kafka's writing.  Werfel and Brod disagreed about music, with Werfel championing the lyricism of Verdi and Brod the new music drama of Richard Wagner.  The last novel that Kafka read was, reportedly,  Werfel's Verdi (1924).  Max Brod helped to arrange the posthumous publication of Kafka's novel Amerika.
In his novels, Werfel often wrote about crises, spiritual and otherwise.  His masterpiece The Forty Days Of Musa Dagh (1933), a portrayal of  the Armenian genocide of 1915, is overdue for rediscovery.  Like Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, and other Central European writers, Franz Werfel predated the Cold War and his work has been overlooked for that reason, especially in the U.S.  

As for the artist Franz Lerch (1895-1977), his life had parallel to Werfel's.  After graduating from the Vienna Academy, Lerch won several prizes and his paintings were snapped up by Austrian museums.  But his early  success could not protect him when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938.  Because of his wife's Jewish origins the couple was forced to flee and Lerch destroyed many of his works.  Resettlement in New York provided safety but Lerch worked as a commercial designer, his painting confined to his off hours. 


Pale Blue Ink In A Lady's Hand by Franz Werfel, translated from the German by James Reidel. Jaffrey NH, David R. Godine, Published: 2012 (1940).
Images:
1. Franz Lerch -  Interieur mit lampe (Interior with Lamp), no date, Artothek of the Republic of Austria, on permanent loan to Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
2. Franz lerch - Frau im Spiegel (Woman In The Mirror). 1927, Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
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Selling The New Art in Vienna

June 21, 2013, 11:58 am
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Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and Koloman Moser:  founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897 and also founders of the breakaway group the Wiener Werkstatte in 1905.  The trio came to be known as the Klimtgruppe (Klimt Group. 
I've alluded before to the erasure of Carl Moll from the story of fin-de-siecle Vienna.  As well as being one of its most admired artists, Carl Moll (1861-1945) was adept an organizing exhibitions and selling art.    Also the stepfather of Alma Schindler Mahler, Moll's prominence was like a series of overlapping circles, reaching ever outward.
Early in his career, Moll attracted the scorn of Karl Kraus, a journalist opposed to hypocrisy and corruption of Habsburg Vienna, who dissected Moll's avarice and lack of principle in his newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch).    Moll had used his position on the government's arts council to lobby for the creation of a gallery devoted to modern art in 1900, which the Secession also wanted and which he hoped to direct himself.
Failing that, Moll became the director of the Galerie Miethke in 1904, after it was sold by the original owner, H.O. Miethke.  Klimt and his supporters in the Secession wanted to but the Miethke Gallery, while another group wanted Moll to represent them, but out of the Secessiongebaude (Secession Building).  The ensuing arguments laid bare Moll's conflicts of interest and the Klimt group seceded from the Secession.  With Galerie Miethke, Moll the impresario was vindicated.  He arranged exhibitions that introduced Vienna to artists of international stature, including Giovanni Segantini and Vincent van Gogh.  To be sure, both were safely dead and could be appraised as known and vetted commodities.





















In The Blood Of the Walsungs, published in 1905, Thomas Mann, also a critic of bourgeois society but from a conservative perspective, had written, "The trimming of life were so rich, so  varied, so overladen, that there was almost no room left for living itself."   That was precisely the condition that  Moser and Hoffmann hoped to change with their exemplary gallery installations of  elegant and functional art.    By 1912, the group was forced to liquidate itself and reorganize as a limited liability company.  Competing explanations for the failure of a business that is now regarded as an aesthetic triumph linger.  Was it a lack of financial acumen and repeated cost overruns?  Or was it the cautious nature of a public that bought piecemeal what was intended as a totality? 

Notes on the photos:
In the top photo, a symphony in black and white, Moser's white-lacqured plant stands bracket a  setting by Hoffmann of ebonized oak furniture.  In this counter intuitive process, light oak  is darkened by rubbing black paint into the grain of the wood.
In the photo below, the display case contains a model of the Palais Stoclet, designed in 1905 and under construction for a wealthy couple from Brussels. The two female figures were designed by Richard Luksch (1872-1936), who had contributed similar faience pieces for the Secession Building and the Purkersdorf Sanitorium.  The pair pictured here were eventually placed in the Stoclet garden.



Images:
1. Wiener Werkstatte exhibition at Galerie Miehtke deigned by Koloman Moser - Vienna, 1905, photograph from Deustche Kunst und Dekoration, Volume 19, October 1906 - March 1907.
2. Koloman Moser - Jardiniere, metal lacquered in white, c.1906, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.
3. Interior of Galerie Miethke - Vienna,  1905, interior designed by Joseph Hoffmann, photograph for The Studio magazine.
4.  Foto Bildarchiv - Marburg - View of the western pergola at Palais Stoclet, with statue by Richard Luksch, Marburg.
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Selling The New Art In Vienna - Another Way

June 29, 2013, 1:43 pm
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"Gingerbread and baked goods."  Yes, this is a picture of a bake sale.  Not an ordinary bake sale.  A bake sale with sweets designed by Koloman Moser and Carl Otto Czeschka.  And these were not ordinary women in fin-de-siecle Vienna, but rather members of a new class that supported the new art.
The Wiener Werkstatte, chronically short of money, joined in the celebration of the 60th jubilee of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1908.   Although not an official invitee, the group joined in the festivities, using the occasion to open their new Kunstschau (Art House) as another way to promote the works of their members.  Ludwig Hevesi, commenting on the location of the Werkstatte's showroom, referred to it as gently as possible as "rather peripheral."
The new  Kunstschau wooden building was constructed quickly,  and included dozens of exhibition rooms, a cafe, and gardens, all designed in the new Jugendstil.  When it was finished, some one hundred seventy-nine artists displayed their works for the jubilee,  the most  notorious being Gustav Klimt's The Kiss.

Lili Waerndorfer was one of the first female drivers in Austria, and she even raced automobiles. Her husband, Fritz Waerndorfer, was the wealthy owner of a textile company and the Werkstatte's major financier.  The couple had married in 1895 and they commissioned Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser to supervise renovations to their existing home.  Fritz Waerndorfer commented later that when he walked through his front door he could imagine that the Werkstatte existed just for him.  It was Fritz Waerndorfer who opened the Kabaret Fledermaus in 1907, decorated by members of the Werkstatte.  Moser, Knips, and Zuckerkandl would each eventually live in Werkstatte-designed villas.

Edith von Mautner-Markopf, who stands in the center of the group, had studied painting with Carl Moll at the Kunstgewerbe.  She  married  Koloman Moser in 1902.  The black and white patterned reform dress she wears in the picture may have been designed by the Floge sisters.

Sonia Knips (1873-1959), also the Baroness Poitiers des Eschelles, spoke impeccable French.  She came from a family of officers in the Royal Cavalry that could its roots back to Belgium in1745.  She belonged to the minor nobility, a class that felt itself unfairly excluded from the royal court of the Habsburgs, a place that their accomplishments should have earned for them. This was the group from which the Wiener Werkstatte drew its greatest patrons.  Before her marriage she worked as a lady's companion to  wealthier families.   She married Anton Knips, an industrialist who owned a major ironworks, in 1896.  Two years later, she sat for her portrait by Gustav Klimt.  In 1903, she commissioned a summer home in the country from Josef Hoffmann.  Anton Knips shared neither his wife's social concerns nor her interest in modern art. Though they were known to be an unhappy couple,   their wealth, gave the Sonja the wherewithal to become a major patron of the Werkstatte and Josef Hoffmann, particularly.

Bertha Zuckerkandl was a journalist for the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper published by her brother Julius Szeps.  In her writing, she became an ardent supporter of the Werkstatte, calling its members " a new aristocracy" in an allusion to the hidebound members of the Habsburg court.  Her husband, Emil Zuckenkandl, was a professor of anatomy at the University of Vienna, and their home was for decades a slaon for the city's forward-thinkers  In her memoirs, Bertha Zuckerkandl wrote that it was at her salon that Hoffmann and Moser first discussed the idea of a Secession movement.The Purkersdorf Sanitorium was built at the instigation of Bertha's brother-in-law Viktor Zuckerkandl.

Images: 
1. Josef Justh 1908 At the Kunstschau Wien, Schonbrunnertsrasse in Vienna, 1908 - in order from left to right: unknown woman, Lili Waerndorfer, unknown woman, unknown woman, Ditha Moser (at center in WW clothing), Sonia Knips, unknown woman, Berta Zuckerkandl, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
2. unidentified photographer - Kunstschau Wien building, a courtyard, c.1908, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
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Fritz & Lili Waerndorfer: Art Patrons In New Vienna

July 3, 2013, 12:07 pm
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Lili Hellmann Waerndorfer (b. Vienna, 29. September 1874 - d. Nyack, California, May 1952) was an unconventional woman who deserves to be better remembered.  Not so much for her enlightened art patronage as for her willingness to try new things, even in trying circumstances she could hardly have imagined in her youth.    One of the first women in Austria to obtain a driver's license, Lili enjoyed racing in her car.  This beautiful brooch in  diamonds, opal, moonstone, and lapis lazuli was designed for her by Josef Hoffmann in 1904. and was likely worn on one of the stylish new 'reform' dresses that women like Ditha Moser, Sonja Knips, and Emilie Floge donned.   Lili Hellmann married  Fritz Waerndorfer in 1895; the couple had one son, Karl.    Later when their fortunes were gone, Lili not only moved to a new continent but wrote and published at least one mystery novel - The End Of The Honeymoon - in 1914.

Friedrich Waerndorfer (b. Vienna, 1868 - d. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1939), nicknamed Fritz, was a  Großindustrieller, a wealthy industrialist who also became an importantart patron.   The son of a successful Jewish textile manufacturer, the young Waerndorfer was sent to England in the 1880s to study the methods used in British textile factories.  He also spent  alot of time in London's museums and became friendly with the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.




Back in Vienna, Fritz Waerndorfer married Lili Hellmann in 1895.   The pairing was unusual:  Fritz was still in his twenties, a young age for a man to marry but Waerndorfer was already a succesful businessman,  and Lili was only six years his junior.  The conventional marital pattern for upper class Viennese was  like that of the marriage of Koloman Moser, who  at 34 wed the 19 year-old Editha Mautner- von Markhof.
Through the critic Hermann Bahr the Waerndorfers were introduced to  members of the Vienna Secession around 1900 and when the Wiener Werkstatte was organized in 1903, the group turned to Waerndorfer to manage their finances.







The wealthy Waerndorfers already owned a home, so they commissioned Hoffmann and Moser to redecorate it in the new style.  (They, along with the Wittgenstein family, were major patrons of the group, accounting for almost a quarter of  its early sales.)  Just inside their front door opened, the entrance hall displayed the harmonious Hoffmann style, its blend of ideal squares and parallel lines.    On a pedestal there was the first of sixteen sculptures by the Belgian George Minne, a Waerndorfer favorite.  Fritz Wearndorfer was the first owner of Minne's most famous work, The Fountain of Five Kneeling Boys (1898), exhibited by the Secession in Vienna 1900 and now in the collection of the Fine Arts Museum of Ghent, Minne's hometown.  Another work by Minne,  the marble Le Macon or The Bricklayer, was displayedin the Waerndorfer's  Galerium.



















These photographs from the Wiener Werkstatte Archive demonstrate how a home could be adapted to the 'total work of art' aesthetic. Notice the contunation of the diamond patterned framing of the floor, the same pattern used in the entrance hall. One thing you can't see in this photograph of the Waerndorfer dining room is the revolutionary 'flat' silverware set designed for them by Hoffmann.  It became the talk of Viennese society.
  was hung
Gustav Klimt's Still Water. Park At Schlosskammer was hung prominently next to the fireplace in the living room.     At this distance  we may see nothing daring in a landscape but Hope I, another of the Waerndorfer Klimts, still has the power to startle.  The Waerndorfers knew the artist and were among his most consistent supporters, regardless of his numerous affairs and out-of-wedlock children.  They knew when they purchased the painting that woman portrayed was Mizzi Zimmermann, Klimt's mistress and that this was not her first pregnancy.





Managing the finances of the improvident Wiener Werksatte members was always a thankless job.  Under pressure from his family to avoid the disgrace of  economic ruin,  Fritz Waerndorfer finally declared bankruptcy in 1913, losing both his and Lili's combined fortunes. The couple then emigrated to the United States in 1914.  Waerndorfer worked as a farmer and  then, the man who had owned textile factories,   became a designer for a textile company.  Fritz began to paint and his pictures were exhibited  in 1927 at the Neue Gallery in Vienna.  The gallery's owner Otto Kallir re-established himself in New York City in 1938, after fleeing the Nazis.  Today, the gallery continues,  run by Kallir's  granddaughter and former business partner under the name Galerie St. Etienne.
The Waerndorfer art collection has not been so fortunatley preserved.  Just as, a generation later, the collections of many Austrian and German Jews would be left behind or looted by the Nazis, the Waerndorfer collection  had to be dispersed for financial reasons.  If there had been a way to preserve it intact, it woul be one of the premier showcases of  the Wiener Werkstatte. 




Images:
1. Josef Hoffmann - Brooch, 1904, Neue Galerie, NYC.
2. Fritz Waerndorfer - no date given, probably c. 1900-05, Brandstatter Archive, Vienna.
3. Wiener Werkstatte Photo Archive, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
4. Villa Waerndorfer - Entrance Hall,  Museum of Applied Culture,
5. Villa Waerndorfer - Galerium, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
6. Villa Waerndorfer - The Dining Room, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
7. Gustav Klimt - Still Water. Park At Schlosskammer, 1899, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
8. Gustav Klimt - Hope I, 1903, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
9. Wedding Portrait of Lili Hellmann and Friedrich Waerndorfer, 1895, Brandstatter Archive, Vienna.
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Waders

July 9, 2013, 10:44 am
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Birds visit the Atlantic coast at every season.  The Great Atlantic Flyway lives up to its name as a vast avian migratory route between the Arctic and the Caribbean.  Like the fish in the water, birds know that there is an important but invisible line separating the warm Atlantic from the cold one, and that the line intersects the shore near the outermost point of Cape Cod.  In August, if the ocean temperature off the Maine coat reaches the low 60s Fahrenheit, it is considered warm. 
People, on the other hand, divide themselves into summer people and  locals.  The locals are the ones who refer to shore birds as Waders, because that's what they do along the shore.  When I was a little girl  in Newburyport, the birds were my beach mates  The birds regarded my approaches warily but seemed willing to share the beach with me as long as I obeyed their rules, which seemed to boil down to doing nothing to startle them. With literal-minded certainty, I never questioned that Crane Beach was named for the birds, but historians of Ipswich, Mass.  know differently. Just across the inland sound, Plum Island, known officially as the Parker National Wildlife Refuge, stretches down the shore from the mouth of the Merrimack River at Newburyport to Ipswich.  The birds, it seems, needed a place of refuge from us.


"The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst."

- The Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

In 1906, B.J.O. Nordfeldt spent the summer in Ipswich.   This immigrant from Sweden had already studied print-making with  Frank Morley Fletcher in England.  What drew Nordfeldt to Massachusetts was the chance to work with the great artist and teacher Arthur Wesley Dow.  Dow had opened a summer school in his hometown of Ipswich in 1891 and, fifteen years later, Nordfeldt  joined a class that numbered about fifty students each season.    While their works were extensions of the ukiyo-e prints of Japan, those Yankee  birds  exerted a hypnotic pull on Nordfeldt's imagination. 














 For more: B.J.O.Nordfeldt: 1906, available here 22 November 2010.

Images:
1. B.J.O. Nordfeldt - The Wave - Moonrise, 1906, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, washington, D.C.
2. Kyoto school - bird perched on a post, late 19th century, Freer Gallery, Washington, DC.
3. B.J.O. Nordfeldt - The Long Wave at Ipswich, 1906, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
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Helene Funke: A Viennese Fauve

July 15, 2013, 12:41 pm
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Is In The Loge  a tribute by the Austrian Helene Funke (1869-1957) to another expatriate artist  in Paris, Mary Cassatt, who painted a similar scene with the same title?   This is just the first of many unanswered questions that come to mind while looking at this artist's accomplished but seldom reproduced paintings.
As recently as 2007 for a exhibition Vienna-Paris: Van Gogh, Cezanne, And Austrian Modernism 1880-1960, held at the Belvedere Gallery, Matthias Boeckl  wrote mistakenly about Funke and her contemporary Broncia Koller that "neither artist had the possibility of showing her work in a public forum - not even at the Secession ..."   Wrong in every conceivable way.  Funke had exhibited with the  Hagebund and with other local groups.  Before that and unlike most of her Viennese contemporaries, she exhibited her work in Paris, with Matisse and  the Fauves in 1907 and again 1908 and she is listed in  catalogs of the Salon d'Autuomne and the Salon des Independents.


Funke  arrived in Paris in 1905 and lived for some time at 27 rue des Fleurus, in the same building where Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo lived.  The Steins opened their art collection to viewers on Saturday evenings, a collection that included such new artists as Cezanne, Gauguin, Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse.   There, Funke found what she had come for. 
Still life painting had been around since the days of the Roman Empire, but it came into disrepute when too many women took it up and became too good at it. For Helene Funke, still life was a genre well-suited to her interests in form and color.   Griselda Pollock, in the ground-breaking study Old Mistresses (1982) didn't have to look very far to unearth Maurice Grant, an art historian who wrote in 1952 that "flower painting demands no genius of a mental or spiritual kind. but only the genius of taking pains and supreme craftsmanship."    Was he oblivious to the use of still life  in 20th century art?


 Funke exhibited with Vienna Hagebund  in 1911, where her paintings were considered too revolutionary by Austrian critics, still struggling to digest the new art of the previous decade.  No one uttered a word about delicacy or small gestures then. 
But Funke's work was much more than a conduit between avant-garde Paris and Habsburg Vienna.  Her expressive brushwork may remind the viewer  of Van Gogh but her experiments with forms are analogous to what was being done by the avant-garde composers she knew in Vienna.  Her Still Life With Rose Basket takes an acceptable subject for a woman and turns it into intertwining arabesques,  She constructed  Peach Still Life with the fruits at the center of  concentric yellow and green waves, that the eye gradually resolves into crinkles of fabric.


Funke used still life to explore color as though it were the subject of a painting, never more obvious than when she left white spaces between colors in Still Life With Fruit And Vessels.  The separations are not technically necessary as they are in wood block prints....
More than anyone else in Vienna, Funke was the artist who  engage with the often invoked names of Manet and Van Gogh.   In Vienna, women were the artists who worked as modernists but men became the modernist heroes, by an all too familiar slight of memory. Although Funke remained physically safe in Vienna during  World War II, her art was "'disappeared' as degenerate during the Nazi era.  Almost all the of Funke's personal papers  were lost, yet another casualty of the war.


For further reading: The Memory Factory by Julie M. Johnson, Purdue University Press:2012
For more about Helene Funke ( in German and English translation)
Images:
1. Helene Funke - In The Loge, 1904, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz.
2. Helene Funke - Peach Still Life, 1918, belvedere  gallery, Vienna.
3. Helene Funke - Still Life With Rose Basket,  c. 1910-19, private collection, Vienna.
4. Helene Funke - Still Life With Fruit And Vessels, 1931, CollectionKalus - Dr. Friderike Ortner, Basel.
 5. Helene Funke - Still Life With Callas, 1927,  Belvedere gallery, Vienna.

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Sonja Knips: A Patron And Her Collection

July 23, 2013, 12:08 pm
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Hers is the  face  staring watchfully  from Gustav Klimt's Whistlererian Portrait Of Sonia Knips (1898, Belvedere Gallery, Vienna).  In the painting, a young woman wears an elaborate pink cake of a dress with a high ruffled neck; her left arm grips the chair as she sits forward, alert and possibly a bit wary.  Guarded is the word that comes to mind when looking at her not quite looking at the viewer.  When she sat for Klimt in 1898,  Knips had already known the artist for   several years, even before her marriage, and there had been the hint of an aborted romance in that past.   For Knips, the highlight of the year 1898 may have been her introduction to  the architect Josef Hoffmann  - not the portrait we usually know her by.  From its formation, Sonja Knips was an important patron of the Vienna Secession and of Josef Hoffmann, yet the lengthy entry  in The Grove Dictionary of Art manages to dodge any mention of her role.  All three - Klimt, Knips, and Hoffmann - shared a common aim: the acceptance of a new  Viennese art. 

Sonja, Baroness Poitiers des Eschelles, was the wife of industrial magnate Anton Knips. Josef Hoffmann was a young architect from Moravia, recently employed by the studio of Otto Wagner.  According to several who wrote about their encounters with Hoffmann, he was  a man of few words, difficult and difficult to know.  Yet the young Baroness Knips (1873-1959) established a relationship with him, based on artistic empathy, that lasted for decades.   Hoffmann once wrote that "One should not obstruct the intuition", a remarkable comment from one who banished the curvilinear  lines of Art Nouveau in favor of the geometry of straight lines, squares, and triangles.    Knips also was unusual for a woman of her position in her adventurousness, eschewing the historicist style favored by the upper classes.   Her taste and discernment enabled the new art  to survive and flourish in a city that was of two minds about the relative merits of its glorious past and its eciting but unsettling present.

Fruit Trees,  one of Klimt's earliest oil landscapes, was a favorite of Sonja Knips.   The painting was  included in the Seventh Secession Exhibition of March 1900. The location of the scene has been tentatively identified as St. Agatha, near Goisern in Upper Austria where Klimt had spent a happy summer.  After purchasing  it, Knips was photographed on a number of occasions with the picture displayed in her home.  What made Fruit Trees look so new was  the artist's telescopic focus on the foliage (matched by Knips's  Japanese-influenced reform dress. - see second photo at top).
 













Delighted by Hoffmann's remodeling of some rooms in her Gumpendroferstrasse home, in 1903 Knips commissioned Hoffmann to design a  country home for her family in Seeboden, a resort town  on the Milstattersee in southern Austria.  The  house, measuring only 9 by 15 meters, was furnished with simple wood and wicker also designed by the architect.  The summer house  sits at the left of the photograph, with a boathouse to its right, directly on the lake.  There was also a horse barn on the property and plenty of room for her dogs to run.

Knips also supported the Wiener Werkstatte in creative ways, wearing its 'reform dresses' in a long-running publicity campaign, in the terms of the day.  Loose-fitting and boldly-patterned, reform  dresses were a way for a woman to ally herself with revolutionary modernism in art  and attitude.   Founded in 1903,  the Wiener Werkstatte, first through the Mosers - Koloman and Ditha - designed and produced the clothing. The Werkstatte grew to  more than one hundred craftspeople in just two years, a silver workshop was followed by others working in ceramics, textiles, metalwork, etc. 
Knips appeared frequently in magazines devoted to art and design,lending her image through  photography to promote the new art.  In 1905 a review celebrating the Viennese art colony designed by Hoffmannat Hohe Warte included a feature on Knips’s wardrobe. On several occasions, Knips modeled outfits and accessories at the Salon Floge. run by Emilie Floge, a close confidante of Klimt.
The flower basket brooch Knips wore at the neck of her dress (photo at left)  was designed for her by Hoffmann, as was the collar worn in the photo (at top), a dramatic piece designed by Moser.











It seems a peculiarly touching tribute from patron to artist that Knips asked Hoffmann to design a monument for the Knips family grave site at Vienna's Hietzinger Friedhof cemetery in 1919.    Both Sonja Knips and her husband Anton lived long lives, with Anton dying in 1946 and Sonja living for another four decades after she gave the commission.  But Knips, whose marriage was widely believed to be unhappy, maintained a personal decorum that, while perhaps a contrast her always forward-looking and active interest in the arts, shared some of the attributes of Hoffmann's austere modernism.  The triangular shape of the monument, while unusual for its purpose, is not flamboyant.


In January of 1926, Sonia Knips left her bridal home  for the one she had dreamed of since Hoffmann began his room-by-room redesign of her Gumpendorferstrassse  residence 23 years before – a complete “Hoffmann-Haus"  in Dobling, an old Biedermeier  district of Vienna. Hoffmann honored the historic neighborhood by  designing the Villa Knips to harmonize with its neighbors.  Although the facade was asymmetrical and the windows were different sizes on all three floors, the proportions  adhered to a rigorously worked-out geometry.   And yet - those proportions dance.

For the site of her dream house, (Knips wrote after moving in that she had dreamed of living there forever)  Knips chose to buy the Villa Zuckerkandl from her journalist friend, not for the existing house but rather for its site, making the genesis of Villa Knips an early version of the ‘tear-down.’  The decorations were designed by Dagobert Peche, unabashedly described by Zuckerkandl  as  “the greatest genius of ornament that Austria has possessed since the Baroque.” 
Villa Knips was to be the last urban home that Hoffmann built.  In the years following World War I the  Austrian economy was weak and  Hoffmann received few building commissions, most  coming from neighboring countries.   



Christina Ehrlich, who studied with Hoffmann and with ceramicist Michael Powolny, carried out the stucco work, both exterior and interior.  The facade of Villa Knips was studded with rows of discreet diamond-shaped accents, a frequent Hoffmann touch (he used them on the wicker furniture for the summer house in Seeboden, too).  Just inside the front door was Ehrlich's staircase,  a series of  stucco columns spectacularly decorated in the vocabulary of 1920s Werkstatte design.  For the interior decoration, Knips chose Dagobert Peche, one of a new generation of Werkstatte designers,  whose Viola carpeting is visible throughout rooms on the main floor.  In print, Berta  Zuckerkandl  asserted unequivocally that Peche was “the greatest genius of ornament that Austria has possessed since the Baroque.”   She had a point; the short-lived Peche overflowed with ideas, occasionally too many at once, but not in his decoration of Villa Knips.  A home, a total work of art, and a meeting place for artists and writers, Villa Knips was everything Sonja Knips had hoped for.



Knips allowed  her private suite of rooms to be  displayed at the International Exposition in Paris in 1925 where the sophisticated French critics were shocked - or  titillated - by the  exoticism of its furnishings.  A sculptured Venus by Susi Singer and paintings by Maria Strauss-Likarz were among her personal items near a sleeping alcove with a bar and smoking area.  The homely  knitting basket with balls of wool escaped notice.  This may be the moment to note that, like Lili Waerndorfer (recently profiled here), Knips was quite happy to own and display one of Klimt's nudes,  one of the artist's  last completed paintings, Adam and Eve.
A complex person, Sonja Knips still eludes our understanding. Her contributions to the arts still excite  admiration, as does Villa Knips, but the woman who made so much possible has faded from view. Recognition awaits.


For further reading: Sonja Knips Und Die Wiener Moderne by Manu von Miller, Vienna, Verlag Christan Brandstatter:  2004. (available in German only)

Images: unless noted otherwise, from Christian Brandstatter Archive, Vienna.
1. Sonia Knips - photographed at the Floge Salon in a Reform dress and collar designed for he by Koloman Moser, c. 1904.
2. Sonia Knips In A Japanese-influenced Reform Dress, photographed at home -  Gumpendorferstrasse -with Gustav Klimt's Fruit Trees.
3. Gustav Klimt - Fruit Trees, c. 1901, private collection.
4. Josef Hoffmann - Knips Country House (at left) With Boathouse (center).
5. Sonja Knips Wearing A Dress From The Wiener Werkstatte in a fabric designed by Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill, with a brooch designed by Josef Hoffmann at the neck, 1911.
6. Josef Hoffmann - brooch designed for Sonja Knips, 1910, Museum of Applied 
Culture, Vienna.
7. Josef Hoffmann, sketch for a Knips family grave site, 1919.
8. Front view of Villa Knips at Nusswaldgasse 22, Dobling, c. 1926.
9. Foyer of Villa Knips, with stucco work by Christina Erhlich, 1926, ModerneBauformen Magazine.
10. Villa Knips, seating area with upholstery and carpeting by Dagobert Peche and a painting by Josef August Lux, 1931.
11. Gustav Klimt - Adam And Eve, c.1917, Belvedere Gallery, Vienna.
12. Villa Knips - seating area with Klimt's Adam and Eve, c.1926-31.

 

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Rediscovering Broncia Koller

July 30, 2013, 11:31 am
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Modernism is a story men tell themselves.  Told often enough, the story takes on the status of history.
The standard narrative of the new art in early 20th century Vienna is especially egregious  in ignoring the women who participated  considering how many of them there were.  The invisibility of patrons like Sonja Knips or Lili Waerndorfer is easier to understand than that of artists who, after all, leave works behind with their names on them.   Which brings me, for the second time in these columns, to Broncia Koller-Pinell (1863-1934) .   


Sometimes referred to only by her married name of  Koller, she was an established artist of thirty-three when she married.  Koller worked in all the major genres of Modernist art: portraits, nudes, landscapes, interiors, and still life.  Schooled at the Academy of Art in Munich, a city with its own Secession group, she studied woodblock printing in Vienna with the accomplished Adolf Bohm around 1900.  Like her teacher, Koller adapted the recently discovered Japanese medium of the ukiyo-e print to local imagery.  

Instead of  pure japonisme or stock symbols of Art Nouveau (think: swans, lotus blossoms, etc.), Koller created strong images of Austrian landscape and working women, even the extremely specific  Roof Of The Vienna Theater From A House At Weinseile Number 6.  Koller’s work moves away from the Jugendstil toward the even newer spare modernism.
 
Although women were not official members of the first Vienna Secession, many women did exhibit with the group and Koller was first among them.  For the Secessionists, the interior was a psychological space, permeable by the public life, and gender was not a negative attribute of the interior.    The term decorative also alluded to the use of the picture plane, a tending toward abstraction.  Their statement in the 1908 Kunstschau catalog read : “To permeate life with art is something altogether different from hanging it with art products.”  
 
At the 1908 Kunstschau, a celebration of Emperor Franz Josef’s 60th jubilee, Koller had a great success,   In one gallery was a group of  her paintings and in another  a wall was devoted to her woodblock prints.  It was there that Egon Schiele first saw Koller’s portrait of her mother, the model for his portrait of Hans Massmann.

Koller exhibited frequently, at the Kunstschau in 1908 and again in 1909. and elsewhere.    In  1911 Koller had a joint exhibition with Heinrich Schroder at Carl Moll’s  Galerie Miethke. In 1919,  Koller participated in the debut exhibition of the Aquarius group  in Salzburg.  She also made  the all-important hanging decisions  for the Sonderbund at Galerie Miethke.  It is interesting to compare Koller's  Arco with Moll's House Of Therese Krones in Dobling-  Vienna (c.1912-14, de Grosz Collection, Vienna).  Painted at about the same time, how  the similar elevated street views, how different the results between Koller's exuberant brushwork and fauvist style palette from Moll's delicate colors and restrained realism, and each impressive in its own way.   Beware  over-generalizations in art; it is a mirage created by our desire for a neat story.
Koller kept an apartment in Vienna and a studio at Naschmarkt. Among her close friends were Lou-Andreas Salome, whose portrait Koller painted,  and Alma Mahler.   Broncia’s brother  Friedrich became Salome’s lover. and the foursome was often together.   The wealthy Pinell family maintained a country home at Oberwaltersdorf that Broncia inherited, and where she painted Harvest, one of her most popular works. When the Emperor purchased  Harvest for the Belvedere, friends reported to Koller on the excitement that greeted its public debut there. 



Alma Mahler  who often visited the Kollers’s summer home in  Oberwaltersdorf with her daughter Anna .  Koller’s son Rupert and Anna married, briefly in 1921,  but when Anna left Rupert Koller the friendship disintegrated, not helped at all by a plat Bocksgesang(Goat's Song), written  by Alma's new partner Franz Werfel, a poorly-disguised chronicle of  the unhappy marriage in five acts.  Other frequent summer guests were Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Egon Schiele.

Broncia Koller  was a friend and  mentor, to the younger painter Schiele.  In 1918 Koller painted a double portrait of Schiele and his wife Edith.  This was also the year of the influenza epidemic that took both Schieles, within days of each other.   Edith Schiele was already so ill that she had been unable to attend the funeral of their friend, Koloman Moser, who had died at age forty-nine from throat cancer.  
Months before he died, Schiele made a watercolor drawing of Koller's daughter Silvia.  As an adult, Silvia Koller (1898-1963) became a successful painter.




Koller-Pinell was Jewish;  her husband Hugo Koller was not.  For her, the increasing anti-Semitism in the Kunstschau after 1932 began  the erasure of her artistic reputation.   In the decades after Koller’s death, the importance of her work was minimized even by men who had praised and supported her in life. It takes repeated acts of rediscovery to keep art alive and available. 



For more about Broncia Koller.
















Images;
1. Broncia Koller - Still Life With Parrot, 1910, Austiran national Museum, Lower Belvedere, Vienna.
2. Broncia Koller - Rooftop Of the Vienna Theater From A House At  Weinseile 6.
3. Broncia Koller - Woman Carrying Food, undated, Medaille College, Buffalo.
4. Broncia Koller - Arco, c. 1910-12, Eisenberger Collection, Vienna.
5. Broncia Koller - Anna Mahler With A Parrot -undated, courtesy of Austrian Art Net.
6  Broncia Koller - Portrait Of Egon and Edith Schiele, 1918, Austrian National Library, Vienna. 
7. Silvia Koller - Still Life With Oranges, 1956, private collection. 
8. Egon Schiele - Portrait Of Silvia Koller, 1918, private collection.
9..  unidentified photographer - Broncia and Silvia Koller At Oberwaltersdorf, 1915, Getty Archive, Los Angeles.

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Feel The Wind Blow: Nell Brooker Mayhew

August 1, 2013, 7:34 am
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At first glance,  this could be a monotype  by Edgar Degas.
Instead of rural Burgundy, though we have the Pacific coast of California in By The Sea (1920), a color etching by an  American artist, once much admired but more recently neglected: Nell Brooker Mayhew (1876-1940).  Most of her works have been held in private collections but have recently been exhibited at the Sullivan Goss Gallery.  

















The heightened contrasts under  blazing sunlight  bleach the color  out the the flowers into so many miniature suns in California Poppies (also from 1920), a scene that could also be in central France. But Mayhew, a transplanted Midwesterner, found a landscape of infinite inspiration in California, as her own words make clear.














"It is a thrilling experience to follow along the old trail on which stood the old Missions of California - the first highway on the Pacific coast - a trail thru thew wildflowers and luxuriant growth - following the ocean from the south to the north of California."

"No two missions are alike; each one was built by the plan needed for the specific location.  It seems as if there had been the artist's joy in creating each design a new idea..." - Nell Brooker Mayhew


When Nell Brooker Mayhew moved to Los Angeles  in 1908, there was no motion picture industry, and no freeways, but there was a landscape startlingly different from her native Midwest and a whole different architectural vocabulary from that of the Prairie style back home in Chicago.  Bungalow apartments, Arts and Crafts cottages, and the remnants of Spanish settlements, became Mayhew's subjects..
Although dating her works is not always easy, Mayhew seems to have begun etching in color before 1910.  The  method, sometimes referred to as a la poupee, is a painstaking one. First, Mayhew incised her design into a waxed copper plate that she then printed in a background color.  After letting the first print dry (overnight), she rubbed oil paints onto the original plate and reprinted over the original impression.  In this way, she could also make additional versions of the same design by rubbing out the oils and using new ones.




Within a few years, Brooker began a study of the remaining Spanish mission churches of her adopted home. In 1918,  Brooker began driving the state from south to north, with her young daughters Mary Jane (b. 1912) and Nell (b. 1914).  
Although she was not the first artist to travel the Mission route (illustrator Henry Chapman Ford created a portfolio of watercolors, etchings and oil paintings, beginning in 1875, it seems a toss-up who had the more arduous trip: Ford in a horse-drawn buggy or Mayhew, accompanied to energetic little girls.  
Like Ford, Mayhew took several years to assemble her portfolio of the twenty-one Mission churches  remaining.  For each building, she created a unique view, sometimes of a part, sometimes from a distance, and in one case, the ruins of an abandoned building.




Mayhew also painted with oils and the vivid colors she used  may have led  her to experiment with adding color to etchings. What is unexpected is the sense of movement she conveyed using the two=step method.  Where images of trees and rolling hills often suggest movement, Mayhew entrances our eyes, as we try to understand how she can make a static image like Mission Dolores (at left) come to life through slight curves in the horizontal structural lines.

Nell Brooker Mayhew (1875-1940) was ambitious and determined from the very start.  She graduated from college in only three years, then immediately began graduate studies in Chicago.   A brief marriage in 1902 ended tragically when her husband of six months died of a heart ailment.   After more study at the Art Institute of Chicago, Nell Brooker moved to Los Angeles in 1908, settling in the artists enclave at Arroyo Seco near Pasadena. She married Leonard Mayhew in 1911 and, in quick succession, gave birth to two daughters.  Nothing slowed the artist down. 




A few other printers worked with the same painstaking  method but, on the available evidence,  none created  images as evocative of movement as Mayhew.  With her dual mastery of etching and coloration she achieved uncommon results, with iamges that are anything but static.
Ernst Klotz, a Leipzig printmaker, born in 1863, is credited with developing the method of painting on the etched plate.  Around 1895 he produced colored etchings printed from one plate à la poupée.  Klotz exhibited with the Munich Secession and also in Vienna.
Also the French illustrator Jean Malo-Renault (1900-1988) from Brittany.
Hermine David (1886-1970), also French, was primarily a painter, who lived and exhibited in New York City from 1915 to 1920. She married the painter Jules Pascin. Of this group, David has the largest reputation.

My thanks to Neil Philip of Idbury Prints for directing my attention to other color etchers.
 and Nell Brooker Mayhew: Paintings On Paper by Alissa J. Anderson, Glendale, Balcony Press: 2005.

Images: courtesy of Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.
1. Nell Brooker Mayhew - By The Sea, 1920.
2. Nell Brooker Mayhew - California Poppies, c. 1920.
3. Nell Brooker Mayhew -  San Juan Capistrano Mission, 1917.
4. Nell Brooker Mayhew - Villa Apartments, no date.
5.  Nell Brooker Mayhew - Crotona Mission, no date.
6. Nell Brooker Mayhew - Mission Dolores, c. 1915.
7.Nell Brooker Mayhew - Lone Sycamore and Poppies, no date given.
8. Nell Brooker Mayhew - Eucalyptus Grove, no date
9. Nell Brooker Mayhew - Sunset Symphony, c. 1910.


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Henri Le Sidaner: The Missing Picture

August 8, 2013, 11:52 am
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All those well-appointed tables set for a meal, all those paper lanterns bobbing from the trees, all those lighted windows, all those deserted moonlit nights.... all those missing people.   That's one way of describing the oeuvre of the late French artist Henri Le Sidaner (1862-1939).  With the often noted Francophile tilt to the history of modern art it seems hard to believe that there are French artists who have escaped our attention, but there are. 
Recently, a lost Le Sidaner saurfaced in Pittsburgh, where the Carnegie Museum of Art is home to two Le Sidaner paintings.   In January, a Pittsburgh school employee realized that a painting hanging in an office was an original Le Sidaner.   Recognizing its worth, the district decided to sell it to raise money for its arts education program. Interior: Light From A Window, a painting of the interior of the artist's home in Versailles,  was sold on May 8th at Sotheby's New York for $750,000.  The auction house also waived its fees, flying to Pittsburgh to appraise the painting, ship it to New York, clean it and provide a new gold frame,
The painting came to the Pittsburgh School District as a gift from The Friends of Art, (a group that has donated hundreds of artworks, mostly by local artists) sometime after it had been exhibited at the Carnegie museum in 1933.

The missing painting, its whereabouts unknown to the artist's estate for decades, is a mystery solved.   But still tantalizing is the whereabouts of the missing persons in Le Sidaner's paintings.  We know that he began to paint under the influence of the Symbolists in the 1890s, but he rarely included human figures in his work. as many of them did.  Looking at Le Sidaner's  paintings, crepuscular and oddly cropped as they are, points to the Belgian William Degouve de Nuncques, whose La maison aveugle  (The Blind House, 1892) influenced so many.
What strikes me about  Le Sidaner's Autumn Twilight is its similarity to The Blind House.  Considering that the name of this seminal work for Surrealism has been translated into English as The Pink House, I wonder what else has been lost in translation.

Images:

Henri Le Sidaner - Interieur: Lumiere de la fenetre, 1931, private collection.Henri Le Sidaner - Autumn Twilight, c. 1920,  private collection.

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Carl Moll And The Semi-Detached House

August 12, 2013, 10:49 am
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“It is no abstract or decorative surface geometry, which surrounds these people, but a three-dimensional, straightforward clarity.” -  Werner Hofmann,  Modern Malerei in Osterreich  (Modern painting In Austria, in German), Wien, Wolfrum Verlag: 1965.

When I think of Josef Hoffmann's totalizing architecture one of its notable characteristics is hos genius for translating volume into planes.  That said, I think Werner Hofmann's assessment of Viennese painting describes perfectly the paintings of Carl Moll (1861-1945).

In 1901,   the first house that Josef Hoffmann built  in Hohe Warte, a new suburb of Vienna, was  a duplex for his friends and fellow artists,  Carl Moll and Koloman Moser.   In retrospect, Hohe Warte has taken on the aura of a  Viennese Acropolis:  home of monumental artists, situated on a hill overlooking a great city.  
No exaggeration this, because history happened here.  At the time Moll moved to his new house at  Wollergasse 10,  he was President of the Secession. Moll was also married to Anna Schindler, widow of the respected  painter  Emil Schindler, making Moll the stepfather of the beautiful and flirtatious Alma.  It was at Hohe Warte that Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler fell in love and married in 1902.   The next year, Moll introduced Hoffmann to Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet.  The Stoclets had come to Vienna on business and they were so impressed by Moll's home and garden that they commissioned Hoffmann to build a villa for them at Hohe Warte .  But their plans changed and they returned to Brussels in 1904, so that is where Hoffmann's masterpiece, the Palais Stoclet, was built between 1905-11.
As a colony for artists Hohe Warte began with just four houses, the Moll-Moser residence at Wollergaase 10,  a villa next door for photographer Hugo Henneberg and his wife Marie at Wollergasse 8, and a villa for another photographer, Friedrich Viktor Spitzer.  Hoffmann viewed the four villas as one total work of art, (after the Secessionist ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk)   incorporating into each one such common features as brick walls and white  rough-cast exterior facades, simple rectilinear shapes, and patterns in black and white.


We know quite a bit about Moll's half of the house from his paintings.  That the artist  found an apparently inexhaustible source of images there, painting several interiors.   That he painted the  sparkling geomtry of the terrace  the same year that  Moll was photographed relaxing with his friends Max Reinhardt and Alfred Roller, his new son-in-law, the composer Gustav Mahler, and his doppelhaus neighbor, Koloman Moser.  Moll also did a  self-portrait in his third floor studio (1906) with a sculpture by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Minne and Hoffmann's trademark black and white pattern on the floor.  Moll created - or recreated, depending on your point of view - the effects Josef Hoffmann achieved architecturally, the striking use of  blue and white, the diffusion of light, and harmony between interior and exterior spaces.  In his paintings, Moll often combined  stippling and small parallel strokes, displaying a debt to Divisonist techniques, again acquired through his contacts with Belgian artists.


In a special issue of The Studio publishedin 1906 and devoted to  The Art Revival In Austria,  Ludwig Hevesi pointed to Moll as the one with the social connections. who collected the funds that financed the Vienna Secession.  Moll  “was the very leaven of the new movement, Minister of Fine Arts  without portfolio,” Hevesi declared.
By then Moll, along with Kolo Moser and Gustav Klimt had become discontented with Vienna Secession, a group they had founded in 1897, and had moved on to found the Wiener Werkstatte, dozens of whose members contributed to the design of the Palais Stoclet.





Images:
1. Wiener Werkstatte Archive - Josef Hoffmann's duplex for Carl Moll and Koloman Moser, 1901, Museum for Applied Culture, Vienna.
2. Carl Moll - Hausgarten. Hohe Warte, 1903, Austrian State Museum, Vienna.
3. Carl Moll - Anna in The Living Room At Hohe Warte, 1903, Austrian State Museum, Vienna.
4. Carl Moll - The Artist In His Studio At Hohe Warte, 1906,  Art Gallery of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

5. unidentified photographer - Gustav Mahler (standing) , Max Reinhardt, Carl Moll, Alfred Roller, Koloman Moser (back to the camera) on the terrace at Villa Moll, 1903, Austrian Theater Museum, Vienna.




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Nonprofit donates custom home in this East Bay city for Marine injured in...

Nonprofit donates custom home in this East Bay city for Marine injured in...

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OCBC Bank Singapore Offers Up to 2.8% p.a. Fixed Deposit Promotion from 21...

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National Poetry Month 2024: Maxine Starr

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