THE BLUE LANTERN

That crisply smart outfit the young woman wears in Marcel Gromaire's painting La voyageuse au bateau (1930) is about to become ubiquitous once again this spring, according to the fashion press.

La rayure bretonne, or the Breton striped shirt, originated in 1858 as the official uniform for members of the French navy. The colors blue and white were chosen as being nautical; sailors soon decided that the contrasting stripes would make it easier to spot a man who went overboard. Even today an authentic marinière(marine shirt) must conform to Naval specifications: the body of the shirt has twenty-one blue stripes, representing Napoleon's major victories, alternating with white stripes that are twice twice the size. To be precise, the blue stripes are ten millimeters wide and the white stripes measure twenty millimeters. And, for practical reasons, the sleeves arethree-quarter length, a style that would become known as 'bracelet-sleeves' when Coco Chanel introduced it to women's wear.

An ambitious young woman, Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971) having had some success as a hat-maker, opened a shop in the seaside resort town of Deauville in 1913 to sell her uniquely styled luxurious casual clothing to women of leisure. Impressed by the crisp style of the sailors stationed at Deauville, Chanel then introduced her own marine look to the Paris in a nautical collection in 1917.

Chanel invented the sportysophistication that has become the preferred style of modern women, exemplified by the Chanel suit, a wool jersey outfitconsisting of a cardigan jacket and pleated skirt, paired with a belted pullover top. Her innovative use of jersey, a machine knit fabric that had been relegated to the manufacture of men's underwear and hosiery, or in sports clothes for tennis, golf and swimming.Other designers disliked jersey, rejecting it as too difficult to handle compared to woven fabrics. Chanel took advantage of wartime fabric shortages and, yes, being a woman, she recognized that women wanted simpler, more practical clothesand greater freedom of movement. Her reputation grew during the decades between the two world wars as French women moved into the labor force (in greater numbers than their American counterparts),taking the places left vacant by a generation of men killed in combat.

Clear as the history of the rayure bretonne is, there are always new pretenders hoping to claim the crown. When Jean Seberg appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's film A bout de souffle Breathless (1960) wearing a marinière a new generation discovered Breton stripes, and Yves Saint Laurent 'introduced'the shirtin his first haute couture collection .

Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971) was Chanel's contemporary, and a painter of French leisure, golf, tennis, fishing, swimming and sun bathing, even managing to combine two of them in Tennis devant la mer or Tennis by the sea (1928, Musee d'Art moderne de la vbille de Paris).

Images:

1. Marcel Gromaire - La voyageuse au bateau (The Woman on the Boat), 1930, Musee d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris.

2. unidentified photographer - Coco Chanel in her marinière, c. 1930, Le Figaro Archives, Paris.

I can never quite decide how good a photographer Jean-Baptiste Leroux is; he always seems to choose the most photogenic locations. Grant him that it would be difficult to avoid the centuries-worth of dramatic chateaus and cathedrals that organize the French landscape into a visual history book. There is much drabness and poverty in the blighted banlieeus that surround French cities like circles of hell but Leroux doesn't go there. Outside France, he seeks out the beautiful and finds it in the back canals of Venice and the gardens of the Palais Royale at Casablanca. I don't want to make too much of this, as Leroux comes to his work with a special love of gardens and interest in biodiversity. Contemporary French artists seem less inclined to valorize ugliness than their American counterparts; maybe that's what two World Wars and Hundred Years War that lasted one hundred and seventeen years will do the collective psyche. In any case, it was an inspired choice that the Conservatoire des jardins et paysages (French Conservation of Gardens and Landscapes) made in awarding Leroux carte blanche to document the gardens of France. When I look at his photograph of frost on the asparagus at Versailles, I feel the bite of the cold.

Image: Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le potager du roi a Versailles les asperges et - au loin - la chapelle (The kings's garden at Versailles, asparagus and - in the background - the chapel(, Grand Palais, Paris.

"Until the age of nine I had nothing—just one ancient dress. I went hungry, ran around barefoot from April to October, even begged. We were a family of “Enemies of the People.” That was what they called those who had been accused of political crimes and sent to the camps. Three of my relatives had been accused of spying for the Japanese, and were executed. Later, my great-grandfather was assassinated in the middle of Moscow, pushed under a car. I didn’t have toys and had only one crayon, purple. I found a piece of cardboard and made a purple horse with a purple eye. It seemed too skinny, so I wrapped a rag around its middle and played with it. In the street, I always picked up bits of brick, limestone, and charcoal, and drew on the pavement with those three colors: red, white, and black."

- Ludmilla Petrushevskaya speaking with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, her comments translated from the Russian by Anna Summers

To appreciate the dark comedy of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's novels and stories you don't have to get the humor embedded in the phrase 'Apocalypse pretty soon', but it doesn't hurt. There is an old Russian saying that goes: "I wake up; it's a bad day." Petrushevskaya must know this well; her stories are often described as fairy tales but not by her fellow Muscovites who see her as the chronicler of their daily lives.

The girl Ludmilla who made a space for herself under a table in her demented uncle's apartment gave birth to the writer whose depictions of suffocating family life all but drives her characters crazy. The bleak living conditions in urban housing blocks, known as kommunalkas, have outlasted the Soviet regime that decreed the virtues that would result from communal living.

All too predictably, scarce material goods and lack of privacy led to the fierce possessiveness that could bring relatives to argue over "ownership" of an electric light switch. Anna, the protagonist of "The Time Is Night" (1982), has to eke out the resources to care for her grandchildren, while her grown children circle like vultures, ready to grab whatever they can. In a more recent story, "Chocolates With Liqueur" from 2002 reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "A Cask Of Amonttilado," a married couple is locked in a struggle to the death for possession of an apartment.

Petrushevskaya, who was born in Moscow in 1938, was widowed while still in her twenties, a young mother with a child to support. Soon she began writing and, although she had a few stories published during the next two decades, most were banned by the authorities. While her stories lay rejected in a desk drawer, Petrushevskaya staged them as plays at schools, factories, or anywhere there was an available room. When glasnost (thethaw) happened in 1988 and Immortal Love was published, Petrushevskaya was recognized as one of the finest living Russian writers.

"Love them, they'll torture you; don't love them, they'll leave you anyway."
What most deeply satisfies me in Petrushevskaya's writing is her refusal of an unctuous, too easily ingratiating, attitude toward her readers. By this I mean that she does not direct us to award our sympathies to one character but not others. Sometimes her characters behave operatically, their emotions matching the plot lines that life hands them. Does deprivation drive people crazy? Petrushevskaya reminds us that it can. Petrushevskaya the philosopher of life as it comes, rather than as we would wish it to be. Like that other clear-eyed philosopher, Billie Holiday, who said: “You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.”

Revised 02/23/2016.

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Anna Summers, New York, Penguin Books: 2015.

Images:
1. Natayla Goncharova - Linge de maison (Household Linens), 1913, tate gallery, London.
2. unidentified photographer - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, courtesy of Penguin Press.

By chance, two of my favorite living Russian writers represent two different Russias. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is from Moscow, capitol city of European Russia although residents of St. Petersburg would loudly contest that designation on cultural grounds. Andrei Makine comes from central Siberia, part of what is known as Asian Russia. Born in 1957, after several early displacements, Makine grew up in an orphanage. Although his schooling was erratic, Makine's teachers recognized a brilliant student. Bilingual since early childhood, Makine wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Moscow on contemporary French literature.

In 1987, while taking part in a teacher exchange program with France, Makine asked for and was granted political asylum. At first he led a clandestine existence, taking shelter in the old Père Lachaise cemetery for a period he has described as one of "permanent despair." He got his first job as a professor of Russian at the Lycée Jacques-Decour and then wrote another doctoral thesis - this one at the Sorbonne - on the Russian writer Ivan Bunin. Makine, who has said "(S)tyle is more important. It's not the what, it's the how," wrote about Bunin. "He was a great stylist who wrote very suggestively. He didn't spray us with ideologies or worries. His writing is pure poetry." Makine has also named Katherine Mansfield as his favorite writer in English.

All Makine's novels have been written in French but they were so good that publishers suspected a hoax of some kind. Makine played along, saying that the works were translations of his Russian originals and then they were published. Only with his third book, Once Upon the River Love, did Makine abandon the deception. His next book, Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995) won both of France's top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis, establishing Makine as one of the most celebrated writers in Europe. Success enabled him to acquire a home, a former lunatic asylum in Montmartre. "The poet Gérard de Nerval was taken care of in my building. It was the only place he felt really well. He found real happiness there."

Contemporary French fiction is characterized by a language in constant analysis and self-examination, what the French refer to it as nombrelismeor navel-gazing. Makine contrasts this to his style, calling it"external."

"Beauty was the least of our preoccupations in the land where we were born, Utkin, me, and the others. You could spend your whole life there and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, never seek out the secrets of the mosaic of the human face or the sensual topography of the human body."

"Love, too, did not exactly take root in this austere country. Love, for love's sake had, I think, simply been forgotten - had atrophied in the bloodbath of the war, been garroted by the barbed-wire entanglements of the nearby camp, frozen by the breath of the Arctic."

Its title accurately reflects the wistfulness that suffuses Once Upon the River Love (Au Temps du Fleuve Amour).The river itself (Amur in Russian, Amour in French -- the pun in not possible to replicate in English) is just an element of the backdrop, although the Amur is one of the world's ten longest rivers, like so much else about Siberia, it seems very far away.

It is winter in eastern Siberia, the village is buried under snow up to the chimney tops, an escaped prisoner has frozen to death, in a tree, and the brightest lights are the windows on the trans-Siberian express. Of course, the train seems to thunder as it passes in the dark of a brutally cold night.

The residents of little Svetlaya are in no doubt that they live on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. With meager prospects for the future - the only jobs around are in logging, mining, or guarding the local gulag - but they are fascinated by the shreds of Western culture that come their way.

In a nearby village the Red October Cinema is running a sort of film festival of Jean-Paul Belmondo movies. That a run-of-the-mill B-movie adventure could undermine official Soviet propaganda extolling the crop yields on a collective farm more effectively than lofty ideals of freedom and democracy is both charming and sad. Three boys, Samurai, Utkin, who is disabled, and Mitya, make repeated pilgrimages to the cinema, tramping through cold woods, so enamored do they become with the French tough guy on the big screen. Although they have no way of knowing it, each will find his own out of Siberia: Samurai to die in an unnamed Central American liberation struggle, like Che Guevara, Utkin to write captions for pornographic cartoons, and Mitya who gets the prize - a job in the movie industry.
Makine's attraction to the French language is an idea with a history behind it. When Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, his novel about Russia during the time of Napoleon, two per cent of the novel (portions of dialogue) was written in French because the upper class characters in his story would have been ardent Francophiles. For them France represented the culture they found lacking in their own country. The romance continues to this day.

Revised: 03/01/2016.
For further reading: Once Upon the River Love by Andrei Makine, translated from the Russian by Geoffrey Strachan, New York, Arcade Publishing: 1998.

Images:
1. Isaac Levitan - The Lake (unfinished), 1900, Russian State Museum, St.Petersburg.
2. Isaac Levitan - Winter. 1895, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

A woman and flower petals. Simple elements, perhaps, but worked out with a curious equipoise. Where in the world is she? Afloat or pinned on a flat surface? Regardless of the settings we find her in, her face is always enigmatic, as is her situation. The artist seems to be nudging to ask whether this woman is engaged in contemplation or a mute struggle; she has called these images "attempts at portraits."

Her work is not well known in North America but Adriana Czernin's drawings evoke thoughts of familiar Austrian artists from a century ago, particularly Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, both of whom coincidentally died in the same year of 1918. Klimt'sdecorative aesthetic with its masonic eyes and spermatozoa rendered in gold leaf was the beautifulfacadethat temporarily obscured a ruinous set of social problems, poverty and its attendants, decrepit housing, low wages, and poor sanitation, venereal diseases and out of wedlock births visited on women by well to do men, and an impotent political system. To the extent that fin de siecle Vienna had ideals, they were worn threadbare by these insupportable contradictions.

Czernin has taken the decorative trappings of misogyny and retooled them for her own purposes. That the Bulgarian born Czernin (Sofia, 1969) lives and works in Vienna, a city that has become a museum of that era in itself, virtually assures comparisons with predecessors and suggests an arrtist unintimidated by them.
Czernin works with ordinary artist's materials: watercolor, pencil, and India ink; she has applied her pictures directly onto gallery wallsin the manner of Klimt's notorious murals commissioned by the University of Vienna (1900-1907). At Galerie Martin Janda she drew herself into an alcove, a protected space that she both inhabited and burst out of, being at the same time self-possessed and assertive. Here ornament may function as a line between public and private space, but exactly where that line is, is difficult to pin down.

To the mix of art nouveau elements, organic forms such as flower petals, leaves, and branches, Czernin introduces mashrabiya, a pattern used in Arabic architecture that dates back to12th century Baghdad.
A latticework pattern, mashrabiya is used as a window covering. It allows those inside to observe without being seen, preserving privacy and also, for women, signifying theirrestricted domestic lives. Using a geometric pattern has allowed Czernin to highlight the abstract elements hat have always been part of her work. Her distortion and the dismantling of perspective are more obvious.

Since 2008 Czernin has been working on a project she calls Investigations of the Inside in which she works with increasingly spiky natural formstoembody her faceless or face-obscuring stand-ins. If this project is about women and nature, it upends the platitude: man does, woman is. As Czernin continues to create picture-puzzles, her messages have become increasingly urgent. I like to think that Czernin is the New Eve confronting the Old Adam. They may be enigmatic but they are well worth your attention.

For further reading: Adriana Czernin, Vienna, Distanz Verlag: 2013 (in German)

Images: courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna.

1. Adriana Czernin - untitled, 2001.

2. Adriana Czernin - untitled, 2004.

3. Adriana Czernin, untitled, 2006.
4. Adriana Czernin - Self-portrait from Investigations of the Inside, 2009.

Waves of blue shimmering and fracturing every known color into shards of now-you-see-them-now-you-don't; this is Marea Alta or High Tide, the creation of Cuban artist Mabel Poblet. Composed of thousands of mirror fragments imprinted with seascapes, Marea Alta literally opened the 12th Havana Biennale; visitors had to pass through the curtain to enter the exhibition, giving them the opportunity to both look at and reflect on their own images as remnants of their country's recent past. As an island, Cuba has a long and permeable coastline; like Italy and India its culture has benefited by infusions from abroad.
As we have learned since the breakup of the Soviet Union, international Communism was never quite the monolith of our bad dreams. Cuba, for example, exerted less heavy-handed control over the arts that the Soviets did. Soviet-style socialist realism was no match for the rich mixture of north and south, Europe and Africa that makes up Cuban art. How the Cuban government supported the arts, building an exemplary art school in the 1960s and even subsidizing artists themselves provided impetus to an already vibrant culture. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the 1990s, Cubans endured what they remember as the "Special Period," of disastrous financial conditions as foreign aid collapsed. Among other hardships, art supplies became almost impossible to obtain, and artists turned to whatever materials were available to continue making things.

Simplemente bellas is an exmplary series inspired by Mabel Poblet's visit to a workshop at a women's prison whereinmates were making plastic flowers from odd bits of plastic. By themselves, the flowers were unremarkable but Poblet was moved bythe satisfactionthe women took in designing and creatingthem. Poblet's original plan was to make a portrait of a young girl overcome by circumstances she cannotcontrol but the finished work also displays an invincible optimism that beauty can be created from ordinary materials and that there

Poblet arranged the flowers, usingbicycle wheels for their containers and fixed them to an acrylic board. When an engine (in back) is turned on, the wheels gyrate, causing the'realistic' flowers to blur into abstraction, alternating current indeed. She has said that she hopes viewers will be moved to think about the relationship between kitsch, folklore, and studio art, and also about the woman who made the flowers. "I thought those flowers deserved a context outside of prison to be shown the way Betsy and her friends would have wanted it."

Like so many of her contemporaries, Poblet uses photography, video and installations in various combinations. Her interest inaspects of pop and kinetic artis obvious in her images of herself such asin Desolata and Narciso or Narcissus (below). Red isPoblet's symbolic color of choice; to her it stands for the polarities of life and death. Although she creates art with what are, for her, didactic purposes, Poblet does it with beauty and joy in the process.

Born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1986, Mabel Poblet (Pujol) graduated from the Instituto Superior de Artes (ISA) in 2012, In just a few years she has been recognized as a major figure in contemporary Cuban art. Her work is includedin museum collections in France and Cuba and has been exhibited in North America and Europe.

Revised: 03/12/2016.

For more visit Mabel Poblet Studio.

Images:
1. Mabel Poblet - Alta marea (High Tide) from La Patria, 2014, Galerie Villa de Arte Manuela de la Uneac, Havana.
2.Mabel Poblet Pujol - Simplemente bellas, 2012, Rachel Ponce Gallery, Madrid, (200x300x15cm + plastic flowers,bicycle tires,electric motors, acrylic plates).
3. Mabel Poblet - Narciso, 2015, Mabel Poblet Studio, Havana.
4. Mabel Poblet - untitled, Cuban Art Space, Havana.

If any art work could launch a dozendissertationsit would be a sculpture by Alison Saar. Saar's sculptures have a way of dominating any gallery. When I saw her sculpture Bareroot (below)last year at the exhibition One Another: Spiderlike, I Spin Mirrors at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, it riveted my eyes. Here in the middle of a large marble gallery modeled on a Greek temple, Erectheion. A woman, whose extremities appear to have been ripped from the earth, lies curled in upon herself, eyes closed. She must be cold, traumatized but what - we can only guess. Her creator, Alison Saar, makes powerful use of humble materials: wood, bronze, tin, and tar.

In Coup (above), a black woman sits upright on chair, her gaze level and fixed; her braided hair stretchesbehind her becoming a rope chain that holds together a pile ofold suitcases. She holds a pair of shears in her hands; they are slightly askance as though the woman is ready to cut loose from her baggage. That baggage is both physical and metaphysical.
The title is surely the key to understanding Saar's intentions although, like any work of art, there are layers of meaning that an attentive viewer could find there. "Coup - noun, singular: AmongcertainNativeAmericanpeoples, a feat of braveryperformed in battle,especiallythetouching of an enemy'sbodywithoutcausinginjury." Suffering and the ineffable suffuse Saar's figures. The physicality in Saar's sculptures is her labor in creating them made visible; she cuts and hammers remnantssalvaged from old tin ceilings, twists wires, pounds nails, and saws and sands wood. Yes, it is possible to use a chainsaw to create works with great spirit.

Saar was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1956. She includes among her ancestors Native Americans, African Americans, Germans, and Scots. Her mother is the artist Betye Saar. Alison Saar began her art studies by helping her father with his conservation work. She credits this experience with helping her realize her interest in sculpture. Her work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and her public commissions are on display in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

Image:
1. Alison Saar - Coup, 2006, Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara.
2. Alison Saar - Bareroot, 2007, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo.

The three small sculptures that make up A Flow resemble a fleet of little boats sailing beneath the waves or, in light of some recent reading, I like to imagine them carrying the twigs that bowerbirds use to create their fantastical architectural displays. And why not? Twigs are not always straight; we learn from nature that a branch grows straight unless an imbalance of forces produces a curve. It was the mixture of shapes, some from nature and some imagined that first drew me to the Japanese artist Tashima Etsuko.

I.
Tashima creates her fanciful sculptures using her own formulation based on the ancient Roman technique of molten glass casting. Just as Japanese ceramics has long been admired for it combination of function and beauty, Tashima's version of pate de verre is amarriage of opposites, combining translucent glass with opaque stoneware. She fires the two substances separately and then attaches them. Pâte de verre is a French term that began to be used around the year 1900 when the artists of l’Ecole de Nancy (School of Nancy), notably the Daum Brothers and Emile Galle, revived the use of the paste made crushed glass, water and gum. Tashima has added glass recycled from fluorescent light bulbs; through a series of experiments she determined that it has fewer impurities and imperfections than other glass, resulting in an opaque material that radiates a delicate luminous blue-green. Japanese ceramics are known for their combination of beauty with functionality. The idea that ceramics could be sculpture or abstract works only appeared in the early 20th century.

A strict dichotomy between humans and the rest of the natural world is no longer tenable but we should not mourn its passing. Evolution is both fact and theory. And the basic theory is not survival of the fittest but rather survival of the good enough because perfection, by definition, would limit the diversity on which all survival ultimately depends. Arbitrary or random mutation is a mechanism, not an explanation.

II.
“We could truly say that ideas come to flowers in the same way they come to us. Flowers grope in the same darkness, encounter the same obstacles and the same ill will, in the same unknown. They know the same laws, same disappointments, same slow and difficult triumphs. It seems they have our patience, our perseverance, our self-love; the same finely tuned and diversified intelligence, almost the same hopes and the same ideals. Like ourselves, they struggle against a vast indifferent force that ends by helping them.” – Maurice Maeterlinck,from The Intelligence of Flowers, translated from the French by Philip Mosley

Although it was primarily his plays and poems that earned Maurice Maeterlinck the Nobel Literature Prize in 1911, it is for his widely admired nature essays that he is remembered now, particularly The Life of the Bee (1901) and The Intelligence of Flowers (1907). From the latter, he wrote, “"Our mind draws from the same reservoirs as does that of nature. We are of the same world, we are almost among equals. We no longer mix with inaccessible gods." Maeterlinck’s effort to harmonize science and religion in the wake of Charles Darwin’s controversial The Origin of Species was one of many but his vision of a mystical science was influenced by his Jesuit education.

The claim that science destroys beauty by putting it under a microscope has illustrious ancestors in William Blake and John Keats. A newer claim that beauty resides in mathematics and evolutionary biology strikes many as too austere. Nature doesn't look like anything the Romantics imagined it as it is revealed at the nano level but it is still marvelous.

Evolution is both fact and theory.Arbitrary or random mutation is a mechanism, not an explanation. A strict dichotomy between humans ad nature is no longer tenable. Yet when scientific knowledgemodifies our human perceptionsor religious beliefs we often feel threatened and, so,miss a great deal that is valuable to the arts.

The Life of the Bee sold an amazing 250,000 copies. “If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live” may have sounded far-fetched a century ago but in light of recent disturbances to the ecology, Maeterlinck gets points for intuition. “Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favorable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness.” Again, points to Maeterlinck for exercising imaginative sympathy.

Through the dramatic power of its metaphorsThe Intelligence of Flowers still offers food for thought, even though the scientific terrain has shifted in the intervening century. To Maeterlinck flowers, through the choreography of their reproductive dance, demonstrate their capacity for thought and, by analogy, that their behavior resembles our own, constituting a form of intelligence. "Ideas come to flowers in the same way they come to us." And so we move beyond Aristotle's dictum: “Art finishes what nature begins.”

III.
An "(A)rt object is always an instruction to act or experience, not a piece of information, as living things are organized instructions, not organized information." - C.H. Waddington, Biology and the History of the Future, Edinburgh, Edinburgh: University Press: 1972

Maeterlink's flowers, it turns our, prefigure what biologists have learned recently about the intelligence of birds. Gerald Borgia and Gail Patricelli detected signs of intention in what can reasonably be described as brd creations as they studied the mating habits of bowerbirds. The male bowerbird creates large assemblages, from the elegant to the fantastical, to attract potential mates. The satin bowerbird will go so far as to use crushed berries to paint the entrance to the bower the color blue; if berries are not available he will make do with blue plastic picnic utensils

The existence of art in nature raises questions we have yet to thoroughly answer. Evolution provides an explanation that is too austere for many people to accept. To Charles Darwin the endless forms that life takes taught him acute attention to visual details. On this foundation he built his theory of natural selection that proposed survival through adaptation; his second theory of sexual selection dealt with courtship and mating and the role of beauty in nature. Sexual selection has been overlooked or considered an embarrassing misstep by a great thinker, because it puts the female in a powerful position. The idea that females exercise aesthetic selection in their choice of mates has troubled men from Darwin's time to our own; no less a personage than Alfred Russell Wallace harrumphed that aesthetics had no space for "beauty, caprice, and feminine whim.(1890)"

While artists have made a taboo of beauty, what interests me here is that they haven’t taken much notice that scientists have embraced it. So, when philosopher, botanist, and musician David Rothenberg writes that "an engagement with art is fundamentally an engagement with beauty, even if it is a strange or unfamiliar beauty," he is going off the reservation. I was surprised that Rothenberg didn't include any discussionof Maeterlinck's nature essays in Survival of the Beautiful as they contain metaphors that are eerily similar to what Richard Prum has observed about sexual selection and aesthetic activity in birds.

For further reading:

The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck, translated from the French by Philip Mosley, State University of New York Press, NYC: 2008, (1907) Winner of the 2008 Prix de la Traduction Littéraire presented by French Community of Belgium

Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution by David Rothenberg, New York, Bloomsbury Press: 2011.

Images:

1. Tashima Etsuko - A Flow I-III, Corning Museum of Glass.

2. Tashima Etsuko - Cornucopia 2-XII, 2002, 20th Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
3. Tashima Etsuko - Cornucopia no date given, Chazen Museum, Madison, Wisconsin.
4. Tashima Etsuko - Cornucopia 03-II, 2003, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
5. Tashima Etsuko - Cornucopia 5-XII, 2005, Smith College Museum of Ar, Northampton.

“Je suisun romancier olfactif.” - Sidonie-Gabr

« Deux hectares, vigne, orangers, figuiers à fruits verts, figuiers à fruits noirs. Quand j’aurai

dit que l’ail, le piment, et l’aubergine comblent, entre les ceps, les sillons de la vigne,

n’aurais-je pas tout dit ? »

"Two hectares, vines, orange trees, fig trees with green fruit, with black fruit. When I’ve

said that the garlic, chili, and eggplant fill in between the vines, the furrows of the vine,

haven’t I said it all? " (translation: JL)

"Je suis un romancier olfactif." - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

“In the kingdom of smells, everything is either bliss or torture, sometimes so subtly blended that I find myself, when the many strands of a supposedly simple are trapped in my palpitating nostrils, actually listening to it, as carefully as if I were unraveling a symphony's sonorous phrases.” - S-G Colette

I. - Nowhere was Colette, the olfactory novelist, happier that at La Treille Muscat, near Saint-Tropez. She had discovered the dilapidated old farmhouse in the 1920s with the help of her friend, the artist Andre Dunoyer de Sergonzac, who already lived nearby. It was there that she wrote Sido (1929), The Pure and the Impure (1932) and The Cat (1933), all of them lovingly illustrated by Segonzac,

A typical day at La Treille Muscat, according to Dunoyer de Segonzac: in the morning Colette worked in her garden, at noon she swam at the beach of Salins, after lunch she napped, then the afternoon was devoted to her writing. She ended the day by meeting with friends at the port. Colette's version, from a letter to Helen Picard, written during the summer of 1928: « En t’écrivant je pose pour Segonzac qui a besoin de ma grosse personne pour des eaux-fortes. Ce grand peintre est un si charmant ami. » (While I’m writing I pose for Segonzac who needs my big self self for his watercolors.) – translation, JL
“Fragrance, with your inexplicable way of making a flower's essence as palpable as an animal's while bombarding us with molecules more astonishing that electric ions, are you perhaps a function more of our minds than of our bodies? The hypersensitive, exposed to your power, stagger, swoon as if from an illness. Though a lover cured of his love may be able to confront his now harmless “ex: face-to-face without a qualm, let him breathe one whiff of the old familiar perfume and he blanches, eyes filling with tears. Because Asmodeus, god of lechery, enlists fragrance as his assistant, filling the night with lethal honeysuckle, unfailing acacia, wanton lime-blossom, to ravage hearts and that remember and savage ones that resist.” - excerpts from “Fragrance” by Colette included in ”Colette's Salon” by Robert Reilly, Vogue: November 1998.

II. - When Francois Mauriac learned that he had won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1952 the first call he made was a visit to Mme. Colette at her apartment in the Palais-Royal. Under the light of her blue lantern he told her that the wrong writer had won the prize; Colette had been nominated for the prize in 1948, but lost out to T.S. Eliot.

There have been other years when, with hindsight, readers have thought the prize went to the wrong nominee. The idea has a long history, when the first committee met to award the first Literature Prize in 1901, members agreed that the Russian Leo Tolstoy was the greatest living writer (me, I would have chosen Anton Chekhov) but at that point Tolstoy had alienated so many of his admirers through his rages and intolerance that they could not bring themselves to award him the prize. Instead, the prize went to a Frenchman, Sully Prudhomme, whose “lofty idealism” has dated rather badly. Prudhomme is remembered, if at all, for the composers who set his words to music, Gabriel Faure and Henri Duparc. Then in 1911, the year that Maurice Maeterlinck received the rpize, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells had nominated Henry James and, my personal best of the worst occurred in 1932 when Sinclair Lewis nominated the Australian writer Henry Handel Richardson (real name – Ethel Richardson)..

Colette's international reputation has only gained luster in the decades since her death. Yet during her lifetime her most esteemed peers, from the Jesuit-educated Francois Mauriac to Andre Gide, a law unto himself, considered her the better writer. A sensualist, Colette wrote from a perspective somewhere beyond the deeply conflicted Mauriac and the totally - and sometimes disastrously uninhibited - Gide
Images;
1. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - Colette vedangeuse, 1929.
2. Andre Kertesz - photograph of Colette at La Treille Muscate, 1930

"I must say that this work means a lot to me, because it has to do with life. And every day brings new thoughts, new problems that help you to stay flexible. It's not necessary to lose your sensitivity, but to save these things, man has to be saved first, and we are the enlighteners, the stimulating force that opens the eyes of our fellow man."- Werner Bischof

Even people who aren't sure what distinguishes Shinto from other forms of Buddhism or of the time period of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, much less all those who have yet to know the work of the late Swiss photographer Werner Bischof, may have seen his photograph Shinto Priests at the Meiji Temple.

On April 26 it will be one hundred years since Werner Bischof was born in Zurich, Switzerland. After finishing his studies, Bischof opened a studio there in 1936 but he only became well known outside his native country after his war reportage from Germany was published in 1945. For Bischof, the war changed everything; where he had produced sophisticated images that combined human subjects and various abstract aesthetic experiments, he turned to what has been called humanist photography or, in the words of his friend Ernst Haas, "a stone became a world, a child was all children, war, all wars."

Bischof was an early member of Magnum, an international photographic collective, founded in Paris in 1947. It was Milan-born Maria Eisner who brought together the photojournalists who founded Magnum: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. Eisner ran the Paris office while Rita Vandervert headed the New York bureau. The idea for the group is attributed to Robert Capa; Werner Bischof expressed it this way. "I felt compelled to venture forth and explore the true face of the world. Leading a satisfying life of plenty had blinded many of us to the immense hardships beyond our borders."

Venture forth Bischof did and, in the seven years that were left to him, traveled to Asia where he photographed farmers in Korea and Indochina (now Vietnam), starving peasants and workers at the new Tata iron-works in India, and street life in Hong Kong. His best known works from circa 1950 are his images of Japan - his attempts to make comprehensible the devastation that remained for years after the atomic bombs dropped by American military in 1945, counterpointed by his serene images of Kyoto, an old city and the former capitol, a city that riveted Bischof's imagination.

“What I have seen in the last days could fill a book, from the enchanting silver pavilion, to the imaginary lake of moss, the mossy waterfall, a wild garden stone Buddhas covered in stone basins for washing hands...a thousand wonders."

In 1954, Bischof came to the Americas, traveling through Mexico, Panama and, finally, to Peru where he photographed the people who lived in remote rural villages in the Andes. On May 16, Bischof died in an accident, when the Jeep he was riding in went off a narrow mountain road (similar to the road between Cuzco and Pisac) went over a cliff. Nine days later and on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, on assignment for Life magazine in Indochina, Robert Capa got out of a Jeep to take photographs and stepped on a landmine.

In death, Bischof left behind a wife and a four year old son, Marco. Werner's widow, Rosselina, organized and preserved his proof sheets, negatives, letters, drawings and diaries for the future.

And finally a question. Why are the penguins crossing the road? For all his seriousness of purpose, Bischof had the wisdom that Ray Bradbury encapsulated in the remark, "We have our arts so we don't die of the truth." In Scotland, in Edinburgh, in 1950, Bischof took dozens of photographs of penguins strolling along the city streets.Sometimes the penguins watched cars go by, sometimes children watched the penguins go by. The penguins were guided along by their own Pied Piper, the zoo director, on a weekly mission to attract visitors to the Edinburgh Zoo.

More about Werner Bischof is here and here.

Images: All photographs by Werner Bischof are from the Magnum Archives.
1. Shinto Priests at the Meiji Temple, 1951.
2. Friedrichschafen - children playing in a bombed out building, 1945.
3. Girl with Puppet, 1951.
4.On the road between Cuzco and Pisac in the Andes, 1954.
5. Penguins strolling in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1950.

“He had but the cold hours of the morning or the heavy hours of the night in which to draw and paint his water-colors." - Walters Art Museum

In five brief years from 1861 until he committed suicide in 1866, Léon Bonvin created watercolors outstanding for their sheer loveliness and realism. Because we know how the story ends it is tempting to read into the images things that may not be there.

Of the dozensof Bonvin landscapes in the Walters collection I chose three of my favorites (that's the selection process) that I think represent his worldview: in the foreground an appreciation of the here and now, and in the distance, the faraway nearby, desperately yearned for. The rose royal in spring, the desiccated thistle in winter, have seldom been painted with equal affection.What might it cost an artist emotionally to depict the countryside that immured him in poverty and obscurity?

Some details of Bonvin’s life have not been definitively confirmed from surviving documents, allowing room for embroidery. Leon Bonvin (1834-1866) and Francois Bonvin (1817-1887) were half-brothers; both were sons of a constable in Vaugirard. Both were primarily self-taught artists but Francois attended two art schools; his mentor was Francois Granet and he became friends with the realist master Gustave Courbet. Having achieved a modest success in Paris, the elder brother encouraged his brother to continue and provided him with paints.

As a young boy he began making small charcoal sketches and ink drawings of a bleak environment suffused with his ardor.…How explain the luminous watercolors that he went to create, with their intimations of a world of light just beyond grasp? So far as we know, Bonvin produced only one oil painting. The lack of money that kept him from using oil paints confined him to relatively unforgiving media like ink and watercolor, but that never registers itself as a lack in his art. Bonvin perfected the technique of outlining his forms in sepia ink, creating an effect similar to the then new medium of photography.

Bonvin worked as an innkeeper; he married in 1861. The young couple struggled; the inn lost money. Yet in the seven year period between 1859 and his death he created numerous exquisite still lifes and subtle landscapes capturing fleeting atmospheric effects. In desperation, Bonvin traveled to Paris in January 1866 to offer his watercolors to a dealer. Rejected, he hung himself the next day in the forest at Meudon. What must it have felt like to have works of such delicacy and palpable feeling rejected? A sale, organized to aid his destitute family, raised some 8,000 francs.

During the rest of the century Bonvin's work was known to a small circle, among them William T. Walters (1820-1894), whose son Henry Walters, founded the Walters Art Museum. William's collection of Bonvin's work (56 watercolors and one oil painting) was acquired between 1862 and 1891 and is the largest single collection of Bonvin's work in existence. That these exquisite French works came to Baltimore is a quirk of history. Baltimore, according to a woman who wrote to a localnewspaper in 1809, was “the Siberia of the arts.” Apparently the brothers Rembrandt and Rubens Peale thought not when they opened a combination art andnatural history curio gallery there in 1812. Even the considerable reputation of America’s first family of the arts was not enough to guarantee a success;after a few years the gallery closed and the Peales moved on. William Walters might never have gone to Paris, might never have been exposed to the works of Leon Bonvin, were it not for Baltimore. Baltimore sat near the political fault line between north and south in 1861. A successful grain merchant and liquor wholesaler,Walters' wealth was built on the backs of slaves. When war came, he took his mixed loyalties and his family to Europe. It may be that, in the French landscape, he found an escape from trouble. If so, that was illusory, as Leon Bonvinwell knew.

Images:

1. Leon Bonvin - Country Scene, 1865, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
2. Leon Bonvin - Roses and Grasses, 1863, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore..
3. Leon Bonvin - Still Life with Wine, Water, and Fruits, 1864, Walters Art museum, Baltimore.

4. Leon Bonvin - Thistles and Weeds in Winter, 1864, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

“Chartreuse photographs badly.” Photography can’t convey everything the human eye can see; Eastman Kodak admitted as much about its color film decades ago.

According to landscape historian John R. Stilgoe in Alongshore (Yale University Press:1994), no photographer has ever equaled the painter Martin Johnson Headeincapturing the fleeting colors of the coastal Atlantic marshes. Salt marshes are common along the east coast of the United States and, after he was initially taken with them at Newburyport, Massachusetts in the 1860s, Heade continued to search them out, from Montclair, New Jersey to the the coast of Florida. To survive in the harsh environment of intertidalmarshes. Spartina grasses, their primarycolor chartreuse, flourish in back-barrier marshes, tough but protected tbrunt of wind and ice.

Writers, too, have tried to capture the lambent nature of marsh life. Sarah Clark wrote in an issue of Harper's Monthly(1882): "As the sunset deepens, the salt-meadows are clad in a golden green moss, each dry blade and bramble on the wind-swept hill gleams like a javelin, the red flowers burn into crimson flames, the cranberry swamp, too, is on fire, and the bridge in the distance looks as if it led to paradise." That bridge became when Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravure The Bridge At Ipswich (1904) was published in CameraWork. The bridge in questionis Choate Bridge, the oldest stone bridge in United States.

A character in Sarah Orne Jewett's novel A Marsh Island (1885), seeing the area at high tide thinks it "looked as if the land had been raveled out into the sea, for the tide creeks and inlets were brimful of water." At low tide the characteristic browns and grays of the marshland are "embroidered here and there with sapphire." Marshing is the name given to the coastal farming, of "salt hay," farming made anarchic without benefit of boundaries, no fences or stone walls possible when the tides wash away all markers. By the 1660s, Plymouth colony was awash in disputes over trespass. Jewett (1849-1909) also reported in 1872, that the men of Rowley were armed and ready to do battle to protect their right to cut hay in the marshes. Usually people were more reasonable in settling their boundary disputes; the tides were there to administer daily doses of humility.

In early spring chartreuse is the green of the moment, a fleeting color. For the past three weeks or so, geese in the park down by the lake have been pairing off two by two; it is mating seaon on the Great Atlantic Flyway. With anticipation I check each day for babies,waiting for those first few, short days after the goslings are born, the days before their feathers take on the dun coloration of their parents, the days when they are little fuzz balls of yellowy-green: in a word, chartreuse.

For more about Martin Johnson Heade and salt marshes, visit the excellentwebsiteHay in Art.

Martin Johnson Heade - Salt Marshes, Newburyport, c.1866-76, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In the foreground, a small frond of purple coral rests on a table, establishing a solid base for a collection of aquatic objects, ones usually found floating in water, seemingly weightless and usually seen as if through a scrim. These curiosities might well have been the contents of a the collection of an amateur scientist in the 18th century but, none the less full of interest for that, at a time when most scientists were amateurs

Anne Vallayer-Coster was a master of still life, not least because she was a great arranger of objects. The title she gave to Les Panches de mer (Plumes from the Sea) tells us how she wanted us to see these life forms out of their natural habitiat. Pale mauve fan-shaped corals form a backdrop resembling ferns, lighter ones in front are silhouetted against darker ones behind; hard shells and spiny corals are arranged like so many sprigs of flowers. Meanwhile, the sponge at right retains all its tactile qualities.

Her method, which so impressed her contemporaries and impresses us still, was to create a wealth of effects with very finely brushed strokes of oil paint; here the reds create a marvelous effect by drawing the eye to spaces within the shells, culminating in the lush sexual pink of the interior conch, reminding us that we are looking at the calcified remains of living, throbbing creatures. Vallayer-Coster’s style stands apart from other still life painters in its seamless harmony of illusionism with her deliberately decorative compositions.Painting with panache, indeed.

Anne Vallayer-Coster was twenty-five years old when she painted Les Panaches de Mer in 1769. The next year she was elected to the Royal Academy, an institution resistant to admitting women to its ranks; along with Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, she was one of only four women. In an official statement the members noted that Vallayer-Coster "painted as well as a man."( translation JL) Her work was admired both at court and among the rising merchant class. It was exhibited at the official Salon in 1771. Amphitrite, named for a Greek goddess of the sea, married to Poseidon.

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818)was born into a family of artists; her mother painted miniatures and her father Louis-Joseph Vallayer was related to the Gobelins of tapestry fame and goldsmith to the King.

Although still life painting was considered the least intellectual of genres, Vallayer-Coster dazzled viewers with her “precocious talent and the rave reviews” that greeted her workfrom, among other luminaries, Denis Diderot attracting the attention of Marie Antoinette. It was the Queen who signed the official marriage contract between Vallayer and Jean-Pierre-Sylvestre Coster, when the two married on April 21, 1781. Thanks to the Queen, Valley-Coster was given a choice apartment at the Louvre, then the royal residence in Paris, directly beneath the main gallery. All this would be changed soon after the Revolution when the monarchy was deposed and the building became a museum open to the public.

Due to her close association with Marie Anoinette, Vallayer-Coster's career was put on hold by the Revolution but she stayed in Paris and remained loyal to her Queen; she was allowed to resume exhibiting at the Salon in 1795, and continuing until the year before her death.

Images:

Anne Vallaey-Coster - Les Panaches de mer, 1769, Louvre Museum, Paris.

You could call this a case of premature enlightenment. Somewhere around 1892 Gustave Caillebotte painted Nasturtiums, a workof sinuous beauty, its leaves coloredlavender, blue, and green subtly harmonized and accented by little red flower petals. But the painting is significant in other ways; in the history of painting Caillebotte's Nasturtiums preceded the Waterlilies of his friend and fellow artist Claude Monet. And, if you look closely, there are intuitions of a momentous discovery contained in Albert Einstein'sTheory of Relativity, published in 1905; namely that space is curved by virtue of the energy at work in the time-space continuum. That is, I think,the movement apparent in Caillebotte's painting mirrors a level of reality not visible to the human eye, but soon to be explicated by the physicist.

John Rewald dismissed Caillebotteas an “engineer” in his 1946 survey History of Impressionism. Renoir, on the other hand, insisted on adding Caillebotte’s work The Floor Finishers to the Louvre's collection. Often pigeonholed as a minor impressionist, at best a follower, the chronology of his works here returned, it makes its place at the forefront creative. The permanence of forms and theirrhythms in Caillebotte's paintings moves it in another direction from the light dabs of the Impressionists.
Among the Impressionists, Gustave Caillebotte was closest to Monet. Not only was he Monet's friend and patron, the two also shared dual passions, art and gardening. Caillebotte's work was a major source of inspiration to Monet. With its decorative dimension and Japanese influence, Caillebotte's panels, the orchid series and the Marguerites now on exhibition at the Impressionist Museum at Giverny, shed light on Monet'sWater-lilies.

With the purchase of the property of Le Petit-Genvilliers at Yerres in 1878, Caillebotte's work took a horticultural turn. Caillebotte raisedorchids and other plants in his greenhouse. He was at work on two series of four decorative panels intended for his dining room when he died of apoplexy at the age of 45. The panels for the dining room doors contained views of his greenhouse and his treasured orchid plants. On an existing panel the orchids are entwined in the curving metal supports of the greenhouse roof.

Focusing on the canvases executed at Petit-Gennevilliers, where he settled in 1888, a few years after Monet purchased the house at Giverny, the exhibition Caillebotte, peintre et jardiniere demonstrateshis increasing freedom as he celebrated the exuberance of nature, of life itself.

Caillebotte, peintre et jardiniere (Caillebotte, Painter and Gardener) is on view at Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny from March 25 to July 3, 2016.
For more about Gustave Caillebotte, visit Human Flower Project.

Images:
1. Gustave Caillebotte - Nasturtiums, c.1892, private collection, France.
2. Gustave Caillebotte - In the Greenhouse of Orchids, 1893, private collection, France.

“In the 60s, the men did not feel threatened by me,” Marisol said later in life. “They thought I was cute and spooky, but they didn’t take my art so seriously.” - Marisol Escobar

“Marisol was an important figure, subtly affecting change by her silence and the particularity of her position … She was the female artist star of pop art, [but] she dramatized it in a very subdued way, through her intensely quiet manner.” – Carolee Schneeman

“Marisol was among the most highly respected artists of the 1960s. As the decades passed, she was inappropriately written out of that history. My aim was to return her to the prominence she so rightly deserves.” – Marina Pacini, curator, Memphis Brooks Museum

Last year El Museoin del Barrio New York presented a small but welcome retrospective of Marisol’s sculptures and works on paper, on tour from the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee.

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. Marisol Escobar - The Generals (Simon Bolivar & George Washington), c.1962, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo.
1. Walter Sanders - Marisol & The Hungarians, 1957, Getty Archives, Los Angeles

Hemingway, Faulkner, Genet, Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Roth, Updike. The list seems unexceptionable; all are 20th century writers whose names are familiar to anyone who has digested their way through college literature readings lists. But have you ever thought about the cumulative effect these writers (and dozens others I could have named) and their worldviews have had on the minds of impressionable young girls. Maybe not, for who wants to dwell on shame, humiliation, ridicule and the diminishing of one's humanity. For me, literature was not theoretical and no matter what academics may like to think, people really do read to learn about life.

Luckily for me, my college days in the early 1980s coincided with the high tide of the Virago Modern Classics, reprints of hundreds of neglected books written by women. Available from Dial Press in New York (black covers) or directly from the U.K. (green covers) they made it possible for me to fill in the lacunae in my literature studies, a hole big enough to drive a truck through. By my reckoning I amassed something like one hundred Viragos and had read at least that many more again by the time I graduated. I wish they were still mine but, being young and more optimistic than I knew at the time, I gave most of them away, certain that these books would always remain in print and that Virago would go on forever. Wrong, so wrong.

What the Virago shelf of books gave me wasmore than a corrective to the mostly male writers offered by the university syllabus; it was an intimation of another way of viewing the world. It also made me diligent at unearthing women writers for other courses. Medieval history – meet Lina Eckenstein’s Women Under Monasticism (1896); Ancient Greek Religion – Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion by Jane Ellen Harrison (1903, rev. 1908), Christian mysticism – The Book of Margery Kempe (1438), German history – Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln (c.1689).

Carmen Callil, from Melbourne, Australia founded Virago Press in London in 1973 with Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, editors of Spare Rib, a feminist magazine. Their first original book was Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village (1977) written by the Oxford historian Mary Chamberlain. Chamberlain lived for several years in a village in East Anglia that she named Gislea, interviewing women about their lives, their hopes and fears, the desperate poverty, lack of educational opportunities, and the bone-crushing loneliness. A marshland that has been reclaimed from the North Sea by methods similar to those used in the Netherlands, the the Fens are known to Americans, if at all, as the location of W.G. Sebald's fatal car crash in 2001. Wisely, Callil brought along fellow Aussie Dale Spender and Nicola Beauman, a Cambridge trained writer to research women writers in English.

Virago Modern Classics specialized in women writing in English; Australians Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Elizabeth von Arnim, the uncategorizable Phyllis Shand Allfrey from the Caribbean island of Dominica, and neglected Americans, notably Emily Holmes Coleman and Jane Bowles. The Virago Modern Classics debuted in 1978 with Frost in May by Antonia White (originally published in 1933) and the next year published Angela Carter’s first book of nonfiction The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. One of their earliest rediscoveries, historically speaking, was Emily Eden (1797- 1869), pigeonholed and, therefore, dismissed as a lesser Jane Austen. Eden, as the titles of her two novels demonstrate, had a distinctly sharp wit. (The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple).

For further reading:

1. A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel by Nicola Beaumann, London, Virago Press: 1983.

Nicola Beauman (b.1943) is a British writer and the founder of Persephone Press, modeled on Virago Press, also specializing in reprints of neglected books written by women. After her pioneering work for Virago, A Very Great Profession, Beauman's most recent book is the highly praised biography The Real Elizabeth Taylor(2008). Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), a British novelist whose short stories were published in the New Yorker in the U.S., was for long regarded as a mild-mannered domestic novelist but, as Beauman's researches have revealed, Taylor's literary aims were subversive, albeit skillfully disguised. Taylor, like a number of other women writers,owes her posthumous reputation largely to the efforts of Virago Press.

2. Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender, London, Virago: 1986.

Dale Spender (b.1943) like Carmen Callil a native Australian, moved to London after earning a PhD in linguistics, Although Mothers of the Novel is a work whose reach exceeds its grasp, it still gives the curious readerthe means to dig up the bodies.

Image:

Vanessa Bell - A Girl Reading, c.1932, Charleston-Firle Collection, Lewes, UK.

The story of Virago and me begins here with the second installment, among the thickets of verbiage that obscured the richness of English literature. Caught between the Scylla of sober scholarship and the Charybdis of triumphal masculinity, I found no space for my girlish ardor for Literature. Two surveys of modern English literature I was assigned in college were both written by male critics/novelists; Walter Allen’s The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) and The Novel Now (1967) by Anthony Burgess. Allen’s book was all measured virtue; Burgess’s book, by contrast, was the work of a man possessed of a rambunctious y chromosome. When Allen wrote his book Britain in the 1950s had yet to experience the general postwar prosperity that leads to rising expectations. Burgess sensed that a cultural moment was in the making but assumed, incorrectly, that it would be an all-male affair. Wrong, so wrong.

Burgess began his career as a literary critic with the aforementioned project already in mind: English Literature: A Survey for Students appeared in 1958, followed by The Novel To-day in 1963 and The Novel Now in 1967. His ambition to tell generations of students what to read and what to think about what they read was imperious. His credibility was underlined by his wildly successful – and satirical - dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962).

According to Burgess, the true novelist is a hermaphrodite, like the blind Greek prophet Tiresias, combining the best of yin and yang (Burgess always puts these terms in italics). But he gives away the game when he defines his terms: the yin prose style is “exquisite, careful, full of qualified statements,” while the yang is “less scrupulous, coarser, more aggressive.” Henry James, meet Ernest Hemingway, and may the best man win!

Only one chapter out of sixteen includes women and it is oh so cleverly titled “Yin and Yang". Burgess appends a list (as he does to all the chapters) of some 100+ titles by 14 authors but has little to say specifically about most of them; he is more favorably disposed to writers of previous generations like Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehman (she gets a nod for the 1953 novel The Echoing Grove, “an exhaustive examination of the agony undergone by women in love.”) or to a writer like Iris Murdoch who seems to float in a religio-philosophic ether above mere humanity and therefore gets three pages! Muriel Spark, a declared Catholic, gets two and half pages without Burgess even mentioning the most salient theme in her works: intimations of a relationship between the creative human artist and a divine creator. For Burgess, as for Ralph Waldo Emerson, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Burgess did manage a few kind words for Elizabeth Jane Howard, a young writer then married to the highly successful - and older writer -Kingsley Amis. Burgess puntedon Brigid Brophy, possessor of an “agile mind” capable oftaking on a multitude of subjects, from Mozart to Aubrey Beardsley, from marriage to the rights of animals. but he worried that her novel The Snow Ball (1964) was likely to be misunderstood “more as a female manifesto than a novel of quality.” Burgess may have felt the need to aim his barbs carefully in the confines of the British world of letters; Brophy was married to the respected art historian Sir Michael Levey. The lessonfor intellectually-minded girls was clear: you need a protector, only a man or the mantle of religion will be strong enough.

Women, as Burgess makes clear, go in for all sorts of tiresome relationship autopsies, so it makes sense that he dismisses Edna O’Brien, author of The Country Girls Trilogy, as “(a) minor, near-popular woman novelist”, a creator of heroines “wronged, demanding, insatiable.” Penelope Mortimer’s novel The Pumpkin Eater (1962) wascompromised by her vision of"the torture of marriage” although Burgess never mentions the protagonist’s illegal abortion, a desperate attempt to save her marriage. The urgency of her narrative leaves him unmoved or, as I now think, affectless. Mortimer herself told an audience in 1964 "I have put into this novel practically everything I know about men and women and their relationship to one another."
Even more offensively, women writers, for reasons that elicit no interest from Burgess, insist on portraying women’s sexual needs and their search for reliable forms of birth control.He laments the popularity of Mary McCarthy’s best-selling novel The Group (1963),finding it “a pity it found so large an audience” The received wisdom among men, following the introduction of the birth control pill and continuing unshaken until the reality of the AIDS crisis put an end to the euphoria, was that a sexual “revolution” had rendered sexuality unproblematic for all time. When the Swedish Academy awarded Doris Lessing the Nobel Prize in 2007 it cited the historic importance of her novel The Golden Notebook: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship.” Burgess saw only “a powerful expression of resentment of the male."
Burgess, a canny self-promoter, even provided his own back cover blurb: “..(to hurl oneself arbitrarily at the library fiction shelves is to waste a lot of time and to insult the novel)” and “…it seeks to instruct, not inflame.” No0 comment.

The terms may have been updated or cleaned up in recent decades but triumphal masculinity is still with us and scholarship still serves as its handmaiden. As for the term virago, there are two common definitions a.) an angry woman who complains and criticizes. and b.) a woman who displays exemplary and heroic qualities. I'll have both, please.

Image:
Grace Crowley - Portrait of Lucy Beynis, 1929, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Exactly one hundred years after his death, a new window is opening onto the work of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi(1864-1916).

Terence Davies, the preeminent living British director has been looking at Hammershoi's interiors for inspiration and the results appear in his current release Sunset Song and the forthcoming A Quiet Passion. Two paintings that I can discern from looking at Davies film stills are Interior With Tall Windows (1911) and Interior Strandgade (1915)

Exhibitions devoted to his work in North America have been long in coming. The first, Painter of Solitude and Light, held at the Guggenheim Museum in 1997, was jointly organized by the Ordupgaard, Copenhagen and the Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Eleven years later in 2008 the National Gallery in London debuted Vilhelm Hammershoi: The Poetry of Silence, an exhibition which then traveled to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. Then in the fall of 2015 Scandinavia House in New York hosted Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershoi, an exhibition drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK). And now, to celebrate their acquisition of a painting by Hammershoi, the National Gallery of Ontario is presenting that exhibition, a first for Canada.
Interior With Four Etchings features Ida Hammershoi and some familiar items from their home, the blue and white Delftware soup tureen, the ladder back chair with a blue upholstered seat, the dining room console and the enumerated etchings. We know from photographs that the Hammershois had an extensive art collection, hung salon style in their apartments. One thing is new, and that is Ida has had her hair cut.

I've writtenabout Hammershoi - a lot.You can check them out.
A New Bridge For Old Christianhavn

Hammershoi Moves the Furniture

Enfilade
Strandage Marienbad: Hammershoi & Alain Resnais

Hammershoi: Where Light Comes From
A Summer Landscape

Images:
Vilhlem Hammershoi - Interior With Tall Windows, 1913, Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen.
Vilhelm Hammershoi - Interior With Four Etchings, 1905, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Vilhelm Hammershoi - Strandgade Interior, 1915, Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen.

“Alone in her room at night she stood and pressed her face against the window. It was the end of March and turned cold again. And all the thumbs of ice began to whirl in shaking circles, keeping with the wind. I shall have snow on my glassy fingers, and a shutter of snow on my grave tonight.”

“There was no light in the room. Only a dull red ligth in the hall. Someone was walking back and forth back and forth passing her door a captive. The voice on the other side of ter wall was shouting for someone. It never stopped all night. It became entangled in the blankets and whistled the ice prongs on the wind. The rest of the voices were not so distinct.”

- excerpts from The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman, 1930.

Although she published only one novel, The Shutter of Snow is remarkable in both subject and technique, its author Emily Holmes Coleman unjustly forgotten. The title originates from Coleman’s intuitive poetic conceit of "heat with destruction and cold with freedom” and draws on Coleman's experience after the birth of her son John in 1924.

The novel's protagonist is Marthe Gail, a young mother unable to care for her baby, who is confined in a mental hospital when she begins to hear voices. Visits from Marthe's widowed father are occasions of emotional turmoil; his aggressive suffocates her. Frantic as she is to escape their shared past, she retreats into silence. And yet, she needs to speak her mind to the important people in her life, her husband Christopher and her psychiatrist Dr. Brainerd. Her struggle to regain a sense of self and her desperate attempts to make herself heard make Marthe a direct descendant of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic TheYellow Wallpaper (1892).

For an obscure author, Emily Holmes Coleman had an illustrious career. Born in Oakland, California in 1899, she lost her mother as a young girl, first to mental illness and then to death. Lonely years at boarding school were followed by four demanding years at Wellesley College. Soon after graduation Emily Holmes married Lloyd Ring Coleman, a psychologist, in 1921. Three years later she gave birth to a baby boy. The joyous event became a descent into nightmare; Coleman was stricken with puerperal fever and then, overwhelmed by what we now understand as post partum depression, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to the Rochester State Hospital in western New York. Insanity was a catchall term used as a blanket to cover many kinds of suffering, inadequately understood. In 1824, Monroe County had founded the hospital as a poorhouse to care for "the raving maniac, the young child, the infirm old man, and the seducer’s victim.”

Coleman found in writing, whether in novels and poems or in her voluminous diaries, a refuge where she was able to order her experiences and take control of her life. For both Colemans, the move to France in 1925 came as a fresh start; Emily became the society editor for the Paris Tribune and Lloyd worked in advertising. Coleman began to publish her stories and poems in transition, a literary magazine where her work rubbed shoulders with that of Hart Crane and Kay Boyle. Founded in 1927 by the husband and wife team of Eugene and Maria Jolas. transition was a literary magazine devoted to experimental work in all the arts.Her novel The Shutter Of Snow got a negative reception when it was published in 1930. Coleman's modernist experiments, her use of shifting viewpoints and her subject matter made critics uneasy. They expressed annoyance at the lack of quotation marks to set off conversations, forgetting that these same techniques had been used by Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert.

Following the publication of The Shutter of Snow, Coleman lived for a year in St. Tropez where she worked with Emma Goldman, editing the anarchist's autobiography Living My Life (1931). Back in Paris, Coleman read the manuscript version of Nightwoodby fellow. Djuna Barnes. Few people remember that it was Coleman who engineered the publication of Nightwood in 1936. Her skills at suggestion and persuasion worked so well that its editor T.S. Eliot and the general public believed its publication had been Eliot's idea. His enthusiasm for the book led him to call Nightwood "the best book written by a woman in the 20th century." The Shutter Of Snow should have been so lucky.

Coleman returned to the United States in 1939 and in 1944 she converted to Catholicism, with the encouragement of her friends Jacques and Raissa Maritain. She became friends with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement and spent time in several of their communities. At the time of her death in June, 1974, Coleman was being cared for at Rose Hill, a Catholic Worker farm on the Hudson River in Tivoli, New York.

The Shutter of Snow is a short novel; for some it may be difficult to read for its style or its content but it is deeply worth the effort. Unnumbered thousands of people will recognize their tribulations in her story. Rooted in her own experience, Coleman speaks to us all.

Image:
Tamara de Lempicka --Jeune fille a la fenetre, 1933.

“The great enemy to advancement for working-class girls was to become pregnant. This was the terror that kept so many chaste, not moral qualms or a lack of adolescent lust. Pregnancy was the great trap and once in the only way out was abortion. It's important to remember how this problem obsessed women in the pre-contraception era. For that for them was effectively what it was. Men might buy 'something' if they could overcome their embarrassment, carelessness, or distaste. They might or more likely might not be persuaded to use it.“ - Maureen Duffy, 1982, excerpt from the preface to the Virago Press edition of That's How It Was.

I. That is how it was, in every particular. According to the myth-makers, abortion is an evil that was foisted on women thanks to the invention of reliable birth control and the "sexual revolution." Women know better as British author Maureen Duffy's novel That's How It Was demonstrates; itwas one of the first Virago Press books I ever read. And because it was written two decades before I found it, it sent me back to my mother's library to search for more like it, and I am found some, but I get ahead of myself.

“Lucky for me I was born at all really, I mean she could have decided not to bother. Like she told me, she was tempted, head in the gas oven, in front of a bus, oh a thousand ways.” That's how That How It Was begins.

That's How It Was could have been titled Two Against the World; it tells the story of the abiding love between Louey and her daughter Paddy,as they struggle to stay afloat in East London. Just as Paddy's adolescent world is expanding, the worst happens at home: her mother is stricken by tuberculosis and hospitalized where Louey is sterilized after the doctors discover that she is pregnant and perform an abortion. “They took my womb away. Sterilization they call it. You see I was going to have a baby and they said it was either it or me,” Louey tells her.Paddy only learns of this when she sees a large incision on her mother's abdomen. Undefeated by trouble, Paddy troublesis able to move beyond herseeminglyinescapable working class lifealthough her mother dies.

“I was just a girl and life offered only things I despised: houses, children, security, housework. I had to pass. I had to. I had to be different.”

Maureen Duffy (b1933) has written novels, plays, a biography of Aphra Behn and The Erotic World of Faery, but That’s How It Was,her first novel, is her best known work. In a plot twist worthy of a Hollywood movie, Duffy wrote the novel, more or less on a whim, at the suggestion of a publisher. Duffy grew up in a working class neighborhood in East London, the setting for That's How It Was. Her father who was Irish deserted the family when Maureen was two months old; her mother died when Maureen was fourteen. Early on she immersed herself in books, her favorites were tales of faraway places, “stories of Ancient Greece and Rome, folk tales of Ireland and Wales, tales of knightly chivalry and poetry."

II. ”…the madness that was born of being a certain kind of wife, with a certain kind of husband; of the suffocating feeling that life was going on elsewhere.” - Penelope Mortimer, excerpt from Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, 1958

“I thought I was supposed to lie on a couch and you wouldn't say a word. It's like the inquisition or something. Are you trying to make me feel that I'm wrong? Because I do that for myself.”

His diagnosis: she has a fear of sex for pleasure.

Her response: “You really should have been an Inquisitor....Do I burn now or later?” - a dialogue between a woman and her psychiatrist, excerpted from The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer, 1962

In retrospect, 1962 was an impressive year for novels by women. Although it doesn't fit into my narrative here, Ship Of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter, a novel that took its author more than two decades to complete, became the best selling novel of that year. Partly from of years of anticipation and partly because Porter became famous for her novella-length short stories, it received mixed reviews. We may find it easy to connect the dots between That's How It Was and The Pumpkin Eater but the old truism held then, and still holds: "The slaves always know more about the masters than the masters do about the slaves."

Penelope Mortimer said that she put everything she knew about relationships between men and women into The Pumpkin Eater and, as we now know, she put a lot of her personal history into it as well. Mrs. Armitage, like her creator, has beenmarried several times and her numberless, nameless brood is a “bodyguard of children.” Some of the children have been sent away to boarding schools or to live with other relatives, the better to make space for the father’s career.

Abortion was illegal in Britain at the time but an exception was allowed for a woman being treated for depression by a psychiatrist. Mrs. Armitage has an abortion and the gynecologist ties her tubes at the same time; in effect there were three people, only two of them conscious, in the operating room – the woman, her husband, and her doctor. At the urging of her own doctor, Mortimer had agreed to an abortion and sterilization after becoming pregnant for the eighth time; her seventh pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage.

Critics applauded the book; Edna O’Brien was an early and vocal admirer. Today, Mortimer's books are mostly out of print, effectively making her unreadable. Her male contemporaries like Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene are still read, and their tone is still narrow minded and overbearing. Mortimer’s drollery and herdeadpan voice cut through blather like a knife..

Penelope Mortimer (1918-1999) was a native of Wales; her education was limited to a school for “daughters of the clergy" followed by a course at a secretarial college. This modest preparation hardly mattered; she moved to London where she dazzled a series of men into sex, setting up house, and babies, meanwhile she began writing novels, her short stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, and she became film critic for The Observer. Although she had not been born to upper class life, through her marriages, first to a journalist and then to a barrister, she ascended the social ladder. As both novels make clear, the constraints placed on female freedom cross all class lines.

III. Mavis Gallant wrote only two novels but A Fairly Good Time (1970) only reprinted in April by New York Review Books.

Although twenty-five year old Shirley Perrigny is a young Canadian widow recently remarried to a Frenchman, she is still essentially a girl, trying to find her voice, worried that the words that come out of her mouth are offensive “toads.” During a romantic tryst she takes time to lecture a lover on the ""centuries of female rubbish"" involved in the masculine dream of female rapture. Although Gallant underlines it delicately, abortio is the deus ex machina that sets the plot on its way. Shirley spends a night away from home, watching over her friend Renata who has just had an abortion. Because the abortion is illegal (abortion only became legal in France in 1975), Shirley cannot tell her husband where she has been as it would implicate him in a criminal action. Better to have him suspect an assignation with another man than to know the truth. The event precipitates Philippe's gradual Cheshire Cat-like disappearance from their marriage.

As A Fairly Good Time makes clear, things do change, although slowly. The dissolution of Shirley's marriage is not a tragedy, her friend Renata does not follow through on the impulse to kill herself, and no psychiatristsget to play God with women's lives.

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal, Quebec but settled in France in 1950 where she began to write fiction. In Canada she worked as a a journalist. Beginning in 1951 more than one hundred of her stories appeared in The New Yorker.

There is more to the Virago story here, herehttp://thebluelantern.blogspot.com/2016/05/virago-made-me-part-two.html
Images.
1. Milton Avery - Seated Girl with Dog, 1944, Neuberger Museum, Purchase.
(This painting was used as the cover image for the 1982 Virago reprint of That's How It Was)
2. Milton Avery - Girl Reading, Philips Collection, Washington, DC.

La Rayure Bretonne

Hoarfrost On The Asparagus!

The Russians Are Coming: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The Russians Are Coming: Andrei Makine

Adriana Czernin: A New Artist Takes On Old Vienna

Mabel Poblet: Marea Alta

Alison Saar: I Can't Look Away

Tashima Etsuko: Learning From Nature

An Olfactory Novelist: Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

The Narrow Roads Of Werner Bischof

Leon Bonvin: A Frenchman's Art In Baltimore

Chartreuse

The Panache Of Anne Vallayer-Coster

Gustave Caillebotte's Curving Space

Remembering Marisol Escobar: 1930-2016

Virago Made Me: Part One

Virago Made Me: Part Two

Sightings Of Hammershoi

Virago Made Me: Finding Emily Holmes Coleman

Virago Made Me: The Hard Parts