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Concrete Palm Trees And Holy Motors: The World Of Robert Mallet-Stevens

March 23, 2015, 7:55 am
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I. Perched on a hillside overlooking the village of Mezy-sur-Seine, this house looks like nothing so much as a luxury liner on the crest of a wave.  And there is some poetic truth to this comparison.  Villa Poiret  is, arguably, the earliest example of what came to be known as ocean-liner chic during the inter-war years.  Villa Poiret was also the first major  design by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.

Fashion designer Paul Poiret had wanted a suburban retreat for his  family for several years when he commissioned the young Mallet-Stevens in 1921; he had approached other architects, including Le Corbusier but was dissatisfied with their plans.  Yet Poiret was also in a hurry to have a house built. An avid yachtsman, he had purchased a property that would give him a front row seat for the boat races at the Summer Olympics scheduled for Paris in 1924.So eager, in fact, was Poiret that he moved into the grounds-keeper's cottage as soon as it was finished in 1923.  He never did get to live in his landmark villa; there were delays in its elaborate construction, the House of Poiret went bankrupt in 1926, and the villa stood empty and deteriorating until Poiret sold it in 1930 to the Rumanian actress Elvira Popescu.  It was Popescu who hired another architect, Paul Boyer,  in 1932 to add the porthole windows.  Popescu lived in the house until 1988,  when it again became vacant and dilapidated; its current  restoration began in 2008 and Villa Poiret is now recognized as a French national landmark.

Filmmaker Leos Carax knew this back story when  he used Villa Poiret for a scene in his most recent film Holy Motors in 2012.  A sophisticated and disorienting take on various film genres,  Holy Motors takes the viewer on Surrealist Odyssey, his Odysseus is  named Monsieur Oscar, the ship is a sleek white stretch limo captained by his equally sleek assistant Celine.    Together they tour Paris on a series of mysterious engagements, each of which requires a different disguise for Monsieur, who uses the back seat as his dressing room. They travel mostly by night through half-lit landscapes that intimate ghostly events offstage.  Carax, a Frenchman,  was undoubtedly aware that Robert Mallet-Stevens was one of the first architects to take an interest in cinema; his set designs for  the film  L'Inhumaine (1924)  are considered a masterpiece.



II. No one had a better biography for an architect  than Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945); you could make a movie out of it.  He was born in Maison- Laffitte, a 17th centuryhouse designed by Francois Mansart, an architect admired for his elegance and subtlety, qualities that Mallet-Stevens absorbed into his own vocabulary.   Mallet-Stevens  was the son and grandson of art dealers and his mother was a niece of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens.  He was also the nephew of Suzanne Stevens, wife of the wealthy industrialist Adolphe Stoclet.  Their  home in Brussels, the Palais Stoclet built  in 1905 on the Avenue Terneuven, was designed by Josef Hoffmann, architect of the Vienna Secession.     Mallet-Stevens  drew on  Hoffman's design of Hoffmann's art colony Hohe Warte  when he came to design  his own, seven houses on rue Mallet-Stevens (1926-1938) in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.  

Where  Le Corbusier wanted to reinvent entire cities, Mallet-Stevens worked primarily on individual commissions, most of them in Paris, the city Le Corbusier would have razed if he had been given the chance.  His ideas were less grandiose and he left behind no large theoretical work to buttress his reputation but Mallet-Stevens was not the light-weight that he has sometimes been portrayed to be; his excellent taste in collaborators set him apart from the self-promoting Le Corbusier.  You could say that his death was ill-timed, taking place before the great post-war building boom. Nevertheless Mallet-Stevens was one of the two most influential French architects of the 20th century.    Period photographs of his work are limited, partly because Mallet-Stevens asked that his archives be destroyed after his death. 


III. “A little house, interesting to live in, to take advantage of the sun.” 

That was how Mallet-Stevens modestly described his vision for his second important residence,  designed for the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noialles.  Soon after their marriage in 1923, the couple signed a contract with the architect to build them a summer home overlooking the Riviera. For this project Mallet-Stevens  chose as his collaborators Elise Djo-Bouregois, Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, and Theo van Dosberg!  What began as a simple country retreat became an “immobile ocean liner” with  fifteen master bedrooms, swimming pool, squash court and a terrace for games of boules, retracting bay windows, clocks controlled by a central system, and a triangular-shaped 'Cubist' garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.


The clients, Charles and Marie-Laure, were wealthy art patrons with a taste for Surrealism; one of Marie-Laure's closest friends was Jean Cocteau.   Her contemporaries found something of the surreal in the Vicomtesse herself: her family tree included Russian aristocrats, Quakers, and even the Marquis de Sade. Villa Noailles was featured in Man Ray's 1926 film Les Mysteres du Chateau de De, allowing a large public of moviegoers to glimpse  a modernist masterpiece.  What bankruptcy did to  Villa Poiret, World War II brought to Villa Noialles. In 1940, the Italian army occupied the house, and forced its owners to leave.  After the war ended, the Vicomtesse returned, living there until she died  in 1970. The City of Hyeres  purchased Villa Noailles  in 1973, and it is now an arts center.

IV. At the same time that Mallet-Stevens was at work on Villa Noialles, he was invited by the French government to design theirembassy pavilion for the  International Exposition of Decorative Arts Paris, 1925.  His collaborators  were Jan and Joel Martel, sculptor twins who designed the famous Cubist palm trees (Arbre Cubiste) for the garden in front of the pavilion. No stranger to world’s fairs, Mallet-Stevens had previously exhibited designs in Brussels, London, and San Francisco.  After the fair ended, the concrete trees were destroyed; other than in photographs they survive in the form of a wooden model now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (In the photograph at left of the Martel brothers' studio, a maquette of the palm tree is visible in the alocve at right.)  Among the most avant-garde works at the exposition, the concrete trees were were mocked in the press; in one cartoon a puzzled gardener tried to decide whether to water them.

Mallet-Stevens and the Martel brothers understood thatthe introduction of reinforced concrete changed everything; without it modern building is inconceivable    “A  thousand shapes are possible, unexpected silhouettes spring up, often strange, but rational and sincere. Reinforced concrete allows overhangs, the elimination of numerous points of support, and the reduction of the various structural elements to a minimum.  So the proportions are profoundly modified and the aesthetic becomes different.”  -  Robert Mallet-Stevens in Architecture and Geometry (1924).

V. “The events of human life, be they public or private, are so intimately bound up with architecture, that the majority of observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in the full reality of their behavior, from the remnants of their public monuments or the examination of their domestic remains.” - Honore de Balzac, excerpt from The Pursuit of the Absolute (1832). 





In the The Unknown Masterpiece, an otherwise ambiguous tale of the painter Francois Porbus, a man who is either a total failure or a misunderstood genius, Balzac based the artist's studio on a specific location, something he did over and over again. So vivid was Balzac’s   word picture of  the artist in his studio, down to  its location   in the rue des Grands-Augustins that Pablo Picasso took a studio there while he painted Guernica the 1930s.   After reading The Unknown Masterpiece Picasso wrote, “Thanks to the never ending search for reality, [Balzac's artist] ends in black obscurity.  There are so many realities that, in trying to encompass them all, one ends in darkness.”

After a fashion life for Robert Mallet-Stevens, a humane modernist, ended  in darkness.  For all that fortune had showered on him, he spent his final five years exiled in France's southern free zone in order to protect his wife Andree, who was Jewish.  He died on February 5, 1945, six months before the liberation of his beloved city on August 25.  Andre Mallet-Stevens survived him, living on until 1980.  The Pompidou Center held a retrospective on the works of Robert Mallet-Stevens in 2005.

Visit the always fascinating Cinetourist for more about Holy Motors.
Note: This piece is dedicated to Tania who drives down Avenue Terneuevn past the Palais Stoclet every day.

Images:
1. Caroline Champetier - cinematographer - Holy Motors, 2012, Les Films du Losange, Paris. c.1926-30, Grand Palais, RMN, Paris.
2. Anna Blair - Exterior view of vaill martel on rue Mallet-Stevens, Paris, from Anna Blair: Untapped Paris.
3. Jacquleine Salmon - Villa Noailles, no date given, Pompidou Center, Paris.
Unidentified photographer, Marie-Laure & Charles de Noailles,
4. Therese Bonney - Studio at Villa Martel on rue Mallet-Setevens, Paris, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC. 
5. Therese Bonney - Terrace of Villa Mallet-Stevens, - home of the architect in Paris, 192, Pompidou Center, Paris.
7. Louis Marcoussis - Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1932, Villa Cavrois, Roubaix.
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A Little Madness in The Spring

March 29, 2015, 1:41 pm
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"A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown --
Who ponders this tremendous scene --
This whole Experiment of Green --
As if it were his own! "
 - A little Madness in the Spring by Emily Dickinson

In Old English the word wif referred to a woman, not necessarily a married woman.  Then came the Middle English word midwife to describe the mistress of a household.  The word housewife as currently understood is one of the words that fails into a category named by the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff "claiming an identity they taught me to despise."

No one has ever - as of yet -  captured the poignancy that lurks in the word housewife better than the late Jayne Davison.  Davison died in 1981 at age forty-nine from cancer.  The year before she published The Fall of a Doll's House: Three Generations of American Women and the  Houses They Lived In.   Davison grew up in Summit, a streetcar suburb in northern New Jersey and lived for most of her adult life in the Boston area, Cambridge to be exact.  It was the similar geographical background that attracted me to the book when it appeared; I intendded to avoid doing housework or becoming some man's chatelaine.  I had seen reproductions of Sheila de Bretteville's Womanhouse (1973) and the several version of Femme Maison by Louise Bourgeois.  Against all advice, I refused to take typing in school; I would not go quietly.

Both Jayne Davison and Louise Bourgeois are gone now.  Davison's daughter Lesley Davison published an updated version of her mother's book To Make A House a Home: Four Generations of American Women and the Houses They Lived In (1994); the book contains dozens of photographs of their comfortable homes.  When I was a girl living in Essex County New Jersey, in my childish myopia I thought everyone lived this life because all the people I knew did.  I hope I am not nostalgic but I can't help but wish from time to time that I had been right about that.  It seemed such a lovely world for a child but, as we have since learned as the doll's houses crumbled, it exacted a terrible price, as all idylls seem to do.  I am still here, taking an admittedly housewifely pleasure in the spring cleaning of my apartment.  This too is not without poignancy.
Sheila de Bretteville has migrated from the Womanspace project at UCLA to Yale University where she is the Director of the Yale Graduate Program in Graphic Design.
 
Images:
1. Unknown French artist - Le printemps (Spring), 14th century, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
2. Louise Bourgeois - Femme Maison (Woman House), 1984, Museum of Modern Art, NYC>
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Java And Jan Toorop

April 6, 2015, 7:07 am
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Kierkegaard said that we live life forward but understand it backward; that's also a good description of how we respond to works of art, although it is not how we are expected to write about art, if we do.
Recently I saw Crescent (above) for the first time. Although I knew nothing about the artist and not much about eastern Asian art, the painting made me think of the Dutch artist Jan Toorop and how his Indonesian childhood influenced his art.

Jan Toorop (1858-1928) was born at Purworejo in central Java where his father was a clerk for the Dutch colonial government that ruled the Indonesian archipelago during the 19th century.  His mother was half Chinese. The Toorops were descended from  Belanda Hitam or Black Dutchmen,  soldiers recruited from  the Gold Coast of Africa (now Ghana), also a  Dutch colony.  It would be anachronistic to call either the Toorop family or Indonesian art ‘multi-cultural’  but contemporary art historians are scrambling to understand the multiple sources of existing artworks or else ignoring them in the hope that they can continue their claustrophobic and deeply exclusionary dialogue undisturbed.

The Toorop family returned to the Netherlands so Jan could study art but  the young Toorop found  the avant-garde artists of Les Vingts in Brussels more congenial than the academic painters at the Amsterdam Academy.  During the period when he lived in Brussels (1882-1886), Toorop became friends with the prickly Belgian from Ostend, James Ensor, and the two traveled to Paris together to check out the latest developments in French art.  In 1886 Jan Toorop married Annie Josephine Hall  a woman from Sligo, Ireland.  Their daughter Charley Toorop was born in 1891; the subject of numerous paintings by her father, Charley Toorop grew up to be an artist herself.
For Toorop, European culture became an addition; his work already had a story to tell that had been inspired by the art he had been exposed to as a child in Indonesia. Like Vincent Van Gogh, Toorop became a socialist sympathizer after observing the people at work in the slag heaps of the Borinage, a horrific landscape more vivid than any hell imagined by the Symbolists.  He read their poetry in books by  Maurice Maeterlinck and Emil Verhaeren, like the rest of his generation.  These names loomed large in international circles; Maeterlinck would win the Nobel Literature Prize in 1911 and contemporaries would not have been surprised if the prolific Verhaeren had done the same.

















We could view the sirens in Toorop's Shipwreck as an example of Art Nouveau, and a bold example at that, but Toorop's visual vocabulary had its roots in wayang kulit, the Javanese art of puppet theater.  It is one of the oldest known forms of performance art in the world. Wayang held a place of high honor at the royal cours and at rural festivals alike.  Wayang beber, a variation, substituted a painted scroll for the puppets; against this background a narrator told a story to the musical accompaniment of a gamelan orchestra. Kulit puppets were flat characters, mounted on bamboo sticks, their faces chiseled in great detail in rhythmic patterns  by hand.  Their attraction for Toorop, an artist of outstanding draftsmanship, seems obvious.  The amassed interlocking human forms that Toorop often employed for his prints have their ancestors on the scrolls and, like their predecessors, what may appear at first as chaos is quickly resolved into a harmonious group by the use of strong lines.


The connection between Jan Toorop and Crescent, at least in my imagination, is there also in another Javanese art - batik.  Of ancient origins, batik making reached its zenith in Indonesia where, not incidentally, the 19th century Dutch immigrants became involved in its production.  The techniques used for transferring  designs to cloth are similar to those used in lithography, seen here in Toorop's work.  To make a design in batik, wax is applied to  areas of the cloth, color is applied to the whole cloth, and then the wax  is scraped off, revealing the completed pattern.  In,lithography, chemicals are applied to to discrete portions of the stone stone or wood block; sometimes incisions are made directly into the surface.  Again, a multi-step process allows layers of colors and lines to be built up sequentially by the artist.  Those who dismiss these arts as minor in comparison to painting with oils ought to give it a try.  And yes, the dominant colors used in batik are indigo blue and warm brown.


Images;
1. Sjarifuddin K Rd Luckman., Crescent, 1976, shaffer Art Galleries, Syracuse, ny.
2. Jan Toorop - Twee sylphiden (Two sylphs) leuiden een klok, 1896, Jan Toorop Reserach Center, @ jantoorop.com
3. Jan Toorop - Shipwreck, 1895, 1899,  design for poster advertising a cantata by Johannes Wagenaar,  Institute of Chicago.
4. Amelia Guo, photographer - Wyanag kulit figure, MuseumWayang, Jakarta.
5. Jan Toorop - Le retour de soi-meme (The return to myself), 1891, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.
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A Fine Line: From Leon Spilliaert to Robert Kipnss

April 13, 2015, 12:04 pm
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What's this?  There's a story in these images and it will be forthcoming when The Blue Lantern recovers.  Thanks for your continued interest.
















































 















Images:
1. Leon Spilliaert -Interior with Green Plant and Glass Globe, 1907, private collection, Belgium.
2. Robert Kipniss - Interior with Lamp and Shadow, 1976, Shaffer art Gallery, Syracuse University.
3. Leon Spilliaert - Tree Behind a Wall, 1936, Johan A.H. von Rossum Collection, Belgium.
4. Robert Kipniss -  Green Roofs, 1978, Shaffer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.
5. Leon Spilliaert - The The Three Arches, November 1907, private collection, Belgium.
6. Robert Kipniss - Late Summer, 1977, Shaffer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.
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April By Plinio Nomellini

April 20, 2015, 12:34 pm
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Image:
Plinio Nomellini - Campagne fleurie en avril, 1910, Civica galeria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Latina.
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Images From What World

April 23, 2015, 11:20 am
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Robert Glant - Circles on a Lawn, c 1981, Shafer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.





















Tom Baril - Eustoma, 1998, Shafer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.
















Robert Doisneau - Barbarian prisoner and Callipygian Venus, 1966, Shafer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.
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Raphael And America

April 25, 2015, 11:48 am
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“Truly, while most artists hitherto have taken from nature something wild and strange which, besides making them abstract and fanciful, often brought out in their work the shadow and darkness of vice rather than the clarity and splendor of those virtues which make men immoral, in Raphael on the contrary there shone forth all the rarest  virtues of the soul accompanied by such grace, proficiency, beauty, modesty and fine manners as would have amply concealed any vice, however gross, and any blemish, however enormous.”
 - Giorgio Vasari, from  Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568)

I. When the Shaffer Art Galleries reopened at the beginning of this year after eight months of renovation, it came as a revelation and not only  because the gallery had more than doubled in size.  Founded in 1870 as a Methodist college, Syracuse University began collecting art four years later, and today the collection  numbers more than 45,000 objects, most of which have not been on public view in decades, if ever.
Dominating the European gallery is a large tondo, a round painting, in a carved, gilded frame that weighs 250 pounds. In back of the frame,  the painting itself is a 47 inch square wooden panel.   That this painting compels  your attention even in the company of Durer, Rembrandt, and Lucas Cranach the Elder, suggests  an artist of the highest order.   The gallery card identifies it as a  Madonna  attributed to  ‘Raphael, school of, c1500.”   Research on the painting is ongoing but what is clear to the appreciative eye is its supremely gentle beauty.

Within the circle a young woman holds a little boy with her left hand while with her right hand she gently draws back a blanket from the face of an infant. An image of sweetness and light that is universally understood.  In this instance she is the Virgin Mary and the children are the infant Jesus and a pudgy future St. John the Baptist,  Christian imagery re-imagined for  a 15th century Renaissance audience.  The characters are set against a landscape that historians have dubbed the 'sacro-idyllic', a style dating back to the early years of the Roman Empire.  This was the stuff of countless murals that decorated the walls of upper class Roman villas, the cultivated agricultural landscape that Virgil envisioned in The Georgics (c.37 BCE), a vision of symmetry and artifice where trees stand alone like antique columns.


II.  How important was the artist known as Raphael?  Until modern artists elbowed their way onto the stage, no art was held in higher esteem than that of the Italian Renaissance and no artist was more revered than Raphael.  To own a Raphael was to reach the pinnacle of collecting for a Gilded Age titan, just as owning a Van Gogh  would be for a collector today.  
“(T)he only  artist whose prestige had endured all changes of taste and fashion up to the end of the nineteenth century.”  - David Alan Brown,  curator of the exhibition Raphael and America.   Art historian Bernard Berenson called Raphael the “most famous and most beloved name in modern art” and this about an artist who had been dead for more than three hundred years!  
Creators sometimes view things differently than collectors do.  Renoir enigmatically described the Raphael's influence as something he had to get out of his system.  Baudelaire, the splenetic, predictably did no think much of the sunny Italian.  In spite of their name, the group known as the Pre-Raphaelites, although fascinated, complained that  Raphael's work had squashed their spontaneity.

That there was no Raphael in any 19th century American art collection was a source of national embarrassment.  The expatriate Bernard Berenson was  inventing a new profession – art attribution -  and thereby creating a market  for ‘Old Master’ art.   Thanks to Berenson, prices were rising as the race to acquire a Raphael was in progress.  In his role as adviser to wealthy collectors, Berenson recommended to Isabella Stewart Gardner that she pass on Raphael’s Colonna Madonna in 1897. But Berenson's opinion was not disinterested; in his world  a painting he did not get the chance to authenticate barely existed.  For him, the Colonna madonna was not merely relegated to the category  of 'school of' pictures created in Raphael's workshop but “pictures Raphael barely looked at.”  Now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Colonna Madonna, more primitive and less elegant than the Shafer Madonna is credited to Raphael himself.

Her contemporaries  often compared Mrs. Gardner to the great Renaissance art patron Isabella d’Este, was planning to turn her Boston home into a museum and she badly wanted a Raphael.  She would better have purchased a Raphael Madonna than the portrait that she did buy of a fat, ugly Roman churchman.  Not satisfied, Gardner wrote to Berenson, “My remaining pennies must go to the greatest  Raphael…”  and not the “tiresome dreary Colonna Madonna.”  

But that is exactly the picture that New York financier J.P.Morgan decided to buy on a whim when saw it in a Parisian gallery in 1901.  Whether Morgan knew that Vasari had described it as “truly marvelous and devout” or that both the Louvre and the British National Gallery had passed on it, he wasted no timei n snapping it up at first sight.  Morgan was not a man to haggle when he wanted something, a habit that caused concern to his business colleagues.  Clinton Dawkins, for one,  worried that Morgan might just buy the entire National Gallery.  And in June 1902 Dawkins wrote “We never see him and it is difficult to get hold of him.  He spends his time lunching with Kings or Kaisers or buying Raphaels.”


III. Raffaello Sanzio or Raphael was born at Urbino in 1483.  It has been claimed that he was born on April 6, the same day that he died in 1520 at the age of thirty-seven; whether that is correct or he was born on the alternative date of March 28 depends, in part, on your taste for artifice.   A small town, Urbino was no rural backwater, advantageously located halfway between Florence and Rome. Thanks to the enlightened patronage of the duke,  Federico di Montefeltro who employed the boy's father as a court painter, Urbino during Raphael's time was a center of culture where all the splendid painters of the day were known. Piera della Francesca worked there for precisely that reason.  One of the Venetian artist Titian’s best known paintings is his Venus of Urbino (1538), commissioned by the Duke.
It is from Vasari, his contemporary, that  we learn about the artist’s early years.  Left fatherless at the age of eleven, Raphael took over his father’s workshop and soon surpassed his father’s achievements.  Word spread of his precociousness and Raphael was invited to apprentice at Perugia in the workshop of Pietro Vannunci, affectionately known as Perugino.  In him, Raphael found a  master whose graceful style harmonized with his own inclinations.  If the young Raphael did not have his hand in this painting, it certainly inspired his Madonna of the Meadow (1505).  Vasari also took the measure of Raphael s' achievement accurately and generously, seeing in him  an artist less intellectual than Leonardo da Vinci and less revolutionary than Michelangelo, yet an artist without peer in the handling of paint.

Was this painting from the workshop of Raphael or was it painted by him?  Art attribution is now a profession on which millions of dollars hang in the balance, a situation that can bring out the worst in some people, as anyone who has watched the arrogant performance of Thomas Hoving in the documentary film Who the *$&% is Jackson Pollock? knows.  The Shaffer Madonna, regardless of who painted it, transcends such worldly concerns.



For further reading: Raphael and America by David Alan Brown, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art: 1983

Image:
Raphael, school of - Madonna and child with the young St. John the Baptist, c.1500, Shaffer Art Gallery, Syracuse University.

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All Things Feel: Gerard de Nerval On The Beach

May 6, 2015, 12:03 pm
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All things feel.
–pythagoras.

So you alone are blessed, you free-thinking man,
In a world where life sprouts in everything?
You seize the liberty to dispose of the forces you hold,
But in all your plans a sense of the universe is lacking.
Honor in each creature the spirit which moves it:
Each flower is a soul moved by Nature’s face;
In each metal resides some of love’s mystery;
“All things feel!” And all you are is powerful.
Beware, even the blind walls may spy on you:
Even matter is vested with the power of voice…
Do not make it serve an impious purpose.
Often in the most obscure beings resides yet the hidden God;
And like the infant’s eye covered by its lid,
The pure spirit forces its kernel though the husk of stones.
–Gérard de Nerval, Vers dorés(1845) in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 739 (J. Guillaume & C. Pichois eds. 1989)  (S.H. Transl.)

 



















I. - “All things feel.”  So said Pythagoras twenty-five hundred years ago and although in the intervening centuries we have had reason to question his theories on the harmony of the spheres and the mystical significance of numbers we have only to look at landscape paintings to see that, yes, all things feel, or least that artists bring their feelings to bear on the natural world around them.
For Europeans in the 19th century, the Atlantic Ocean seemed like the edge of the world even though they knew differently thanks to scientific advances.   For the French, the northwest coastline in Brittany and Normandy took on a new aspect at mid-century when, as historians like to say, the beach was "invented."  The sea which had long been a fearsome place, the site of naval confrontations and a treacherous place for fishermen trying to make a living, was being transformed into a place for leisure and recreation thanks to a new invention, the railroad.  Along with vacationers came  painters who  took a new approach to marine painting, loosely defined.  In literature this is sometimes called the 'pathetic fallacy', when a writer attributes human emotions to natural phenomena.  But for painters the relationship to their subject was more direct, through the movement of the brush.



















Art historians date the change to 1869 when Gustave Courbet painted  The Wave  at Etretat although its subtlies  may elude modern viewers.   Courbet based his work  on recent  scientific discoveries about the physical phenomenaof tides and on the transparency and fluidity of water, foregrounded in the new medium of photography.    Along with Courbet, his friends the painters Eugene Boudin and Claude Monet, both children of upper Normandy, were equally passionate to capture what they felt in the ocean's presence. 
But how, I wonder, would these same historians overlook Euegen Delacroix's painting La mer vue des hauteurs de Dieppe (The Sea Viewed from the Cliffs at Dieppe), accessibly located at the Louvre in Paris.  The color and motion in this late afternoon marine was typical of Delacroix, an admirer of artists of the Venetian Renaissance.  And in a morceau that will become suggestive farther down the page, one of Delacroix' closest friends was the writer Theophile Gauthier.

Eugene  Boudin was born in Honfleur where his father worked as a harbor pilot; Boudin himself worked on a steamboat as a boy before the family moved to Le Havre.  There he worked at a picture framing shop where the artists encouraged him to paint.  Although Boudin would live most of his adult life in Paris, he returned each summer to his beloved coast.  The “prodigious magic of air and water”  that critics saw in Boudin's work owed as much to the artist's perfectionism as to his intimate familiarity with the sea.  Although the young  Boudin spent hours carefully copying the marine paintings of seventeenth century Dutch artists like van Ruysdaehl in the Louvre, throughout his career he searched for a technique equal to what he saw and felt in nature's presence.   He confided as much as to his journal.
“Sometimes when I’m out walking….I look at this light which floods the earth, which quivers on the water and plays on clothes and it is frightening to think how much genius is required to capture so many difficulties….And then again I sense that the poetry is there and sense how to capture it.”

Other artists found other models.  Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, and Henri Riviere, all  artists who were deeply influenced  by the "floating world" of  Japanese ukiyo-e prints, a world composed of fleeting and sometimes disconnected moments.   Henri Riviere (1864-1951), who began his career putting on shadow-puppet shows in Parisian cabarets, made a series of seven lithographs Les Vagues that, by their appearance and the titles he gave them, read as so many theatrical tableaux starring the tides...small rising tide, wave rolling on the sand,wave hitting the rocks and cascading down, the tempest, etc. In his hands La tempete becomes a tableaux rather than an active menace.



















II. - Writers who grew up in western France also could not stop wiring about their experience on the littoral either.  The correspondence between Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is full of painterly descriptions of  nature in the land of  their youth, Flaubert's at Rouen and  Maupassant's at Dieppe.  It was at his mother's insistence that the seventeen year old  Maupassant met the established author. 

The young Maupassant,  never happier than when he was on a boat, obtained a position at the Ministry of the Marine.  In a letter to his mother, written in September 1879, Maupassant sounds almost giddy as he rehearses the itinerary of his  vacation, reeling off  names:  Rennes, Nantes, Saint-Briac, Dinard, Saint-Malo, Coutances, Jersey, Guernsy, Cherbour, etc., ending with a reunion with his mother at Etretat.  Maupassant 's most daring book Sur l'eau (On the Water) in 1888, based on a summer cruise he piloted along the French Mediterranean.

The runaway success of La Mer (1861) penned by  historian Jules Michelet was a leading indicator of the new landscape sensibility on writing, too.  "The ocean speaks.  The Ocean is a voice,  He speaks to the distant stars, answers their movement in its grave and solemn language.  It speaks to the earth, to the shore of a pathetic accent, dialogue with their echoes [..] This is the great voice of the ocean." Michelet.recommended choosing a vantage point for viewing the sea, a beach or a cliff, based on one's mood.  This was what contemporary painters were doing, too.  Whether they  perched on the cliffs at Etretat and Fecamp or set up on the beach below, painters were working face to face with the water

So, who was Gerard de Nerval and why does he belong in this company? What can we say about a man and his lobster?    Nerval (1808-1855) was born in Paris; after his mother died, the two year old was sent to live with her great-uncle in Valois and his life thereafter was carried out largely between these two poles of country and city.  And yet, the most dramatic episode of his, aside from his suicide hanging himself from a sewer grate on a Paris street, took place at La Rochelle on the coast of Normandy. Not well known today outside France, Nerval was a romantic poet, in the vein of his lifelong friend Theophile Gauthier, author of Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835).



It was Gauthier who gave us the first published version of Nerval and the lobster, although the poet himself wrote about it in a letter to his childhood playmate Laura LeBeau, "...dear Laura, upon regaining the town square I was accosted by the mayor who demanded that I should make a full and frank apology for stealing from the lobster nets.  I will not bore you with the rest of the story, but suffice to say that the reparations were made and little Thibault is now with me in the city..."  The tender-hearted Nerval had rescued  the lobster from certain death in a pot of boiling water and promptly decided to keep it as a pet.  
What struck Nerval's contemporaries as mere eccentricity was a deeply felt conviction that all living things were connected.  "They are peaceful, sentient creatures," he wrote about lobsters. "They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gobble up your nomadic privacy like dogs do. "

“Matthew Arnold, looking over
The Channel from the cliffs of Dover,
Scanned with his telescope almost
The whole French coast
As far as Etretat,
And was upon the point of saying “Ah,”
When he perceived, not far from the Aiguille,
A lobster led on a leash by the sea.
It was Nerval, enjoying his vacances. !
Alas for gravitas!  Helas for France!
Having of late been panicky
About culture and anarchy,
Arnold now left in a hurry
Foreseeing a night of worry."
- "A Prelude" by Richard Wilbur, from Anterooms, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2010.


Not only had Nerval read Pythagoras, in particular the Golden Verses that inspired his  poem All Things Feel but he took to heart the Greek philosopher's example.   A strict vegetarian, Pythagoras was alleged to have contributed to his own death by acting on his principles.  When it suited him, Nerval was known to say that he had walked Thibault through the gardens of the Palais Royal on a blue leash.  Perhaps the blue ribbon that connected man  and lobster is best understood as a symbol of the waters that connect all forms of life on earth, a reminder to the humans who casually subject other sentient beings to being boiled alive in that water have obligations to these fellow beings.  In a moment of despair, Nerval wrote “This life is a hovel and a place of ill-repute.  I'm ashamed that god should see me here.”  As between between the pedantic Englishman Arnold and the tormented French romantic, the American poet Richard Wilbur casts his lot with Nerval, as I suspect most of would do.
Something like despair was at work in surrealism, something connected its practitioners to Nerval, the tormented Romantic.  Dancing on the grave of one's own compassion and empathy when those emotions became insupportable .  Salvador Dali's lobster telephone (1936) was Nervals' descendant by way of Guillaume Apollinaire's poem (1911).  We know Nerval the visionary without knowing his name but we know his admirers, Anrde Breton, Marcel Proust and Rene Daumal. 






Antoine Poupel is an avant-garde photographer who practices what in French is called photographie plastique, which it to say that applies paint to his photographs. Poupel was born in where esle? - Le Havre in 1956.

Images:
1. Henri Riviere - La Tempete, from the series Les Vagues, c. 1891, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
2. Gustave Courbet - La Vague, c. 1869, Musee d'Art moderne Andre Malraux, Le Havre.
3. Eugene Delcroix - La mer vue des hauteurs de Dieppe (The Sea viewed from the cliffs of Dieppe), 1852, Louvre Museum, Paris.
4. Eugene Boudin - Etude de crinolines, c.1862, Collection Senn-Foulds, courtesy Musee d'Arte moderne Andre Malraux, Le Havre.
5. Jean-Francis Auburtin - Falaises et bateaux (Cliffs and Boats) vue plongeante, 1898, private collection, courtesy Musee d'Art Moderne Andre Malraux, Le Havre.
6..Antoine Poupel - Noah's Ark, 1981, Galerie Francoise Paviot, Paris, courtesy Musee Andre Malraux.
7. Antoine Poupel -Le Havre, 1983, Francoise Paviot Gallery, Paris, courtesy Musee Andre Malraux.
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Far Niente

May 18, 2015, 12:45 pm
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"Esterina, your twentieth year now threatens,
a cloud of greyish pink
that day by day enswathes you.
You know and you're not afraid.'
 - excerpt  Falsetto (1924) by Eugenio Montale


"Rejoice when the breeze that enters the orchard
brings you back the tidal rush of life:
here, where dead memories
mesh and founder,
was no garden, but a reliquary.
...
Find a break in the meshes of the net
that tightens around us, leap out, flee!"
 - excerpt from  In limine  or At the Threshold (1924) by Eugenio Montale



I.  Esterina Rossi was eighteen years old in 1924 when a shy young poet  admired her from a distance. Two year before that Eugenio Montale had published I Limoni (The Lemon Trees), one of his first published efforts, in which he declared his break with the conventional Italian poets of his day, the laurel-clad ones  who “stroll only among the shrubs”.  Ouch.  There are thorns in those shrubs.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) was the son of a well-to-do chemical traders. He was born in Liguria, the region south of the Piedmont on the Gulf of Genoa.  Liguria had been part of the Kingdom of Sardinia before the Italian unification of 1861.   Montale showed an early interest in music; he studied opera singing in his native city of Genoa.  His poetry, for which he received the Nobel Literature Prize in 1975, has excited a variety of responses.  Joseph Brodsky described Montale’s as the “voice of a man speaking – often muttering  - to himself” while more recently Jonathan Galassi, who has spent years translating the collected poems of the great 19th century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, has placed Montale as his 20th century counterpart.

Dolce far nienteor fare niente is an expression that comes from Latin; the phrase expresses 'the sweetness of doing nothing at all.'  To savor idleness, to let the mind wander, becomes an occupation itself.  According to Merriam-Webster, its first known use occurred in 1814.  This can't be the whole story though, as the term appears in a letter from Madame de Sevigne to her daughter Francoise in 1676,

“Don't worry at all about my stay here; I feel perfectly well; I live here in my own fashion; I stroll  frequently; I read, I have nothing to do, and although in no way lazy by occupation,no more is affected than me by the farniente of the Italians.”    - Marie de Rabutin in a letter to her daughter Francoise, Madame de Grignan, dated  September 16, 1676.

Madame de Sevigne (1626-1696) was anything but an obscure French noblewoman writing from her rural seat,  famous throughout Europe  for her poetry and her extensive correspondence in which she delivered devastatingly frank commentary on the court of the Sun King.  Les Rochers, a massive chateau at Vitre in Brittany, was no  backwater for a woman who understood the sweetness of doing nothing better than she practiced it.

II.  We can detect hints of those pink clouds in S'Avanza or Twilight by the painter Angelo Morbelli.  Morbelli (1853-1919) was one of the painters gathered under the umbrella label of Divisionists but that is the least of their interests for us today.  Their theories about vision were likely to become outdated, and they have.  Their accomplishments in making art with a conscience are still exemplary.
It enriches our appreciation of their work to know something of the context in which these artists painted.  In the new nation of Italy about one in twenty spoke what we now consider the Italian language.  The literary language in which educated people read the classic writers – Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio – was Tuscan.



Angelo Morbelli (1853-1919) was born into a family of wealthy winegrowers. in the Piedmonte region, part of the Kingdom of Sardinia before national unification.  As a student at the Accademia di Brera he met other young artists like Giovanni Segantini and Emilio Longoni,  fellow northerners but from very different backgrounds  Segantini was orphaned at the age of eight, then sent to live with relatives in Milan but was abandoned several times.  Longoni came to Milan as a young man in search of a trade.  These artists of the first self-consciously Italian generation, based in the north were witnesses to the upheavals of industrialization and the poverty that was exacerbated by mass migration from the countryside to the cities.  In their paintings  themes of social conscience and aesthetics are blended in a way that diverges from the more familiar  images of bourgeois leisure painted by their French counterparts. Morbelli often painted images of loneliness and isolation; his Dawn and Twlight were intended to be paired – the mother and chld already out at the crack of daylight and the young woman fallen asleep over her book.    For Morbelli, the bridge from aesthetics to ethics may have been his early deafness; it deprived him of his chosen field of music and he turned to the study of art.

Morbelli may have painted S'Avanza at La Colma, a country house owned by his family at Casale Monferrato in Piedmont.   Along with leisure to read the latest books on physics, chemistry and optics, Morbelli sought out the highest quality paints and varnishes.   He had his favorite pigments -  zinc white, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and cerulean blue  - specially made to guarantee permanence, often imported from England.   What we know for certain is that Morbelli wanted viewers to hold two images in mind: the pleasures of far niente and those who labored far from it.


The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1925-1977, translated from the Italian by William Arrowsmith, New York, W.W. Norton: 2012.
Images:
1. Angelo Morbelli - S'Avanza (Twilight), c.1894-96, Gallery of Modern Art, Verona.
2. Angelo Morbelli  - Alba (Dawn), 1891, National Gallery of Catalan Art, Barcelona.
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Dreams And Memories: Giacomo Leopardi

May 26, 2015, 1:11 pm
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  " The sun is falling as the peasant girl
Returns from the open fields,
Bearing a swath of grass in her hand
Her customary bunch of violets
And roses which will grace
Her hair and breast the coming holiday.
And, spinning, the old woman sits upon
The steps among her neighbors,
Their faces turned against the dying light;
And she tells tales of her green days, when she
Adorned her body for the holidays
And, slenderly robust,
Would dance the night away
Among the companions of her lovely prime.
The very air seems now to deepen, the sky
Turns darker blue.  Down from the hills and roofs
Returning shadows fall
At the whitening of the moon.

  Now bells declare the time
Is near, the festive day, the
The hour of heart's renewal.
The shouting lads invade
The village square in troops,
Leaping now here, now there,
Making such happy chatter.
Meanwhile the whistling laborer comes back
To take his meager meal
And ruminate about his day of rest.

  And then, when every other lamp is out
And other sounds are stilled -
Listen - a pounding hammer and a saw:
It is  the carpenter,
Awake and hurrying by lanternlight
Inside his shuttered shop
To end his task before the morning breaks.

  Of all the seven days this is the one
Most cherished, full of joy and expectation.
The passing hours will bring tomorrow soon,
And tedium and sadness,
When each shall turn inside
His mind to his habitual travail.

  O playful little boy,
Your flowering time is like a day of grace,
So brightly blue,
Anticipating the great feast of life.
My child, enjoy the season.
I will not tell you more, but if the day
Seems slow in coming, do not grieve to much."
 - "The Village Saturday" (Il sabato del villaggio) written by Giacomo Leopardi in September 1829, translated from the Italian by Ottavio M. Casale, in A Leopardi Reader, Urbana, University of Illinois Press: 1981.

How I wish that I had discovered Giacomo Leopardi years ago, in college maybe, instead of floundering in the longueurs of TheDivine Comedy or The Fairie Queen.
Leoaprdi wrote Il sabato del villagio during his last stay in his home town of Recanati, a commune in the Papal States that had been conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte just three months before the poet's birth. The place where he felt trapped, at odds with his parents, and taunted by other boys  was also the place where dreams and memories began.  Leopardi once compared nature to childhood, its energy reaching toward a perfection that is momentary.   We can question ourselves whether the child in the poem is one of the boys who taunted the poet or whether the old woman toiling away at her loom is a stand-in for the young and lovely Sylvia who he watched from afar at her spinning.  But only after we accept the poet for what he was – an impassioned, honest, and deeply moral being. The musicality of his verse seems effortless; his life was anything but.
 To Italians he is second only to Dante but Giacomo Leopardi is much closer to us, a modern in his humanism and his skepticism.  Nietzsche wrote of  Leopardi's poetry, “Long passages are fit to repeat in lieu of prayers through all the watches of the night.”  Schopenhauer the pessimist lamented that he never got to meet Leopardi, his "spiritual brother."

 
Progressive scoliosis which first appeared during Leopardi's adolescence made love, marriage, and children unattainable ; it also let him vulnerable to the cold, an additional torment in the times before central heating.  Tormented by other boys for his deformity, Leopardi came to see himself as “ a walking sepulcher.”   He also suffered from periodic bouts of blindness caused by eye strain. And yet there are many accounts by those who knew him of his truly beautiful smile.

Leopardi  “abhorred the provincial town of Recanati, where his parents presided as Count and Countess.  They have been characterized as practicing a “medieval” type of Catholicism; he came to despise the Church whose dogmas seemed designed to mock his suffering. He tried to explain human woe in human terms.  As a young man he had hopes of securing a position with church or government that would free him from financial reliance on his family, but his writings offended officials.   He fell in love with three women that we know of, all  were married and unattainable  yet they allowed the young man close enough to nurture hope.  Successful and admired though his poetry, prose, and translations were, for Leopardi more than most of us, his desires far outran reality.

To Italians he is second only to Dante but Giacomo Leopardi is much closer to us, a modern in his humanism and his skepticism.  Nietzsche wrote of  Leopardi's poetry, “Long passages are fit to repeat in lieu of prayers through all the watches of the night.”  Schopenhauer the pessimist lamented that he never got to meet Leopardi. 



Not a a systematic thinker, Leopardi has often been called a philosopher for the extraordinary flow of his ideas.  he valued honesty and morality above all. His writing is peppered with qualifiers like “perhaps” and “so to speak.”    
Throughout his short life,Leopardi kept reaching out to other people no matter how often he was rebuffed; he understood that humans need each other.  Plagued by loneliness though he was, Leopardi took great pleasure in reading and writing and he easily outstripped his teachers, one after another.  His candor stands as a rebuke to academics who posit a "biographical fallacy", the better to ignore the artist in favor of whichever theory they have hitched their professional stars to.
Ever restless, Leopardi traveled from Milan where he edited the works of Cicero  to Bologna to Florence, the city where he published I Canti, his greatest work, recently translated by Jonathan Galassi (New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux: 2010).  Leopardi died on June 14, 1837, two weeks before his thirty-ninth birthday, far from Recanati, i a villa over the Bay of Naples.


In the story of 19th century European art were not so Franco-centric the name of Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908) would be better known.  His working lifetime overlapped with that of Corot and then Monet, artists who need little introduction.  Fattori's art began with  historically-themed paintings and then works that we might place within the Barbizon style and a late flowering of etchings, several now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Fattori is considered to be the per-eminent artist of the Macchiaiolli, a group or movement that began in Florence.  One obvious difference from their French counterparts was their shared youthful involvement in the revolutionary movements of 1848.  Another is implicit in the name Macchiaiolli with its root in macchia or patches of color; their paintings frequently include bold strokes of color that they learned from paintings by Rembrandt and Tintoretto.




Images:
1. Giovanni Fattori -  White Road, no date.
2. Giovanni Fattori - Wooded Walk With Figure, no date, Art Institute of Chicago.
3. Giovanni Fattori - The Black Dog, no date, Art Institute of chicao.

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Commes des garcons

June 2, 2015, 2:06 pm
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I - Les Garçonnes the French called them, using their gendered language to suggest that women in the decades between the two world wars had turned into some kind of hybrid of male and female, not androgynous exactly but definitely new.  Short hair, short skirts, and trousers, smoking, dancing, and working; everything they did seemed to flout conventional mores.  
And no one shredded convention more thoroughly than Danish artists Gerda and Einar Wegener.  The two met when they were students at the Danish Royal Academy of Art in 1902.  Gerda was only seventeen at the time and the daughter of a provincial clergyman; Einar was twenty.  They were married two years later.  Einar Wegener was unusual in supporting Gerda's even career
When the couple arrived in Paris in 1912, it was Gerda whose work was the immediate success; Her paintings  shown at the Salon and her illustrations for such periodicals as Vogue and La Vie Parisienne were memorable for their sensuality.  People began to guess at the identity of Wegeners' favorite model, she of the almond-shaped eyes, known only by her first name - Lili.   That's Lili in La sieste (above).


As with any story this delicious, this one has been retailed in varied versions.  What is clear is that at some point Einar began to pose for Gerda in woman's clothing, donning also the persona of “Lili.”  What began as an invented character became in time the third member of a trio, a woman named Lili Elbe.  In 1930 Elbe went to Germany to undergo an experimental operation,  the first publicly recorded sex reassignment surgery. News of the event was a sensation in newspapers throughout Europe and was even noted in the Milwaukee World newspaper.   In October, the King of Denmark invalidated the Wegeners' marriage; however Elbe was able to legally change her name and gender on her passport.  Elbe died in 1931 of complications from her fifth surgery, an attempt to implant a uterus.


David Ebershoff published a novel The Danish Girl that imagines the Wegeners' relationship and published in 2000.  A film based on the novel has been in planning for a few years and is currently in production, directed by Tom Hooper (The King's Speech – 2010) and starring recent Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe.  Swedish actress Alicia Vikander will play Gerda Wegener.


II - The Paris the Wegeners found was the acknowledged center of the art world and, like Berlin, a mecca for the self-created person.  Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo shared a flat on the rue de Fleurus with an attached studio where they kept their growing art collections  and their gatherings attracted  local artists (Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, and Guillaume Apollinaire) and  fellow expatriates, including the American journalist Djuna Barnes (1892-1982).  When Barnes arrived in Paris in 1921, she spoke no French (and never learned the language during the nine years she lived there) but came armed with a letter of introduction from Vanity Fairto the Irish expat James Joyce.  Barnes was also the illustrator of her own books (The Book of Repulsive Women - 1915) and  Parisians noted a similarity in style between her drawings and Rousseau's.  A Barnes story A Night Among the Horses had beenpublished in  Margaret Anderson's Little Review and chosen as one of the best stories of 1919. .   Anderson, also an decided to move to France after seeing a performance of Sacred Dances by the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher Gurdjieff.  She became a student at his  institute the Prieuré des Basses Loges at Fontainbleau-Avon, undeterred by the negative publicity that  Gurdjieff  had recently endured as  “the man who killed Katherine Mansfield” when the writer died there under his care in January 1923.




















"Call her walking-mort; say where she goes
She squalls her bush with blood/. I slam a gate.
Report he axis bone it gigs the rose
What say of mine?  It turn a grinning gate.
Impugn her that she baits time with an awl.
What do my sessions then?  They task a grave.
So, shall we stand, or shall we tread and wait
The mantled lumber of the buzzard's fall
(That maiden resurrection and the freight),
Or shall we freeze and wrangle by the wall?"
–                     “The Walking-Mort”  by Djuna Barnes, reprinted in Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology edited by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp, Berkeley, Counterpoint Press: 2014.



Henri Lebasque (1865-1937), who painted  La Cigarette in 1921, founded the Salon d’Autuomne in Paris in 1903 with his friend Henri Matisse.  The casual sophistication of the smoking woman, it has to be remembered; would have been a daring subject for the time just as her cropped hair would have earned her the sobriquet  “La Garconne”.  In the case of La Cigarette the circumstances of the painting are prosaic;the model was Helen Lebasque, nicknamed Nono, the artist's daughter.   Comme des garcons, like the boys; one episode in women emancipating themselves.  Sometimes even the words trip you up.

Images:
1. Gerda Wegener - La Sieste, 1922, Pompidou Center, Paris. 
2. Gerda Wegener - Lili, 1922, Pompidou Center, Paris.
3. Henri Lebasque - La cigarette, 1921, La Piscine, Roubaix.

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Ask Me No Questions, I'll Give You No Answers: Michelangelo Antonioni & Monica Vitti

June 9, 2015, 12:41 pm
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"Your paintings are just like my films.  About nothing.  But with precision." - Michelangelo Antonioni to Mark Rothko, in conversation at Rothko's New York studio.

I. - But for the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni switched from black and white to color when he filmed Il Deserto Rosso(Red Desert, 1964), critics would have dubbed  the director's early 1960s films  "the alienation quartet" instead of "trilogy."  (L'Avventura -The Adventure - 1960, La Notte - The Night - 1961, L'Eclisse - The Eclipse,1962) Taking a long view, the distinction means less than it at first appeared.  For awhile after the introduced of color film directors, like photographers, spoke of the "purity" of the black and white process as though it was not a distortion of reality as much as any other means of representing three-dimensional reality in two dimensions.  There is a ready analogy in the history of recorded sound; when the microphone was introduced, people complained tha it would distort how singers projected their voices, with the implication that these new resources would be a source of cheating.

Whatever they are called, Anontioni's early films have fallen into neglect; even the director's death in 2007 at the age of ninety-four has failed to spark a reconsideration.  The standard explanation is that the word "alienation,"  an amorphous term at best, has become old-fashioned, associated with the zeitgeist of the 1960s, in a word -  passe.   It has been replaced by  a stew corrosive irony and vapid hipness.  In his always entertaining Hip: A History (2004),  John Leland preferred to focus on the makers (Transcendentalist writers and black jazz musicians)  and the technical gadgets, while finessing consumerism, the real mechanism that spread hipness.  Before you dismiss the dazed wanderers searching on an island for a missing woman (L'Avventura) or a woman walking, seemingly aimlessly, through an urban wasteland (L'Eclisse), ask yourself if they look much differently from contemporary pedestrians wandering  in front of moving vehicles, their eyes glued to the cell phones in their hands.  Do we really have nothing more to learn from Antonioni?

















II. - Critics have made much of Antonioni's use of architecture is his films, his use of windows as framing devices for scenes, his decontextualized shots of modern skyscrapers, designed by  architects who have little interest in context to begin with.  But this is not only about architecture and not only about modernism.  Antonioni was an amateur painter, particularly of landscapes, and keenly aware of how quickly this ancient country was being transformed by industrialization resulting in vacant urban wastelands and arid modern apartment buildings going up in Rome,  That there was continuity in the building of mass housing, a project that began under the Fascist regime and continued under a democratically elected government after war's end counted for little.

A scene in L'Eclisse was set in the Borsa, a modern building that replaced an antique monument to the Emperor Hadrian, a man keenly interested in archtiecture, as Antonioni surely knew.  Antonioni shows us the stock exchange in its usual mood of hysteria, speculatorsscreaming orders to buy and sell; he makes us see a familiar scene as it might look to a visitor from another world – unintelligible and, therefore, meaningless.   As he often does, Antonioni marks a change abruptly by means of a caesura, with a brief silence on the trading floor as traders pa respects to a recently deceased colleague,  Thirteen years later, in an interview, Anotonioni stated that he had intended this scene to show capital being shifted from production to speculation, “signs of violence that are connected to money…..I would say that The Eclipse is still a modern film in that its protagonists are people who do not believe in feelings – that is, they limit them to certain things.”  Whatever his views of the middle class had been in the early 1960s, by 1975 he saw signs of deterioration and anger.
















III. -  "I am not a moralist, and my film is neither a denunciation nor a sermon. It is a story told in images whereby, I hope, it may be possible to perceive not the birth of a mistaken attitude but the manner in which attitudes and feelings are misunderstood today." - Michelangelo Antonioni speaking at the press conference following the premier of L'Avventura at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960.

When L’Avventura  premiered it caught viewers unawares. The audience at Cannes was divided, some applauding vigorously, some booing the director.  Moniica Vitti left the auditorium in tears.  The festival jury was also divided; it awarded a jury to prize to L'Avventura and gave the coveted Palme d’Or to Federico Fellini's La dolce vita.  American critics were not impressed, led by the influential Bosley Crowther of the New York Times who sneered that the film looked like a few reels had been lost.

Critics had the opposite complaint two years later when L'Eclisse was released, that the final eight minutes should have been lost, and those minutes have been excised from a number of  prints.  The twilit streets caused by the eclipse are largely empty save for blinking street lights, a passing bus, and a man reading a newspaper headline about atomic energy.   This is the landscape that the lovers, Vittoria and Piero or Vittoria and Riccardo, once inhabited. The wooden fence and the rain barred remain, eerie reminders of everyday life.

“I especially love women,” he has said. “Perhaps because I understand them better? I was born amongst women, and raised in the midst of female cousins, aunts, relatives. I know women very well. Through the psychology of women, everything becomes more poignant. They express themselves better and more precisely. They are a filter that allows us to see more clearly and to distinguish things.” – M.A.

It would be an anachronism to label Antonioni a feminist filmmaker.  His contemporaries sometimes interpreted this as the “feminine” life force  being poisoned by rampant industrialization wrought by patriarchal values and heedlessly inflicted on the natural world.   I prefer an analogy in the saying that the slaves always know more about the masters than the masters know about the slaves.  


IV. - Lack of communication and understanding between lovers parallels the disconnect between society and nature.   The first theme dominates La Notte where the married couple of Lidia and Giovanni reckon with their emotional estrangement through the death of a close friend and their encounter at an all-night party with the host’s daughter.  In L'Eclisse the themes merge, and in Red Desertthe devastated landscape dwarfs human despair.  In retrospect, Red Desert was the period; Antonioni left for England where he made his first non-Italian film, the classic Blow-Up (1966). Almost twenty years passed before he returned to film in Italy again, in 1982 making  Identificazione  di una donna (Identification of a Woman), a film about an aging director. 



Nanni Moretti, in Sight & Sound, once said that lovers of Italian films come in two varieties: admirers of Fellini's egocentric but kind-hearted world and those who prefer Antonioni's  austere modernism and  his characters with their endless  existential angst.   Antonioni’s didactic methods yielded few answers but have stimulated many discussions.


Monica Vitti was Antonioni's collaborator on the movies they made together.   If Antonioni’s camera gazes at Vitti, Vitti gazes back; it is through her eyes that we witness the scene at the stock exchange, it is  her consciousness that takes in the urban landscape and despoiled nature.   When Antonioni was introduced to Vitti, she was a stage actress, particularly admired for her comedic style in the boudoir farces of Georges Feydeau (1862-1921).  Her beauty, which is undeniable, is simply there.   After their relationship ended, Vitti worked with other directors, including Luis Bunuel, and made her debut as a director in 1989 with Scandalo Segreto.  
















Returning to where we started, the intersection of painting and film in the meeting between Antonioni and Rothko, let me add that Antonioni described Rothko's work: "It's painted anxiety."   In Red Desert the character of Giuliana attempts to assuage her anxiety by opening an art gallery; she paints in a style similar to the American artist.   And just to underline the point, this first technicolor film by Antonioni is one of the most beautiful and emotionally charged uses of color in film history, with every frame of film given the same meticulous attention as Rothko gave to each inch of canvas.


Images: stills from the films
1. Monica Vitti in Red Desert, 1964.
2. Monica Vitti in L'Avventura, 1960.
3. Monica Vitti in La Notte, 1961.
4. Monica Vitti and Alain Delon in  L'Eclisse, 1962.
5. Monica Vitti in Red Desert, 1964.
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Mikhail Larionov's Van Gogh Moment

June 15, 2015, 1:41 pm
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Two artists, two moments.  For the thirty-seven year-old Vincent van Gogh, 1890 was the final year of a short and tormented life that ended in July with a gunshot, a presumed suicide.  For the young Russian artist Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) the year 1904 was bright with promise.  Larionov had already met his lifelong partner and fellow artist Natalia Goncharova at art school in Moscow.  Larionov was taken with the Impressionist painters at the time, but after his first visit to Paris in 1906 he became intrigued by the Fauve style.

Larionov would go on to run through  a veritable dictionary of 20th century styles, some of which he helped to invent, like Rayonism, one of the first Russian experiments in abstraction.   Post-Impressionism, Neo-Primitivism, Cubism, he excelled at all of them, thereby providing work for future generations of art historians.

















Would Larionov have been familiar with the Dutch painter's work back in Moscow in 1904?  I haven't been able to answer the question but Larionov's  Acacias  In Spring shares a similar upward-looking perspective and a season: spring.  We know from a letter to his brother Theo that Van Gogh painted Blossoming Almond Tree in February 1890 as a gift for his brother and sister-in-law Jo to hang over their bed.  The month before Jo had given birth to a son, named Vincent; the almond tree blossoms in February in southern France where van Gogh was then at Arles.





















Although it is currently held in a private collection,  Larionov's The Rain is well known in France and has been frequently been nominated as an example of the japoniste influence in French art.  As Larionov and Goncharova settled in France in 1915, it may be retrospectively so.  It's similarity to van Gogh's Rain At Auvers is hard to ignore.  When van Gogh painted Rain At Auvers he had recently moved to northern France from sunny Provence, in search of treatment by a local doctor.  In a letter written from Auvers, van Gogh described the wheat fields "boundless as the sea."  The painting itself is quite small (19.75 x 19.50) and its proportions give the viewer a sense of claustrophobia where Larionov's square shaped Rain suggests someone viewing the rain from a safe, dry indoor vantage point.  If it was painted indoors, Rain At Auvers suggests that van Gogh felt the walls closing in on him.














The exhibition Van Gogh And Nature is on view at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts from June 14 to September 1.

Images:
1. Mikhail Larionov - Acacias In Spring, 1904, Russian State Museum, St. Peteersburg,
2. Vincent van Gogh - Blossoming Almond Tree, 1890,  van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
3. Mikhail Larionov - The Rain, 1904, private collection.
4. Vincent van Gogh - Rain At Auvers, 1890, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.






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Ornette Coleman In The Garden Of Music

June 19, 2015, 8:41 am
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In the Garden Of Music from left to right- Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Bob Thompson, Carol (Plenda) Thompson.

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played.night after night but differently each time."  - Ornette Coleman

With the death of Ornette Coleman on June 11, they are all gone with the exception of saxophonist Sonny Rollins.  The musicians who congregated in the Lower East Side apartment of the artist Bob Thompson (1937-1966) around 1960 were the Fauves (wild ones) of the music world, as Thompson, with his classical models,  was  - and was not - in paintings.    Thanks to Thompson we have here an image that captures them in grand style.
Thompson was a figurative painter working at the high tide of abstract expressionism, just before it crashed into Pop and Op art.  Using the Fauve palette of a Gauguin, Thompson re-interpreted  Christian subjects (The Flagellation Of Christ) to the Caprichos, satires of human folly by Francisco Goya (Stage Doom).   The Kentucky native became the quintessential bohemian, living and working in a downtown studio without benefit of heat or water.  Together with saxophonist Jackie McLean, Thompson even lent a hand to establish Slugs, a jazz club for the avant-garde.  In the event, Bob Thompson was the first to go; he  died in Rome, Italy, where he had gone to study the works of his beloved classical painters - Piero Della Francesca and Raphael.

"It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something." - Ornette Coleman

Coleman was born in Ft. Worth, Texas where he was banished from his high school band for improvising, the very thing that would eventually set his music apart from the jazz mainstream, delighting some and outraging others.  Most musicians play instruments tuned -or tempered - to compromise pure intonation to work within musical scales.    Coleman set himself the task to get in between those notes, to find ways to make those micro-tones audible.  Without wading too far into the weeds, technically, in Coleman's bands, solos floated free of the underlying melodies; he called it harmolidcs and then sound grammar.  In 2007 Coleman's cd Sound Grammar became the occasion for the award of a Pulitzer Prize in music.


Although  the instrument least suited to take on Coleman's music, it was through a recording by the Canadian pianist Renee Rosnes I learned to hear and enjoy his music.   Her attaca, moving quickly from  phrase to phrase, managed to intimate something close to inaudible.  But the music, like Bob Thompson's painting, is a celebration of movement and color.  With the notable exception of the lovely ballad Lonely Woman, Coleman composed mostly in major keys:  Ramblin, Peace, Turnaround, Una Muy Bonita, When Will the Blues Leave, etc.

From an interview with Marc Myers of allaboutjazz.com on June 12:
"He (Coleman) knew exactly what he was doing.  He was channeling Charlie parker's free spirit.  He was also adventurous.  It takes enormous courage to play music that many people might not like and to stick with it, no matter what."

Listen to Renee Rosnes perform Blue Connotation on Art & Soul, Blue Note Records: 1999. 

Image:
1. Bob Thompson - Garden Of Music, 1960, Wadsworth Atheneuem, Hartford, CT.
2. Bob Thompson - Onette, c.1960, Birmingham museum of Art, ALA.
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"Neither Out Far Nor in Deep"

June 25, 2015, 12:41 pm
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The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be-
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
 - A Further Range  New York, Holt: 1936

Pairing images by the nineteenth century Italian painter Giovanni Fattori with a poem by a twentieth century American poet Robert Frost is not so fanciful as it might at first seem.   Italy is a country surrounded on three and a half sides (in length) by water and the Atlantic ocean in Frost's poem was the entry point and the orientation for generations of European settlers.  Oddly enough, the sea is a larger presence in French painting and literature than either of the other two.  Odd because in France the beaches and  fishing ports are like exiles in the outer provinces (Normandy, Brittany, Gasgogne, and Provence) while the capital of both country and culture in is far inland in Paris.













Giovanni Fattori (1825 –1908) was an Italian artist.  In middle age Fattori was attracted to the landscapes of the French Barbizon painters; because of their influence he gave up historical subjects for paintings outdoors (en plein-air) and became a convert to painting in natural light.  He was one of the founders of the group dubbed the Macchiaioli, painters of the light.  One of those was his friend Silvestro Lego; Fattori's painting shows Lega sitting on outcropping of rocks as he paints the waves  cresting around him.

Images:
1. Giovanni Fattori - Tramunto sul mare (Sunset on the Shore), c. 1890-95, Galeria d'Arte Moderna + Florence.2. Giovanni Fattori - Silvestro Lega Painting by the Sea, c. 1866, Collection Juncker, milan.
 
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A Treasure Revealed. John Rewald's Monet To Matisse (Part One)

July 3, 2015, 12:12 pm
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Monet To Matisse, as a title for an exhibition, sets the gold standard for museums everywhere. The public loves Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; their origins in controversy are all but unimaginable; today.   So much so that the current exhibition at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica, New York is the second to use that title this year. (The first was an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida.  There is no connection between these two, the first being cobbled together from museums around the country.)

What the exhibition in Utica offers is an experience of an entirely different kind. It could be called 'Corot To Chagall' without sacrificing alliteration to accuracy.   On view until Thanksgiving weekend this Monet To Matiise is built around the permanent collection of the Dixon Gallery in Memphis, a collection that has rarely traveled and is only visiting upstate New York while its home is undergoing renovations.

Hugh Dixon and Margaret Oates Dixon assembled their art collection with help from John Rewald,  a pioneer in the study of French painting.  Hugh Dixon was an Englishman who married an American woman.  The couple bought seventeen acres near downtown Memphis where they built a home and began to collect art, beginning with British portraits and silver.  Rewald introduced them to French art and Margaret Dixon was particularly attracted to paintings featuring the color combination of green and white.  Because they had no children, the Dixons set up a foundation to keep their collection intact and in place to benefit  their community.  It took effect in 1974, after Margaret died in February and Hugo was killed in an automobile accident in November,


Rewald (1912-1994) researched art and artists with a zeal that anthropologist Clifford Geertz would term “thick description.”    Like Charles Chasse with the Nabis, no town was too out of the way and no  friend or relation of an artist too obscure for Rewald.  Everyone who has studied these artists is his heir, whether they know it or not.  He inspired such trust in those who met him that the canny journalist and collector Felix Feneon made Rewald his executor.
Rewald  was born in Germany and emigrated to France in 1932.  He received a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Paris for his pioneering study of Cezanne.  When WWII began, Rewald was labelled an enemy.   Alfred Barr, Jr., of the Museum of Modern Art sponsored Rewald’s emigration to the U.S. but could not convince Harvard University to publish Rewald’s work. 


There had to be a Cezanne for the Dixon collection and this one ...The Chateau-Noir was located on the road that ran between  Aix and Mont Sainte-Victoire, two of the artist's favorite subjects.  Cezanne was less interested in the chateau than in the forests that surrounded it, choosing to work in the woods where the sky was barely visible through the tree branches. 



















Like the more familiar - and later - works of Impressionism, The Paver On the Chantilly Road - Fontainbleau (c.1830-35) was a departure from traditional French landscapes when Corot painted it.   Figures in earlier French paintings, unlike those in Dutch art, were usually famous people or characters from mythology, not ordinary working people.  The horizontal strokes of color are often present in paintings from the Dixon collection; the way they thin out to the consistency of watercolor at the bottom of the canvas is quite modern.  Although Corot predated the other artists in the exhibition he belongs with them; he made their way possible.














Paul Camille Guigou (1834 – 1871) was a  landscape painter from Provence who studied art in Marseilles and settled there.  Despite his sterling artistic influences, from the Barbizon school to Gustave Courbet, Guigou's own works were received  with indifference, forcing him to scrape a living by giving lessons and writing the occasional newspaper review.  Following his early death from a stroke at thirty-seven, Guigou was  forgotten, his pictures mostly out of view in private collections.  Interest in Guigou's work began with an exhibition in Paris in the early 20th century.  Rewald,an intense researcher of Cezanne, was well-placed to discover works by this underrated artist.  Although it is quite small in size, Environs de Martigues adroitly draws our eyes into a surprisingly deep  vista where sparkling white rocks scattered about the foreground are matched  by intensely blue  ribbons of  water, both highlighted by the bright southern sun.  The man and two dog to the right of the meandering path suggest that purpose, at least momentarily, gives way to a lazy afternoon. There is something expansive about this humble oil on board, as though the Provencal sun has opened our eyes to a larger world.









In spite of his provincial background Gaston La Touche (1854-1913) exhibited  in Paris for the first time at age twenty-one,   It was Felix Bracquemond who advised the young artist to study the eighteenth century painters Watteau and Boucher; when he did, La Touche brightened his palette.   When it was shown in 1909 The Joyous Festival was considered  old-fashioned in 1909  but that no longer mattered when Rewald recommended it for the Dixon collection.  At 82x113 inches it is one of the largest in the exhibition and it seems the finest thing La Touche ever painted.  La Touche's magically feathery brushstrokes make the paper lanterns and the falling fireworks upstage the formidable backdrop of Versailles.  La Touche is another example of Rewald's view from the inside of the French art world.  He interviewed Renior's younger brother Edmond, Paul Signac and Aristide Maillol, and he was a close friend of the families of Odilon Redon and Camille Pissarro.


















It was Rewald's idol Paul Cezanne who said, “We are perhaps all derived from Pissarro.  Already in '65 he had eliminated black, bitumen, sienna, and ochres.  This is a fact.  'Only paint with the three primary colors and their immediate derivatives,' he told me...”


During the last  summer of his life Camille Pissarro(1830-1903) stayed at the port city ofLe Havre on the English Channel from June until September 1903, producing a major series of twenty-four pictures, “perhaps the most remarkable group pf works he ever made.” Long-delayed public acclaim had come only recently to Pissarro and he relighed docmenting the.renovations to a beloved French locale.  
Pissarro chose a front row seat, staying in first floor rooms at the Hotel Continental that overlooked the jetty. Pleasure craft and commercial boats share the water, vacationers promenade the boardwalk while stevedores work on the docks. How much interest is added to The Jetty At Le Havre throuhg artist's vantage point, a rectangle become a trapezoid the better to offer a broad view of the goings-on.

















Albert Marquet (1875-1947) came from  Bordeaux to study at the Ecole des Arts-Decoratifs in Paris which is where he worked beside Henri Matisse.  When the two of them, along with Raoul Dufy and Andre Derain exhibited their brightly colored paintings together at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, their were dubbed Les Fauves (Wild Beasts).  It was not a compliment.  Although Marquet and Matisse remained close and discussed their works often, Marquet is a shadowy presence outside France.  Here, again, Rewald chose well; this is one of Marquet's most satisfying works, Blue Boat At Porquerolles is a gallant little craft and we envy its crew.



















The Palace, Belle-Ile (1897)), a painting by Matisse from the Dixon Collection is also about a little boat.  This is early Matisse, less stylized than his later works, was painted during his second visit to an island off the coast of Brittany where he stayed with the Australian painter John Peter Russell.  There Russell showed Matisse paintings by his late friend Vincent van Gogh; the works were unknown at the time and came as a revelation to Matisse.   His use of bold horizontal stripes in complementary colors to render the boat demonstrate the power of color used as line. Because of this, I like to think the two-masted schooner is the “palace” of the picture.

















Henri-Edmond Cross (1856-1910) has been inexplicably overlooked on this side of the Atlantic. A friend of Signac, Cross experimented with bright colors and pointillist methods.  His paintings, more than those of any of his contemporaries, have been favored for the covers of recordings of French music of the time. 
Like Renoir, Cross suffered  from rheumatism, a particularly cruel ailment for a painter.  Cross moved with his family to the south of France in hopes that  warmer weather would bring him some relief.  He continued to paint until his very last months.  Each tiny dot of paint applied to The Little Maure Mountains (1909) cost him dearly.  A small work (13x21 inches) it conveys the grand sweep of the mountains ranged above Sainte-Tropez.  In the current  exhibition, the picture is placed next to Les Collettes (14x18 inches, c.1914)  a landscape with figures by Renoir.


An earlier work by Renoir, The Wave (1882) was painted on or perhaps in, the English Channel on the Normandy coast.  As close to abstraction as Renoir ever came, the viewer has to look closely to see the little boat making for shore in the rough Channel seas.  Renoir's brushstrokes, often delicate and feathery in his portraits, here are thick and volatile and capture a moment in motion as well as any of his peers.



















A French perspective on French art, this exhibition should not be missed.


For further reading;
John Rewald - Studies in Impressionism, H.N. Abrams, New York: 1985.
John Rewald - Studies In Post-Impressionism,  H.N. Abrams, New Uork: 1986.


Monet to Matisse: The Age of French Impressionism   is  on view at Munson-Willaims-Proctor Art Institute, Utica, NY from May 16 through November 29.
Images: all artworks are from the collection of the Dixon Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee.
1. Marc Chagall - Bouquet of Flowers With Lovers,  1927.
2. Paul Cezanne - Trees And Rocks near Chateau-Noir,  c.1900-06
3. Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot - The Paver Of The Chantilly Road - Fontainbleau, c. 1830-35.
4  Paul Guigou - Environs of Martigues, 1869.
5. Gaaston La Touche - The Joyous Festival, 1909.
6. Camille Pissarro - Entree du port du Havreet les brises-lames ouest soleil matin, 1903.
7. Albert Marquet - Blue Boat At Porquerolles, 1937.
8. Henri Matiise - The Palace.  Belle-Ile, 1897.
9. Henri-Edmond Cross - The Little Maure Mountains, 1909.
10. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - The Wave at Sea,
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But Where Is The Beach?

July 4, 2015, 12:00 am
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One of summer's burning questions.

Image;
Benno Wundshammer (1913-1986) - But Where Is the Beach? - August 1959, BPK. Berlin.
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John Rewald's Monet To Matisse (Part Two)

July 8, 2015, 12:18 pm
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My first thought on looking at Young Woman Playing The Guitar by Henri Rouart was wonder that I had never seen this painting before, even in reproduction.  Her profile, her blue and white striped shawl draped at an angle away from her arm, the blue ribbon tied gaily to her instrument...who is she?  And for that matter, who was Henri Rouart?  John Rewald thought that he recognized in the young woman, the artist's daughter Helene and, in the background, Rouart's estimable art collection.

Although known for transforming landscape painting,  Impressionist artists also painted portraits as well including the odd figure in a landscape.  One of their aims was, as Edgar Degas put it, was “the painting of modern life.  What we now take to be rural landscapes were,  in their time, the suburbs of Paris, mostly.     So  it was not really so far from there to the urban haunts that attracted Degas.  Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe(1885) in charcoal and pastel would be a lesser work in other hands but Degas had the mastery in his hand and eye to execute transient moments  with a sureness that looks like the making was as close to instantaneous as the moment captured.   Degas used it as the model for one of the dancers in The Ballet Rehearsal (1891)  in the collection of Yale University.Art Gallery.

Henri Rouart and Edgar Degas shared a long history: they became friends as schoolchildren, served togther in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870,  and remained close throughout their lives.    Rouart, like Gustave Caillebotte, had enough money so that he had no need to sell his paintings.  This is unfortunate on two counts.  First, many of their best works remain in private collections, out of public view.   The second problem is that what the market get does get to value critics often follow its lead.  Caillebotte had money to begin with; Rouart made his fortune as the inventor of a rapid-courier system  by pneumatic tube.   Money, for both painters , did not automatically buy fame.


It was through portraiture that Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) achieved a measure of financial security, while bringing impression techniques into his portraits, while retaining a measure of realism.  The son of a tailor from Limoges, the young Pierre began working at the age of ten to help support his family,  painting china at the local porcelain factory.  The young child  reading in The Picture Book was the artist's son Jean,  who grew up to become one of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century.   The small size of the painting gives suits  the  affectionate family picture, in contrast to some of Renoir's  professional commissions that featured their subjects larger than life.


In his biography of the artist, Renoir My Father, Jean Renoir tells us that iit was his father's habit not to pose the boy bur to allow him to find something to occupy himself,  This is how Renoir created such images of candor and intimacy as The Picture Book, an occasion Jean specifically recalled in his biography.

Renoir, who grew weary of artistic gatherings in his later years, made an exception for ones with Berthe Morisot and her family at their home in rue Villejust.  He was also vocal in his outrage at the insults. heaped on the work of “that great lady” by ignorant male critics.  Renoir was away in the countryside painting with his friend Cezanne when the telegram arrived, bringing news of her death.  He immediately folded up his easel and headed for the train station.
Renoir was related to Morisot through art and friendship; Henri Rouart was related to Morisot through art and the marriage of Morisot's daughter Julie Manet, also a painter, to his nephew Ernest Rouart.


Late in her career, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) began to explore more ambitious themes (including nudes) than the domestic scenes expected from female artists.     In PeasantGirl Among the Tulips (1890) the girl is not a middle class child at play; she is restintg after work.   Set in a landscape without a sky or any obvious light source, a young girl sits, tulips and shapes of tulips all around her.   Morisot's brushwork renders the girl's dress, the tendrils of hair curling around her face, the shape of her face, all with reference the spring flower.  Even her hands, stained from working in the earth and now clasped at rest, remind us of the awakening spring.
John Rewald, a lucky art historian indeed, was well-placed by chance to understand the connections between these artists and between art and life. From the realism of Rouart to the surprising freedom of Morisot, we see what Impressionism contributed to the portrait.  For the Dixons, and now for us, he assembled a collection that offers viewers rich hours of seeing and being with art,
Also of interest: Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye is an exhibition of view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from June 28 to October 4.

Images: all artworks are from the collection of  the Dixon Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee.
1. Henri Rouart ( 1833-1912) - Woman Playing the Guitar, c.1885-90.
2. Edgar Degas - Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe, 1885.
3. Pierre-Auiguste Renoir - The Picture Book, c. 1895.
4.Berthe Morsiot - Peasant Girl Among The Tulips, 1890. 
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Asta Nielsen: The Woman Who Played Hamlet

July 13, 2015, 12:31 pm
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"She is everything! She is the drunkard's vision and the lonely man's dream." - Guillaume Apollinaire, 1920.
“She” was Asta Nielsen, a Danish actress and the most famous movie  star in the world.  American films had no one like her, the Gish sisters and Mary Pickford were grown-ups acting in girlish guise and Louise Brooks had yet to make her reputation.  An equally accomplished comedian and dramatic actor, Nielsen played the character of Lulu in Leopold Jessner's Erdgast(1923), based on the play by Frank Wedekind six years before Brooks assayed the part in G.W. Pabst’s production Pandora’s Box.

 Nielsen was at the zenith of her career in 1920.  Tired of the roles she was being offered and despite her international success, she formed her own production company. For her first venture, Nielsen played the title role in Shakespeare's Hamlet;she was not the first woman to play the Danish prince.  But the role posed challenges for a woman and Nielsen, in collaboration with playwright Erwin Gepard, crafted a solution: her Hamlet would a princess who, for the purposes of royal succession, must masquerade as a man to take the crown.  This vein of gender-bending was just one intriguing aspect of Nielsen's acting persona that would have been tamped down by Hollywood.  Where Garbo had to compromise her androgynous sex appeal, Nielsen enjoyed greater autonomy in her career.

Look no further than The ABCs Of Love, a comedy that looks astoundingly modern a century on.  Nielsen's character is a seemingly naive country girl who sizes up a prospective fiance, deciding to teach him to be a “real” man.  This involves her in cross-dressing and a trip to Paris (where else?). In The Eskimo Baby (also 1916), a outdated farce about a “native” girl from Greenland who is brought to Denmark as a human souvenir. Her shoplifting spree in a big city department store is a small surreal jewel of a performance.



Sofie Amalie Nieslen (1881-1972) was the second child of a poor family in Copenhagen.  The father Jens was a workman who was often ill and unemployed; the mother Ida cleaned houses and took in washing to help support the family.  When Asta's father died in 1895, her mother wanted her to go into trade but Asta already knew that she wanted to act.  At school, her teachers had taken notice of her singing voice and provided lessons.  So did the instructors at the Royal Theater of Copenhagen where Nielsen enrolled in the acting school.
Then Nielsen suffered a setback that would have derailed many young women; she became pregnant.  Not only did she keep her child, a daughter she named Jesta, but Nielsen refused to marry the father and continued to pursue her career.  Success in a stage production of Strindberg's Miss Julie emboldened her.  Against the advice of her colleagues, Nielsen decided to try her hand at films, a new  medium lacking the cultural prestige of the theater.



Together with Urban Gad, a stage designer at the Royal Theater, Nielsen made her first film Afrgrunden in 1910.  Gad wrote the screenplay and directed while Nielsen played the lead as well as working on costumes and props. Nielsen and Gad were married in 1912 but separated three years later, terminating their professional relationship as well.  Their legacy is acpped by The Abyss, the film made Nielsen a star; no matter that the plot was insubstantial, Nielsen's acting was praised for its naturalism and subtlety.  Film historians agree that The Abyss is the most erotic silent film ever made. The onscreen chemistry between Nielsen and Gad culminates in a scene where Nielsen's character lassos him and, after tying him up, she brushes her derriere against him.  This isn't Kansas anymore.


Nielsen starred in G.W. Pabst's  The Joyless Street (1925) with the young  Greta Garbo.   We remember Garbo  today because she emigrated to the United States shortly thereafter while Nielsen chose to work with European directors.  If Nielsen had received the backing of MGM as Garbo did, we would know her today for what she was, the equal of the Swedish star.  Come to that, we wouldn't remember Pabts today if he hadn't gone on to make films with the American Louise Brooks, a woman smart enough to take her outstanding talents to Europe.
After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, as many filmmakers fled Germany,  Joseph Goebbels tried to entice Nielsen to stay by offering her a government-financed  film company but she refused.  She returned home to Copenhagen in 1937 and after Nazis troops occupied Denmark in 1940 they offered Nielsen the chance to make films but she again refused.  The woman who had dared to openly criticize the practices of the film industry, for the quality of their offerings and for their failure to support the liberal cinema, would not back down.
Of the 70 plus films that Nielsen made, about 30 are available today, with the largest collection preserved at the Danish Film Museum  in Copenhagen,
1. Asta Nielsen in Daughter Of The Landstrasse,  1914, German Film Institute
2. Asta Nielsen, 1912. GFM.
3. Asta Nielsen in The ABCs Of Love, 1916, GFM.
4. Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad in The Abyss, 1916, GFM.





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Searching For A.H. Fish, Finding Florine Stettheimer

July 18, 2015, 1:24 pm
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“Occasionally
A human being
Saw my light
Rushed in
Got singed
Got scared
Rushed out
Called fire
Or it happened
That he tried
To subdue it
Or it happened
He tried to extinguish it
Never did a friend
Enjoy it
The way it was
So I learned
To turn it low
Turn it out
When I meet a stranger -
Out of courtesy
I turn on a soft
Pink light
Which is found modest
Even charming
It is a protection
Against wear
And tears
And when I am rid of
The Always-to-be-Stranger
I turn on my light
And become myself.” 
 - untitled poem by Florine Stettheimer, from Crystal Flowers, BookThug, Toronto: 2010 (reprint of edition of 1949).


It was the untitled poem  that did it.   Untitled, I think, because what other words could do justice to a hurtful dilemma that women know only too well.   That strange feeling you get when it seems that someone has gotten inside your head and knows how you are.

I started out in search of one artist,  A.H. Fish, and was waylaid by another, Florine Stettheimer.  Stettheimer (1871-1944) was a painter and anything but a starving artist.  The daughter of a banker from Rochester, New York, Stettheimer studied art and traveled throughout western Europe before settling on Manhattan as her permanent home.  Money was hers by birthright but Stettheimer was a very private person;  unlike A.H. Fish whose career was highly visible until it wasn't, hidden, you could say, in plain sight.
Florine Stettheimer's art mixes style and substance in unsettling ways that would start to make sense in the heady decade of the 1960s.   Something lurks in her flowers and flourishes of femininity, camouflaging a  rebellious mind.  Stettheimer knew that her work, like that of other women artists, was always accepted “on approval”, a status that could be revoked at any time. Art historian Linda Nochlin likens Stettheimer's position to that of Balzac, a writer who supported the return of the French monarchy in the 19th century while being its most pointed critic. I also see something in Stettheimer’s style that surfaces  in the work of the New Yorker artist Mary Petty (1899-1976).


In “Notes on Camp” from 1964 Susan Sontag asserted the concept was “wholly aesthetic,” having no political or social dimensions.  During the intervening decades  things have changed ed as women, gays, and minorities have insisted that their concerns and methods are both personal and political at once.  Stettheimer, a New Deal liberal, would have understood. She was an opponent of patriarchal infallibility; wealth made her outspokenness easier to voice. At first glance, Stettheimer's style doesn't look like what we were taught to expect from serious social commentary,  It does reflect her influences, the years she spent in France, reading everything ansd seeing everything, making friendships with modernists heading toward abstraction like Marcel Duchamp and  Albert Gleizes. It may seem a bit of a stretch but I see a connection between Stettheimer's paintings (especially the Cathedralseries) and the more recent  series  Porrnament Is Crime by Joyce Kozloff. 

Even family life, a woman's socially prescribed place, was not safe from Stettheimer's gimlet eye.  Heat is a family portrait that seems to depict a descent into Hades, its colors ranging from cool greens at the top to blood red at the bottom.  Mother in the person of Rosetta Stettheimer presides over her increasingly enervated brood, culminating in Florine (at lower right) who looks positively feverish.  The cake (at bottom) wishes "Mother" a happy birthday (dated July 22, 1918).
Clearly, Stettheimer had need of a sense of humor.  Here is a second excerpt from her poems in Crystal Flowers, taken from a group she called "Comestibles." And this was written decades before Erica Jong published Fruits & Vegetables in 1971.


“You stirred me
You made me giddy
Then you poured oil on my stirred self
I’m mayonnaise."




















Information about A. H. Fish, including why she chose to obscure her identity is difficult to verify.    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 fighting.  Her gamines, featured in Conde Nast’s Vogue and Vanity Fairbetween circa 1914 to 1927 are as much exemplars of their era as Held's flappers. She married Walter Sefton, an Irishman, in New York City in 1918.   She  died in 1964.
John Held, Jr. Miguel Covarrubias, A.H. Fish:  all illustrators whose work became the face of magazine art in the 1920s, all represented in anthologies of graphic art.  Held was the producer of collegiate humor for Life magazine, in its first incarnation.  Covarrubias  the Mexican-born transplant whose caricatures for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker introduced elements of modernism to the magazine world, and A.H. Fish whose adorable gamines were etched  with a wistfulness born of the gap between a girl's aspirations and a woman's life, somehing that Stettheimer's wealth could not completely insulate her from.  Fish introduced a different perspective, one that roughed up the dominant male version of events.  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.


















John Held, Jr. Miguel Covarrubias, A.H. Fish:  all illustrators whose work became the face of magazine art in the 1920s, all represented in anthologies of graphic art.  Held was the producer of collegiate humor for Life magazine, in its first incarnation.  Covarrubias  the Mexican-born transplant whose caricatures for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker introduced elements of modernism to the magazine world, and A.H. Fish whose adorable gamines were etched  with a wistfulness born of the gap between a girl's aspirations and a woman's life, somehing that Stettheimer's wealth could not completely insulate her from.  Fish introduced a different perspective, one that roughed up the dominant male version of events.  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 in Eve  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.

Anne Harriet Fish (Sefton), born in Bristol, England, became an illustrator, author, and designer of porcelain figures.   Conde Nast (1873-1942) was a pioneer of modern magazine publishing 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, then as now,  most advertising dollars, even  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, whose caricatures of the rich and famous became as well known as photographs of their subjects.  So why has Fish gone missing from art history?



For more about A.H, Fish
The earliest work that I could uncover (at archive.org) isBehind the Beyond: And Other Contributions to Human Knowledge by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1913),  illustrated by A. H. Fish.  High Society: A Book Of Satirical Drawings (1920) was drawn from her work for Conde Nast. 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 Life 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."

For further reading: 
“Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive” by Linda Nochlin ( Art In America 1980) reprinted in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader,Thames & Hudson, New York: 2015.

Images:
1. Florine Stettheimer  Portrait of Myself, 1923, Columbia University.
2. Florine Stettheimer - Heat, c.1919, Brooklyn Museum.
3. A.H. Fish - Social Scene, no data giver, Conde nast Archives, NYC.
4. A.H. Fish - Eve, no date given, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
5. A.H. Fish - Dancing Couple # 2, March 1921, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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