THE BLUE LANTERN

One of summer's burning questions.

Image;
Benno Wundshammer (1913-1986) - But Where Is the Beach? - August 1959, BPK. Berlin.

My first thought on looking at Young Woman Playing The Guitar by Henri Rouart was to wonder how it was that I had never seen this painting before, even in reproduction. Seen in profile, the inner concentration contrasted by the blue ribbon tied gaily to her instrument suggests a complex personality. The angle of her blue and white striped shawl falling away from her arm is a nice formal touch that reminds us of the activity that is momentarily suspended in the picture. Most (American) museum-goers would ask who was Henri Rouart? John Rewald, histoiran of the French Impressionists, identified the young woman as the artist's daughter Helene and, in the background, Rouart's own art collection.

Although known for transforming landscape painting, the Impressionists painted portraits as well including the odd figure in a landscape. Remember that one of their aims was, as Edgar Degas put it, “the painting of modern life. What we now take to be rural landscapes were, in their day, were scenes of the suburbs of Paris, mostly. So it was not so far after all from there to the urban haunts that Degas drew. Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe(1885) would be a lesser work in other hands but Degas had the coordination of hand and eye to fix individual moments of human activity. Degas used this drawing as a model for one of the dancers in The Ballet Rehearsal (1891) in the collection of Yale University.Art Gallery.

Henri Rouart and Edgar Degas were childhood friends who served together in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and remained close throughout their lives. Rouart, like another Frenchman Gustave Caillebotte, had enough money so that he had no need to sell his paintings. This is unfortunate; many of the best works are in private collections, out of public sight and what the market values often influences the critics. Caillebotte had money to begin with; Rouart made his fortune as the inventor of a pneumatic tube mail system. Money, for these two, did not automatically buy fame.

Through portraiture Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) attained financial security, using impressionist techniques to enrich the realistic portrait. The son of a tailor from Limoges, Pierre began working at the age of ten to help support the Renoir family, decorating china at a local porcelain factory. The young child shown reading in The Picture Book was the artist's son Jean, who became one of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century. The small size of the painting suits this intimate family moment.

In his biography Renoir My Father, Jean Renoir explains how his father allowed the boy to occupy himself, rather than striking a formal pose. The Picture Book was an occasion Jean specifically recalled in the book.

Renoir, who avoided social occasions in his later years, made an exception for Berthe Morisot, visiting her 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 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.

Morisot was never the conservative artist critics would have us see , but Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) explored ambitious themes (including nudes) along with applying near-abstract techniques to traditional "feminine" domestic scenes. InPeasantGirl Among the Tulips (1890) we see not a middle class child at play but a girl taking a rest from her work.; her earth-stained hands folded on her lap. There is no sky or any obvious source of light, in the picture, the tulips shapes and fragments in nature and in the girl's hair and face are expressive rather than realistic.

From the realism of Rouart to the surprising freedom of Morisot, we see the faces of Impressionist portraits.

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.

"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. When World War II ended. there was talk of Nielsen working with the young French director Claude Chabrol but I haven't been able to discover any details of the project.

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.

“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 19^th 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.

“There's a lot of people walking around, full-grown and so-called normal – they have everything that they were born with at the right leg length, the right arm length and stuff like that. They're symmetrical in every way. But they live their lives like they are armless, legless, brainless, and they live their life with blame. I never heard Michel complain about anything. Michel didn't look in the mirror and complain about what he saw. Michel was a great musician – a great musician – and great, ultimately, because he was a great human being, and he was a great human being because he had the ability to feel and to give to others of that feeling, and he gave to others through his music. Anything else you can say about him is a formality. It's a technicality and it doesn't mean anything to me.” – Wayne Shorter speaking to writer David Hajdu (excerpted from Heroes And Villains, Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press: 2009.)

“I can feel a piano. It talks to me.”

“And It’s legal. You can do it in public!” - MP

How he makes it new. He begins by breaking down chords into their individual notes, reiterating each note several times like a tolling bell, relishing the moment. as we try to put the notes together in our heads. Then the melody arrives, dropped down from where a singer or a brass player might key it, giving the listener a sense of joy that feels almost weird. The tune was Afro Blue. Michel Petrucciani (born Orage, France, December 1962 - died New York City, January 1999) was seventeen when he recorded Date With Time.

What sets the piano apart from other instruments in jazz is that pitch on a keyboard cannot be bent or smeared as it can on brass. Pianists make up for this in a variety of ways. Syncopated rhythms will accentuate the weak beats, the left hand plays two strong beats – a note and a chord – while the right hand plays a melody accented between the beats. This was dubbed early on as ragtime for these “ragged” rhythms.

Petrucciani was born with the Osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition commonly referred to as “glass bones.” He acknowledged being in some pain at all times but said that it was unimportant. He was uncomfortable with the awards showered on him for his virtuosity, seeing in them pity for his condition. Applause was problematic too; although he appreciated it, it interfered with getting more music out there. “That’s why I play 45 minutes non-stop….I prefer laughter to applause.” One such performance that was recorded (Au Theatre des Champs-Elysses,1997) began with another of his favorites, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage.

“You know sometimes when I play a concert… and I have that right timing… those notes make me feel warm and good… it’s like lovemaking, it’s like having an orgasm.

“It might lead me to death… meaning that I’d be on my deathbed saying, too bad I can’t live another year, I would have been much better.” - MP

It was after hearing some Duke Ellington records, Petrucciani decided to study piano. When he was fifteen he played in a trio with touring Americans, trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Kenny Clarke. He went on to record Ellington compositions like Caravan. One my favorites is his version of Take the A Train wrapped front and back with his own delicious tune She Did it Again.

His playing has been compared to Bill Evans (“the salt of the earth to me”) for his lyricism and to Oscar Peterson for his virtuosity. But the 1980s were a strange time in jazz, critics were feeling sour and Petrucciani's joie de vivre did not suit their mood.

“When I play, I play with my heart and my head and my spirit… I don’t play to people’s heads, but to their hearts.”

“…the pitfall is that when I make a mistake it sounds absolutely outrageous, really horrible because everything else is so clear!” - MP

When the eighteen year-old Petrucciani showed up at his door, Charles Lloyd was playing his horn to the trees of Big Sur and practicing transcendental meditation. Lloyd looked back later and marveled: “It doesn't seem possible to have all that wisdom, maturity and coloring together at his age.” But it was. Rejuvenated, Lloyd formed a new quartet so the two could work together. Montreux '82 (Blue Note) was recorded live in Switzerland and released under Lloyd's name. The next year Peturcciani gave a solo recital at Carnegie Hall and the American jazz critics, basically an all-male East Coast cabal (even today,) were forced to take note. When he turned twenty-one, Petrucciani became the first French musician to be signed to the prestigious Blue Note label. In retrospect the live recording Power Of Three (1986) where Petrucciani is joined by Wayne Shorter on saxophone and Jim Hall on guitar was one of the best of the decade. Just listen to Bimini, a calypso written by the unlikely duo of Jim Hall and the multi-terrestrial Sun Ra.

“I’m a brat. My philosophy is to have a really good time and never let anything stop me from doing what I want to do. It’s like driving a car, waiting for an accident. That’s no way to drive a car. If you have an accident, you have an accident—c’est la vie.”– MP

As he toured at an infernal pace, it would be easier to name musicians Petrucciani didn't play with than those he did. All his friends urged him to slow down but that was no part of his plan

New York is my energy," Petrucciani once told an interviewer. He died there days after celebrating his thirty-sixth birthday there on January 6 of a pulmonary infection. He is buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, one grave away from another pianist - Frederic Chopin. On New Year’s Day 2000, during my first solo broadcast radio hour, I played Petrucciani’s Chloe Meets Gershwin.

“You say goodbye. I say hello.”

"Je teteste dire au revoir" (I hate to say goodbye) - Michel Petrucciani

Images: Michel Petruccciani, also MP with Charles Lloyd with his son Jean, courtesy of Blue note and Dreyfus Records.

I have been to beaches in southern Maine in August, from Ogunquit to Wells to York Beach, and I know that the temperature of that strip of blue water in Wells Beach never rises above the low sixties. This is water for serious ocean lovers. But by late afternoon, when the beach would have the sun behind it, the sand is as hot as the chromium yellow that Gertrude Fiske slathered across her canvas. Although the telephone poles are delicately indicated, they give a sense of solidity to Fiske's composition that scaffolds the thickly applied colors. The triangle is one of the most satisfying structures to build a painting with, and this goes as much for a landscape verging on abstraction n as it would for the most conventional of portraits. The pink and mauve strokes that are applied over the blue of the sky help the eye move around the canvas from bottom to top and keep it from fixating on the horizontal lines of beach, sea, and sky or the bravura smears of color that represent the dune at bottom. Wells Beach is the work of a consummate artist.

Gertrude Fiske studied in Boston with Frank W. Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School. More important for Fiske's development as a painter than either of these American followers of French Impressionism were the summers she spent at Ogunquit, Maine with Charles Woodbury and the short-lived Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922) at Ogunquit in 1911. As a teacher and then as a collector and dealer in Brooklyn, Field encouraged the careers of several American modernist painters, includingMarsden Hartley, John Marin, and the Zorachs, Marguerite and William, as well as Gertrude Fiske.

For further reading : Gertrude Fiske (1878-1961) with an essay by Carol Walker Aten (Boston: Vose Galleries of Boston, Inc., 1987); Vose Galleries archives.

Image: Gertrude H. Fiske - Wells Beach, c.1920, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

According to Jacques Prevert, if you paint a bird and the painting doesn't sing, "it's a bad sign." In Gilbert Poillerat's Portrait of a Bird that Doesn't Exist I think I see bird song made visible, a sunny version of the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Remember that Plato believed sensations are the vehicle that allows us to experience what is universal; ideal forms he called them. A fanciful picture of a child at the beach on a summer day anchored, so to speak, by ontology.
So who was Gilbert Poillerat, an artist who never seems to get more than two paragraphs to himself in any written forum? Poillerat was a maitre- ferronnier, a specialist in metalwork who studied for eight years, from 1919 to 1927 with the Art Deco master, Edgar Brandt. According to journalist Mariana Paul-Bousquet, it was his graceful iron balustrades that made Poillerat's name and fortune. In 1943, she wrote: "They are like a winged language, crossing from the present to sweet visions from childhood." (translation JAL) There are those wings again!

TO PAINT THE PORTRAIT OF A BIRD

First paint a cage
with an open door
then paint
something pretty
something simple
something beautiful
something useful
for the bird
then place the canvas against a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest
hide behind the tree
without speaking
without moving...
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but he can just as well spend long years
before deciding
Don't get discouraged
wait
wait years if necessary
the swiftness or slowness of the coming
of the bird having no rapport
with the success of the picture
When the bird comes
if he comes
observe the most profound silence
wait till the bird enters the cage
and when he has entered
gently close the door with a brush
then
paint out all the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the feathers of the bird
Then paint the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful of its branches
for the bird
paint also the green foliage and the wind's freshness
the dust of the sun
and the noise of insects in the summer heat
and then wait for the bird to decide to sing
If the bird doesn't sing
it's a bad sign
a sign that the painting is bad
but if he sings it's a good sign
a sign that you can sign
so then so gently you pull out
one of the feathers of the bird
and you write yours name in a corner of the picture
- poem by Jacques Prevert (1900-1977), translated by Lawrence Ferlinghettii, New York, Doubleday & Company: 1971.

Image: Gilbert Poillerat (1902-1988) - Portrait-de-l'oiseau-qui-n'existe-par, 1979, Pompidou Center, Paris.

He has been dead for one hundred and twelve years but James Abbott McNeill Whistler is making a star turn in the Berkshires this summer, with two exhibitions, one in the Lunder Center at the Clark Art Institute and another at the Williams College Museum of Art, both located in Williamstown, MA. This is no small thing when one of the paintings, the one at the center of the Lunder exhibition, is not only Whistler's most famous painting but is also the most famous painting by an American artist that is not in the collection of an American museum.
Whistler's Arrangement in Gray And Black No.1, commonly referred to as "Whistler's Mother" was purchased from the artist by the French nation in 1891. Painted in 1871, the picture was exhibited at Philadelphia in 1882 but no American had the foresight to buy it. Interestingly, the French art critic and dealer Theodore Duret who was an early supporter of Whistler's work was also an advisor to the American collectors Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, whose collection became one of the treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If only is a thought that hangs in the air whenever I think of Whistler's painting of his mother. This may have been one of the things Sadakichi Hartmann had in mind when he wrote of Whistler, “America really did nothing for him and he did nothing for America."

When Hartmann published The Whistler Book in 1910, he was already an established author, with Shakespeare In Art (1901) and a two-volume History Of American Art(1901), among other books, to his credit. The child a Japanese mother and a German father, educated in Germany and the United States, Hartmann had the background – and the connections – to understand the artist in his place and time. “One afternoon in 1892, walking along the boulevards with Stephane Mallarme, during absinthe hours, I met Whistler. The poet and painter raised their hats and shook hands and exchanged a few words in French, which I did not understand.” Hartmann's knowledge of art was buttressed by personal experience; he had seen the works he wrote about at first hand, as in: “Chardin and Watteau, who cross-hatched and stippled pure colours in their pastels and water colors, were really the forerunners of impressionism.”

“Impressionist composition is unthinkable without focus. The lens of the camera taught the painter the importance of a single object in space to realize that all subjects cannot be seen with equal clearness, and that it is necessary to concentrate the point of interest according to the visual abilities of the eye. There is no lens, as everybody knows, which renders the foreground and the middle distance equally well.” - Sadakichi Hartmann, excerpted from The Whistler Book (1910)

Sadakichi Hartmann was not being tendentious; an astute critic of modernism in all media, he was well aware that painters could have seen this with their own eyes but they needed photography to notice the phenomenon. As an early critic writing about photography as art for Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, Hartmann was always attentive to the influence of photography on painting, forthright in pointing out the connections at a time when the subject was only discussed sub rosa. Even an artist like the Belgian Fernand Khnopff, who made no secret of his use of photography in his pictures, found that critics were unprepared to assimilate this new method into their discussions.

Was Whistler interested in the narrative uses of painting? Not much. For an answer, consider his most famous painting: Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother. Notice how the outlines of the black dress worn by Mrs. Whistler cannot fit the proportions of an average body; as painted, shr has the head of a petite 19th century woman and the body of a modern basketball player. This artfulness only makes it easier for viewers and critics to supply the influences and the list of candidates is long: Rembrandt for darkness, Courbet for luminosity, Japanese ukiyo-e prints for flatness, photography for focus.
Hartmann's assessment of what makes a Whistler interior so mesmerizing has lost nothing to time, changing tastes, or competing theories: “…there are many horizontal lines in its composition but the diagonals of the figures shape our response. In Whistler's interiors, the background is usually a straight wall: he rarely indulges in perspective."

The Whistler Book is still worth reading today. Its style may be somewhat dated but it is clear and graceful, as you would expect from a writer who understood the mutability of taste. Close as he was to his subject in real time, Hartmann needed no over-arching theory to justify his interest or make his career. Indeed, Sadakichi Hartmann was so full of ideas that he needed a pen name - Sidney Allan - to get them all into print.

For more about Sadakichi Hartmann.

For more information on the exhibitions, visit Clark Art Institute and Williams College..

To read The Whistler Bookby Sadakichi Hartmann, Boston, The Page Company: 1910.

Images:
1. James Abbott McNeill Whistler - Note In Red a/k/a The Siesta, before 1884, Terra Foundartion, Chicago.
2. James Abbott McNeill Whistler - Nocturne In Gray And Gold - Chelsea Snow, 1876, Fogg Art Musem, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
3. James Aboot McNeill Whistler - Arrangement In Gray And Black No. 1: Portrait Of The Artist's Mother, 1871, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Is geography destiny? A weighty question for a late summer day, with no easy answer in sight. In her writing, Colette she relishes the natural world in all its antique pantheism. How good a writer was she? When the devout Catholic Francois Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952, the first call he paid was to Mme Colette at her apartment on the Palais-Royal; he wanted to assure her that the wrong person had won the prize!

It is impossible to avoid the word idyllic in describing the writer Sidonie-Gabrielle (1873-1954) Colette’s life at Treille Muscate. Up at dawn she moved through dewy grass to weed her tomatoes, then walking through the woods with her cats, returning to the house for a breakfast on wild figs: “ green ones, with yellow flesh, white ones with red flesh, black ones with red flesh, violet ones with pink flesh, mauve rather than violet, with a fine skin.”

In 1924, Colette was divorced from her second husband Henry de Jouvenel, a Parisian journalist and publisher, after Colette's affair with her seventeen year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jounevel, became the stuff of Parisian gossip. They had been an unlikely couple: she was the daughter of a working class family from a small town in Burgundy, an author of louche novels of manners, and a stage performer; he was the son of French nobility.

Looking for a respite, Colette spent a fortnight spent at La Bergerie, a villa near Cap-d'Aire on the Mediterranean, a place she had previously dismissed as “ pretty and false.” She was attracted by the proximity of her friends from the theater who gathered at nearby Saint-Maxime but the deciding presence was that of Maurice Goudeket, her new young lover. In just a matter of months, Colette changed her mind, “What a country! I don't want any other.”

With help from the painter Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, Colette found her own place, a small farmhouse near Saint-Tropez that had no plumbing or electricity but did have two and a half picturesque acres of grape vines and fig trees, and a path through the pines to the sea. She named it La Treille Muscate (The Grape Arbor). Soon after the move, Colette wrote two of her finest books there - The Last of Cheri there in 1926 and Break of Day in 1928. After reading Break Of Day, Henri de Jouvenel's complained, “But can't you write a book that isn't about love, adultery, semi-incestuous couplings, and separation? Aren't there other things in life?” The lack of sympathy that had grown
between them was never more obvious.

For answer, consider this passage (from page 30): “Autumn is the only vintage time. Perhaps that is true in love, too. It is the season for sensual affection, a time of truce in the monotonous succession of struggles between equals, the perfect time for resting on s summit where two slopes meet....”

As a young girl studying French, I devoured every book by Colette that I could find, translated by Roger Senhouse, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. What I found there was puzzling: a writer who claimed equal rights for the sensuous with the intellectual, yet seemed out of sympathy with my nascent feminism. No better argument in favor of reading things before you are ready for them exists. These paragraphs from The Evening Star, picked at random, are exemplary.

"It seems a pity to eat them," said Marcelle Blot.

"you're not compelled to, Marcelle."

All among my collection of paperweights, tight-stuffed with curlicues, burnt sugar twists, flowers and small insects, Marcelle arranged her round, impeccably re4d tomatoes, with never a crease or a rib on them, the last tomatoes from her Saint-Cloud garden, and with a sigh murmured " Yes it is compulsory. Because they are good."

"On each successive day following the first fully ripened fig of the second crop, you can count on any number up to a dozen "secondary figs" being ripe and ready to fall into your hand, soft, with inflexed necks, bearing the pheasant's eye mark at their base and on the sides the parallel stripes that crackle their tender skins of mauve and grey. For the first few days you'll not be able to eat your fill. There's little to be said for your appetite if you can't polish off six, ten, or even a dozen figs with the chill of night still upon them; they readily split apart and are red inside as a pomegranate. They are not as yet runny with their full measure of honey-sweet stickiness, and are so much the easier to put in the mouth.

But the figs multiply with the rapidly increasing rate of maturity. Before the week is out the huge fig tree, the young tree further down, and the contorted tree will all be overwhelmed with ripe fruit, pendent from like the stocking nests of the Haitian Cacique bird. There is no end to them. Every single one deserves to be picked and placed on a wicker tray. Time is of the essence,for by now it is easy to see that in their turn the grapes are insistent on being cut, that the tomatoes have reached the peak of their red lacquer lavishness, and all that remain on the peach trees are the fluffy little pellets destined to become the hard ammunition for children to pelt each other..

After which the trees will bear no further crop but apples."

Excerpts from The Evening Star (L'Etoile Vesper) translated from the French by Roger Senhouse, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Evening Star (L’Etoile Vesper) was published in Paris on Bastille Day in 1945. In French the word vesper, which means “evening,” also refers to Venus.

So far as I can tell, Cyrille Besset (1861-1902) had one really good picture in him. How to make a memorable image of such a luscious landscape is harder than you might think. The winding road leads away from the sea yet still satisfies the eye. Route blanche de Provence (1891) which is now in the collection of the Musee d'Orsay was painted soon after Besset took up residence in Nice. Besset was born in Saone-et-Loire and studied with Alfred Roll in Paris before moving to Nice in 1890. He caught cold and died from respiratory complications in December 1902 while painting the landscape he loved.

Images:

1. Cyrille Besset - Route blanche de Provence, 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - Paysage No. 1 + 1912 + Flint Institute of Art.

2. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - La ferme a l'Aire - Saint-Tropez, 1925, Pompidou Center.

“Italy is made. We have still to make the Italians.” – Massimo d’Azeglio (1798-1866)

Just in case the point needs to be underlined, that eighty cents was the daily wage in the Po Valley circa 1895. Working conditions were so bad in the rise fields of the Piedmont that the women who performed this back-breaking labor had a name - they were known as mondine. Like the women themselves, we only know that there is a sky above is through its reflection in the water they stand in. We know that Morbelli used photographs as a memory aid to achieve this bravura example of deep space on an extremely shallow plane. A lesser artist would have been constricted by the panoramic dimensions of the canvas.

The path traveled by Italian art in the 19th century is different from the triumphal march of the French that began with the Impressionists. Stylistically, the Italians were all over the place and art historians have not been kind to them on this account. Yet the late 19th century was full of lively experiment, more than the Italian peninsula had seen in centuries. Silvestro Lega Emilio Longoni, Plinio Nomellini, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, to name a few, were called Macchiaioli (meaning patches of light) as a way to describe their stylistic experiments.

Their idealism, found its subject in the economic upheavals that attended the political unification of Italy; their politics ranged from progressive to anarchistic. The early 1890s were a time of strikes in the industrial cities of the north, a protest against unemployment, low wages for workers and poor living conditions for all. Conditions were no better for the poor in rural areas; not for the new generation of Italian painters the heroic peasants of Jean-Francois Millet.

Why art historians prefer the Italian Futurists, artists, many of whom became all too sympathetic to the Fascist movement, remains an intriguing question. One possible answer is that the Franco-centric version of art history for this period is a story, both admiring and satirical, of the rising bourgeoisie. Their interests were decidedly forward-looking; the agrarian life was old-fashioned.
What of the early Roman poet Horace wrote that the purpose of art is to "instruct and delight?" This idea has come to seem problematic. Morbelli and his fellow Macchiaioli were berated from all sides: for choosing ugly subjects rather than attractive ones and equally for making ugly realities beautiful in their paintings. Even when socially-conscious art soars high above "agit-prop", as it does in the best Italian Ne-Impressionist paintings, instruct or delight as it may, its effects are uncertain. We are moved by it, but to what effect?

Image: Angelo Morbelli - Per ottanta centesimi! (For Eighty Cents!), 1895, Museo Francesco Biorgogna, Vercelli.

"He certainly very clearly expressed something. Some said that he did not clearly express anything. Some were certain that he expressed something very clearly and some of such of them said that he would have been a greater one if he had not been so clearly expressing what he was expressing. Some said that he was not clearly expressing what he was expressing and some of such of them said that the greatness of struggling which was not clear expression made of him one being a completely great one.' - excerpt from Matisse in Selected Writings Of Gertrude Stein Random House, New York: 1946.

Here, in one short yet elliptical paragraph, Gertrude Stein explains how, after a great early success, the painter Henri Matisse decamped to the suburbs of Paris, away from the slings and arrows being hurled at him by his former friends, the Cubists and Pablo Picasso in particular.
It was Roy Lichtenstein who made me see this. Specifically, his painting Artist's Studio (1973), recently on display at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. It is a typical example of Lichtenstein's method of reinterpreting a painting (in this case The Red Studio by Henri Matisse) but it made me look at Matisse's original from a different angle. Arguably the best known painting Matisse ever made, The Red Studio is a picture of his studio at Issey-les-Moulineaux, For those who guessing games, The Red Studio, provides the occasion for speculating about the paintings within the painting, hanging on the walls and stacked on the floor. But be warned, as Matisse cautioned the puzzled visityors to his studio: "That (red) wall simply doesn't exist."
Lichtenstein, a Pop artist of the 1960s and 1970s was a controversial figure and still is, eighteen years after his death. Trying to describe what Lichtenstein did when he painted is still debatable. Did he copy, borrow, imitate, or steal from other artists?

But what he does by focusing on the lower left part of Matisse's painting is an homage the work of a very different artist - Emile Galle (1846-1904). A master glass designer whose name is synonymous with Art Nouveau, Galle's experimental glass-making techniques were applied to exemplary shapes like the goblet and the carafe on Matisse's table. But what of that orange object with the green vines winding around it? Matisse's contemporaries would have recognized it as one of Galle's utterly unique pieces with the evocative name: La main aux algues et aux coquillages (The Hand with algae and seashells).

If Lichtenstein make me look at something familiar with fresh eyes, Matisse made me think of something we often overlook, namely that styles, periods, and movements in art are conveniences for sorting things out in ways the artists themselves may not have needed. Likely there are many admirers of Matisse who do not admire Art Nouveau. But Matisse was, himself, a decorative painter, and he may have been attracted to Galle's three-dimensional representations of (then) new discoveries in evolutionary botany. It was perfectly possible to be a Fauve (wild beast) painter and a strict bourgeois at the same time. And as for the Cubists back in Paris, their triumphalism would be overtaken when a new generation of young American artists found their way to abstraction through the paintings of Henri Matisse.

Images:
1. Henri Matisse - detail from L'Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio), 1911, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
2. Emile Galle - La Main aux algues et aux coquillages (The Hand With Algae and Seashells), 1904, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

I. - MARISOL

Marisol Escobar was twenty-seven when she created a series of wooden sculptures she named The Hungarians. The artist sits, in this photograph taken by Walter Sanders for Life magazine, surrounded by several of them. At her left is the most familiar of these, a family on a wheeled platform, representing a train or perhaps a bus. The image of attempted escape is implied; the mother cradles an infant while the father stands behind a toddler. The Soviet Army had recently invaded Hungary, crushing an uprising of Hungarians demanding independence; the world had watched and failed to respond to tanks rolling through the capital city Budapest, crushing bodies and spirits alike. Surely it is no accident that in Marisol's work, the people who are trapped are looking at us.

Marisol, as she is known professionally, is one of the great sculptors of the post-war period but, like so many women, she is hidden in plain sight, penalized perhaps for having had an early success. Born in Paris to Venezuelan parents, Marisol was well-traveled from an early age, living on three continents. She studied in New York City with Hans Hofmann, sizing up the male art world that was Abstract Expressionism, and cleverly navigated around it, aided by her beauty, to create powerful artworks of social comment and critique. I first encountered Marisol's work in person when I saw The Generals (1962) at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. I had to crane my neck (The Generals is seven feet three inches tall) to get a good look at Simon Bolivar and George Washington. Although she has often mixed her media, wood has been Marisol's favorite material.

II. - THE HUNGARIANS

When we think of walls, we usually mean barriers of dirt, stone, or bricks. In the modern world, walls are often visually insubstantial but actively wounding, with sharp metal prongs or electrification. Consider barbed wire. Barbed wire was developed by the French during the 19th century, an invention they had reason to regret in the course of two world wars. Its original purpose was to keep farm animals from escaping their owners. Now barbed wire fences are in the news again; keeping people out and keeping people in.

III. - THE POETS

"We are pinned under the point of compasses,
But how far can we see from the centre of our life?
Who draws the circle? And what range does
That hand allow? And beyond the unbearable
Why does agoraphobia drive back
Our eyes to the designated disk,
Where we - like maniac stallkeepers –display
Tea cup, book, wedding ring,
Handy souvenirs one after another, and we
Pretend to wait, as if could come
Anybody feasting eyes on our belongings
Just standing there, delirious with joy, forever?
- "Pretend To Wait" by Agnes Rapai, translation here.

Agnes Rapai (b. 1952) is a Hungarian poet and translator

"... For we are guilty too, as other peoples are,
knowing full-well when and how and why we've sinned so far,
but workers live here too, and poets, without sin
and tiny babies in whom intellect will flourish;
it shines in them and they guard it, hiding in dark cellars
until the finger of peace once again marks our nation,
and with fresh voices they will answer our muffled words.

Cover us with your big wings, vigil-keeping evening cloud."
— excerpt from "I Cannot Know" (Nem tudhatom) by Miklos Radnoti, translated by Gina Gönczi

Mikos Radnoti (1909-1944) was a Hungarian poet who was murdered during the Holocaust. His last poems, written in a small notebook and on scraps of paper, were only discovered when his body was exhumed from a mass grave some years after his death.

I first read about Miklos Radnoti here.
Read more about Marisol.

Images:
1. Walter Sanders - Marisol & The Hungarians, 1957, Getty Archives, Los Angeles

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels odd to have to introduce Johanna Grussner to American audiences. Grussner, who was born on the Aland Islands off the coast of Finland in 1972, lived in the U.S for eight years, She attended the Berklee School of Music on scholarship and then earned a Master's degree in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music in 1998. She taught at Public School 86 in The Bronx where she developed a program of vocal and instrumental instruction and music theory. In May 2001 she brought a group of fifth grade students to Finland to perform gospel concerts. Since 2001 Grüssner has lived in Stockholm, Sweden.

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

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

The song is structured without a verse; it has four sections – A, a variation of A, B, and back to the A variation in conclusion. Alec Wilder (in his History Of American Popular Song, 1972) heard in its melody echoes of the mixolydian mode of Gregorian chant. Mixolydian was the seventh of eight modes (similar to key signatures ) in medieval church music. Arlen also used melisma in Out Of This World, scoring two notes for the word “knew.” Melisma is a technique familiar to us from its use in gospel music; it comes from early Christian plainsong. Unlike syllabic singing where each syllable is matched to one note, when a singer moves from one note to another on a single syllable, that’s melisma. Wilder was certainly right to describe Out Of This World a not typical of Harold Arlen's songs, but then it is not typical of anyone else's style that I can think of either.

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

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

You are looking at one of the most influential paintings from the 1890s; if it reminds you of something Rene Magritte might have painted, you will not be surprised to learn that Magritte himself credited this work - La Maison Aveugle (The Blind House) - as the origin of surrealism. Surrealism is not so easy to see these days, so completely have its gestures been adopted by advertisers. The term itself has become shorthand for things that don't make sense. How curious is it that this alternative version of reality happened as scientific discovery was explaining natural phenomena in terms of what cannot be seen? It was distressing enough that Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Nietzsche had already told the world that we were losing our religion; now we were to be deprived of poetry as well.

Like the more famous Magritte, William Degouve de Nuncques was a Belgian artist whose pictures vibrate to the music of an invisible tuning fork. Perhaps all art is a balancing act between the id and the ego. Degouve de Nuncques, who was subject to bouts of depression throughout his life, explained why he gave La Maison Aveugle its title this way: "The blind house; that was a case of the silent, sombre nature that held its mirror to my face, and in the mirror I saw emotive life that had foundered in death."

Logic suggests that artificial illumination would make the night seem less strange but that is not how artists reacted to gas lamps or electric street lights. The brighter the illumination became the more the night was sculpted by contrasts of darkness and light; paradoxically, the brighter the light, the more mysterious and even menacing darkness became by contrast.

To me, The Pink House (its common title in English), like the other night paintings by Degouve de Nuncques, suggests a refuge from life in stifling interiors. With curtains closed on the lighted windows, the grass shimmers like a promise of freedom. Yes, the trees are in full bloom while the bushes by the foundation are nothing but bare branches; this is why trying to pin down what symbolist art meant makes some people want to forget the entire movement. The signals are mixed, as are human emotions. The house, whether defined by its color pink (think: warmth) or by its ascribed personality (blind, as some artists considered the bourgeoisie to be to difficult aspects of reality) is a thrilling example of how influential a painting can be. Here is one example - La Maison Mystere by the Anglo-Belgian artist Emile-Antoine Verpilleux.

Revised 10/03/2015.

Images:
1. William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935) - La maison aveugle (The Blind House), 1892, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.

2. Emile-Antoine Verpilleux (1888-1964)- Maison Mystère, no date given.

(This and other information and images from the collection of Jacques Doucet at Bibliotheque d'Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris are here.
Q. Why Jacques Doucet?
A. Doucet was the original owner of Les Demosielles d'Avignon (1907). He purchasied it directly from Picasso at the artist's studio.

"You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can't be both." - Gertrude Stein

But if you think Gertrude Stein laid that particular argument to rest, keep reading.

I. - The title of the painting above tells a story, but not the whole story. A Room at the Second Post-Impressionist Exposition - The Matisse Room waspaintedin 1912by Roger Fry to commemorate the second exhibition of Post-Impressionist Art held in London.

Roger Fry was a historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance when he was converted to modernism by Paul Cezanne’s paintings, seen in Paris. Four years later Fry organized the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London. By 1910 these artists were not news, but Fry coined the catch-all term them that stuck, so we remember the moment. At the same time, the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph is credited with first use of the term avant-garde (a military term originating in French) to describe what made artists modern. That French culture aroused deep suspicion in the British only makes things more delicious.

II - Call it a protest or a piece of performance art, it was an “anti-Renoir” event. On Monday, October 5, a small group gathered in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Art to denounce the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, dead these one hundred years, The participants held homemade signs, one stating “Treacle Harms Society.” They demanded that the museum remove a number of inferior Renoirs (there are a lot of them) and instead give their precious gallery space to artists like Gauguin, Cezanne, etc.

The spectacle provided great fun to the public including a bemused Carol Off who interviewed the instigator Max Geller on the CBC news program As It Happens It is not often remarked in polite company just how mediocre Renoir's paintings can be; after all their prices are astronomical, assuming you can locate one for sale. Ar his best, Renoir's pictures show him to be a gifted member of the dazzling group of French Impressionists painters. But his pretty young women lived a precarious existence as working women in the 19^th century city, those nubile young nudes were intended not for the walls of museums so much as for the smoking rooms of lascivious rich men.

The protest could have been held, with equal justification, at the Clark Art Institute in Willamstown, at the other end of Massachusetts. The Clark owns thirty-two Renoirs, some very fine and as many that are mediocre. For my taste the star Renoir at the Clark is the still life Onions (1881). Here Renoir applies his modeling technique to vegetables; what takes my breath is that the artist captured the delicate shimmer of their papery skins.

Sterling Clark’s taste for Renoir began in 1916 when he purchased his first painting, Renoir’s A Girl Crocheting. Despite its demure title, the subject is really the young woman’s luscious body. There is ample evidence (Nymphs and Satyrby another French artists, William-Adolphe Bougereau,for instance) that Sterling Clark's taste in art extended to what we might call fuzzy porn.

Four years ago, the Clark deaccessioned ( a euphemism for sold off for $$$) one of its Renoirs, Woman Picking Flowers, through a London gallery, asking price $15 million. As the flower-picker was Camille Monet, wife of Claude Monet, the painting has some significance as the document of a friendship. Asked why the Clark decided to sell this Sterling Clark selection at an art fair, director Michael Conforti explained in a written statement that the offering “would afford both transparency and visibility since this art fair is so widely followed and well attended by those individuals who are most likely to have an interest in works of this quality.’’ Notice that this does not answer the question.

There may come a day when Pierre-Auguste Renoir is remembered as the father of Jean Renoir, one of the great 20th century filmmakers.

III. - Both an art historian, Sir Kenneth Clark, and a structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, believed that collecting-and arranging, call it curation or bricolage, is a basic human activity. Lévi-Strauss added a dark reminder: that ancient Roman curators were procurers, agents for hire.

Museums as we know them were built on the collections of royalty, beginning in the eighteenth century. The first curators were hardly free agents, either. By the 1860s, French artists were fed up with the curators of the official salons and began their own counter-exhibitions, joining aesthetics and commerce under their own banner.

The third act in this drama took place in New York City when Alfred Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art,, became art's chief arbiter of value, a model that ruled the art world until, like other ideas, it wore out its welcome. It fell to curator Lucy Lippard, whose exhibition Six Years: The Dematerialization of the art Object from 1966 to `1972 to threw down the gauntlet. The modern museum had made a fetish of art works? Very well, we will dematerialize them! And so they gave us conceptual art.

Contemporary suspicion of institutions has given rise to art fairs (places where art is sold) and kunsthalles, (places where art is displayed but not collected). The anxiety about separating the good from the bad seems to be a human constant and we have given the curator the power to assign value, but what values? Aesthetic or monetary? And let us not forget eros. Deciding seems to be an activity very much like peeling one of Renoir's beautiful onions.

Revised 10/11/2015.

Images:

1. Roger Fry - A Room at the Second Post-Impressionist Exposition - The Matisse Room, 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Onions, 1881, Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.
3. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - A Girl Crocheting, 1875, Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA.
4.

"...the end of our exploring to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

One autumn years ago I saw the first snow at Algoma. It was the middle of October, the time when Canadians celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. I was on the road that runs along the north shore of Lake Superior, on the way from Sault Saint Marie to Wawa. When snowflakes started to hurtle toward my windshield, I turned around and headed south. Two days later at the McMichael Collection in Kleinberg (north of Toronto) I saw A.Y. Jackson's First Snow At Algoma and thought "I have been there, too."
The McMichael centers on paintings by Jackson and the other members of The Group Of Seven, Canadian landscape painters active during the period between the two World Wars who are, lamentably, little known in the U.S. Also works by Thoreau MacDonald (1901-1989), the son of Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald. Thoreau MacDonald was an artist and illustrator who preferred to work in black and white, as he was colorblind. He was also a walker and, as such, sensitive to his place in a land populated by otters, minks, fixes, and lynx. His artistic method was to keep his attention focused on the moment - that thing that is the only thing any us ever has - and to make his art when he was back in his studio. What was it that held the attention of this handsome lynx?

Meanwhile, an exhibition The Idea Of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris is on now and will continue until January 24, 2016 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It is the first, time that Harris had been the subject of abn exhibition in the United States.

Images:
1. A.Y. (Alexander Young) Jackson - First Snow, Algoma, c.1919, McMichael Collection, Kleinberg, Ontario.
2. Thoreau MacDonald - Lynx At Kleinberg from Birds And Animals, 1968

I - There is a style of art criticism that I think of as being peculiarly American. Peter Schjeldahl, from his position at the New Yorker, practices it with relish. The style was rejected as the "biographical fallacy" after World War II, but critics find it so appealing that it keeps coming back and, it can be a useful tool, if deftly employed. Biographical criticism was made popular by a Frenchman, Hippolyte Taine (1828-1895). Taine's contention that you could learn a lot about a work of art by knowing something about its creator's life is one of those propositions that is so vague that it is impossible to disprove. That a Frenchman introduced this idea seems unremarkable yet the French have long shown a lack of interest in biography as is it practiced in the English-speaking world.

But getting back to Schjeldahl who has never met a dead artist whose sex life - or lack thereof - didn't make his hair stand up with anticipation. Where an Abstract Expressionist like Helen Frankenthaler was always at pains to deny the landscape-like elements in her work, Willem de Kooning was considered a strong painter for including subtle and not so subtle reminders of his copious sexual escapades into his pictures. Said escapades were retailed with relish by Schjeldahl is his column in the New Yorker.

II - The risks of biographical interpretation are nicely illustrated by the paintings of Felix Vallotton (1865-1925). Vallotton, a Swiss artist, is best known for his black and white woodcuts, particularly the series Intimacies and Crimes And Punishments. They are like firecrackers, some go off immediately they are set and some do a slow burn. His paintings are not so well known in North America; most are in European museums.

Le Ballon (see above), painted in 1899, is one of the best-known; it has been an inspiration to hundreds of photographers. Indeed, Vallotton himself had purchased Kodak camera that year and

there is a convincing hypothesis offered by critics that Vallotton created the composition of Le Ballon by using two photographs, one taken from above (afar) and one taken from below (a close-up), approximating a view from underwater. The end result is a painting that shows us two worlds - the world of a child chasing a balloon and the world of adults. I am far from the first person to notice that the shadow of unseen trees seems to symbolize the adult world chasing the little girl toward the future.

What might a biographical interpretation of Le Ballon be? In 1899, Vallotton married a widow who had three children. At thirty-three, the bachelor with a reputation for modiness had acquired a ready-made family. Conjecture as you you like; here's what Vallotton had to say. The boys were "two perfect cretins." As for his step-daughter, "Madeleine parades and imposes her self-importance, her stupidity, her bossiness." And again: "She spends her time doing her nails and watching everyone's suffering as if from on high." All this family happiness prompted Vallotton to ask himself: "What has man done wrong that he is obliged to submit to this terrifying 'associate' known as woman?"

III - Vallotton's landscapes. Felix Vallotton began painting his disorienting landscapes several years before he acquired his first camera. They leave the viewer in the odd position of never quite knowing where they are. The artist called them"paysages composes"and with good reason; they were not painted from nature or memory, rather they were assembled from bits of nature that he relished and then combined into a whole of his own making. Vallotton had his reasons for using cutout forms with contrasting colors. He had belonged to the relatively short lived movement known as Nabism, a bouillabaisse of symbolism, abstraction, and infatuation with Japanese prints; Vallotton then became a master of the woodcut himself. And as to the problem of the elephant in the room: the only thing Vallotton's work has in common with Impressionism is that admiration for Japanese art of the floating world. His landscapes should not be taken literally although he often named them after specific locations, you will not find their approximations on location; the artist was after a universal landscape, a landscape of the imagination that the Symbolists would have recognized as their own.
The early landscape Clair de lune (1894) is a nocturnein navy bluewith a fat pink cloud conglomeration that looks more substantial than the land itself. As for the stream that cuts across the field reflecting the moonlit clouds, it is cutout stream, reminding us that although ink-dark colors suggest depth, this is a flat paper world, a floating world indeed. After a few years, Vallotton turned to other subjects; when he produced The Pond - Honfleur in 1909 it was his first landscape in several years and, once again, a nocturne.

IV - Like most artists with large oeuvre, Vallotton's work varies in interest. There is really nothing to be said about his nudes except perhaps that what works for the natural world doesn't work well for human bodies. When the Zurich Kunsthaus presented a solo exhibition of Vallotton's work in 2007, it had been forty years since the last one. Nothing equals the woodcuts and we would be poorer without them but the landscapes and interiors deserve another look.

For further reading: Keeping An Eye Open by Julian Barnes, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 2015.
Images:
1. Felix Vallotton - La ballon ou Coin de parc avec enfant au ballon + 1899, Musee d'Oesay, Paris.
2. Felix Vallotton - Clair de lune, 1895, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. Felix Vallotton - The Pond - Honfleur, 1909, Kunstmuseum, Basel.

Please bear with The Blue Lantern as I work out some personal kinks. Wish I looked this stylish while doing so.

Image:
1. Sonia Delaunay - Schizzo, no date given, Pompidou Center, Paris.

I had never heard of Angela Perko until recently when I saw Wrapped Lemons apres W.J. McCloskey (above);I had heard of William McCloskey, but couldn't remember how although I did remember why. The elusive artist painted strangely captivating wrapped fruits, a genre he may well have invented.
The artist Angela Perko, also turns out to admire the Canadian artists known collectively as the Group of Seven, artists I've mentioned recently. Perko cites the group, especially its lone female member Emily Carr, as influencing her use of color. She arranges colors fearlessly, as comfortable with dissonance as she is with delicacy. Like the Seven, Perko explored painting through landscape; like McCloskey she was born elsewhere but eventually moved to California.
I think Perko's Wrapped Lemons refers to McCloskey's Florida Lemons (below). Perko's painting lets us imagine a world where our eyes can separate planes of vision. This feature, along with her use of depthless color achieved through barely visible brushwork, makes this a true cubist artwork. There is a sad story about the McCloskey painting. According to The City Review (May 21, 2014), it was offered for sale at auction in New York City but "It failed to sell."

We are spoiled; we take the year-round availability for granted of any fruit we desire. Historically speaking, this state of things began just yesterday but there are artists whose works remind us of the magical properties of fruit, especially citrus fruit, with its contrasts of sweetness and tartness in seductively tactile containers.

Wrapped Oranges, painted in 1889 by the little known William J. McCloskey, brought me up short when I first saw it (see below). These arrangements of fruits in tissue on what appear to be tabletops evoke a mysterious sense of place out of time, much as the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi' s empty rooms do. Tissue was the preferred method for packing these precious fruits for shipping before the days of refrigerated trucks..

The story of American still life painting begins with the Peales (Charles Wilson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Titian Peale, and Margaretta Peale to name just five of the prolific and close-knit family). Their paintings were among the best that a new nation produced during its early decades. The Peales were also known as experimenters in tromp l'oeil, a technique used to deceive the eye into seeing relationships between planes and dimensions that are not there in ostensibly realistic spatting.

Like the Peales, WillIma McCloskey and his wife Alberta Binford, painted works of great technical virtuosity; William excelled in portraits and fruit, Alberta in portraits floral still lifes. It was while staying in Los Angeles during the 1880s that the young couple established their artistic reputations. Already southern California had begun to promote itself as the garden state of the west, home to plentiful orange groves. An unusual couple in many respects, the McCloskeys did not stay put, making their whereabouts at any given moment hard to pin down; but they lived in New York City (on 23rd Street near the Art Students League), London, and Paris and exhibited their works in Atlanta, Buffalo, and Providence, at least. Neglected after their deaths, McCloskey's wrapped fruits again attracted public interest beginning in the 1990s.
Both artists bring to the table, so to speak, an enthusiasm for paint that makes joie de vivre tactile.

Angela Perko is represented by Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, Santa Barbara.

For further reading about William McCloskey: Partners In Illusion: Alberta Binford and William J. McCloskey by Nancy D.W. Moure, Santa Ana, Bowers Museum of Art: 1996.

Images:
1. Angela Perko - Wrapped Lemons apres W. J. McCloskey, 2015, Sullivan Goss: An American Art Gallery, Santa Barbara.
2. William J. McCloskey - Florida Lemons, 1919, Sotheby's, NYC.
3. William J. McCloskey - Wrapped Oranges, 1889, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

"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 in his films, the late Peter Brunette, going so far as to say that Antonioni's framing of shots is so masterful that you could isolate almost any one individually and hang it on a wall as a work of art. But this is not only about architecture and not only about modernism. Antonioni was an amateur painter who constructed miniature buildings as a child and admired the abstract-expressionist Mark Rothko. Did he associate Rothko's multiform blocks of color with the blocks of color used by the Italian Macchiaioli painters of the late 19th century? It seems possible. His use of painterly abstraction in his films looks inevitable in the rear-view mirror of time.

But Antonioni the boy who loved drawing and then the teeanger who fell in love with cinema, grew up to earn a degree in economics. 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 architecture, as Antonioni surely knew. Antonioni shows us the stock exchange in its usual mood of hysteria, speculators screaming 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, Antonioni 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, its style was so unexpected, especially to fans of his earlier pictures. 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 sensed a cliched battle of the “feminine” life force with the natural world versus the patriarchal poisoning of nature. I prefer the analogy represented by 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 meeting between Antonioni and Rothko, let me add Antonioni's description of Rothko's work: "It's painted anxiety." In Red Desert, the character Giuliana attempts to regain her bearings by opening an art gallery where she paints in the "Rothko" style. Watching Red Desert makes me regret that Antonioni lacked the funds to make all four of these films in color.

Revised 06/1//2015.
For further reading: The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni by Peter Brunette, Cambridge and London, Cambridge University Press: 1998.
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.

But Where Is The Beach?

John Rewald's Monet To Matisse (Part Two)

Asta Nielsen: The Woman Who Played Hamlet

Searching For A.H. Fish, Finding Florine Stettheimer

Michel Petrucciani: Never Say Goodbye

A Summer Afternoon. A Beach In Maine

A Beach In France. An Imaginary Bird

The Book On Whistler: Sadakichi Hartmann Takes His Measure

The White Roads Of Provence: Colette In Summer

For Eighty Cents !

A Corner In The Artist\'s Studio

Marisol And The Hungarians

Johanna Grussner: Out Of This World

Day For Night: The Pink House

Who Decides ?

First Snow At Algoma

Felix Vallotton: All Is Not What It Appears To Be

Never Enough Sonia Delaunay

Wrapped Lemons: Angela Perko & W.J. McCloskey

"Silence Is So Accurate" : Michelangelo Antonioni & Monica Vitti