THE BLUE LANTERN

“Something went through the thickets of belief in those days like a single wind bending many trees – a spirit of heresy ad reform, the blessed sense of an arising and going forth, a mini-renaissance and – reformation, such as only the best of times experience; whoever entered the world then felt, at the first corner, the breath of this spirit on his cheek.” – from The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins, (in English - 1952, in the original German - 1930) p. 54

The year of the photograph (at left) was 1904 and the place was Innsbruck, almost as far away from the capital city of Vienna as you could get and still be in Austria. The man in the white suit was Heinrich Kuehn, a member of the Vienna Secession and the proud owner of a new "Hoffmann-style" house, as he described it in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, complete with fabrics designed by Koloman Moser. Kuehn the photographer was one of the people who felt the pull of the spirit that Musil described.

Heinrich Kuehn (1886-1944) was bitten by the camera bug while studying medicine at the University of Leipzig. The images framed in the microscope proved compelling. After Kuehn's father died in 1893 and the son inherited a fortune, he took part in four photography exhibitions during the next year.

In 1895, Kuehn was accepted as a member of the Wiener Camera Club, an it was there that he met Hugo Henneberg and Friedrich Viktor Spietzer, and also Ernst Mach, who used photography as a recording technique in his experiments with the speed of sound, which is another story. The club was notable for its inclusion of female members, unusual at that time.

Three of the Secession members, Kuehn, Henneberg, and Hans Watzek designated themselves as the Trifolium (Kleeblatt) or Cloverleaf group. Their photographs were published in the Secession's journal Ver Sacrum during 1898, the same year that Kuehn and Henneberg traveled together to Italy. In 1901, Henneberg and Spitzer moved to Hohe Warte, an artists' colony designed to demonstrate the Secessionist aesthetic of gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art, in houses designed by Josef Hoffmann.
Kuehn's European fame was at its zenith in 1900. Carl Moll, who displayed Kuehn's astonishing early landscape Dammerung (1898) in his home atelier, included the photographer's work in the 1905 International Exhibition of Selected Pictorial Photography, held in Vienna. The American Alfred Stieglitz, who had spent several months photographing with him in 1904, recognized in Kuehn's work the best argument for photography as art.

In the early decades, amateurs were the ones who who developed the new medium's artistic possibilities; commercial photographers were limited to a narrower purview in their work. The technical aspects were daunting and, as a hobby, photography was a costly one, so most of the early artistic photographers were members of the upper classes. Yet Kuehn never gave up a keen interest in improving camera technology and the printing process that remained from his scientific training.

In that spirit, he was among the first in Austria to take up the autochome, introduced by the Lumiere Brothers of France in 1907. The technical demands that fixing colors in grains of potato starch made on users must have reminded Kuehn in his darkroom of his days in medical school.

As Kuehn tried various printing techniques, he altered his aims, too. His early photos make use of depth and perspective, later replaced by a focus on flat areas of pigment. This change may also have been influenced by the style of the graphic designers of the Viennea Secession group. In this latter, his photographs share an aesthetic recognizable from Gustav Klimt's The Tall Poplar Tree I (1900). Kuehn also admired the paintings of Arnold Bocklin, as did many of his contemporaries. There is something circular in the way that a new aesthetic comes into use, something that defies the linear impulses of historians.

The pains that Kuehn took to perfect his compositions were as detailed as any painter's. In him the amateur was rooted in the soil of love, not dilettantism. His photographs of flowers are a good exmaple. The intense purple of violets is set off by a clear glass bowl against a white background but the creamy whiteness of the narcissus blossoms peeking over the top of an earthenware jar are highlighted by their own shadows. The more of Kuehn's photographs you look at, the more you realize that on him, nothing was lost and, by him, nothing was left to chance. His compositions satisfy the imagination while never boring the eye. When you consider the cumbersomeness of the processes he had to work with, Kuehn's ability to capture flow is marvelous. I wish I knew what thoughts were going through his mind when made his self-portrait in his "Hoffman style" home.

Images:
1. Heinrich Kuehn - Self-Portrait, 1907, Austrian National Library, Vienna.
2. Heinrich Kuehn - Dammerung (Twilight), 1898, bichromate plate with watercolor, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
3. Heinrich Kuehn - Still Life With Violets, c.1908, Austrian National Library, Vienna.
4. Gustav Klimt - Die grosse pappel I (The Tall Poplar Tree I), 1900, private collection , New York.
5. Heinrich Kuehn - Narcissus In Vase, 1909, Austrian National Gallery, Vienna.
6. Heinrich Kuehn - His children Walter, Edeltrude, Hans and Lotte under the photographer's umbrella, at home at Innsbruck, 1912, Austrian National Library, Vienna.

This photograph was taken during the winter of 1930 and the place is Megeve in the French Alps. The woman who poses on the snowy slope is festively attired for a day of skiing but the festivity does not reach her eyes. Her name is Madeleine Messager Lartigue; her nickname is Bibi, given to her by her husband. Can we ever see her for herself, once we know who her husband became ?

In Art And Illusion, E.H. Gombrich wrote that artists paint what they know, rather than what they see. It was the contention of the Frenchman Jacques-Henri Lartigue, “I have always been a painter.” Yet I look at his paintings and his photographs and want to tell him, “ No, you are a photographer.” In spite of training at the renowned Academie Julian in Paris, in spite of numerous exhibitions, Lartigue was never able to convince tout Paris that he was meant to be a painter. In the event, Lartigue (1894-1986) is remembered as one of the 20^th century's preeminent photographers.

When Madeleine Messager married Jacques-Henri Lartigue on December 17, 1919, it seemed a perfect match. They were both young, beautiful, and full of a joie de vivre that we associat, in retrospect, with the Jazz Age or, as the French call it, Les Annees Folles (The Crazy Years). In him, restless energy had yet to find the right outlet. In her, it was both more joyful and more serene. He described her later as being “wonderful, joyful, intelligent, and curious ... " Perhaps it was the difference in their backgrounds that gave her the stronger anchor. Her father was Andre Messager, a respected orchestral composer and the director of the Paris Opera. . Lartigue was just the son of a wealthy family of industrialists. Their son Dani was born August 23, 1921, and a daughter Veronique was born in1924, but lived only a few months.

An elegant couple, Jacques and Bibi participated in the bustle of the 1920s. We know that Lartigue was fascinated by creative couples from his admiration for the film director Sacha Guitry and his wife, actress Yvonne Printemps. From north to south, their destinations were intended to spark Lartigue's paintings ( Etretat, Deauville, the Basque Coast, Biarritz, Mont Blanc, the French Riviera) and it seems unkind to point out that the spark emanates from the adventurous Bibi.

From the time he was a boy, Lartigue took pictures constantly, documenting a life of fun, speed, and glamor, and also creating a series of characters out of his female companions, most memorably his first wife In an inversion of the Gombrich maxim: he looked at Madeleine Messager and saw Bibi Lartigue. And yet, after reading Kevin D. Moore's recent (2004) biography Jacques-Henri Lartigue: The Invention Of An Artist the reader knows no more about Madeleine/Bibi than when they started, not even the dates when she was born or when she died.

Aesthetically, Lartgue was caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If his painting had been more competent, a comparison to that of his friend Kees van Dongen would not have been invidious. If his sun-washed autochrome photographs had been paintings, they would have looked too good to be true, lacking the authority of reality behind them.

Yet he seemed to live a charmed life, skating along its surface like a water beetle. If his circumstances during the 1930s were shabby, he sought to downplay life in the twenties. When they arrived a Nice in May of 1920, they styaed first with relatives before taking up residence at the Eden Roc. He didn't even know the owner of Chateau de La Garoupe when he went to paint there, he knew one of the gardeners. When they were at Cannes with their friend Arlette Boucard, Lartigue emphasized that the spectacular house belonged to Arlette's father, no man of leisure but the hard-working Dr. Boucard, When the Lartigue family fortune was severely diminished by the stock market crash of 1929, Lartigue refused to compromise his ideas or give up his liberty to earn a living.

Around 1927 when Jacques gave up color for black and white photography, Bibi stopped smiling for the camera. Bibi appeared doubtful about their life together. Did she doubt his love or his talent as a painter? We know that she left him shortly after the vacation at Megeve and that they were divorced in 1931. We also know that he met the beautiful Romanian model Renee Perle in March of that year. For the man who loved women, after two years with Renee, there would be others - Marcelle, called Coco, and his third wife Florette - none of them were the person that Bibi was. As for Madeleine Messager Lartigue, she made a life for herself away from the camera.

For further reading: The Autochromes of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, published in 1981 by the Viking Press, edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

All photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Ministere de la Culture, Paris.

Bibi Lartigue at the Eden Roc, Hotel Cap d'Antibes, Nice, 1920.

Bibi Lartigue in the Park at Chateau de la Garoupe, Cap d'Antibes, 1920.

Bibi Lartigue sitting on the beach at Etretat, 1920.

Bibi Lartigue and friends on the beach at Nice, mid-1920s.

Bibi Lartigue - Spring, 1926.

Bibi Lartigue and an unidentified friend, Nice, c.1927.

Bibi Lartigue on the Ile de Saint-Honorat, Cannes, 1927.

“His talent for surface decoration and every sort of invention in the field of arts and crafts struck us as fabulous.” - Josef Hoffmann

In photographs Koloman Moser can always be counted on to have a twinkle in his eye. As his friend Hermann Bahr described Moser's disposition:“He is Viennese through and through. His inventions seem to dance, to hover....Occasionally one perceives a gentle melancholy like the merest shadow o a cloud, but it's gone in an instant.”

The other half of the Doppelhaus that Josef Hoffmann built for the painter Carl Moll became the home of designer Koloman Moser. Moser moved there with his widowed mother and sister in 1902.

Photos of the house on Steinfeldgasse show few furnishings but Moser himself designed the built-in cabinets and the rest of the furniture for their new home. In 1901 Moser also designed a studio/residence for the painter Josef Engelhart (1864-1941), his future brother-in-law. With his house neighbor Moll, Moser also traveled that year to Dresden and , again in 1906 to the men traveled around Europe. In 1902 he designed a boudoir for his new next door neighbor, Marie Hennneberg.

Moser's design conception was perfected in his new Hohe Warte neighborhood. Here he imposed a layout of diagonal symmetry inscribed on a square. Built-in cabinetry, a necessity for a family with few pieces of furniture was thereby turned into a new and elegant design principle. Moser also distributed his electric light fixtures around the ceiling in preference to the simple and obvious central overheard light. The integrated treatment of the walls and furnishings created a clean geometric surface that could accommodate some curvilinear elements without becoming overly busy.

In 1900 Kolo Moser had designed a 'reform' dress for Alma Schindler, stepdaughter of Carl Moll. After Alma went to the Moser home in Vienna's working class Third District, she wrote in her diary for February 1, 1900, a passage that also reveals the leap that Moser was about to make in his life as well as in his art:

“Passing through a dingy entrance hall, we climbed the equally dingy stairs to the apartment. On the doorbell we read: Theresia Moser, cartetaker's widow.

Shyly I rang the bell. A woman in a threadbare cardigan opened it – she so resembled Moser that I instantly recognized her as his mother. I asked after him – he wasn't at home. A dowdy young girl appeared – his sister. I could see behind her into the front room, which also served as the kitchen. It was fairly sordid and, above all, dreadfully shabby.”

Koloman Moser's father Josef worked at the Theresianische Akademie and the family lived on the grounds of the preparatory school. He had two sisters Leopoldine and Charlotte, Josef Moser died unexpectedly in 1888, and the Mosers had to move. Moser worked his way through various art courses by giving drawing lessons. It was while he was a student at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschuel that Moser met Gustav Klimt in 1895.

It was his permanent appointment as a professor at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule (College of Arts & Crafts) in 1900 that finally gave the 32 year old Moser a measure of financial security. At that time the average life expectancy in Austria was 44 years for men and 47 years for women so Moser was running short of time.if he wanted to marry and have his own family. (As it turned out Moser, a heavy smoker was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx in 1916 and died in 1918 at barely fifty years old, leaving a widow and two sons, Karl (age 12) and Dieter (age 9) ).

Moser's painting of Cyclamen from 1907 shows a corner of the dressing room he designed for his bew bride, Ditha, in 1905. Notice the rows of black squares outlining the built-in furniture against the white wall and the liberty Moser the painter took in shading it green for this occasion. Bahr was also the one who nicknamed Moser the Tausenkunstler or 'Thousand-artist'. You can see what he meant.

Images:
1. Wiener Werkstatte Archive - Josef Hoffmann's duplex house for Koloman Moser and Carl Moll, Hohe Warte, 1903, Museum for Applied Culture, Vienna.
2. Wiener Werkstatte Archive - Koloman Moser house - Hohe Warte, c. 1901, Museum of Applied Culture.
3. Koloman Moser - Cyclamen, 1907, Vienna State Museum.

"I have always sought perfection, and believe it or not, perfection of form. In any work of mine you will find a plastic form, viewed objectively and purely for itself, subject to the laws of light and shade, displayed with the limited resources of the 'modelé'... my art is limited to the capabilities of chiaroscuro." - Leon Spiiliaert, translation by J.L.

The beach at Ostende, Belgium is known for a phenomenon called 'blue apple, green sea" , a trick of the light that makes the sky seems to fall on the water, changing the colors of sea and sand before the eyes.

An artist of wit and strange magic, Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) has often been regarded as a creator of worrisome and even disturbing imagery. Acknowledged for his masterly use of gouache, pencil, India ink, and charcoal, Spilliaert the man suffered from ulcers, hence the insomnia that made him a night walks on the shore. On the evidence of the images, you have to put on blinders to miss his acute interest in the others who inhabit them. Spilliaert's Fillette au grand chapeau (1909, Offa Gallery, Knokke-le-Zoute - above) dates from seven years before his marriage to Rachel Vergison and nine years before the birth of his daughter Madeleine, but the humor and even joy of the wind and the other elements is there already and in full.

I like to think of the night as the artist's companion as he walked along the shore. Spilliaert's friend, the symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren, wrote that the silence of the night was so large that even the ocean listened. In Digue la nuit (Dike at Night) the verticals beams cast by the streetlights cut through the moist air hanging over the embankment something like what daylight does to the water, or so Spilliaert makes us see it. The Kursaal at Night, from the same year, 1908, can be viewed as either remarkably abstract ( in retrospect) or as a surreal precursor to Giorgio de Chirico's deserted plazas.
His figures are enigmatic but more varied in their particulars than received opinion allows. Some do appear as emblems of waiting, anxiety or loneliness (The Gust, Vertigo) while others like Les Postes and L'elevation are fanciful without being in any way sinister. Balance La Baigneuese, a woman relaxing on the seawall with her little dog after a swim, with the the nightmare vision of a woman perched high over an undefined abyss, clinging to the stairs in fear of Vertigo.
In 1904, the year of The Gust', Spilliaert's work was exhibited alongside that of Pablo Picasso at Galerie Clovis Sagot in Paris. Yes, there are noticeable affinities with Fernand Khnopff, Edvard Munch, and Odilon Redon but Spilliaert's work could stand all comparisons. His nocturnal scenes are highlighted by splinters of light, delicately gilded in pinks and blues; his pastels of fishermen, women walking dogs, or peasants camped on the piers, are expertly modulated in color chalks.

Leon Spilliaert was a real Oostendenaar, as a native of Ducth-speaking West Flanders. He grew up in the coastal beach resort of Ostend where his family ran a perfume shop that catered to the tourists. Yes, he read books by Edgar Allan Poe and Nietzsche, as did legions of his contemporaries. It provokes a smile to think of the diffident young Spilliaert followed James Ensor around Ostende, too shy to introduced himself to the older, established artist, even though Leon's uncle Emile was a member along with Ensor of the Cercle des Beaux Arts d'Ostende. Ensor, now there was a man of seriously perturbing sensibilities.

Leon Spilliaert - The Gust of Wind, 1904, Musee d'Ixelles.

Leon Spilliaert - Digue la nuit (Dike at Night)), 1908, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Leon Spilliaert - The Kursaal at Night, 1908.

Leon Spilliaert - Vertigo, 1909, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Ostend.

Leon Spilliaert - Les Postes) The Posts, 1910, private collection, Belgium.

Leon Spilliaert - L'Elevation, 1910, private collection ?

Leon Spillliaert - La Baigneuse (The Swimmer) , 1910, Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussles.

The last of the (monthly) illustrations by Franz Melchers for L'An was posted here.

L'An (The Year) by Thomas Braun is an undeservedly obscure book that was first published in 1897 by Editions Claesens, Brussels & Lyon and, to the best of my knowledge, never yet reprinted. It was the first of many books of poetry written by Thomas Braun (1876-1971), a Belgian known equally during his lifetime as a prominent jurist.

Braun was married to Marguerite van Mons (1876-1919). What we know best about Marguerite is her portrait, painted by Theo van Rysselbegrhe when Marguerite was ten years old. Two years before van Rysselberghe had painted her sister older sister Camille, a less accomplished work but the family was pleased enough to commission a second portrait by the young artist, still in his twenties. Van Rysselberghe joined the avant-garde group Les XX in 1883, at around the same time as Fernand Khnopff. Khnopff executed a series of portraits of children of his Brussels acquaintances during the 1880s and Van Rysselberghe's Portrait of Marguerite van Mons has been often compared to them. Although the colors in Khnopff's portrait of his sister Marguerite (1887) and of Marguerite Landuyt (1897) are similarly blues and golds, the one that van Rysselberghe would have seen is Khnopff's Portrait of Jeanne Kefer (1885), a three year old standing in front of a door, painted in pinks and greens. Sometimes in art similarities are less traceable to influence than to a general aesthetic vibe in the air.

Getting back to L'An, it was published in an unusual and costly large square format, with the most up-to-date color process available at the time. Clearly the publisher saw something special in this collaboration and a new edition would be welcome.

Theo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926) - Portrait of Marguerite von Mons, 1886, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

"If we cannot dedicate ourselves to his purposes, then clearly his work will look like nonsense."

That sentiment, from an introduction to an English translation of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, comes from filmmaker Terence Malick. The dream sequences in Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) show a vision of the creation of the cosmos that looks eerily like the paintings of Augustus Vincent Tack (1870-1949).

In recent decades, Tack's work has been neglected, associated as it is with the unfashionable concept of synethesia. For Tack, colors made movement and emotion visible Synesthesia was popularized through the colored vowels of Arthur Rimabud's poem LesVoyelles and the paintings of Kandinsky. For post-war painters, the very idea was anathema.But that may change as his painting belongs to a third way in Western art, one that harmonizes European and Asian techniques of visual representation.

As a young man, Tack admired the japoniste works of John La Farge (1835-1910) above those of all other American artists, and extended the older artist’s use of the abstract and decorative properties of Japanese art in his own work. Duncan Phillips saw it that way, too, writing that Tack’s work carried “forward the La Farge tradition in American painting." His early works (Winter Landscape) were a mixture of late 19th century techniques but he began to paint the mystical landscapes his name is known by towards the end of World War I. They belong to a mystical strain in American art that began with Albert Pinkham Ryder but they also point toward abstract expressionism. Clyfford Still, for one, admired Tack's paintings for their subtle harmonizing of colors and planes

During his lifetime, Tack was fortunate to have a sympathetic patron in the critic Duncan Phillips, who bought dozens of Tack's paintings. When Phillips opened his eponymous museum, the Phillips Collection, in 1921, he commissioned murals from Tack for the museum, including a group of twelve lunettes from 1928-31 for the Music Room. One of Tack's last works, circa 1943, was the panoramic Time And Timelessness, a fireproof theater curtain for the Phillips. But having most of your work located in one place can limit your visibility, as the posthumous fate of Dwight William Tryon at the Freer Gallery (also in Washington, D.C.) illustrates.

Phillips often displayed Tack's paintings with photographs by the contributors to Camera Work. And, in fact, Alfred Stieglitz had done something similar is his photographic series Equivalents.In 1928, Duncan Phillips realized his dream of having a gallery decorated with murals by Tack. The space, a music room which had irregular proportions, was challenging. Tack used all his favorite resources, including Catholic mysticism and Platonic philosophy. During several trips to Italy in the early 1920s, Tack studied the Renaissance paintings of Giotto. He also responded strongly to encounters with old Roman mosaics. Phillips was exultant at the result, calling it a "Hall of Cosmic Conceptions" , a place where the theoretical unity of life and art became visible.

Tack puts the constant movement of human eyes to work for his artistic purposes. Some critics who dislike this, have called it Tack's "distortions." Even in his more conventional early works, Tack's landscapes are more decorative than representational His frequent use of the lunette, a half-moon arch was a conceit borrowed from architecture, as a framing device, disguises the absence of traditional perspective. Indeed, Tack's use of multiple perspective points gives the viewer a glimpse of something beyond restlessness, possibly even chaos, yet grounded in his emotional response to natural phenomena.
As the quote below makes clear, Tack expressed the inspiration for his painting in a language more romantic, more mystical than we are used to. He made impressive use of large, architectural designed spaces in service to his ardent conviction of the spirit's transcendence. And yet, as he himself deepened his commitment to that expression, he painted in a way that speaks our visual language, a blending, perhaps premature, of the figurative and the abstract. Tack, at his best, can take your breath away.

“Who has not watched the rhythmical serrations of sand, or snow -drifts blown by the wind, or wind blown clouds, or the reflections of leaves in the water, or patches of sweet fern growing on a hillside, or rain-stained walls or the the foliage of thick growing crops?” - ( Augustus Vincent Tack, c. 1944. )

Note: At top:Augustus Vincent Tack - Aspiration, 1931, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Winter Landscape, c. 1898-1902, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Windswept, c. 1900-02, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Storm, c.1922, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Canyon - c. 1923, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Far Reaches (lunette), 1930, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Dawn, c. 1934-36, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Augustus Vincent Tack - Time and Timelessness (The Spirit Of Creation), c.1943, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

My parents bought this print of White Birches In Vermont when we lived in Massachusetts and, years later, it moved with me when I left home. The artist, Luigi Lucioni, never came up in any of my art classes. I liked the picture simply for its familiarity. Then I spent several winter weekends in Manchester, Vermont. This bit of information would be of no interest except that, after my first visit to Manchester, I began to have an odd feeling about that print hanging in the dining room at home.
It was not my imagination. I had stared at that scene from the opposite direction out the kitchen windows of a rented house, the golf course blanketed in snow. Lucioni, impeccable artist that he was, knew to choose the most comely angle for a scene that, it turns out, he revisited several times: in paint, ink, and drypoint. Mt. Equinox, named for the date when Vermont's Surveyor General reached its peak in 1823, shadows old U.S. Route 7, on its northward way from Norwalk, Connecticut to the Canadian border. The white spire announces the Congregational Church on the Village Green.

Out of sight, behind the tress lining Route 7 is the old Eaton House. Across the street the stately remains of the Equinox Hotel, peeling white clapboards and rotting Corinthian columns, flcikered in the lights cast by the cars heading north from New York in search of good snow-pack. Begun as a private home, the Equinox Hotel opened in to the public in 1853. Its clientele included the wealthy from cities along the east coast seeking refuge from the summer hear. The Equinox hosted four Presidents, not including Abraham Lincoln whose wife Mary Todd Lincoln had booked a suite for the summer of 1865.

Times change, and change again. The Equinox closed in 1972, a victim of air-conditioning and the changing tastes of vacationers. By the time I first saw it, the Equinox was thought to be too dangerous to enter and beyond of hope of repair. Then an improbably poetic rescuer appeared by the name of Perrier- Jouet & Cie. The pure spring waters that ran off the mountain had been bottled and sold by the Equinox Water Company from the 1880s to the 1920s. There was even a ginger champagne!

Once I recognized where the white birches were, I had to come back in summertime. Then I discovered the marble sidewalks (four miles of them), the pride of the village, all the stone quarried locally and scrubbed carefully each spring to remove any traces left by acid rain.

Clara Sipprell - The Ekwanok Golf Course In Manchester - undated.

This photograph was taken in the afternoon, facing east from behind the Eaton house.

Clara Sipprell - Congregational Church in Manchester, Vermont - ? before 1960.
Next door to the north (left) of the church is the Eaton house. Note the white marble sidewalks.

Clara Sipprell - untitled, c.1940-50
This building is located north of the Eaton house. It was an abandoned ice cream shop when I first saw it.

Clara Sipprell - The Equinox Hotel (a small part of the facade that stretches for an entire block), c. October, 1937.
This photo was taken in the afternoon on a day much like today.

Then, during the winter of 1993, as news from the Balkans taught us painful daily lessons in geography, I happened on Clara Sipprell: Pictorial Photographer by Mary Kennedy McCabe (Amon Carter Museum: 1990). Sipprell had come to the Balkans by chance, when her dear friend Irina Khrabroff married a Yugoslavian man in the 1920s. It was at the behest of another friend, novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher, that Sipprell made her summer home in Manchester, Vermont, from 1937. Somehow I was following Clara Sipprell without even knowing who she was.

Clara Sipprell (1885-1975) was born in Tilsonburg, Ontario, the last child and only girl in a family of six. Her father, a schoolteacher, died before Clara was born. One by one, the family migrated eastward to Buffalo, New York, where Clara's older brother Frank opened a photography studio. Clara began to hang around the studio so her brother gave her a Kodak and, in 1910, she exhibited her work at the Buffalo Camera Club, which did not yet admit women. Sipprell Photography was auspiciously located at 795 Elmwood Avenue, just down the street from the Albright-Knox Gallery where Alfred Stieglitz chose to hold the first International Exposition of Pictorial Photography, in November, 1910. Five years later, sure of her vocation, Clara Sipprell left for New York.

Decades later, an accomplished and admired photographer, Sipprell wrote that she was, “some kind of interpreter of humanity's eternal struggle to know itself and its surroundings through an unswerving faithfulness to the eternal truths.” It would be easy to explain Sipprell's neglect at the hands of art historians by her unfashionable views or her adherence to pictorialism decades after it went out of favor. But I wonder. Sipprell never married yet she was hardly insipid; she loved to drive fast cars and collected the traffic tickets to prove it, smoked, traveled widely and photographed famous personages from the sculptor Rodin to the Queen of Sweden. One recent (male) critic described her appearance in unflattering terms, as though that explained it and, for him, it did.

An accident of history made Sipprell's work relevant once again. In her photographs we have access to an alternate version, where minarets and crosses coexist, where women, men, and children lead ordinary lives, and the land is old, not the enmities. And for all the times I travailed back and forth on Elmwood Avenue and all the times I have walked along the sugar-white sidewalks of Manchester, I would have loved to have Clara Sipprell as a companion of my imagination. Better late than never but still too late, always too late.

Clara Sipprell - The Harbor At Split, Dalmatia, c. 1926.

Clara Sipprell - A Street In Kotor, Dalmatia, 1926.

Clara Siprrell - A Street In Old Mostar, c. 1926.

Clara Sipprell - A Mosque In Mostar, c. 1926

Clara Sipprell - Woman Sitting on A Cobblestone Street, Montenegro, 1926.

Clara Siprrell - Marketplace in Zagreb, c. 1926.

Clara Sipprell - A Street Shrine In Kotor Montenegri, 1926.

Clara Sipprelll - A Moslem Woman In Sarajevo Bosnia, c.1926.

Clara Sipprell - A Little Turkish Girl, c.1926.

Clara Sipprell - A Shoemaker in Sarajevo, c.1926

For further reading:
Clara Sipprell: Pictorialist Photographer by Mary Kennedy McCabe, Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum: 1990.

Images:
Luigi Lucioni - White Birches In (Manchester) Vermont.
Clara Sipprell - photographs from the collection of the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

"The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish."

Linda Butler - Backlit Radishes. Iwate-ken.

To read the short, rich poems of Kobayashi Issa (1763-1826?) is to meet a radiant spirit, but Issa's life was full of wrenching dislocations and repeated fresh beginnings that resulted in sadness, layered like an onion. His measured cadences in the face of insupportable sorrows rebuke our modern prolixity.

"Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art."

Issa was born in a remote mountain village on May 5, the day of the Iris Festival (Tango No Sekku), the flower said to fend off darkness and dispel evil. But his mother, Kuni, died when tYataro was three and his grandmother Kunjaro became the boy's caretaker. After the death of his beloved wife, the father, Yagobei never recovered from the loss and the family home becamea place of silence and gloom, as the poet would later remember it.

"In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers."

As in a fairy tale, the good, studious little boy found no favor with his father's second wife, Satsu, especially after the birth of a new son. As an adult, Issa recalled numerous daily beatings at the hands of his stepmother. Yagobei secretly helped his adolescent son escape to the city of Edo ( now Tokyo).

At twenty-four, Issa began his study of haiku from a local master. Four years later, a dream that his father was ill brought Issa on the long and arduous journey home on foot. Finding his father unharmed, Issa wandered the countryside, practicing his poetic skills on everything he encountered. Ten years later, he returned again to nurse his dying father.

"With my father
I would watch dawn
over green fields."

At the advanced age of fifty-one, after enduring decades of poverty, Issa finally married. He and his bride Kiku lost two infants in quick succession and a one year old daughter to smallpox. Of their third lost child, Issa wrote: "Being, as I am, her father, I can scarcely bear to watch her withering away - a little more each day - like some pure, untainted blossom that is ravished by the sudden onslaught of mud and rain." After that another child was born but did not survive infancy, Issa's wife Kiku in died in 1823.

'At my daughter's grave, thirty days
after her death:

Windy fall--
these are the scarlet flowers
she liked to pick."

Alone again at sixty, Issa was stricken by a mysterious recurring paralysis. He married a second time but this union lasted only a few weeks. Tragedy struck Issa's third marriage when the newlyweds' home burned down and the couple was forced to take shelter in a farm shed. While walking out one day in the snow, the poet was stricken by another sudden attack and froze to death. The following spring his widow gave birth to a child who survived and thrived. The poet's great affection for children, and for all of creation, survives in his poems. In Linda Butler's photographs of life in rural Japan there are lineaments of Issa's spirit and, to my delight, she quotes Issa's poems. If it is true that we die twice - once when we cease to breathe and then again on the last occasion when someone speaks our name - then the voice of Issa lives.

"A huge frog and I,
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.'

"The world of dew is, yes,

a world of dew,
but even so"

"All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes."

"Look, don't kill that fly!
It is making a prayer to you
By rubbing its hands and feet."

"Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually."

"Under my house
an inchworm
measuring the joists"

"Summer night--
even the stars
are whispering to each other."

" The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children."

Note: Translations of the poems of Kobayashi Issa quoted here were translated from Japanese by Robert Haas.

Linda Butler - Spring Rain. Aichi-ken.

Linda Butler - Temple of Carved Stones. Shiga-ken.

Linda Butler - God Of Wealth. Shiga-ken.

Linda Butler - Pond in Winter. Yamagata-ken.

For further reading:
1. Of This World by Richard Lewis & Helen Buttfield, New York, Dial Press: 1968.
2. Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary by Linda Butler, Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press: 1992.

"El si pronuncian y la mano alargan/
Al primero que llega."

"They swear to be faithful yet marry the first man who proposes."

Sometimes the way in to a picture begins with an emotional frisson. Aesthetic appreciation or historical underpinnings may add layers to the experience but the visceral response never lets go. Stagedoom by Bob Thompson (1937-1966), one of several works the artist made based on Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos of 1795-97, is that kind of work.

In Goya's original (below), all the participants are morally compromised, from the nubile woman offering herself to the highest bidder, to the church fathers who guide her, to the watching crowd. Thompson made significant alterations to the image. The young woman's nakedness symbolizes her vulnerability and isolation; the mask dehumanizes her by hiding her facial expression. The priests offer no comfort; their teachings imprison her. And who could doubt the evil intentions of the hovering bird-like creatures, a frequent feature in Thompson's paintings. The smiling death's head gives the game away.

That Thompson was attracted to Goya's jaundiced view of humanity is obvious. and known A female viewer brings to Stagedoom an understanding of the long, painful road to womanhood with its potential for physical and emotional violation that has its roots in Thompson's fraught vision of relations between men and women, but is something different as much as Thompson's vision is different from Goya's.

In an alternative history of post-war art the paintings of Bob Thompson would have a prominent place. He was based in New York in the 1960s, although his interest in Goya drew him to Spain in 1962. His watercolors suggest the intimate scale of scenes painted on the steps leading up to the church altar but he also worked at the monumental scale favored by the Abstract Expressionists and in the vivid saturated colors of the emerging Pop Art movement. Unlike Andy Warhol, whose appropriation of advertising images constituted a poke in the eye to all but a knowing few when they were made, Bob Thompson worked in utter, bold seriousness. The artists he revered, Piero della Francesca, Titian, and Nicolas Poussin were masters of classical European art who gave Thompson, a young black man from Louisville, Kentucky, his symbolic lexicon. Based on their compositions, Thompson made technicolor nightmares where humans and animals interact to reveal truths that often go unspoken, unacknowledged.

“I began to think, my god, I look at Poussin and think he's got it all there. Why are all these people running around trying to be original when they should just go ahead and be themselves and that's the originality of it all...You can't draw a new form... [the] human figure almost encompasses every form there is...it hit me that why don't I work with these things that are already there...because that is what I respond to most of all.” - Bob Thompson

“I think...painting should be like the theater, a presentation of something...To relate, like painters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance... painters were employed to educate the people...they could walk into a cathedral, look at the wall and see what was happening...I am not specifically trying to do that...I have much more freedom, but in a certain way, I am trying to show what' happening, what's going on,,,in my own private way.” - Bob Thompson

Images:
1. Bob Thompson - Stagedoom, 1962, opaque watercolor and charcoal on woven paper, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica.
2. Francisco Goya - El si pronuncian y la mano alargan, plate number 2 from Los Caprichos, c. 1795-97, intaglio print, Brooklyn Museum.

“Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may harken to the gusts of homeless wind that go sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what was once a world!” - Nathaniel Hawthorne, excerpted from The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Lulled by the murmur of a stream, yes I was, into thinking that this painting might be a picture of West Arlington, Vermont, because it was a place I was familiar with. Naive, yes, but this is an exemplary New England landscape, of clapboard houses and a road that winds with the twists and turns of a stream in rocky terrain. It was, however, painted in Cornwall Hollow, a small town in northwestern Connecticut near the Housantonic River. This was the place where the artist Ben Foster came to live after his return from Paris. Paris had welcomed the young American upon his arrival in 1886 but Foster, who had grown up in North Anson, Maine, was "inconsolably lonely" for the woods of his native New England.

Today, Ben Foster (1852-1926) is obscure, even for a Tonalist painter. The critical consensus has it that Foster's lifelong bachelorhood was a bad career move, since it meant that he left no offspring to guard his reputation. Foster was also pigeon-holed as a late blooming artist when the forty-eight year old won a gold model at the Universal Exposition in Paris 1900 for Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau, an honor he shared - and deservedly I think - with Winslow Homer for his much better-known painting Summer Night, an eerily lit painting of two women dancing by the ocean shore at night. The French saw something distinctively American, a brooding melancholy they might have encountered the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in these pictures, purchasing both for the French nation after the exposition ended. They are now part of the collection of the Musee d'Orsay.

Foster's compositions can appear off-balance at first, in a way that we may overlook now but that struck his contemporaries as awkward. One critic even described Foster's subject as being "the aloofness of nature." But that strikes a wrong note to me. The Connecticut River Valley and its environs, that Foster painted over and over again, have been a harmonious landscape bearing the imprint of human hands for a long time. The first European settlers of the 1620s, who found coastal Massachusetts an unwelcoming place, moved west a decade later and found in the Valley the fertile New World of their dreams.

“ (A) perfect neatness and brilliancy is everywhere diffused, without a neglected spot to tarnish the luster or excite a wish in the mind for a higher finish”.
- Standing at the top of Mount Holyoke, Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) saw it that way, too.

After being elected to the Presidency of Yale University in 1795, Timothy Dwight embarked on a course of regular summer excursions, a campaign that lasted ten years and took him to the farthest extents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts which was no small undertaking. ( I can vouch for that myself, having stood by the bronze historical plaque that marks the Massachusetts Pre-emption Line by the side of U.S. Route 20 at the outskirts of Geneva in western New York. Geneva, you may remember, was the limbo to which F. Scott Fitzgerald consigned Dr. Dick Diver at the end of Tender Is The Night) For the record, Timothy Dwight described New York as a crude and lawless place when he passed through around 1802. His Travels, published in four volumes, were the prodigious result of his observations. For Dwight, a Puritan theologian, a beautiful landscape expressed a moral truth; the uncultivated wilderness that was Vermont left him cold. In a curious way, this connects Dwight to the early Italian Renaissance master, Fra Angelico. An art history professor suggested to us that, rather than looking for signs of mathematical perspective in his work, we might consider his spaces as metaphysical places, where moral actions take place.

“It is hard for us to admit that most human qualities, like hydroponic vegetables, manage to flourish even when they have no roots in the soil. But there can be no doubt that an entirely new relationship to the environment has evolved…”

- In our own time, the landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson has ruminated on the meaning of place, particularly what he called the 'vernacular landscape' and our confused responses in the absence of Puritan pieties. Jackson (1909-1996) an American who was born in Dinard, France, taught in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and founded and edited for years the journal Landscape in 1951. Jackson is credited with creating a field called Cultural Geography, but he knew better. His tribute to Timothy Dwight is typically generous of a man who, no Puritan he, could write: "The older I get and the longer I look at landscapes, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence, and that that beauty derives from the human presence."

For further reading:
1. Timothy Dwight - Travels in New England And New-York, S. Converse, New Haven, CT.: 1822-21.
2. John Brinckerhoff Jackson - Timothy Dwight: A Puritan Looks At Scenery in

– Discovering The Vernacular Landscape, New Haven, Yale University Press: 1984.

Image:
Ben Foster - Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau, September - 1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Who better to document the culture clash that was the 1960s than a French New Wave filmmaker living in Southern California? Contemporary viewers may see more of John Waters than traces of La Nouvelle Vague in Lions Love (...And Lies,) in itsnewly remastered digital format, but Agnes Varda's film is still a very funny movie and a delightful addition to her available oeuvre. Of Los Angeles, Varda recalled recently : “ I found it very dreamlike. It had the quality of daydreams, which I like. And a quality of strangeness." From now until June 22, 2014, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents the first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to her work: Agnes Varda In Californaland.

When Agnes Varda moved to Los Angeles in 1968, she came with her husband Jacques Demy whose 1967 film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort had paired the American Gene Kelly with the Snow White and Rose Red of French cinema – sisters Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac – in a color-filled musical that attracted the attention of Hollywood movie makers.

While Demy worked a project offered to him, Varda was free to make her own projects: a documentary about the Black Panthers, Oncle Yanco a short film about a distant relative living in Sausolito, and a celebration of the new counterculture, the feature film Lions Love (... and Lies). Varda describes her “Hollywood” films this way: "The films are about sex and politics, like they were at the time.” For the LACMA installation Varda designed a room within a gallery, using stacks of celluloid film cans from Lions Love.

Structured like nesting dolls, Lions Love takes a trio of real people: Jerome Ragni and James Rado, whose Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical had created a sensation when it opened Off-Broadway, and Viva, an actress who appeared in Andy Warhol films, and sets them loose in a film partly scripted and partly improvised. In filming. Varda plays with cinematic illusion, as she often has, allowing the actors to look directly at her while on camera or by panning past a mirror that captures herself at work. A heavenly choir, heard in voice-over, hymns the creature comforts of their rented house in the Hollywood hills: a giant bed, a curvaceous, heated swimming pool, a loopy mix of plants, plastic and real. Varda frames Viva in a halo of light that crowns her pre-Raphaelite beauty, a more generous gesture than Warhol was capable of making. Like a masculine version of Snow White and Rose Red, Rado is the quiet one and Ragni is the clown. It took a woman to imagine this kind of poly-amorous group.

The plot has this trio of flower children, waiting for the break that will make stars of them, rubbing their bushy heads together as they murmur their mantra: “Star. Star. Star.” These three couldn't care less about the 'new morality', living as they are in what they imagine to be a new garden of Eden. Like children at a sleep-over, they lounge endlessly in bed, conversing about the meaning of life. They kiss and nuzzle and make crank phone calls to the bank ( "I'd like to order $200 to go"). They while away their afternoons in the pool, smoking substances that dilate their pupils as surely as their casual nudity does to the pupils of viewers. Into this group, comes Shirley Parker, an independent filmmaker also trying to make it in Hollywood. A New Yorker in over-sized sunglasses, she is both attracted and annoyed by the indolent trio.

When Viva decides, like 'the folks who live on the hill' that they should have children, the trio borrows (abduct) some from the neighborhood. Not surprisingly, at a time when abortion was illegal and safe and effective birth control was hard to find, Viva contemplates pregnancy without enthusiasm. "Do you think I could go through nine months of it and only come out with one?" Domestic disaster ensues. The kids refuse to take naps, urinate in the pool and eat nothing but french fries. "I think," says Viva, "we have to find another way to the spiritual life."

Into this technicolor dream comes a nightmare in the form of black-and-white television coverage of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles, just three days after the shooting of Andy Warhol in New York. Like everyone else at that moment, the three are glued to the screen but drape the television set in a black cloth.

The characters, as much as the fact of their nudity, caused consternation when Lion Love (...And Lies) was relearned in 1969. At the New York Film Festival that year where it was screened, Lions Love was coupled in the public mind with Duet For Cannibals, the first film by the American intellectual Susan Sontag. As a sign of the times, the two women endured an excruciating joint interview on Public Television with Newsweek's award-winning but clueless film critic Jack Kroll. Varda immediately bristled at Kroll's repeated characterization of her stars as "grotesques" and "marginal characters" who would be of no interest to ordinary moviegoers. When she pointed out that Viva and Andy Warhol were real people, Kroll questioned why anyone should be interested in them. Both Varda and Sontag were at pains to remind Kroll that, in the films he preferred, the characters act out conventions of behavior manufactured for the movies, not the behavior of real people.

The discussion only went downhill from there. When Varda asserted that movie stars and politicians like the Kennedys were now on equal terms as "public effigies" because of television culture, an idea that Sontag explored in Duet For Cannibals, Kroll responded testily: "Reality is being shoved in our faces." At one point, Kroll even pointed out to Varda and Sontag that they were both women. It was a long half hour.

For the lucky visitors to Agnes Varda In Californialand, the retrospective may shed new light on the filmmaker's career. The ultimate test for Lions Love (...And Lies), or any movie, is how it strikes the viewer on its own merits. If Lions Love shows a moment when everyone was young and optimistic, that is a fair description although Varda expresses some reservation with her additional parentheses (...And Lies) .

Sex and politics was in the process of becoming a subject unto itself when Lions Love was made and film critics were not the only ones who were uncomfortable. Events moved quickly enough so that in 1985 when the California director Donna Deitch.released her film Desert Hearts, a lesbian love story set in post-World War II Las Vegas, critics wrote admiringly of what are some of the most erotically-charged love scenes ever filmed - and by a woman.

Notes:
1.Varda and the cast of Lions Lovewere featured in the first issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1969.
2. Jim Morrison of The Doors, Peter Bogdanovich, and the European character actor Eddie Constantine make cameo appearances in Lions Love.
3. Lions Love (…And Lies) a film directed by Agnès Varda, France 1968, 35mm, color, 110 min. Printed by Cine Tamaris
4. Lions Love (...And Lies) was screened at Yale University on November 8, 2013, the second showing of the new digital transfer.

Agnes Varda - portion of wall installation for Agnes Varda in Californialand, 2013, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Harry Chapman, Jr. - Agnes Varda filming Mur Murs in Los Angeles, 1980, LACMA.

How unusual to find these particular artists grouped together but the three paintings form an improbable but satisfying triptych. From left to right John Singer Sargent's Javanese Dancer, Jules Pascin's Woman In A Pink Dress and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's Madonna and Child. The space now occupied by two of them has long been taken up by a very large landscape - Fields In The Month of June (Les champs au mois de juin, 1874,) by Charles-Francois Daubigny). Someone with an eye for color connected the thread of reddish pink and pinkish red and the blue-green from the Bouguereau to the pictures brought out of storage.

As I approached them the other day I was delighted to see a bench positioned before them because a glance around the gallery that I have visited many times at the Johnson Museum at Cornell University persuaded me that this was what I had come to see.
The three choices available to women a century and more ago, I thought: madonna (Bouguereai), whore (Pascin) and performer (Sargent). The last one freer than the other two but morally equivocal, caught in a sexual demilitarized zone, so to speak.
Three variations on the use of oil painting, too. Bouguereau made his canvas disappear, creating an illusion that the air between the viewer and the painting is pure, free of dust motes. Pascin's use of grey hues with his colors may indicate the air in a room where cigarettes were smoked, an indication that the woman is a prostitute, as his sitters often were. He also used the weave of the canvas part of his painting, a different relationship between the artist and the viewer than the one Academic artists like Bouguereau aspired to. A fitting choice for a subject (probably Lucy Krog) who has few illusions of her own.

Bougeureau, the painter most concerned to achieve a recognizable realism, created the picture least connected to reality. Mary and Jesus sit, the infant already bestowing a blessing on a little disciple. The devotional imagery of the Italian Renaissance has morphed into a 19th century French drawing room.

Javanese Dancer is the finest of Sargent's attempts at this particular subject, posed to be sure but conveying a sense of dance as movement. Her sash as she swings it from her chartreuse shadowed right arm (what a color) and the diagonals of her skirt pull on the viewer's eye. At the same time the formality of the gesture of her left arm, not to mention the ceremonial dagger she wears suggest self-possession, perhaps a denial of the Western assumption of the sexual availability of female performers in Sargent's time. Sargent worked his colors into the canvas with a zest that makes me think this was a bus-man's holiday from all those delicate watercolors he did.

As I sat there, I could see out of the corner of my eye, Otto Dix's Woman Reclining On A Leopard Skin (1927), both of them ready to confront the culture represented by my chosen paintings. But that experience belongs to another day.

And now some notes on the painters. According to those who knew John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) his musical talent was equal to artistic gifts so his numerous studies and finished works of dancers come as no surprise. Although he lived and worked through the days of Impressionism, Expressionism, fauvism, and Cubism, he remained committed to his own realistic style. There has never been a critical consensus regarding Sargent's work, to put it mildly. It is as though his masterly renderings of beautiful women and powerful men might compel us to admit that we are in thrall to them as much as Sargent was.

Jules Pascin (1885-1930), the least well-known of the these three painters, was born in Bulgaria to Italian-Serbian and Spanish-Jewish parents. He attended art school in Munich but moved to the United States to avoid the draft during World War I. Paris was the place that he loved and he returned there in 1920. An excess of debauchery led to his suicide by hanging. He applied his excellent draftsmanship to his many studies of women; his models were often prostitutes.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a French painter of a much more conventional type, although he was represented on this site recently by Nymphs & Satyr. To the Impressionists, who despised him, Bouguereau represented everything that was wrong with official art. Think of someone today daring to sneer at the results of an art auction at Christies and you will get the idea of how large Bouguereau's reputation was at one time. In recent decades, thanks to renewed interest in figurative painting, Bouguereau has been rediscovered by a new generation. With over 800 paintings to his credit, many of them in major museums, he could hardly avoid a comeback.

Note: I have tried to reproduce these three paintings at their relative sizes to give readers as good a sense of the experience in the gallery as possible.

Images; from the collection of Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
1. John Singer Sargent - Javanese Dancer II, 1889.
2. Jules Pascin - Woman In A Pink Dress, (probably Lucy Krog), undated but probably c. 1915-1920.
3. William-Adolphe Bourguereau - Madonna And Child With Saint John The Baptist, 1882.

'At my daughter's grave, thirty days
after her death:

Windy fall--
these are the scarlet flowers
she liked to pick."

"A huge frog and I,
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.'

"The world of dew is, yes,

a world of dew,
but even so"

"All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes."

"Look, don't kill that fly!
It is making a prayer to you
By rubbing its hands and feet."

"Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually."

"Under my house
an inchworm
measuring the joists"

"Summer night--
even the stars
are whispering to each other."

" The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children."

Note: Translations of the poems of Kobayashi Issa quoted here were translated from Japanese by Robert Haas.

Linda Butler - Spring Rain. Aichi-ken.

Linda Butler - Temple of Carved Stones. Shiga-ken.

Linda Butler - God Of Wealth. Shiga-ken.

Over the course of the last millennium, the shape of the cosmos has changed. To the people of medieval Europe the harmoniously ordered universe was like a multi-storied building, organized on a vertical axis. To those devout (more or less) Christians the vertical cosmos existed as much more than a description of physical space, rather it was a transcendent vision of space-time. Humans understood their place in the cosmos as being rooted in the earth, in the seasonal rhythms of nature from the vernal equinox to the harvest and around again. In the height of the sun as it moved across the sky and the changing positions of the stars at night, they saw the changing seasons as a reminder to look upward toward the giver of all things and intimations of a divine architecture From this cyclical understanding of time came the circle as a symbol of perfection and many suggestive metaphors.

The humanist thinkers of the Renaissance gradually supplanted this vision of the cosmos through their secular understanding of nature. By a combination of accident and deliberation, a profound reorientation occurred” the cosmos became horizontal. The mythical realm remained sacred, transcendent, and eternal but a social realm, profane and determined by new ideas in mathematics and science, spread by way of increasing literacy and commerce. Farmers and other peasants continued to live in the vertical cosmos until the early 20^thcentury while the horizontal cosmos took hold in growing cities. Thanks to the use of mathematical perspective, prosperous Italian villa owners decorated the walls of their homes with expansive vistas or human activity. Nature lost its numinous aura to become an object of aesthetic contemplation.

Of course, medieval artists had been aware that objects looked smaller the farther away they were from the observer but they felt no need to develop a method to describe it, as their cosmos was secure. One of my art history professors pointed out that, in the paintings of Fra Angelico, space should be understood not by mathematics but through metaphysics.

Fast forward to the second half of the 20th century, the cosmos may not be circular but the arguments about it still trace a circle that the ancient Greeks would have recognized: the uncertainty of human observation as a means to discover eternal truths versus the seeming reliability of geometrical theorems. An energetic and restless presence during the years he taught astronomy at Cornell University, Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was interested in cosmology even when the very word was out of fashion.

Sagan has at last received a fitting memorial in Cosmos, an installation by Leo Villareal. Comprising 12,000 LED (light emitting diode) lights that generate constantly shifting celestial patterns, Cosmos was unveiled in 2012, the culmination of two years of design and planning. Villareal created the light patterns on his computer, adding to them as he observed the movement of the clouds and of geese flying over Ithaca in early autumn from various points on the Cornell campus. The Mallin Sculpture Court adjoining the fourth floor of the Johnson Museum was chosen as the location for its high visibility not only on campus but also from various points around the city of Ithaca. At night the ceiling dematerializes, matter giving way to a world of light, an expression of the wonder with which Sagan surveyed the cosmos, a wonder he shared with the natural philosophers of the middle ages.

'Into the emptiness that weighs
More than the universe
Another universe begins
Smaller than the last.

Begins to smaller
Than the last.
Dimensions
Do not yet exist.

My friend, the darkness
Into which the seed
Of all eleven dimensions
Is planted is small.

Travel with me back
Before it grows to more.
The church bell bongs,
Which means it must be noon.

Some are playing hopscotch
Or skipping rope during recess,
And some are swinging on swings,
And seesaws are seesawing.

That she is shy,
Which means it must be May,
Turns into virgin snow
And walking mittened home with laughing friends.

And the small birds singing,
And the sudden silence,
And the curtains billow,
And the spring thunder will follow—

And the rush of freshness,
And the epileptic fit that foams.
The universe does not exist
Before it does."

Into The Emptiness from The Cosmos Poems by Fredreick Seidel, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2000.

Leo Villareal (b. 1967) is an American artist who studied sculpture at Yale University.

Images:
All photos are by James Ewing (1, 2, 4) appear courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, except those (3, 5) that appear courtesy of Ithaca Journal.

Imagine a miniature world of contrasting landscapes of beaches, woods, and hills, an island where one is never more than some hundreds of feet from the sea. On the Ile-aux-Moines, the camellias, Hortensia, and mimosa crowd around old stone houses and ancient megaliths, refreshing the land as the tides do the shore. A place of beauty and the quiet necessary for contemplation. How much like paradise would this place have been to a young artist who also loved the natural world and its creatures?

Henry de Waroquier (1881-1970) .was born in Paris 18 January l881. As a child, his imagination was stirred by scientific discoveries so he went back and forth between biology and art before choosing a vocation, writing of his struggle: “What interests me isn’t art, but life.” In the evnt, he chose both.

Paris in Waroquier’s youth offered the new art at Galerie Durand-Ruel and the Japanese art at L’Art Nouveau Bing., both nearby, a heady abundance of Impressionism and “la lecon orientale.” In 1903 Enrolled at L’Ecole Estienne in 1903, Waroquier’s instructors practiced the cult of the curvilinear. Her later wrote that in his early works he tried to understand the relationship between land, water, and sky through the lines that joined them.

Between 1901 and 1910 Waroquier made extended annual visits to the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany, attracted to its ancient, stony landscape and the chance to observe marine life from close up. He stayed on L’Ile -aux –Moines (Island of the Monks) near Locmariaquar, famous for its oyster fishing, and also on Belle-Ile-en-mer, another nearby island. In Breton, Mor bihan means “small sea” and the term refers to its characteristic tidal estuaries. Indeed, many of the place names in the area describe the landscape in evocative ways: : bois d'amour, bois de soupirs, bois de regrette (the forest of love, the forest of sighs, the forest of regret.

Waroquier began to study the techniques used by Divisionist painters around 1905 and later turned his hand to Cubism, his.pole star continued to be the diluted colors borrowed from faded, old Japanese prints. He also expressed his affinity for another painter of Breton scenes, the somber realist Charles Cottet.

But Waroquier, the japoniste, eschewed the use of traditional perspective. His many studies of waves, bouquets of trees, and panoramic views leave the viewer up in the airo to speak. Perhaps Waroquier imagined himself as part of the ‘floating world’ when he painted; some of his pictures are annotated with text, as are many ukiye-oworks.

In later life, he created a series of clustered masks that were displayed on the Boulevard Saint-Michel during the protests of May 1968. . Henry de Waroquier died in 1970.

Note: My thanks to Neil Philip of Idbury Prints for his comments on an early version of this article, especially for pointing out that Henry de Waorgquier lived across the street from Galerie Durnad-Ruel as a child.

Images: from Henry de Waroquier: Images de Bretagne by Jean-Pierre Fourcade, Paris, Somogy: 2000.

Study of Fish, 1900, pastel.

Still Life on Japanese paper, 1909.

Golfe de Morbihan, 1907, pastel.

Le chemionde la longue de la cote, 1908, watercolor and charcoal.

La Greve - Ile-aux-moines, (with cows at left) 1908, Musee de beaux-arts, Rennes.

Ile-aux-moines, 1906.

Boats. Ile-aux-moines, 1906.

Aristide Maillol - Portrait Of Madame Maillol, 1895, Musee Maillol, Paris.

Today is the anniversary of the birth of the French artist Aristide Maillol (December 8, 1881), so herewith a tribute, once again, to one of my favorite artists.
As I have insisted before, the paintings of sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) deserve far more attention than they have received since his death. As one scholar of Maillol's work, Wendy Slatkin puts it: "many of the surviving paintings are beautiful and even impressive." She then goes on to do that peculiarly annoying art historian thing by saying that they "occupy an admittedly less significant position than contemporary works by Gauguin, Denis, or even Serusier." Apparently, there is an unspoken quota for " beautiful and even impressive" paintings and it has been filled by painters who are not also great sculptors because, I guess, that would be unfair. The universe has spoken and it is not interested in Aristide Maillol, painter. But ever since I acquired a poster for the exhibition Le Post-Impressionisme from the Palis de Tokyo I have wanted more.

Maillol's paintings are structured like musical compositions, that is certain aspects are subordinated to a dominant line or rhythm. Maillol was part of a neo-classical movement that had its immediate origins in Gauguin and Cezanne, artists searching for a modern reinvention of the Renaissance relationship between humans and the landscape. Maillol's portraits usually include some type of symbolic greenery.

During the Renaissance, portraits were made for specific occasions rather than intended as the character studies they have since become. When Maillol looked for a model wedding portrait to celebrate his marriage to Clothilde, his bride and fellow artisan, he turned as he often did to the Italians for inspiration. On this occasion he found it in Leonardo da Vinci's Ginvera de' Benci.

Giorgio Vasari in Lives Of The Artists, which first appeared in 1550, discussed da Vinci's nuptial portrait of Ginevra and the symbolism of the juniper in the vegetal background and, in typical Vasari fashion, muddied the waters enough to keep generations of art historians busily buzzing.

A similarity of facial features, around the eyes and mouth, may have brought Ginevra de' Benci to mind, but Maillol's ingenious re-working of the symbolic foliage in the background is a charming symbol in itself for the tapestry-making that brought the young couple together. . In Maillol's portrait the golden flowers of the tapestry cast a happy glow on Clothilde's skin.

Nude (Clothilde Maillol), 1898, Musee Maillol, Paris.

La Baigneuse (also known as The Wave) , tapestry, 1898.

"(T)he epoch of the tapestries was the happiest of my life." - A. M.

The years in Paris had afforded Maillol many happy afternoons spent in contemplation of the medieval tapestries at the Musee de Cluny. Upon his enforced return to Banyuls, Maillol conceived the idea of a tapestry workshop, that would employee local artisans and produce his designs. La Baignuese (above) has been called "the most powerful decorative image ever created by a French tapestry maker." The painting that preceded La Baigneuse is lovely also. While Maillol's Nude shows the artist's affinity with the japoniste aspect of the Nabu aesthetic, his love for Clothilde simply will not let him flatten her presence to a mere two dimensions. You can almost feel the brush caress the canvas. It is only a small matter, but I miss the blues and violets in the transfer from canvas to wool. Maillol had decided to develop his own plant-based dyes for tapestry. He liked to recall how he and Clolthilde would walk the fields of Rousillon, armed with a pharmicist's manual, as they searched for seeds and berries for their experiments in color. Sadly, the tapestry years came to an end when Maillol suffered a debilitating eposide of temporary blindness and his doctors advised him to give up weaving.

Maillol (1861-1944) was born in the village of Banyuls-sur-Mer in Rousillon, an area nicknamed the 'French Catalonia'. To his fellow artists, the sun-baked Midi explained Maillol's sunny disposition.

Maillol's father, a fisherman, was away from home much of the time, and his mother seems to have been an invalid, so raising the little boy fell to two maiden aunts. After attending a lycee in nearby Perpignan, the nineteen year old Maillol arrived in Paris in November 1882, with little money but artistic aspirations. Poverty and deprivation were the companions of his student days, but he also found a circle of friends in the Nabis, particularly Maurice Denis and the Hungarian expatriate Jozsef Rippl-Ronai. Characteristically, Maillol remembered the pleasures of that period:

"We painted still lives, mainly of apples...I painted more apples than Cezanne, without ever having seen a Cezanne...It was the Age of the Apple. It was the epoch when we wasted our time." - A. M.

Maillol achieved a considerable success when the first solo exhibition of his paintings was held at the prestigious Galerie Ambroise Vollard in 1902.

Young Woman Picking Apples, 1894, ? Musee Maillol.

Les deux jeunes filles, c.1894, ? Musee Maillol.

Woman Sitting With A Parasol, 1895, ? Musee Maillol.

The Enchanted Garden, design for a tapestry, c. 1895, ? Musee Maillol.

La chaumiere aux cinq arbres, undated, Musee d'Art moderne et contemporaine, Strabourg.

Maison en Rousillon, c. 1895, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Paysage a Banyuls-sur-mer, c. 1895, tapis (tapestry), Musee d'Art moderne et contemporaine, Strasbourg.

For more about Aristide Maillol see From Here You Can See The Qauttrocento, posted on 23 April 2012.

Images: by Aristide Maillol from the collection of Musee Maillol, except as noted.

Below: Leonardo da Vinci - Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, c. 1474-78

and the reverse side with a wreath of luarel, palm, and juniper, inscribed with the motto Virtutem forum decorat (Beauty adorns virtue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

"I see Everything I paint in This World. And I know that This World is a World of imagination and Vision, but everybody does not see alike...The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all Ridicule and Deformity & by these I shall bot regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But in the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eyes is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination." - William Blake to a critical patron.

From Blake's commentary we can intuit that philosophical problems with the idea of beauty, like most philosophical problems, are evergreen.

Image:

Theo van Doersberg - Tree, 1916, Portland Museum of Art, Maine.

Within this photograph of a rainy day and a forgotten sandal on a dock is a vision of beauty that moves beyond forms. In Zen, this is called satori, a mystical experience wherein the contemplation of a visual image allows the viewer to intuit a reality beyond the visible.    In the background of the picture we see a ceremonial-looking gate blurred by mist. The Great Torii is revered in Buddhism as the boundary between the worlds of the human and the spirit but, look long enough, and you can intuit as much. Designed so that, during high tides, it would appear to float on the water, it was originally constructed in 1168 at Miyajima, in western japan.
To move outside one's own philosophical and religious traditions is an experience that can be both humbling and exhilarating. Which brings me to the photographer and writer Fosco Maraini (1912-2004). I have enjoyed his photographs for several years but only recently got around to reading Meeting With Japan (translated from the Italian by Eric Mossbacher, New York, Viking Press: 1960). What a shame it took me so long.

The son of an Italian father and an English mother, Fosco Maraini grew up in a cosmopolitan family in Florence. He showed an early interest in languages so that, by the time, he entered the University of Florence, he was already fluent in both Tibetan and Japanese. Also, while serving as a translator for the Italian Navy in the Middle East, Maraini was bitten by the travel bug. Chosen to join a scholarly expedition to Tibet by the eminent orientalist Giuseppe Tucci, Maraini was there when the 14th - and present - Dalai Lama, Tenzyn Gyatso,was identified in 1938. He also witnessed the Chinese usurpation of Tibet. But he decidedthen and there to follow Tucci's path.

Maraini first came to Japan on a scholarship from the University of Florence in 1938. With him was his wife Topazia Alliata da Salaparuta, ("I felt I'd married a sound. Ours was a phonetic marriage.") and their daughter Dacia, now a well known novelist.   They lived on the northern island of Hokkaido and Maraini taught Italian literature at the University of Kyoto. In September, 1943, the entire family (now including three daughters) was interned in a concentration camp at Nagoya when Maraini refused to sign a loyalty oath to Mussolini. After two grim years, the Marainis were released in August of 1945 and were allowed to return to Italy.
But Maraini would live again in Japan, returning in 1953. The changes brought by war saddened him, as when he described a railroad stationmaster who seemed "the only man in uniform who could still hold his head high."
His interest in the ways that humans relate to their deities probably led to his engagement with Buddhism. When you read Maraini's writings you encounter the intense knowledge that informs his photography. A deep engagement with people as with ideas characterizes his work. When he photographs places it is not from the viewpoint of a traveler and his human subjects are individuals, rather than representative types.    A little girl in art class holding a paintbrush or a fisher-woman, armed with a knife and naked from the waist up, are accorded their rightful dignity. I could paraphrase Maraini's version of the spiritual aesthetic he found in Japan but much better, I think, to to read it in his words.

Himeji: painting class, 1963.

"For the reader to appreciate why I was so captivated ( by Tokyo at night) it is necessary to explain that Japanese towns, seen from the ground-level and by daylight, are inescapably ugly.... (I)t applies to them all, I should say without exception. Even Kyoto which ends by turning out to be one of the most fascinating places in the world, is at first sight a bitter disappointment.

What is the explanation of this fact in a country so sensitive to all forms of beauty? To find the answer it is necessary for a moment to note some of the basic differences in the outlook of East and West. With u there is something essentially sunny and radiant about beauty, which would make it absurd to want to conceal it; it is almost necessarily accompanied by a certain need of bright light. When Hegel says “beauty is essentially a manifestation of the mind” he is expressing a profound belief of the West.

Keats''beauty is truth, truth beauty' illustrates another aspect of our Western attitude. Not only must beauty shine out in the world, but is linked to subtle, ancient, and deep subterranean veins of truth. All our aesthetic thinking, from Aristotle to Croce, turns in the last analysis on the relations between truth and beauty. Thus, our cities declare themselves in squares and avenues, colonnades and cathedrals . Their beauty is spread out in the sun, is constructed, organic. They are the children of the social order and technique, but also the children of dialectics ad geometry.

In Japan, however, beauty is something that has to be worked for, earned; it is the reward for a long and sometimes painful search, it is the final attainment of insight, a jealously guarded posses ion; there is a great deal of vulgarity about beauty which is immediately perceptible. The historical list of this aesthetic approach are not so much with truth and understanding; they take us at once into the fields of intuition – illumination (satori), taste (shumi), and the heart (kokoro). In one way it can be called a romantic attitude to beauty, from another angle it can be said that, as the beautiful is always recondite, it is an aristocratic attitude.

Hence it follows to associate a town, the place where everyone comes and goes, the public domain par excellence, with beauty would be absurd. Japanese towns are always mere tools for working and living in. impermanent entities serving mere practical ends. They contain beauty, of course, but first you must desire it and seek it out, and then, perhaps, in the end it may be granted to you to find it. Them if you find it, it will offer you subtleties unimaginable elsewhere, among secluded gardens and temples, or villas where the most perfect communion between man is achieved. In Japan beauty is like an island, a whispered word, a moment of pure intoxication to be remembered forever."

Garden of the Gosho Imperial Palace at Kyoto, November 1970.

Stairway inside the Gosho Palace, 1968.

Garden at the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, no dtae given.

Garden designed by Honami Koetsu in 1615, with bamboo fence.

Thermal baths at Beppu, June 1968.

Japanese paper umbrella viewed from underneath, c. 1985.

Banners at a children's festival near Kamakura, May 1967.

Images: by Fosco Maraini, photographer, from the collection of the Alinari Archives, Florence.

I don't think you have to speak French to get the humor of the original poem once you know the gist of the story. The meaning crosses the language barrier quite well thanks to several words with common Latin roots . My rough English translation is my holiday offering to readers. Joyeux Noel !

"Être ange - (To be an angel)

c'est l'estrange - (is strange)

dit l’ange - (said the angel)

Être âne - (To be a donkey)

C’est étrâne – (is strange)

dit l’âne – (said the donkey)

Cela ne veut rien dire – (That's not saying anything)

dit l’ange en haussant les ailes– (said the angel raising its wings)

Pourtant - (However)

si étrange veut dire quelque chose– (it s strange to say something)

étrâne est plus étrange qu’étrange – (strange and stranger than strange)

dit l’âne – (said the donkey)

Étrange est– (Strangeness is)

dit l’ange en tapant des pieds - (said the angel stamping its feet)

Étranger vous-même – (Stranger yourself)

dit l’âne – (said the donkey)

Et il s’envole.' - (And she disappeared).

- from Bim - Le petit ane by Jacques Prévert,and Albert Lamorisse, Paris, Hachette: 1952.

Jacques Prevert (1900-1977) was a French poet and screenwriter. It was the Hungarian composer Joseph Kosma who was the human bridge between Prevert's two worlds. While working with filmmaker Marcel Carne in the 1930s, the two men met. When Prevert's collected poems were published in Paroles (1945), Kosma set several of them to music, most memorably Les feuilles morts (Autumn Leaves). The song was featured in the 1946 film Les portes de la nuit (The Doors of Night), the last collaboration between Prevert and Carne.

Image: Kees van Dongen - Le petit ane sur la plage, c.1930, Musee de l'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez.

Before there was the 'Vargas Girl' there was the Kirchner Woman. Raphael Kirchner (1876 - 1917) was a popular illustrator and a purveyor of the popular genre of erotica known as cheesecake. Thanks to advances in color printing the postcard, along with the poster and the illustrated magazine, were the phone apps of their day, distributed far and wide. I suspect that Kirchner's erotic photographs were never sent through the public post as they are of an altogether more directly arousing intent. Being European, the Kirchner woman was ginger-haired and full of ginger, the sort who would not hesitate to stuff a yule tree down a chimney. The state of her virtue was as evanescent as her garments, as in 'now you see it, now you don't.'

Raphael Kirchner was born in Vienna but, like many artists of late 19th century, he moved to Paris in 1900 , then the center of the art world. He is known to have produced more than one thousand illustrations, many of which are now in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, thanks to the beneficence of the omnivorous postcard collector Leonard Lauder.

Images:
1. Raphael Kirchner - Angel Putting a Christmas Tree Down the Chimney, 1903, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
2. Raphael Kirchner - Byrrh !, 1906, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Heinrich Kuehn And The "Hoffmann-style" House

Madeleine Messager / Bibi Lartigue

Koloman Moser And The Semi-Detached House

Blue Apple, Green Sea: Leon Spilliaert

Franz Melchers - And Some Others

Augustus Vincent Tack: The Far Reaches Of Painting And Time

Clara Sipprell: From Vermont To The Balkans

Kobayashi Issa: A Radiant Gaze

Stagedoom

Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau

Agnes Varda In Lotusland

Three Women And The Artists Who Painted Them

Kobayashi Issa: A Radiant Gaze

A Multi-Storied Cosmos

Henry de Waroquier On The Isle Of The Monks

Beauty Adorns Virtue: Aristide Maillol

This Tree, This World

Another Version Of Beauty: Fosco Maraini In Japan

Jacques Prevert: Bim - The Little Donkey

Raphael Kirchner: A Hard-Boiled Holiday