Rice Is Life

April 22, 2014, 11:46 am

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Rice is Life, Syracuse artist Mary Giehl's installation is a visual cartography of world hunger. Giehl molded a series of white bowls out of water and rice, a nod to the making  of Japanese mochi or rice cakes.  She threaded them to red silk and suspended them to form the outlines of a map of the world that illustrates the places where hunger is greatest.  The rain is red, I think, because food is both sustenance and joy, the color of life's blood and the color of celebration is several Asian cultures. The white bowls float above the heads of the viewer like cloud formations from which the rains come, a floating world of rice.  and the red threads make emphatic representations of rain as depicted in 19^th century Ukiyo-e(floating world) prints from Japan.   

Why rice?  Because rice is the principal source of nutrition for half of the human race.   Over one billion people have as their occupation, the growing of rice.  Terms like labor intensive and back-breaking could have been invented to describe the effort it takes to grow rice. And yet, rice also symbolizes progress:  once it was  a luxury food for the lucky few.  When farmers discovered that rice, previously cultivated on dry land  in the valleys of Central Asia grows even faster in water, poking itself above the water line for the right amount of oxygen, it was momentous.   Paddy turns out to be a word that originates in Malaysian to describe the characteristic irrigated rice terrace. 

Thai, Malay, and Burmses myths agree on the delicate nature of rice. Places where rice is grown are organized on rice time. Rice has its own cycles, sowing, planting, growing, maturity, harvest. Rice creates itw own architecture, too, of square paddies, irrigation paths, gates, and the optimum placement of houses.  In rice we see the early imagining of environmentalism, and the deliberate creation of a kind of beauty.

 In Buddhism the world is divided into ten parts: Buddha is the first part and rice is the second,  The Japanese have an old saying, that rice is the most sacred thing on earth after the emperor.  Daikoku, a Japanese god of happiness, is always pictured with rice.   The Buddha's father was named Suddhodanta, meaning  'Pure Rice' and in Shinto, there is also a god of rice, Inari.  Sake is wine made from rice and historians think that women were first to turn rice into alcohol.

Rice Is Life is on exhibition at the Everson Museum from April 2, 2014 to July 27, 2014. 

Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891) the Japanese artist was  a modern alchemist who painted with lacquer. And he was an ardent painter of rice.  Zeshin revived  seikai-ha, which he used for wave forms, an old technique that was so difficult it had not been used for more than one hundred years.  In his search for a supple medium, Zeshin invented his own technique of lacquer painting that he called urushi-e, using specially treated paper and new recipes for the lacquer.  To this end, he mixed lacquer with bronze to simulate iron.  He also experimented until he found a mixture of lacquer and rice starch to approximate the appearance of oil paints.  Even today, Zeshin technical acumen has not been equaled.  Lacquer has often been used for works beautiful and gaudy at the same time, whereas Zeshin used it to create delicate images of bell-crickets, violets, and the white sand raked around cedars; traditional elements of Japanese landscape executed in a modern medium.

The importance of absence as a means to appreciate that which is present has been called by many names but it is a strong presence in Japanese aesthetics.  Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, said that his writing was motivated by the search for harmony between humans, nature, and emptiness.

Kenji Ekuan is his book The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox ( Cambridge, MIT Press: 2000) makes connections between the humble bento box and modern design.  Makuouchi bento or intermission lunch originated as portable snacks for theater-goers.  Its aesthetic is based on  the enjoyment of order, with its piquant unification of disparate elements.  Beauty intentionally  concocted from the materials that stimulate human greed requires its own creative etiquette. The makeshift intermission lunch is centered around round rice balls.  The shokudo, or rice paddy lunchbox it the Chinese version, divided into four equal squares for four rice paddies at the different seasons of the year. 

There is also a very modern element of waste avoidance to the Japanese aesthetic, likely rooted in the narrow confines of the archipelago of Japanese islands whose traditional name was Flower Chain Islands.  Within the confines of the bento box a seemingly infinite variety of color, texture, fragrance, and flavor are arrayed   All this beauty was created from an environment that was unfavorable in some respects, as is life for most people.

Images:
1. Anonymous - red lacquer rice container - Edo Period, 19th century, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
2. Mary Giehl - Rice Is Life, 2014, photo courtesy of Everson Museum, Syracuse.
3. Shibata Zeshin - Rice Stacks and Trees, c. 1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
4. Shibata Zeshin - Rice Drying Frames, c. 1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
5. Shibata Zeshin - Stacks of Rice and Dragonflies, c.1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

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Wyndcliffe: An Old House On The Hudson

April 26, 2014, 1:37 pm

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“The effect of terror produced by the house at Rhinecliff was no doubt due to what seemed to me its intolerable ugliness. My visual sensibility must always have been too keen for middling pleasure; my photographic memory of rooms and houses - even those seen but briefly, or at long intervals - was from my earliest years a source of inarticulate misery, for I was always vaguely frightened by ugliness. I can still remember hating everything at Rhinecliff, which, as I saw, on rediscovering it some years later, was an expensive but dour specimen of Hudson River Gothic; and from the first I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home, between her battlemented caps and the turrets of Rhinecliff.” (Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance,p. 28), New York, Charles Scribners' Sons: 1933)

Harsh criticism from the author of  the classic treatises  The Decoration of Houses (with Ogden Codman, 1897) and Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904).  If Edith Wharton could see Wyndcliffe in its current state of advanced decay, would she second the sentiments of her friend Henry James who, on first seeing the ruins of ancient Rome as a young man, wrote:  “To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity.”  The Norman style brick house, even in its heyday, looked to be the setting for  a Gothic novel and Wharton had nothing good to say about it.    Today moss grip the exterior walls, while most interior walls have collapsed, filling in what had been the basement, and bringing down stairways and fireplaces along the way.  Wyndcliffe stands, barely, but in ruins.

In The Necessity for Ruins, (Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press: 1980) John Brinckerhoff Jackson wrote the following about  “The Impact of Religions on the Landscape” by geographer Erich Isaac:

“It is probably not necessary to point to the current movement to preserve wildness or natural areas as fragments of what we might call the original design of creation. The instinct behind the drive is very similar to that which inspires our architectural restorations: to restore as much a possible of the original aspect of the landscape.   It is perfectly true that to restore part of a town to its mid-19^th Century appearance is not in fact to restore it to its original form.  But anthropologists tell us that, in the thought of most peoples, primal time -  the golden age, that is to say – begins precisely where active memory ends – thus about the time of one's great grandfather.”

“First there is that golden age, the time of harmonious beginnings.  There ensues a period when the old days are forgotten and the golden age falls into neglect.  Finally comes a time when we rediscover and seek to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty.

But there has to be that interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential.  That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for ruins: ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and of a return to origins.”

If a way to restore Wyndcliffe could be found, what would that mean?  Edith Wharton had no pleasant memories of the house or of her visits to her aunt Elizabeth, “a ramrod-backed old lady compounded of steel and granite, had been threatened in her youth with the 'consumption' which had already carried off a brother and sister. Few families in that day escaped the scourge of tuberculosis...when Elizabeth in her turn began to pine, her parents decided to try curing her at home. They therefore shut her up on October in her bedroom in the New York house in Mercer Street, lit the fire, sealed up the windows, and did not let her out again until the following June, when she emerged in perfect health, to live till seventy. My aunt's house, called Rhinecliff, afterward became a vivid picture in the gallery of my little girlhood; but among those earliest impressions only one is connected with it; that of a night when, as I was ready to affirm, there was a Wolf under by bed...” (A Backward Glance, p. 27)

And Wharton's comments about the social circle her family was enmeshed in show, she was dry-eyed about its characteristics and its passing.

“The weakness of the social structure of my parents' day was a blind dread of innovation, an instinctive shrinking from responsibility.” ( A Backward Glance, p. 22)

Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones (1810-1876) of New York City was well-connected; along with being the aunt of the future novelist, then Edith Newbold Jones, Mrs. William B. Astor was a cousin and the brothers William and Henry James were frequent guests.  Jones purchased l80 acres south of Rhinebeck in 1852 for a summer home to overlook the Hudson River.  Little information is available about her chosen architect, George Veitch but work began on the house in 1853. 

Jones never married although  she had been engaged to a man who died.  She enjoyed tennis and had courts constructed on the grounds at Wyndcliffe.  After her death, her nephew Edward B. Jones, Jr. retained a life tenancy until is death, when the property passed out of family hands.    Andrew Finck, a brewer from New York City, purchased Wyndcliffe from the Jones estate in 1886, and the house and its furnishings remained intact until 1936.   The house  stood empty until  it was sold again in 1950,  reportedly to a group of Hungarian nudists.

After more changes of ownership, the acreage surrounding Wyndcliffe was subdivided and houses built,providing Wyndcliffe with some protection from vandalism but nothing to prevent the deterioration that follows abandonment.  First, part of the east wall of the house where the front parlor had been collapsed.  In 1997, photographer, Monica Randall described Wyndcliffe as a dangerous place.  "The Victorian boathouse that once stood on the water's edge has long since fallen into the river.  All the meandering paths and garden walks have crumbled and been reclaimed by the earth.” More recently, the space around the second and third west windows on the north wall has caved in.

Which brings me back  to my question, what would restoration  mean?  The acclaimed novelist whose connection to Wyndcliffe draws our attention might well find its nature better revealed  in its current state than she did when it was a showplace.  Among other genres in which she excelled, Wharton was a writer of terrific ghost stories.    "(S)ome dark unseen menace...I could feel it behind me, upon me, and if there was any delay in the opening of the door I was seized by a choking agony of terror." Who can doubt that this was inspired, at least in part, by her feelings about Wyndcliffe?  The restored vacation home of a rich relative hardly seems an apt monument to this particular vivisectionist of the pretensions of  rich people.  The ruminations of  landscape geographer  J.B. Jackson are illuminating but not necessarily in this case.  Do we really need  Wyndcliffe with a gift shop?

Images: unless otherwise noted, are from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Jack Boucher, photographer, 1979, Library of Congress.

1. Wyndcliffe facade viewed from the southeest, on southwest Mill Road, Rhinebeck, Kodachrome.

2. undated photograph by unidentified photographer of Wyndcliffe, from Phantoms of the Hudson Valley by Monica Randall (Woodstock, Overlook Press: 1996).

3.Wyndlciffe, its front viewed from the south and its east side, kodachrome.

4. Wyndcliffe, the west side viewed from the northwest, kodachrome.
5. Wyndclifee first floor parlo at southeast corner of house. 
6. Wyndlciffe, the north side, 1979, before the second and third upstairs windows on the west side (at right in photo) caved in.

The Pyramid Of Capital Returns

May 1, 2014, 6:40 am

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"We rule you.
We fool you.
We shoot at you.
We eat for you."

"We work for all.
We feed all. "

It never gets stale.

If your eyesight is sharper than mine, help me fill in the small print, please.     

Image: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C..
A Labor Union Placard: Pyramid of Capitalist System, Issued by..........Copywright 1911 by The.........Pub. Co., Cleveland, O., U.S.A.                

The Garden Of (Emily) Eden

May 7, 2014, 8:37 am

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“She began to doubt much whether it were happiness, or anything like it, to be going to be married. ' - Helen Beuafort, a character in The Semi-Attached Couple by Emily Eden (1829, pub. 1860)

The French writer Colette once said that engagement was the sweetest time in a woman's life: she was adored by a man without having any demands placed on her.  Clearly, Helen Beaufort, the does not find it so.  A beautiful young woman of good family, Helen is engaged to Lord Teviot, the matrimonial catch of the season.  He is handsome, charming, and wealthy and madly in love with Helen.  She is even younger than her eighteen years would suggest: pampered and protected, her lack of experience has made her in no way prepared to leave home.  Indeed, she isn't even sure that what she feels for Teviot is love she is frightened by his passion for her.

“Then she found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy, engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him. He was always quarrelling with her–at least, so she thought; but the real truth was, that he was desperately in love, and she was not; that he was a man of strong feelings and exacting habits, and with considerable knowledge of the world; and that she was timid and gentle, unused to any violence of manner or language, and unequal to cope with it. He alarmed her, first by the eagerness with which he poured out his affection, and then by the bitterness of his reproaches because, as he averred, it was not returned.” - Hlene Beaufort (T S-A C)

“She tried to satisfy him; but when he had frightened away her playfulness, he had deprived her of her greatest charm, and she herself felt that her manner became daily colder and more repulsive. His prediction that she would be happier anywhere than with him seemed likely, by repetition, to insure its own fulfillment. Even their reconciliations–for what is the use of a quarrel but to bring on a reconciliation?–were unsatisfactory. She wished that he loved her less, or would say less about it; and hethought that the gentle willingness with which she met his excuses was only a fresh proof that his love or his anger were equally matters of indifference to her.” - Helen Beaufort  (T S-A C)
After the wedding, things only get worse.  Teviot is jealous of his bride's affections, her attachment to her family, and  is prone to lose his temper about it, leaving Helen bewildered and frightened of him.
Into their honeymoon home, a large house party of friends invites themselves and it is through their intrigues and interferences that the newlyweds  sort out their misunderstandings and achieve happiness together.

So who was Emily Eden and why are her books so obscure now outside her native Britain when once they were so widely admired? 
A casualty of our gendered quota system in literature, Emily Eden ( 1797-1869) has been pigeon-holed as a lesser Jane Austen, and Eden's oft-expressed admiration for her predecessor has been used against her own work. While Eden published only two novels  (The Semi-Detached House [1859] and The Semi-Attached Couple [1860, but written in 1829]), and Austen six, Eden's two hold their own very nicely.

Eden was cut from entirely different cloth.  The daughter of William Eden, first Lord Auckland, and Eleanor Elliott, Emily Eden always had more than enough money and a room of her own. Her written voice has a confidence that obviated any need for what Phyllis Rose has called "Jane Austen's tense depth charges."  Eden was the seventh girl in an aristocratic family, deeply involved in politics and public service. And, yes, Anthony Eden, was a collateral descendant in the family line. Jane Austen was fortunate in the love and support for her writing that she received from her family, but she was a spinster in the home of minor landed gentry in the southwest of England.  

And what of the other surviving female novelists?   It was a marketing coup of dramatic proportions that the three accomplished writing brothers, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, having gained the notice of literary London, revealed themselves to be three Bronte sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Ann, daughters of a poor curate from the north of England.  As for George Eliot, who was publishing regularly at the time that Eden's two novels appeared, she was scandalous in her private life but wrote novels of impressive moral uprightness.

Emily and her sister Fanny lived in India for seven years, from 1835 to 1842, when their brother served as British Governor General.  Emily's position had many of the advantages of  marriage without the oppressive responsibilities.  From that position she was able to bravely look at fairy tale marriages, both before and after the wedding.  This temperament showed itself early on, when the 17 year-old Emily reacted to the news that Annebelle Millbank had become engaged to the rakish George Gordon, Lord Byron, by writing to her eldest sister, “She does not seem to be acting with her usual good sense is Mama's opinion as by all accounts Lord Byron is not likely to make any woman very happy.''

This is the nascent creator of Mrs. Douglas, a character in The Semi-Attached Couple, who appraises Helen Beaufort's family as "all laugh as if they thought they had good teeth."  Eden does as much for Mrs. Douglas herself:

“Mrs. Douglas had been an heiress, which perhaps accounted for Mr. Douglas having married her; but though no one could suppose that he married for love, he had been to her what is called a good husband. He let her have a reasonable share of her own way, and spend a reasonable portion of her own money; he abstained from all vivid admiration of beauty within her hearing; he had a great reliance on her judgment, and a high opinion of her talents; and though he was too good-hearted to hear without pain her sarcasms on almost all her acquaintance, he seldom irritated her by contradiction, but kept his own opinion with a quiet regret that his wife was so hard to please.”

Even more remarkably for that time, Eden could turn an analytical eye to politics, having witnessed its operations from close-up.  Another character, a bored young man, suddenly takes up a campaign for political office, astonishing his family because,  as Eden tells us, ''a contested election is perhaps one of the finest remedies that can be applied to a confirmed languor, either of mind or body.'' 

“Now it is a remarkable fact in natural history that in all the suburbs of London, consisting of detached houses, called by auctioneers 'small and elegant,' or on Terraces described as first-rate dwellings, there always is an invisible macaw, whose screaming keeps the hamlet or terrace in a constant state of irritation.” – excerpted from The Semi-Detached House by Emily Eden

The Semi-Detached House, as its title suggests, has a plot based on the vicissitudes of banking and real estate as they affect another newlywed pair.  The combination of life after the happy ending  and the world of finance and real estate demand a worldly knowledge and sureness of authorial tone far removed from the isolation and vulnerability of world as viewed from Haworth parsonage. 

 “The Times of the following morning announced two more failures of large banking houses, and there were dark hints in the City article about a great capitalist, which were perfectly unintelligible to those who had not been brought up to talk Stock Exchange fluently...” - (T S-D H)

Recently married and pregnant, Lady Blanche Chester  is unable to accompany her husband to his diplomatic post in Berlin.  Instead, she is ensconced or, as it seems to her, immured in a suburban villa, semi-detached, that she shares with the middle class Hopkinsons, wife and daughter of a sea captain.   An eighteen year-old bride, Blanche is possessed of a volatile temperament (“ ... she was one of those excitable people whose health fades when their spirits are depressed, and who expand into strength when their minds are at ease.”) and an assured awareness of her position in society.

Happily, the two families discover that they share more than a roof.  But a good plot needs complications and Eden provides them, along with her sharp eye for human foibles, beginning with delicious rumors that cast Blanche Chester in the role of a cast-off wife or even more deliciously, a mistress sub rosa.
As for the novels of Emily Eden: Under the rose no more. 

Images:
Philip Hermogenes Calderon - Half An Hour With The  Best Authors, 1866, Tate Gallery, London, UK.
Cover of Virago Press Modern Classics reissue, 1982.
Note: Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833-1898) was an English painter, albeit the son of a Spanish father and a French mother.   His father, at one time a Roman Catholic priest, became a Professor of Spanish Literature at King's College, London.

Joy Is Our Cause: Harriet Whitney Frishmuth

May 14, 2014, 9:26 am

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" ...listen; there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go"
 - E.E. Cummings, 1944

What world is this where a young girl dances on the back of a fish, her head turned to the side where another fish perches on her shoulder, as though speaking into her ear?  Is this a vignette from some obscure mythology or a tribute to the freshness of the new 20^thcentury American girl, who could charm, bemuse, and even alarm her elders?   The prosaic answer is that this is a garden fountain by Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (1880-1980).  But there is too much poetry in Frishmuth's sculpture to leave it there.

Two years ago this month, I finally visited the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, a small city on the Mohawk River about forty five minutes west of Albany.  The museum, which has kept a rather low profile, is home to a varied collection of American paintings, thanks to the Arkell family who made their fortune with Beechnut Baby Foods.  I hadn't thought about Frishmuth for    a long time, but there it was.  It turned out to be Humoresque modeled, as I later learned, by Madeleine Parler, a ballerina who died at twenty-five, on tour far from home,of leukemia.  Frishmuth captured Parker forever young.  The title may be a nod to the generations of piano students who have made Antonin Dvorak's Humoresque second in popularity only to Beethoven's Fur Elise.

Frishmuth's relationship with her models was unusual and definitely light years removed from the perfervid atmosphere of Auguste Rodin's studio at Meudon.  I mention Rodin not only because his louche attitudes and behavior were notorious during his lifetime but because Frishmuth was a student of the man widely acknowledged as the greatest sculptor of the human figure in his time.  Her collegial working relationship with models included asking them to suggest poses to embody her themes. Lasting friendships often resulted, notably with Desha Delteil (1899 -1980) and Madeleine Parker (1911-1936). Delteil and Frishmuth died within months of each other in 1980.

How Frishmuth and Deltiel first met says a lot about the artist's personality and approachability.  Frishmuth was living in her studio at Sniffin Court, a picturesque alleyway near Manhattan's Thirty-ninth Street, where artists lived and worked in converted stables.  At the time, Delteil was an apprentice dancer with the Russian emigre choreographer Michel Fokine.

“It was in 1916 that [Desha] knocked at my studio door and asked if I could use her.  When we had finished our little chat she went out skipping, half dancing and singing through the courtyard to the street.  At first I used her [Desha] for my class. ...Then one week I had her pose just for me and as neither of us knew exactly what we wanted I put a record on the victrola.  It was L'Extase by Scriabin.  Desha started dancing and one pose intrigued me. I carried it out and called the finished bronze L'Extase after the music.”

Desha Delteil was much in demand as an  artist's model  for her unusual ability to hold difficult poses for long periods, a skill she perfected as a dancer.  The photo of Delteil (at top) was one of a series she made in collaboration with photographer Nikolas Murray (1892-1965) for Vanity Fair in 1921.  Murray was briefly married to Desha's sister Leja.
She was born Desha Podgorsek in Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia but at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  She and her sister Leja came to the United States in 1913. 

It was Delteil who also modeled for The Vine (1921), a work that is now synonymous with the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing in the public imagination.   At seven feet three inches tall, the female figure, her back gracefully arched,  holds her own against the reconstructed columns and stained windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany's Laurelton Hall.  Another casting of The Vine belongs to the Yale University Art Gallery, which is where Abelardo Morell photographed it in 2008.  Against the sylvan backdrop of Corot's  A Pond Seen Through the Trees (c. 1855-1865), the nymph holds out a garland, as if in offering to the woodland gods. 

Madeleine Parker was also a student of Fokine, making her professional  debut at the Metropolitan Opera House at the age of 12.  She had been born in Fichtburg, Massachusetts in 1912, but after her father’s death the family moved to New Hampshire. After New York, Parker tried her luck in Hollywood.  In 1935, under a new name, Mira Dimina, Parker joined the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.  She died on November 22, 1936 of leukemia at a hospital in Adelaide, Australia.  Most writers have concentrated on the brevity of Parker’s life and its sad end far from home but that does a disservice, I think, to her vibrant art and its expression through Firshmuth’s sculptures.

Parker knew Desha Delteil, who introduced the young ballerina to her friend the sculptor.  According to  Ruth Talcott, Frishmuth's secretary,  “Frishmuth asked young Madeleine what she would do if she were standing on a flat rock in a shallow pool and there were frogs nearby, and then girl said that she would probably try to tickle the back of one of the frogs.   Like this...”  And so  Playdays was conceived.   Sometimes cast as a a fountain, when it is , the frogs at the base spout water

Parker was also the model for for Call of the Sea (1924).  It stands a diminutive four feet high but is a breakthrough sculpture by an American woman.   I remember seeing it at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens as a little girl.  The exuberance of her arm thrown back as she rides the fish  is the essence of joy, frozen in a moment, and unforgettable.  There is something in Frishmuth's approach to the female body that ignores the prurience that the erotically judgmental male brings to the experience.

Speaking of which....a version of Call of the Sea was donated to Vassar College in 1954,  to grace  Sunset Lake on campus.  Doubtless because the figure of the young girl riding a fish is so deliciously rendered and deliciously suggestive, it was the object of several  kidnappings by male students from Yale University. When the lake was dredged in the late 1970s, Call of the Sea had disappeared, only to be returned in 2011.  Restored, it now stands, safely, in the sculpture garden of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Harriet Whitney Frishmuth was born in Philadelphia in 1880.  She grew up in Europe where she studied at private schools.  While staying at a Swiss pensione the 19 year-old Frishmuth first tried modeling with clay.  She studied for two years in Berlin before returning to  the States where she worked at the Art Students League under Gutzon Borglum, who later designed and executed the Mount Rushmore project.  Borglum encouraged the young artist to work on her own.  Her maternal uncle, Dr. T. Passmore Berens, gave Frishmuth studio space in his Park Avenue apartment but it took years of  designing  small statues for the Gorham Company before she was able to work independently.

Like many artists,  Frishmuth found it increasingly difficult to make a living during the depression years of the 1930s.   She returned to Philadelphia but in 1940, a fall from a scaffold left her permanently injured.  For a time her work went out of style, so her hostility to modern art was understandable.  But Frishmuth always scorned the dismissive term 'sculpturess.' 

If Frishmuth's works seem to dance, a rare feat in bronze, it may reflect  the joy she found in dance.

“ I was in a theater watching Michel Fokine dance.  I was making a portrait of Fokine at the time... The big curtain was down and I saw this vision of a figure pass across the screen and I cooed hardly wait to go back to the studio to start modeling it.”  A sleek, forward leaning figure perched on a globe, Speed was used as a hood ornament on luxury cars and  a large marble relief can still be seen today on the former Bell Telephone Building in Erie, Pennsylvania.

A note on dating:
Because Frishmusht's sculptures were often cast several times, I have used the dates supplied by the owners for each work shown here.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are taken from the Harriet Whitney Frishmuth papers on file at Syracuse University.  Syracuse University also owns nine bronzes by Frishmuth.

For further reading: 
American Women Sculptors by Charlotte Street Rubenstein, Boston,  G.K. Hall: 1990  Madeleine Parker and the Fokine Connection  at Dancelines (Australia)

Desha Delteil photographs at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.

Images:
1. Abelardo Morell -  Frishmuth and  Camillle Corot,  2008, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
2. Nikolas Murray - Desha Delteil, 1921, Vanity Fair (magazine), NYC.
3. Harriet Whitney Frishmuth - Joy of the Waters  (Desha Delteil, model) , 1920, Flornce Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT.
4. Harriet Whitney Frishmuth - Call of the Sea (Madeleine Parker, model), 1924, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie
5. Harriet Whitney Frishmuth - Playdays (Madeleine Parker, model), c. 1924, private collection
6. harrier Whitney Frishmuth - Humoresque (Madeleine Parker, model), 1924, Farming Community Library, Farmington, Michigan.

Dolce Far Niente: John Singer Sargent's Watercolors

May 19, 2014, 11:59 am

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“Sargent's work has its limitations, but they are largely set by its qualities.  If a transcript of life is to be made vivid, with all its hanging effects struck instantly  upon the canvas, there can be no brooding and musing and dreaming.  The surface of the paint is smooth and flowing, the color is brilliant and pure, but neither have that absolute and subtle perfection that comes when an artist holds his canvas by him, looks at it long and often, searching it, adding a touch here and a glaze there with loving care until it fuses into unity.  The composition likewise has no such absolute perfection.  The figures are usually well place and well grouped, they fit well into the frames;  but after all the composition is taken as nature gave it, with some choice from different poses and some suiting of the dimensions of the canvas to them, but no weaving of light and shade, line, and spot, into a complete decorative arrangement.  His portraits rarely have distinction in their patterning.  This amounts to saying that Sargent is not Whistler.  It has already been hinted that he is not Rembrandt, and it may be added that he is not Raphael.  It is even possible to hint that he is not Velasquez, though he and Whistler have not been claimed as reincarnations of that master.  But he has no need to claim a reflection of another man's qualities, for he has his own and they suffice.

    With a certain temperament it is quite permissible to dislike his work, as it is permissible to dislike the work of Rubens; but with all limitations and reserves made, he has talents manifest and unmistakable that give him securely his position as the first portrait painter since Reynolds and Gainsborough.”

   – History of American Painting by Samuel Isham & Royal Cortissoz, New York, Macmillan: 1905; 1926.

 A century has passed since Samuel Isham delivered that assessment of the American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and it is hard to imagine anyone capturing the Sargent 'case' better in a few hundred words than this.   But, I cannot resist saying something about Sargent's ravishing watercolors now, as John Singer Sargent: The Watercolors ends its tour at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston on May 26th. (It opened on April 5, 2013 at the Brooklyn Museum and on October 13, 2013 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  The exhibition draws on the Sargent collections of these two museums).
Sargent exhibited a large group of his  watercolors at Knoedler Gallery in Manhattan in 1909.  The Brooklyn Museum bought 83 pieces and three years later the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquired its own collection of nearly 50 watercolors. Sargent was fortunate in having the group kept together, more or less as he wished. Viewers of the ravishing exhibitionJohn Singer Sargent: Watercolors (Brooklyn, Museum, Boston Museumof Fine Arts, Houston. Museum of Fine Arts) have been able to see the paintings exactly as the artist intended.
No artist in recent decades that I can think of has captured the sweetness of doing nothing, or dolce far nients, as it is called in Italian, better than Sargent.  To let your mind wander, without experiencing boredom, to savor idleness withiout guilt at eschewing physical exertion: all this strikes us a mirage of luxury, even though it is more available to us than it was to our ancestors.

“Don't worry at all about my stay here; I feel perfectly well; I live here in my own fashion; I stroll frequently; I read, I have nothing to do, and although in no way lazy by occupation, bo one is more affected than me by the farniente of the Italians.”

 - Madame de Sevigne (1626-1696) n to her daughter Francoise,  Madame Grignan, in a letter dated 16 September 1676,from her country home Les Rochers in Brittany. 

  An influential intellectual and author of voluminous correspondence, the Marquise de Sevigne had been left a widow at age Netty-five and the mother of four fatherless children.  I can't help but think that under such circumstances even an aristocrat would need extraordinary energy to both accomplish as much as she did and to be able to relax and enjoy life.
For Sargent, relaxation was travel and vice versa.  He often traveled with a retinue, including several nieces and the daughters of friends. One of them posed for Zuleika (at top) in a costume Sargent found somewhere in the Middle East.  The  name Zuleika has  a history in biblical and Arabic literature.  In Christian telling, Zuleika was something of a villainess fir her attraction to her manservant Joseph but according to Rumi, her love was a manifestation of the human longing for God. What Sargent shows us is the harmony of disparate pictorial elements, the red Turkish-style pantaloons, the green and white silk overdress, the blue shawl, and a lightly skteched but evocative face, eyes on her book or lost in thought.

 
Critical opinion has not always been kind to Sargent. The argument is partly  retrospective  - he is like us but we don’t always like ourselves.  Aspects of modern life that we view with ambivalence originated in his time. The advent of mass tourism has cheapened the experience of travel.  Amateur watercolorists have dulled our eyes to his mastery. 

Is Sargent modern enough for us?  He painted seemingly without restraint, and made no academic attempts to conceal his techniques or how he arrived at his effects. His gaze, if you will, is more of a fleeting glance, as we experience all things at a faster pace. Mountain Fire  verges on abstraction, vapours  shroud the Alpine landscape  by Sargent's wet washes that obscure their sharp edges

Samuel Isham (1855-1914) was a figure painter from New York City.  He graduated from Yale University in 1875 and studied at the Academie Julien (1883-1889) ith Boulanger and Lefebvre  from 1883 to 1889. The first edition of his  History of American Painting was published in 1905.   Isham's book was praised for his “just appreciations and pleasing style.”
When Macmillan published a revised edition in 1926, it included additional chapters by Royal Cortissoz.  The choice of Cortissoz may have rested on his reputation as a critic but Cortissoz, was hostile to modern art, so his chapters form an odd coda to a magisterial work.

Addendum on 05/ 23/ 14.
Sargent never painted Edith Wharton's portrait but he did paint a number of her friends, including Ralph Curtis (1880), Lisa Colt, later Mrs.Ralph Curtis (1898) and Henry James (1913).   After the publication of her novel The Custom of the Country in 1913 whose character the society portraitist Claud Walsingham Popple was widely accepted as a thinly veiled portrait of Sargent, that was no longer a possibility if it ever had been.  In her private journals, Wharton had written, "Saregnt is the only artist I can think of who has the techniques of genius without its temperament." 
Wharton knew art and she knew artists.  In her later years, she spent a great deal of time in Europe with the art historian Bernard Berenson and the young Kenneth Clark.  Most of her stories about art, however, come from her earlier years as a writer.  The Temperate Zone (published in Here And Beyond, 1924) was an exception. The Muse's Tragedy and The Portrait appeared in her first collection The Greater Inclination (1899).  Included in her second collection Crucial Instances (1901) were The Moving Finger and The Rembrandt.
A delicate situation worthy of a Wharton story ensued after Wharton published The Verdict in 1908.  Her friend  the portrait painter Ralph Curtis was convinced that the second rate artist featured in that story was Wharton's verdict on his own career.  I can imagine that the character of the novelist Mrs. Dale, who appeared in the story The Copy that appeared the same year in her collection Tales of Men and Ghosts (along with The Daunt Diana), spoke for Wharton when she said, "I foresee the day when I shall be as lonely as an Etruscan museum."

Images:
1. John Singer Sargent - Zuleika, c. 1906, Brooklyn Museum.
2. John Singer Sargent - Venice - La Dogana, 1911, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
3. John Singer Sargent - Corfu - Light and Shadows, 1909, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum.
4. John Singer Sargent - Gourds, 1908, Brooklyn Museum.
5. John Singer Sargent - Mountain Fire, c. 1906,  Brooklyn Museum.

Rilke's Rodin

May 24, 2014, 1:11 pm

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 “Suddenly, out of all the green in the park,

something, one knows not what, has gone;

one feels it approaching the window then

and notes its silence,  Imploring and stark.

Out of the grove stirs the song of the plover,

and oe thinks of Saint Jerome in his cell,

wo much does the loneliness seem to wash over

this voice of fervor, which the sudden spell

of rain will answer.  Salon walls that beguiled

as with pictures have now withdrawn from us,

as if they were not to hear what we say.

The sun-faded tapestries mirror the dubious

light of afternoons, that same light today

in which one grew so frightened as a child.

 - Before the Summer Rain from New Poems (1907) by Rainer Maria Rilke,(translated from the German by Joseph Cadora, Port Townsend , Washington, Copper Canyon Press: 2014.

From Chantilly.in June, 1906, only weeks after his dismissal from the studio of Auguste Rodin, the titan of French sculpture,  and still stinging from the rejection, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Before the Rain. Rilke chose a window at the Chateau de Chantilly, originally constructed in the 1560s, as the vantage point for a poem describing an impending storm, perhaps wishing to distance himself from the storm of emotions that accompanied his exile from Rodin.  Images of walls receding, taking with them happy memories, and the inspired linking of a bird and a saintly hermit are exquisite bearers of his pain.

“It was not only to do a study that I came to be with you – it was to ask you, how must one live?” - R.M.R.

Rilke (1875-1926) had come to Paris in the summer of 1902 for the expressed purpose of writing about Rodin.  A penurious but finicky young man, the German native spent his first weeks haunting the stacks at the Bibliotheque Nationale.  He needed a lucrative commission badly, but he was poorly prepared for it, speaking French haltingly and with few of the skills of a scholar.  When Rilke presented himself to Rodin's on September 1, he brought a gift of his poems. which the non-German speaking Rodin could not read.  He had prepared his way with a letter the previous month, described by William Gass as being “baited with the sort of fulsome praise you believe only when it is said of yourself...”
After that first luncheon,  Madame Rodin graciously invited the thin young poet to return  “anytime you're in the neighborhood.”   
The next day in a letter to his wife, the painter Clara Westoff,  Rilke wrote,“...it seemed to me that I had always known him.  I was only seeing him again; I found him smaller, and yet more powerful, more kindly, and more noble.” The day after that Rilke took the train to surburban Meudon, where Rodin had his studio at the villa des Brillants.  Walking along a path between rows of chestnut trees, Rilke finally sees what he had dreamed of:  “a little red and yellow house stands – before a miracle – before a garden of stone and plaster figures.”

To gain access to Rodin, Rilke offered the artist his services as secretary and lecturer, or to put it in our terms, publicist.  Rilke's French was slow to begin with and never got up to speed and clerical tasks bored him.  His admiration was nothing like the self-forgetful devotion of Eric Fenby, amanuensis  to the moody British composer Frederic Delius.  Apparently annoyed beyond endurance, Rodin fired his young assistant on May 10, 1906, “like a thieving servant,”  Rilke reported indignantly to Clara. 

During Rilke's time at Meudon, Rodin began a new affair with the young British artist Gwen John.  The relationship followed a template Rodin had perfected through repetition:  a young female artist comes to Paris; finds that she needs to support her studies by modeling; she is flattered when the great man singles her out and shows interest in her work.

Rilke's observations about the erotic hothouse in Rodin's studio strain credulity. Too romantic and self-involved, Rilke's Rodin was a product of hero worship, not factual informed art criticism.  Rilke even managed a feminist gloss on the sexual roundelay.  “ ..here the woman is no longer an animal who submits or is overpowered.  She is too awake and animated by desire, as if they had both joined forces to search for their souls.”  This, in reference to The Gates of Hell, no less.

 In a letter to his new love Lou-Andreas Salome, written during the summer of 1903, Rilke described  Rodin's studio in terms that could apply to Rilke’s own situation.

“They were living, living on nothing, on dust, on soot, and on the filth of their surfaces, and what falls from the teeth of dogs,on any senselessly broken thing that anyone might still buy for some inexplicable purpose.  Oh what kind of world is that!  Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, leftovers of things that have been, and everything still agitated, as though driven about helter-skelter in an eerie wind, carried and carrying, falling and overtaking each other as they fall.”

Nevertheless, Rilke's version of Rodin retains its fascination for anyone interested in either writer or artist.  A similar project for a monograph on the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi (1862-1916) fell by the wayside.  Speculating about the reasons why has been a parlor game for art historians, writing in their own terms, not Rilke's.  My hunch is that just as Hammershoi's work is elusive, it and its reticent creator also eluded Rilke.

For further reading:  Auguste Rodinby Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Daniel Slager, New York, Archipelago Books: 2004 (1903)

Images:
1. unidentified photogrpaher - Rainer Maria Rilke at Rodin's in Meudon, c. 1902-06,  Musee Rdoin, Paris.
2. unidentified photographer - Rodin's studio at Place de l'Alma with from left to right - Eve - Balzac - Pallas - Muse tragique - Victor Hugo,  no date given, Grand Palais, Paris.
3. Lyn Stern - untitled photograph, 1982, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

I Have The Room Above Her

May 29, 2014, 7:24 am

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"I have the room above her.
She doesn't know I love her.
How could she know I love her,
Sitting in her room below?
Sitting in her room below,
How could she know
How far a dream could go?
Sometimes we meet. She smiles
And oh, her smile's divine.
It's such a treat to hear her say,
'Hasn't the weather been fine?'
I blush and stammer badly.
My heart is beating madly.
Then she goes into her room,
And I go sadly up to mine.
A lover more impetuous than I
Would say his say and know the reason why
When I get my chance
I let my chance go by.
I have the room above her.
She doesn't know I love her.
How could she know I love her,
Sitting in her room below?
Sitting in her room below,
How could she know
How far a dream could go?" (GayLord Ravenal)

"Sometimes we meet. He smiles
And oh, his smile's divine.
It's such a treat to hear him say,
'Hasn't the weather been fine?'
I blush and stammer badly.
My heart is beating madly.
Then he goes up to his room,
And I go sadly into mine."  (Magnolia Hawks)

- I Have The Room Above Her, Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein, II, from the musical Showboat, 1927.

This tender love song comes from Showboat, amusical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, II that was first produced at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City December 27, 1927.  I Have the Room Above Her  was one of three songs specially written for the 1936 Hollywood film of Showboat. Why"I Have the Room Above Her"has long been overlooked is puzzling.  Was it the aspect of a duet?  That kind of thing is routinely surmounted by singers in search of material.  Was it the competition from other songs in the show"Ol' Man River", "Bill", and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"?   That should be no bar to success; there's no quota for hits in a musical..

 And what a musical.  It may not be obvious now but when it premiered, Showboat was sui generis, a musical play rather than a musical comedy.  Nor should we underestimate the courage it took for Kern and Hammerstein to bring Edna Ferber's novel to the stage with  its themes, including interracial love.  The treatment is dated, the music never.

Drummer Paul Motian revived I Have the Room Above Her as the title track to his 2005 recording  for the German ECM label.  Together with Bill Frissell playing guitar and Joe Lovano on saxophone, the tune gets a delicate and dream-like treatment. Play it over and over.

Image:
W. Eugene Smith  - As From My Window I Sometimes Glance, 1957, Smithsonian Museum of American Ar, Washington, D.C.

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Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark

June 6, 2014, 11:44 am

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“Some live on top of skeletons

others live on the water.”

-  from My Winter Palace (Mon Paradis: Der Winterpalast) a film by Austrian Elfi Mikesh, also filmed in 2002 at St. Petersburg.

“Long did I build you, oh house!

With each memory I carried stones

From the bank to your topmost wall

And I saw your roof mellowed by time

Changing as the sea

Dancing against a background of clouds

With which it mingled its smoked.” 

 -  from Maison de Vent (Wind House) by Louis Guillaume, translated from the French by Maria Jolas

St. Petersburg: an improbable city, built on marshland with the labor of thousands of conscripts,  was the creation of one man, Peter the Great.  A new city  in world historical terms, St. Petersburg became the official capital of Russia in 1712.  To begin, the Russian army had wrested control of land around the delta of the Neva River  from Sweden in 1703.  The Tsar's original goal of Russian access to the Baltic Sea trade became the basis for his dream of a "window on Europe."   Crowned at the age of ten, Peter's ambitions were vast.

 In 1913, as the Romanov Dynasty prepared to celebrate its 300th anniversary, Peter's dream had come to glorious fruition.  The Silver Age of Russian culture (1890-1920) produced artists and poets of the caliber of Anna Akhmatova, Leon Bakst, Aleksandr Benois, Anton Chekhov, and Sergei Diaghilev.  But Tsar Nicolas and Empress Aleksandra, preoccupied with the precarious health of their only son and heir,  failed to notice signs that the people were growing impatient with their rulers.  The Revolution of 1905 brought political reforms that were only bandages to a bleeding body politic.   The last Grand Ball became so only in retrospect and, in film-maker Aleksander Sokurov, it has found its poet.

"One must be light of heart and hand,
Holding and taking, holding and letting go.
Those who are not so, life punishes,
And God has no mercy upon them."
 - The opening couplets from Der Rosenkavalier, 1911, bv Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated from the French by Maria Jolas.

In Vienna, where the Habsburg Empire was also troubled, Hugo von Hoffmansthal (1847-1929) brooded over the retrospective view, too. He set Der Rosenkavalier in 1740s Vienna at the court of Empress Maria Theresa.   All is light and airy as a Viennese pastry in the Richard Strauss opera.  Not quite like real life, as things turned out.  The Empress gave birth to a daughter on November 2, 1755, the day after All Saints Day earthquake in Lisbon.  The daughter grew up to become the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.  Monarchy ending badly, and not for the last time.  An ending foreshadowed now in a great film, Aleksnader Sokurov's Russian Ark.

“The blizzard had calmed in pine groves,
But, tipsy without any wines,
- Ophelia over her waters –
White silence all night sang to us.
And he, who’d been seemed not still clear,
Was then with this silence engaged,
And, gone, he stayed graciously here
With me till the end of my Age.”

-          Eulogy of the Spring’s Eve by Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Yevgeny Bonver

 

In eighty-six minutes, we travel through three centuries of Russian history from the founding of St. Petersburg  to the Siege of Leningrad in 1943, see more than a millennium of art in the halls of of the Hermitage, a complex that includes the Winter Palace, and it is presented - miraculously -  "all in one breath.

It took four years to prepare to make Russian Ark and one day to film it.  The Hermitage Museum could be closed  only a short time, so the film was shot on  December 23, the shortest day of the year in 2001.  After thirty-six hours of setting up, the crew had just four hours to complete shooting during daylight (between 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.).  The cast, comprising 800 actors and 1,600 extras, had to be ready and in place before shooting began.  The crew calculated that, if anything went awry, they could stop action during the first twenty minutes and begin again; after that, they could stop for nothing.  The finished film was their fourth take.

The onscreen narrator of Russian Ark is based on a real person, Adolphe-Louis, Marquis de Custine (1790-1857), a French diplomat and author of Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia (1839).  Custine spent most of his Russian days in St. Petersburg.  A political reactionary in French terms, Custine was appalled at the Russian aristocracy for having "just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be 'spoiled as savages' but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like trained bears who made you long for the wild ones."  Custine's off-screen companion through the Hermitage and history is the voice of the filmmaker himself, Sokurov.  Their first exchange gives us the flavor of Custine's voice as we have it from his writings, not so diplomatic.

     “What city is this?” -  Marquis de Custine

     “What city? Well, everyone speaks Russian.” - Aleksandr Sokurov

     “I so hoped this was Chambord during the Directoire period.” -  Marquis de Custine 

 

So balletic is the camera movement of the German cinematographer that the viewer never questions why, in some scenes, Custine moves invisibly through crowds of people and at other times he stops to chat with persons from various historical periods, not always presented in the odr in which they occurred.

The two men rehearse the encounter between Russian and European culture, a classic love-hate relationship that has preoccupied Russians, especially artists, for a very long time.  Andrei Biely, for instance, intended his novel The Silver Dove  (1909  ?) to be the first of a trilogy on that perennial Russian theme, East or West?   At the time, Biely wrote, he was cooling his heels in the peasant village of Bobronsk, exiled far from the artistic center of the Silver Age in St. Petersburg.

“Russian music makes me break out in hives,” Custine snarls when he hears the haunting strains of a Glinka Nocturne in the distance.  There is also a third shadowy man, the nameless spy who follows Custine’s every movement, a fact Custine railed against in his book.  The Romanovs left nothing to chance except the important things.

Marquiis de Custine criticized St. Petersburg as the creation of one man, something the aristocrat might been expected to admire.  His comments suggest that the Marquis knew about those Potemkin villages constructed during the reign of Catherine the Great.   "I came here to see a country, but what I find is a theater. The names are the same as everywhere else.  In appearances everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things."  But what a theater.

The Romanov Dynasty was well into its second century when Catherine the II commissioned theFrench-born Florentine architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli to create a new Winter Palace for her.  Completed in 1764, the complex was promptly dubbed “the Russian Versailles” by the local poet Lomonosov.   France was, even then, the gold standard of international culture.  Among other innovations, Rastrelli’s inspired coloring of the stucco warmed the exteriors  of his stone buildings  in ice cream tints of blue, green, pink, and yellow, giving St. Petersburg is distinctive appearance.

To fill her new Winter Palace, Catherine dispatched agents on a buying spree, armed with the means to scoop up entire art collections from Germany, France, and Italy.  They brought back the Raphaels, Rembrandts, and Poussins that have made the Hermitage one of the foremost museums in the world.  The works of the English portraitist Sir Anthony Van Dyck, may have especially appealed to Catherine’s desire to burnish the Russian court’s reputation, for the attractive image they presented of Charles I and his Royal Court.  After belittling Catherine’s taste in Italian art, when an enraptured Custine spots Antonio Canova’s marble version of The Three Graces (c. 1817) he cannot resist a dig at his Russian hosts”  “Canova almost married my mother!”

Hegel’s definition of art as “the sensuous presentation of ideas” comes to mind more than once during Custine’s encounters as he views the collection.  He joins Tamara Kurenkova, a blind sculptor who plays herself in the film, where she has stopped by the main staircase to touch a winged marble statue on her way to the Rembrandt Gallery.  He also spots a young man lost in contemplation before El Greco's painting of Peter and Paul..  When the young mandeclares himself an atheist, the Catholic Custine questions him at length, wanting to know what a religious painting means to him if he is unfamiliar with the scriptures. 

Tilman Buttner’s camera tracks forward and back through space, zooming inward or outward as Sokurov’s script stretches time, a reminder that the movement of history is, among other things, a visual palimpsest.  We see young girls running back and forth in a hallway hung with portraits of past Romanovs and then a door opens into the exquisite small dining room where Nicolas and Alexandra and the little czarinas sit down to tea, a white rose centerpiece an emblem as innocent as the scene itself.  All too soon as we know, after Czar Nicolas II is forced to abdicate in March of 1917, the provisional government will be overthrown by the Bolsheviks in this very room. 

 “Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons.  Not only does it confer age on our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old.  It is as though it were living in the past of centuries gone by.” -  Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, translated from the French by Maria Jolas

Words that could apply easily to the Romanovs.  For its final episode, the movie flashes back to the winter of 1913, to the last Imperial Ball.  The Mariinsky Orchestra plays the program from that melancholy occasion as three hundred couples dance on the highly polished floor - for the first time since 1913.  What is real life but history, and vice versa?

Sokuorv's compression of time and events is, paradoxically, given the breathing room to happen by the unprecedented non-stop take.  The little czarinas race and back forth in the family portrait gallery, its walls lined with generations of Romanovs, their  energy and  heedlessness an implicit comment on.the absence of the little Prince Alexei, forbidden to run and jump, the only boy among this generation and a hemophiliac.  A disease that was a death sentence then, that would soon be subsumed by the death sentence meted out to entire Romanov  family by the Bolsheviks.

But before those grisly murders, we go through the door at the far end of the gallery to enter the small dining room.  There Nicolas and Alexandra and their children sit down to tea, the little czarinas so like the white roses they gather around.  It will be in this same room, as Russians know, that the provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917.

 

As the Romanovs celebrated their 300^thanniversary, their rule was growing weak.  For the occasion, the Mariinsky Orchestra plays as three hundred couples dance.  When the music ends, a pensive Custine bids goodbye to his host.  “Farewell Europe.  It is over.”   We  watch as the guests descend the grand staircase, down and around and down, heading into oblivion.   We know that their class is doomed; overhearing wisps of conversations is excruciating.  “It feels like we are floating.”  The future, as unfathomable as the Neva, waits. 

Is the Hermitage the ark?   It certainly appears so in the film’s closing moments as the camera moves past the departing guests to the prospect beyond the doors, across the warm waters of the Neva, not yet frozen over,  gusts of wind sway the vapors rising like so many ghostly fingers pointing. But we who watch as the festive crowds stream out of the palace, planning  future balls know that they are doomed.   Culture is the ark that will keep humanity alive.

The last words are Sokurov's, addressed to the absent Custine, voiced over icy cold images that evoke the terrible Siege of Leningrad in 1943.  More than one million Russians perished as the Germans blockaded and bombarded the city.  The Hermitage was one of the Wehrmacht's favorite targets. Yet the Russian people had the pride to hide and even bury most of its precious artworks.  If you belong to the tribe that demands relevance from its movies, think of this when you hear the suggestion that the City of Detroit should sell off the art collection of the Detroit Museum of Art to pay debts.  

“Sir, sir.  It's a pity you're not here with me.  You would understand everything.  Look.  The sea is all around.  We are destined to sail forever.  To live forever.” - Aleksandr Sokurov

 

“The world is large, but within us

it is as deep as the sea.“  - Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the French by Maria Jolas.

Aleksandr Sokurov was born in 1951 at Podorvikha, Irkutsk District, Siberia.  He studied history at Gorky University and cinematography at the All-Union Cinematography Institute in Moscow. 
Sokurov has explained why he wanted to shoot Russian Ark in one eighty-six minute take, “ I don't want to experiment with time.   I want to screen real time.  It should be as it is. One doesn't have to fear the flow of time.”  Sokurov has been remarkably faithful to the historical record, also to  the moderns who appear in the film: the ballerina, the doctor, and even Mikhail Piotrovksy, Director of the Hermitage Museum are real people.  The result is a rare achievement in poetic and spiritual film-making.  But there are other opinions.  Some critics called Russian Ark a stunt when it was released, others have been frustrated that they can't discuss it in terms of their favored tools of the trade, editing and framing.   Perhaps they have confused means and ends, or perhaps they have just forgotten the important things.

For further information, visit The Island of Sokurov

Images: unless otherwise noted, are stills from Russian Ark, a film by Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002.
1. St. Peterburg, Neva River at left, the Hermitage at right - from Ember Stuff
Entering the Winter Palace for a ball in 1800.
Marquis de Custine in the Raphael Loggias at the Hermitage..

Custine enters the Rembrandt rooms.
Custine is guided by Tamara Kurenkova.
Custine and the young atheist with El Greco's Peter and Paul (c.1587-92)

Catherine walks between the Hermitage and the Winter Place. 

Catherine the Great walking (close-up). 

Chidlren playing in the gallery of the Romanov portraits.

Custine in the Grand Ballroom.

Descending the Grand Staircase after the last ball.

The Neva River seen from the entrance to the Hermitage..

Ostroumova-Lebedeva: Artist Of The Silver Age

June 16, 2014, 12:49 pm

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“In the early spring when they chipped off the crust of frozen snow from the streets and squares; when along the newly exposed paving between these strata sped, appearing as if from nowhere, streams that glistened in the sun; when dark-blue shadows with piercing distinctness molded the cube-shaped buildings and the roundness of columns; when ‘new’ air poured through the wide-open windows (liberated from their second window frames) into stale apartments; when the ice on the Neva swelled, turned grey, and, finally rose up, broke, and started moving towards the sea – then the Petersburg spring was stunning in the elemental expressiveness of its awakening. There could be no doubt that one season was giving way to another. But when the new order had finally been completely established, there began a truly blessed time. The city which had for months been so forbidding became gentle, enchanting, and kind. The trees in the gardens were covered in the most tender leaves; the scent of lilac blossom was overpowering; the bird-cherry was spicy-sweet; and the elegant blocks of palaces were reflected in the now freely flowing water.” - Alexander Benois, from Memoirs, Paris: 1936, Columbus Books, U.K.: 1988

"It drags on without end, this heavy amber day.

Impossible the sadness, vain the waiting!

Once more the deer speaks of the Northern Lights -

Its silvered voice sounds in the deer park."

  - from Rosary by Ann Akhmatova, 1912, translated from the Russian by Richard McKane in Selected Poems, Oxford University Press: 1969.

The last time I mentioned Alexander Benois in these columns, the Russian artist was in France.  But after a few years abroad, Benois returned to his native city of St. Petersburg, to become the director of the Mariinksy Theater, home to the Imperial Ballet.  Paris was exciting but Russian ballet was about to set fire to the stage and Benois, designer of sets and librettist, would play an important role. in the revival of Russian art.
Benois is a figure who appears throughout the story of another St. Petersburg artist, the overlooked (outside Russia)  Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva.  She  reinvigorated the medium of engraving in Russia, introduced Japanese prints, and became a master of the woodcut.  Like her friend Benois, who put painting to the side to find his metier through the stage, Ostroumova moved beyond painting, too.

 “Never has classical architecture had so much room,"  wrote Joseph Brodsky in his essay The Child of Civilization

The 'Silver Age' in Russian art spanned the decades from 1890 to 1920.  Russian artists were ready for something new: they had become bored with realism and  were enchanted by the artifice that western symbolism seemed to offer.  In 1905, as riots were brutally suppressed by the Tsar and the Russo-Japanese War ended in defeat at Tshumima, real life seemed to take on horrific aspects of Symbolist vision.  But there had been storm warnings.  On May 4, 1901, students demonstrating at the Kazan cathedral had been beaten and even killed by the police.  In reaction, Ostroumova took to her bed for two days with what she characterized as a mental breakdown. This turmoil, both inner and outer, is noticeably absent from her art. 

St. Petersburg was a magnet for artists not fortunate enough to be born there.   Anna Akhmatova (from Ukraine) and Osip Mandelstam (born in Warsaw) both read their poems  at the short-lived (1912-15) Stray Dog Cabaret, its manifesto issued under the attention-getting title Slap in the Face of the Public.  The young composer Prokofiev, left Moscow to study at the conservatory, playing his  experimental compositions called Sarcasms, Op. 17 (1912).  The Muscovite Alexander Scriabin, who made his debut as a pianist in St. Petersburg, later proclaimed that his music would herald the coming of the Apocalypse. 

 Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva lived throuhg the major upheavals that the new century visited on her city.  She was born in St. Petersburg in 1871 and died in Leningrad in 1955 (same city, different names).  Her birth date was May 17, using the old style calendar, which became May 5 using the reformed calendar, and she  died on May 5, 1955.

If St. Petersburg was Russia's "window on Europe" it opened toward Paris, where Ostroumova and Benois first met.  For Ostroumova, the impetus to study in Paris was partly practical. "My father has told us many times, that he will not be able to support us in the future, that he will give us a good education, and that we will have to earn our living.”  Anna chose art; her sister Sonia chose chemistry.  Shortly after her arrival in 1898,  Ostroumova met Alexander Benois who was living with the family of her classmate Konstantin Somov.  Ostroumova and Somov were both  students of the American James McNeill Whistler.

An erratic teacher at best, Whistler would eventually implore Ostroumova to come to America with him for further study,  although he had initially  dismissed her with typical contemptuousness: "But you can do nothing, you know nothing, I can't teach you!"  In her memoirs, published in three volumes between 1935 and 1951 (translated by Larissa Haskell), Ostroumova-Lebedeva described  Whistler's unorthodox  teaching methods.

"Many things surprised me or even seemed quite funny to me: the complete lack of freedom or any independence and the absolute obedience to all rules insisted on by Whistler."
"To mix colors on the palette one had to use a special method invented by Whistler and if you try to do it your own way your neighbors grab hold of your hands because they watch you the whole time." 

After returning home in 1899, Ostroumova joined  Benois, Leon Bakst and Sergey Diaghilev in starting  the ambitiously named Mir Iskusstva  or World of Art. She married Sergey Lebedev, a chemist, in 1905.

Mir Iskusstva celebrated the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg by holding a design competition for art cards to be sold at railway kiosks and on the docks.    The cards, printed on fine quality papers, sold 30 million during two decades.

Like the French print-maker, Henri Riviere, Ostroumova recognized the poetry latent in modern technical feats like the Eiffel Tower, constructed in 1889.  Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s woodcuts of activity around the waterways of St. Petersburg will look familiar to  anyone who has seen Riviere's Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower.  The faded colors of antique Japanese prints that the French mistakenly took for the original colors, turned out to be the ideal palette for representing how the Florentine architect Rastrelli's ice cream colored stucco buildings appear under northern skies.  Ukiyo-e, art of the Japanese 'floating world', proved to be an apt medium for picturing St. Petersburg.

 

From 1918 to 1922, Ostroumova-Lebedeva taught at the Institute of photography and photographic technology and then, after 1934, at the Russian Academy of  Fine Arts. Meanwhile, Alexander Benois was now a curator of paintings at the Hermitage Museum, under whose imprimatur he published a monograph on Ostroumova-Lebedeva, circa 1924.

Ostroumova-Lebedeva also worked with the Community of St. Eugenia, a charity under royal patronage of Czar Nicolas I's granddaughter.  The group funded new hospitals, trained nurses, and sheltered the poor. In 1920, the Communists  disbanded the group:  charity  was no longer needed in a workers' state.

 

 “How much has been said and written about the White Nights. How they were hated by those who could not get used to them, and how passionately they were loved by others.  …And suddenly in this solemn stillness, in the transparent sleepy twilight, between the scarcely darkened sky and the strangely luminous water, from somewhere up above, settling gently on the water, there begin to be heard notes that are almost hollow, ‘glassy’, ‘from beyond the grave’. It is the chimes of the clock on the spire of the fortress, telling us in two prayer chants that it is now midnight… The chimes played ‘Glorious is our Lord’ and then, immediately after that, ‘God save our Tsar’. ...   They say that these hourly roulades, this drip-dripping of sounds in the quiet of the night drove prisoners in the fortress to despair, to madness.”  – Alexander Benois, Memoirs

 

Some cities are built around a central square. St. Petersburg has at its heart a virtual square of majestic buildings clustered around water.  No wonder then that Benois set Stravinsky’s Petrouschka (1911) on Admiralty Square,  The flatness of the surrounding countryside gives a regal look to buildings in a city built on landfill.  Thanks to Catherine the Great, not a monarch to rest on the laurels of her Romanov predecessors, a series of devastating fires that wracked the city became the impetus for enlightened urban planning.  Pink marble from nearby quarries in Finland was used to reinforce the canal embankments, giving a warm glow to watery reflections of gray northern skies.  The mists of St. Petersburg are also a feature in Ostroumova-Lebedeva's prints, a lesson from the floating world applied in her post-WW II print The Peter and Paul Fortress at Night (1946).  T

During the Second World War, she lived through the siege of Leningrad, continuing to record the life of the city.  Her images of  boys fishing near a warship or bridge construction are shapely works, suffused with the poetry of northern light and at the same time constructed with a sharp eye for the revelations of photography, the flatness of layers of planes like so many bits of stage scenery, the way the eye could cut and frame reality at will.  

Read more online about The Other St. Petersburg
Images: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, color woodcuts, Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.
1. Spring Motif - View from Stone Island to Krestovsky and Yelagin islands, 1904.
2. Kriukov canal, 1910.
3. Punkaharju (Finland), 1908.
4. View of the Neva and the Stock Exchange from Trinity Bridge, 1926.
5. The Summer Garden in Winter, 1902.
6. Barge on the river, 1904.
7.Chain Bridge, 1903.
8. Construction of the Palace Bridge, 1922.
9. View of Peter and Paul Fortress at Night, 1946.

Note: On July  17, 1989, the remains of Tsar Nicolas and Empress Alexandra, and three of their children, Olga, Tatyana, and Anastasia, and other members of their household who had been executed on July 17, 1918 at Yekaterinburg, were returned for burial to St. Petersburg in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
 
10. The Ekatarina Canal, 1910.
11.  Fishing Boys, 1942.

A Perfect Summer Painting: Henri-Edmond Cross

June 21, 2014, 11:08 am

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“The vast sea, it seems to me, without storm or heat.” 

– from In The Vicinity of Van Gogh, by Rene Char, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws & Christopher Prendergast, in Selected Poems by Rene Char, New York, New Directions: 1992.

What better description of a summer day is there than these eleven words from the  poet Rene Char?  Outside France, Char (1907-1988) is best remembered for his poems that have been set to music by Pierre Boulez. The lure of Paris notwithstanding, Char returned again and again to his native Provence, with its sea and sand, made dazzling by the Mediterranean sun.

Les Iles d'Or (Golden Isles) by Henri-Edmond Cross is the most radical work the artist ever made and possibly the most radical to come out of France during the 19th century. Cross, who was thirty-five in 1891, had been wintering in Provence for several years to ease the pain of his rheumatism.   In Golden Isles I sense pure joy, but then Provence does that to people. 

We don't actually see the sun in Les Iles d'Or  but rather its effects.  Those millions of photoreceptors in our eyes have seen yellow sand sparkle in the sun through shallow waters just as Cross paints them with yellow dots  and watched shadows hover in the blue-green distance..  Cross  applied his colors in smaller dabs on the upper portion of the canvas to simulate a receding horizon (a figure of speech to describe   a flat canvas).

In  Guy de Maupassant's  Sur l'eau (Afloat), published in 1888,  published just three years before its author was confined to an asylum with syphilitic dementia, is one of his sunniest works.  Presented as a logbook of a trip around the Mediterranean by sailboat, Afloat is recognizably  a modern work.  In no other book did  de Maupassant mix  elements of light and dark, fact and fiction,  daring the reader to notice how unreliable a charming narrator can be.  The  title alludes to his location and also to the precariousness of the situation. I can't resist  this quotation from Kant, as a riposte to de Maupassant (the summer sun does this to people).

 “If we are to call the sight of the ocean sublime, we must not think of it as we ordinarily do, as implying all sorts of knowledge (that are not contained in immediate intuition).  We must regard it as the poets do, merely by what strikes the eye.” – from Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, 1790.

De Maupassant mixed up and Cross picked apart.  Although Divisionism was once accepted as a scientifically-based technique for depicting the effects of light,  its passing takes nothing away from paintings made under its influence.  Propositional knowledge, that is,  things that we know are true like the saltiness of the ocean, it was not.   But we receive the truths of the world - if that is what they are - through our senses, and Cross got that right.   To quote his contemporary, Paul Valery:

"To see is to forget the name of what one sees.”

Images:
Henri-Edmond Cross - Iles d'Or, c. 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Bulgarian Poets: Dimitrova & Levchev

June 24, 2014, 11:37 am

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"Grandfather’s roof was made of slate

And weeds grew on its shaggy shelf.

“Where is my grandfather's house?’ I ask.

“It fell in ruins all by itself,”

they tell me.  “Look how we paved the yard.”
And there is the old roof, stone by stone,

flagging the court, but I can’t believe

that that strong old house collapsed on its own.

It was a beautifully fashioned house,

Cozy, in human kindness furled,

But alas it had the same defects

As Grandfather’s vision of the world.

The thick slate roof was terribly heavy

And the house itself had no foundations.

Very slowly it sank into the ground

with fate of all houses and nations.

I’m sure that old house didn’t fall to pieces

But slowly, slowly of its own great weight

Sank till the roof is level with the earth

And now I walk like a cat on its slate.

Box-tress rise from the flues like smoke

While down below the hearth burns fair,

The pot is boiling – nothing is changed

In Grandfather’s  lost Atlantis there.

And father, a little boy is curled

In Grandfather’s lap.  His eyes are wide.

“Quick, go to sleep now, the bogey man

is on the roof.”  Father listens, terrified.

Yes!  There is something there! He shudders

Deliciously and hearing proof

He falls asleep and dream, he dreams

My heavy footsteps on the roof.

It is cruelly hard to build a roof

that time’s foundation can hold in place.

The superstructure (as Marx would say)

Should never overload the base.

And those who write should think of things

as real as roof-trees, tall and straight,

Someone with lightening in his wings

Has started walking on our slates.”

 - Roofs by Lyubomir Levchev, translated from th Bulgarian by William Meredith, in Poets of Bulgaria, Greensboro, Unicorn Press: 1986.

Lyubomir Levchev (b.1935) was a prominent member of the Bulgarian Writers association under the Communists.

Blaga Dimitrova (1922- 2003) was more openly critical of Bulgaria’s communist government in her work than many others.   While working as a journalist, she visited Vietnam several times, where she adopted a daughter in 1967.  During the 1970s, four of her books were rejected by the state press for publication After the fall of communism, Dimitrova served for two years (1992-93) as Vice President of Bulgaria.  One of the most respected writers from Eastern Europe, Dimitrova's poems have appeared in the United States in Ms. and other magazines.

Bulgarian literature is not well known in the English-speaking world even though Bulgaria has a long history, stretching back more than thirteen hundred years.  While William Meredith has described the function of poets in American culture as ornamental, that is not that caes\\se in eastern Europe where poets are accorded a place of honor. Americans are free to write what they want but often focus on trivia and use few of the tools in the poet’s quiver.   By contrast, writers constrained by repressive governments are often ingenious in presenting serious and controversial ideas.  The poems I chose to reproduce here are both typical and outstanding examples of metaphor and fable deployed to raise metaphysical questions shared by writer and reader  Levchev plays with the history of his grandfather’s house, critique an entire society in the process, with a pinch of the nose to Marxist orthodoxy along the way.  Dimitrova uses harmony in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to a similarly subversive effect.  Even finer, I think,  is Bulgarian Woman From the Old Days in which Dimitrova’s large intentions do nothing to obscure the woman she memorializes.

Dimitrova is said to have inspired the character named Vera in John Updike’s  story “The Bulgarian Poetess” which appeared in the New Yorker for March 13, 1985..  “He was attacked by the romantic vertigo of men traveling alone,” Updike writes of his alter-ego, Henry Bech, when he meets “Vera” at a writers conference in Sofia. The American Updike does himself no favors but a rough justice here: he creates a character as self-absorbed and clueless is himself.

 

“Bach gave to all an equal right –

no voice is made to serve as mere

accompaniment or background for

a privileged superior.

And so through time a prayer ascends

in single spirit, and in many senses:

power in a unity depends

on little independences.”

-          Of Bach and Harmony

“This is how I remember her from the old days –

saving all her life.

Preposterously turning over

worn-out clothes,

knitting every loose end,

patching, darning tying up.

And to her very last, remaining

true to the thrift

she’s famous for: she has become

diminutive herself, as if

to save a scrap

of the space she occupies.

The way I see her now

She could tumble right

Into the laundry basket –

scuttling around, a little mouse,

with everything about her

turning to a trap.”

-          Bulgarian Woman From the Old Days

 “Thank you, day for being gone.

And thank you, gift, for being for me.

And for the shade of thorns above,

its work of wood and innocence of leaf,

for blue in all its shapes and shadows,

clouds of thunder, routed in rain,

for pain, a love without a remedy,

for breath, the words that may

replace it.  And especially

among the multitude of things

I thank you for not forcing me

To thank you on my knees.”

-          Vespers

Because the Sea is Black by Blaga Dimitrova, translated from the Bulgarian by Niko Boris and Heather McHugh, Middletown, CT., Wesleyan University Press : 1989.

Images: gelatin silver prints by Pentti Sammallahti, Finnish photographer.

1. Etr, Bulgaria, 2003.

2. Ksar, Bulgaria, 2003.

3. Vracansca Planina, 2003.

 

The Kosode And The Nabi: Pierre Bonnard

June 28, 2014, 10:28 am

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Before the  kimomo, there was the kosode.  Kimono, a familiar Japanese word meaning "thing-to- wear" came into use during the late 19th century.  Its function was to distinguish between Japanese dress and the Western-style dress that Europeans brought with them as they flooded into a country previously closed to outside influences.  In practical terms, the most noticeable difference was the size of the sleeve opening or armhole of the garment, and kosode translates .as "small sleeve." 

This is by way of explaining why I have placed two kosodes from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum next to paintings by the Franchman Pierre Bonnard.  As a participant in the group of young artists who called themselves Les Nabis (the prophets) in the 1890s, Bonnard was nicknamed le nabi tres japonard for his wholehearted admiration of Japanese art. Bonnard executed Woman in a Checked Dress (at left)  and three other panels (now in the collection of the Musee d'Orsay), first by painting on silk fabric and then gluing it to canvas.  The French call this technique maroufle.

In fact, the exuberant juxtapositions of patterns and lines, rendered flatly, that Bonnard and others were introduced to through the medium of Japanese woodblock prints, were images of courtesans wearing kosodes mostly, not kimonos.  It was a major exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890 that introduced le tout Paris to those ukiyo-e prints.  From courtesan to bourgeois, the translation was dazzling.  The Game of Croquet (below) was set at the Boonard family home in Iseres, and some of the players have been identified as (from left to right) the artist's father, his sister Andree, and her husband Claude Terrasse, a composer.

About his early works, Bonnard later said, "We were trying to go farther than the Impressionists and their naturalist impressions of color.  After all, art is not Nature!"  But this could give an incomplete impression of Bonnard's intentions.  "I am of no school, I am only seeking to do something personal.". 

Images:
1. Silk kosde with design of gingko leaves, waves, and butterflies, Edo Period (1603-1868), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
2. Pierre Bonnard  (1867-1947) - Woman in a checked dress, 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paros.
3. Pierre Bonnard - A Game of  Croquet, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Silk kosode with design of plum blossoms and clouds, Edo Period, Metorlpolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Read more about the Kosode and other interesting things at Society for Creative Anachronism.

Ostroumova-Lebedeva: Artist Of The Silver Age

June 16, 2014, 12:49 pm

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“In the early spring when they chipped off the crust of frozen snow from the streets and squares; when along the newly exposed paving between these strata sped, appearing as if from nowhere, streams that glistened in the sun; when dark-blue shadows with piercing distinctness molded the cube-shaped buildings and the roundness of columns; when ‘new’ air poured through the wide-open windows (liberated from their second window frames) into stale apartments; when the ice on the Neva swelled, turned grey, and, finally rose up, broke, and started moving towards the sea – then the Petersburg spring was stunning in the elemental expressiveness of its awakening. There could be no doubt that one season was giving way to another. But when the new order had finally been completely established, there began a truly blessed time. The city which had for months been so forbidding became gentle, enchanting, and kind. The trees in the gardens were covered in the most tender leaves; the scent of lilac blossom was overpowering; the bird-cherry was spicy-sweet; and the elegant blocks of palaces were reflected in the now freely flowing water.” - Alexander Benois, from Memoirs, Paris: 1936, Columbus Books, U.K.: 1988

"It drags on without end, this heavy amber day.

Impossible the sadness, vain the waiting!

Once more the deer speaks of the Northern Lights -

Its silvered voice sounds in the deer park."

  - from Rosary by Ann Akhmatova, 1912, translated from the Russian by Richard McKane in Selected Poems, Oxford University Press: 1969.

The last time I mentioned Alexander Benois in these columns, the Russian artist was in France.  But after a few years abroad, Benois returned to his native city of St. Petersburg, to become the director of the Mariinksy Theater, home to the Imperial Ballet.  Paris was exciting but Russian ballet was about to set fire to the stage and Benois, designer of sets and librettist, would play an important role. in the revival of Russian art.
Benois is a figure who appears throughout the story of another St. Petersburg artist, the overlooked (outside Russia)  Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva.  She  reinvigorated the medium of engraving in Russia, introduced Japanese prints, and became a master of the woodcut.  Like her friend Benois, who put painting to the side to find his metier through the stage, Ostroumova moved beyond painting, too.

 “Never has classical architecture had so much room,"  wrote Joseph Brodsky in his essay The Child of Civilization

The 'Silver Age' in Russian art spanned the decades from 1890 to 1920.  Russian artists were ready for something new: they had become bored with realism and  were enchanted by the artifice that western symbolism seemed to offer.  In 1905, as riots were brutally suppressed by the Tsar and the Russo-Japanese War ended in defeat at Tshumima, real life seemed to take on horrific aspects of Symbolist vision.  But there had been storm warnings.  On May 4, 1901, students demonstrating at the Kazan cathedral had been beaten and even killed by the police.  In reaction, Ostroumova took to her bed for two days with what she characterized as a mental breakdown. This turmoil, both inner and outer, is noticeably absent from her art. 

St. Petersburg was a magnet for artists not fortunate enough to be born there.   Anna Akhmatova (from Ukraine) and Osip Mandelstam (born in Warsaw) both read their poems  at the short-lived (1912-15) Stray Dog Cabaret, its manifesto issued under the attention-getting title Slap in the Face of the Public.  The young composer Prokofiev, left Moscow to study at the conservatory, playing his  experimental compositions called Sarcasms, Op. 17 (1912).  The Muscovite Alexander Scriabin, who made his debut as a pianist in St. Petersburg, later proclaimed that his music would herald the coming of the Apocalypse. 

 Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva lived throuhg the major upheavals that the new century visited on her city.  She was born in St. Petersburg in 1871 and died in Leningrad in 1955 (same city, different names).  Her birth date was May 17, using the old style calendar, which became May 5 using the reformed calendar, and she  died on May 5, 1955.

If St. Petersburg was Russia's "window on Europe" it opened toward Paris, where Ostroumova and Benois first met.  For Ostroumova, the impetus to study in Paris was partly practical. "My father has told us many times, that he will not be able to support us in the future, that he will give us a good education, and that we will have to earn our living.”  Anna chose art; her sister Sonia chose chemistry.  Shortly after her arrival in 1898,  Ostroumova met Alexander Benois who was living with the family of her classmate Konstantin Somov.  Ostroumova and Somov were both  students of the American James McNeill Whistler.

An erratic teacher at best, Whistler would eventually implore Ostroumova to come to America with him for further study,  although he had initially  dismissed her with typical contemptuousness: "But you can do nothing, you know nothing, I can't teach you!"  In her memoirs, published in three volumes between 1935 and 1951 (translated by Larissa Haskell), Ostroumova-Lebedeva described  Whistler's unorthodox  teaching methods.

"Many things surprised me or even seemed quite funny to me: the complete lack of freedom or any independence and the absolute obedience to all rules insisted on by Whistler."
"To mix colors on the palette one had to use a special method invented by Whistler and if you try to do it your own way your neighbors grab hold of your hands because they watch you the whole time." 

After returning home in 1899, Ostroumova joined  Benois, Leon Bakst and Sergey Diaghilev in starting  the ambitiously named Mir Iskusstva  or World of Art. She married Sergey Lebedev, a chemist, in 1905.

Mir Iskusstva celebrated the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg by holding a design competition for art cards to be sold at railway kiosks and on the docks.    The cards, printed on fine quality papers, sold 30 million during two decades.

Like the French print-maker, Henri Riviere, Ostroumova recognized the poetry latent in modern technical feats like the Eiffel Tower, constructed in 1889.  Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s woodcuts of activity around the waterways of St. Petersburg will look familiar to  anyone who has seen Riviere's Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower.  The faded colors of antique Japanese prints that the French mistakenly took for the original colors, turned out to be the ideal palette for representing how the Florentine architect Rastrelli's ice cream colored stucco buildings appear under northern skies.  Ukiyo-e, art of the Japanese 'floating world', proved to be an apt medium for picturing St. Petersburg.

 

From 1918 to 1922, Ostroumova-Lebedeva taught at the Institute of photography and photographic technology and then, after 1934, at the Russian Academy of  Fine Arts. Meanwhile, Alexander Benois was now a curator of paintings at the Hermitage Museum, under whose imprimatur he published a monograph on Ostroumova-Lebedeva, circa 1924.

Ostroumova-Lebedeva also worked with the Community of St. Eugenia, a charity under royal patronage of Czar Nicolas I's granddaughter.  The group funded new hospitals, trained nurses, and sheltered the poor. In 1920, the Communists  disbanded the group:  charity  was no longer needed in a workers' state.

 

 “How much has been said and written about the White Nights. How they were hated by those who could not get used to them, and how passionately they were loved by others.  …And suddenly in this solemn stillness, in the transparent sleepy twilight, between the scarcely darkened sky and the strangely luminous water, from somewhere up above, settling gently on the water, there begin to be heard notes that are almost hollow, ‘glassy’, ‘from beyond the grave’. It is the chimes of the clock on the spire of the fortress, telling us in two prayer chants that it is now midnight… The chimes played ‘Glorious is our Lord’ and then, immediately after that, ‘God save our Tsar’. ...   They say that these hourly roulades, this drip-dripping of sounds in the quiet of the night drove prisoners in the fortress to despair, to madness.”  – Alexander Benois, Memoirs

 

Some cities are built around a central square. St. Petersburg has at its heart a virtual square of majestic buildings clustered around water.  No wonder then that Benois set Stravinsky’s Petrouschka (1911) on Admiralty Square,  The flatness of the surrounding countryside gives a regal look to buildings in a city built on landfill.  Thanks to Catherine the Great, not a monarch to rest on the laurels of her Romanov predecessors, a series of devastating fires that wracked the city became the impetus for enlightened urban planning.  Pink marble from nearby quarries in Finland was used to reinforce the canal embankments, giving a warm glow to watery reflections of gray northern skies.  The mists of St. Petersburg are also a feature in Ostroumova-Lebedeva's prints, a lesson from the floating world applied in her post-WW II print The Peter and Paul Fortress at Night (1946).  T

During the Second World War, she lived through the siege of Leningrad, continuing to record the life of the city.  Her images of  boys fishing near a warship or bridge construction are shapely works, suffused with the poetry of northern light and at the same time constructed with a sharp eye for the revelations of photography, the flatness of layers of planes like so many bits of stage scenery, the way the eye could cut and frame reality at will.  

Read more online about The Other St. Petersburg
Images: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, color woodcuts, Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.
1. Spring Motif - View from Stone Island to Krestovsky and Yelagin islands, 1904.
2. Kriukov canal, 1910.
3. Punkaharju (Finland), 1908.
4. View of the Neva and the Stock Exchange from Trinity Bridge, 1926.
5. The Summer Garden in Winter, 1902.
6. Barge on the river, 1904.
7.Chain Bridge, 1903.
8. Construction of the Palace Bridge, 1922.
9. View of Peter and Paul Fortress at Night, 1946.

Note: On July  17, 1989, the remains of Tsar Nicolas and Empress Alexandra, and three of their children, Olga, Tatyana, and Anastasia, and other members of their household who had been executed on July 17, 1918 at Yekaterinburg, were returned for burial to St. Petersburg in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
 
10. The Ekatarina Canal, 1910.
11.  Fishing Boys, 1942.

Invincible Summer

July 3, 2014, 3:36 pm

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"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."- Albert Camus

I like to think that these words by Camus make a fitting epigraph for one of Vincent van Gogh's last paintings.  First Steps - After Millet  dates from January of 1890, six months before the artist died.   During the autumn of 1889, van Gogh had admitted himself to an asylum at Saint-Remy, not the first of his many trials and setbacks. 

Vincent wrote to his brother Theo many times expressing his admiration for his predecessor, the Barbizon painter Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875).  Van Gogh's homage to a pastel by Millet from the late 1850s is one of a series the artist called his "translations" , meaning something like a musician's interpretation.  He had performed similar homages to  Japanese artists Utagawa Hiroshige and Keisai Eisen in 1887.

Millet's work is now out of fashion, as is his view of the human place in nature  but it is a view that has resonance even so.  I think here of Millet's The Gleaners (1857) and its inspiration for the filmmaker Agnes Varda, whose Le glaneur et la glaneuse (2000) follows her search for modern-day gleaners.   Using humble digital video, Varda finds common human impulses everywhere she turns her camera, , finding the wsidom of van Gogh and Millet.

But turn to the painting itself.  .The scene is one that is universally understandable: the joyful feelings that parents feel when their child takes its first steps.  Mother has brought the little one outside so that father can take time from his labor to share in this happy event.  A gentle rebuke to cynicism, Van Gogh's First Steps offers a glimpse of the artist's own invincible summer, the strength that made it possible for him work in spite of emotional torment.

Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890 from an infection apparently caused by an untreated gunshot wound to the chest. His was only thirty-seven years old.  His brother Theo, who was at his side, reported that Vincent's last words were: "The sadness will last forever."   Fortunately, so does his work.

Image:

1.Vincent van Gogh - First Steps - After Millet, 1890, Metropolitan Museum

of Art, NYC.

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My Venetian Hours

July 8, 2014, 2:50 pm

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“Ultimately, the city of the doges only really enriches us by keeping its treasures in concert with the ebb and flow of a single, subdued medium; by allowing us to glimpse the harmony that quietly endures behind their opulent exterior, even if it means that our own silhouette is entirely absorbed into it.”

 - Loving Venice by Peter Kral, translated from the French by Christopher Moncrieff, London, Pushkin Press: 2011 (1999).

“At certain hours, when the shadows thicken and the sun only casts one ray of light obliquely under the vaults of the cupolas, strange effects rise for the eyes of the poet and the visionary.  Brazen lightenings flash suddenly from the golden backgrounds.  Little cubes of crystal gleam here and there like the sunlit sea: the outlines of the figures tremble in their golden field; the silhouettes which just before were so clearly marked become troubled and mingled to the eye.”

-          Theophile Gauthier, Voyage en Italie Paris, G. Charpentier (1852), translated from the French by H. Neville Maugham  in The Book of Italian Travel (1580-1900), New York, E.P. Dutton: 1903)

 And then there is this opening stanza from Gauthier’s  poem Sur les lagunes:

“Sur une gamme cheomatique,

   Le sein des perles ruisselant,

La Venus de l’Adriatique

  Sort de l’eau sons corps rose et blanc.”

:On a chromatic scale,

The net trickles  pearls,

Venus of the Adriatic,

 Rises out of the water, her body rose and white.”  – translation, J.L.

A summer vacation may sound like a luxury, as indeed it is, but as an out of body experience it is available to anyone with more imagination and less money.  Every year for the past three decades I have visited, in memory, the town on the Atlantic coast where I spent the happiest times of my childhood.  

Venice, a city built on salt marshes, has just enough of the familiar.  Not a thousand islands but well over one hundred comprise a city that historians date to c. 568.  The buildings are models of what can be constructed from stone, marbel, stucco, and brick, but they were supported by wooden pilings driven into the muck below the waterline, much like the staddles that dot the Newbury Marsh, where they are used to raise freshly cut hay above high tides.  (The staddle was an invention brought from England by 17th century settlers.)  I can smell the salt in the air just by looking at the photographs in Venise: itinerance by Jean-Baptisite Leroux.  A feeling of floating through time as well as space, too.

“When I seek a word for music I never find any other word than Venice.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“Abhorrent, green, slippery city,“ was the verdict of  D. H. Lawrence, and a minority opinion at that.

The more enthusiastic opinions of Shelley, Byron, or and Henry James are already too well known to need any special attention from me but there are other writers who make good companions for an armchair traveler.  What you may notice about these writers is their enthusiastic use of the semi-colon, along with my taste for  their work. Keeping in mind the words of the Czech writer Peter Kral quoted above, the often-painted and photographed view of the canals of Venice are mostly absent here.  After all, Venetians walk on two feet just like the rest of us.

Although there are competing versions of Venetian origins, the early Venetians were Roman Catholic, the Church’s didactic architecture proved unsuitable for the city;  Gothic buttresses were unsupportable on the spongy shore of the Adriatic.  In its place, a style sometimes called Venetian Gothic but more accurately  described as Veneto-Byzantine developed out of the trading and crusading tendencies of those early Venetians. 

The oldest surviving example of the Veneto-Byzantine style in residential architecture is the Palazzo Lordan, built in the 12^th century.   Its exemplary layout includes an arcade facing the water where goods could be unloaded while in back the palazzo faces a courtyard and garden, the family well (precious source of fresh water), and a staircase to the second floor, where the family living quarters were located.   The ground floor portico opens into a grand hall (androne), a space where many household functions were carried out.  The servants were housed on the top  - and least desirable - floor.  Rooms were laid out to maximize ventilation.  Abundant light, potable water, and green space were – and still are – markers of privilege in urban settings.

The Venetians also adopted their form of government from Byzantium, their ruler was a crowned Doge, essentially an elected lordship.   There was also a Mrs. Doge, the dogaressa, whose most important public duty, aside from the tricky combination of virginal purity and the production of future doges, was to preside over the Marriage of Venice to the Sea, an annual celebration of the city’s miraculous creation by early Romans..  Timed to take place on the Feast of the Ascension, this made a diplomatic medling of paganism with Christian piety.   According to myth, But the real origins of Venice are both more prosaic and more practical:  the city was founded by colonies of fishermen.

 “The basilica, like the city around it, has nothing to fear from this faun or from our own frivolity; it was born under the perpetual gaze of the visitor, and so it has continued.  Its artists have worked amid the chatter of sailors and merchants.  Since the beginning of the 13^thcentury, this façade has been a shop window, a showcase for antiques.  The shops under the arcades are in reality a continuation of it.”

-          Michel Butor, on tourists in Description de San Marco (1962), translated from the French by Ian Smallwood.

The pescheria or fish markets were popular places for workers to socialize as well as to work.  Factionalism, a feature of social life wherever people gather, was common among rich and poor alike.  It served as a civic safety valve in the confines of Venice.   Frequent brawls occurred, involving fists, sticks, and the occasional arson thrown in.  During the Renaissance, the upper class became less discrete in minimizing social differences as increasing prosperity tempted them to more conspicuous consumption, invidious comparison, and flagrant display, as though to anticipate Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of. the Leisure Class (1899).  Through the colors they wore in public, the well-to-do signaled their status; men, their social status and women, their  sexual status.  Sartorial distinctions siganled types of ‘bad’ women –  “concubines, courtesans, meretrici, and whores, to bordello prostitutes.” Workers invented their own forms of invidious comparison based on occupation, right down to the kind of fish one specialized in.  One native who moved easily between high and low was Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), as in this accoung of a night when he fell in with a band of roving rowdies.

 “One very dark night we decided to overturn a big marble table which was a sort of monument.    The table stood almost in the middle of the Campo Sant’ Angelo.   In the days of the war which the Republic had fought against the League of Cambrai, so the story ran, it was on this big table that the commissaries had counted out their pay to the recruits who enrolled in the service of Saint Mark.”

-          -  Casanova,  History of My Life translated by Willard Trask, New York, Harcourt, Brace  & World, 1967.

In Venice, the sacred is never far removed from the profane, or even out of sight. The Church of Santa Maria Formosa stands  just a few yards from  the Campiello Querini, formerly a communal field.

“From the outside the Church of Santa Maria Formosa  is a bulbous and comely church.  Behind it laps one of the narrow lanes of Venetian water which link streets to churches, squares to alleys.  The church is wide and peaceful in its  volume as if the front doors opened to show off the square before it, the square and all that stands around, the pharmacy, the funeral shop with its shiny coffins stacked one on top of another and carved with enthusiasm, the uneven roofline, the Bar dell’Orologio wherein youth and age stand eyeing each other, and, on the far left, the Communist Party’s ornate and ancient headquarters with its painted façade.”

-         - Muriel Spark, from Territorial Righta, New York, Coward, MacCann & Geoghegan: 1979.

Oh,lucky man.  William Dean Howells was able to enjoy this view whenever he liked.  Howells,  an American author, lived in the Palazzo Giustinian with his family when he was the U.S. Consul to Venice during the Lincoln administration.  In this remembrance, he describes hours spent in the Giustinian gardens.

“It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright and odorous blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing their names; and  I could hardly have said whether the garden was more charming when it was in its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a breath from the  mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with a light evanescent flowering of snow.  At any season the lofty palace walls rose over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved by the old mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister.  These often worked on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders to which one could have fancied the blossom of their youth had flown:”

 - William Dean Howells, Venetian Life (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin:1866

“ 

Beyond the noise of voices, the snatches of music, the swinging of paper lanterns, the tilting and dipping of sterns and bows, the church in its grey immensity stood motionless and silent.  Now that Eustace was growing accustomed to the light he saw that the façade was faintly flood-lit by the lamps at its base, a wash of gold had crept along the silver.  Yet how stern were the uncompromising straight lines, drawn like a diagram against the night; how intimidating were the shadows behind the buttresses which supported by roof and dome.”

-          L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda(1947)  - New York Review Books (2001) writing about the annual Feast of the Redeemer (Redentore) that takes place each July.

Hartley (1895-1972) began to frequent Venice after he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1922.  In spite of the admiration that his trilogy of novels about a brother and sister – Eustace and Hilda – evoked, commercial success eluded Hartley until 1953 when he published The Go-Between.  This was the novel that began with some of the most quoted words of 20^th century literature.  “The past is another country.  They do things differently there.”  Hartley may have been thinking of Venice or not when he wrote those lines but whether you take them as positive or negative, that sums up what so many have thought after seeing Venice.

Jean-Baptiste Leroux (b. 1949) is a French photographer, unafraid of beauty, gifted with the patience that is required for being there to seize the moment.  His books include Venise: itinerance, Paris, Actes Sud: 2011, Dans les jardins des Grimaldis, Paris, Editions du Chene: 2009 and The Gardesn of Versailles, London, Thames & Hudson: 2002.

Images: Jean-Baptiste Leroux, photographer,  Reunion musees nationaux, Paris.

1. Dorsoduro - Palazzo Loredan, arcade gate.

2. Dorsoduro - Near the Guidecca Canal.
3. Looking down at a canal.
4. Venetian windows
5. Dorsoduro - Palazzo Giustinian - well.
6. Pescheria - San Polo.
7. Dorsoduro - Traghetto San Maria del Giglio - San Marco.
8. Dorsoduro - Campo Santa Margherita.
9. Dorsoduro - View of Venice from the roof of Palazzo Giustinian.
10.  San Polo - Calle dei Boteri.

Frida Kahlo

July 12, 2014, 12:15 pm

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It arrived in my mailbox and here it is.  I hope it's authentic.  I'd like to think it is.

On Time Off Time: Dorothea Tanning

July 17, 2014, 12:22 pm

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"What I remember most about this picture is the support.  It was a piece of wonderful linen that I stretched and prepared myself.  It was the only time I ever did any such thing.  And then, of course, when it was done, I felt I had to make some rare precious picture on it, and I think the words I used were the key to the enigmatic quality that I wanted."– Dorothea Tanning, 1989

If art would only talk it would, at last, reveal

itself for what it is, what we all burn to know.

As for our certainties, it would fetch a dry yawn 

then take a minute to sweep them under the rug.

certainties time-honored, as meaningless as dust

under the rug.  High time, my dears, to listen up.

Finally Art woudl talk, till the sky like a mouth

clear its convulsive throat while flashes and crashes

erupted as it spoke - a star-shot avalanche of

visions in uproar, drowned by the breathy din

Of soundbites as we strain to hear its august words"

"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz."

 - "Artspeak" by Dorothea tanning from Coming To That, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press: 2011.

When Dorothea Tanning died in 2011, she was 101 years old and, as she described herself, "the oldest  living emerging poet."  Perhaps her decades-long career in surrealist artist made it easier for Tanning to cut through the weeds of modernist caveats about the reliability of words.  She could equally well make a poem be playful or serious.  Nor is there any hint of nostalgia, which would be understandable in one who was toasted at her wedding by Igor Stravinsky in 1946.  Free association, automatic writing, subconsciousness; Tanning had juggled with hand grenades in making her painting.   She came to text, both poetry and novels, as a practitioner more than a theorist.  Which may have something to do with the genesis of  "Artspeak."  There is a sly hint of a Cheshire-cat smile in these lines and the thought occurs:  those who can do; those who can't theorize.

Image: Dorothea Tanning - On Time Off Time, 1948, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Smart Hearts In The City

July 22, 2014, 8:02 am

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"So she stands – nude- stretching dully

Two amber combs loll through her hair

A vague molested carpet pitches

Down the dusty length of stair.

She does not see, she does not care

                              It’s always there.

The frail mosaic on her window

Facing starkly toward the street

I scribbled there by tipsy sparrows -

Etched there with their rocking feet.

Is fashioned too, by every beat

                           Of shirt and sheet.

Still her clothing is less risky

Than her body in its prime.

They are chain-stitched and so is she

China-stitched to her soul for time.

Raveling grandly into vice

Dropping crooked into rhyme.

Slipping through the stitch of virtue,

                           Into crime.

Though her lips are vague and fancy

In her youth –

They bloom vivid and repulsive

As the truth.

Even vases in the making

                       Are uncouth".

-       Seen from the ‘L’  by Djuna Barnes, from The Book of Repulsive Women

Hard boiled.   How a term supposedly coined to describe the cynicism of  men fighting organized crime during the Prohibition Era translated so easily into an unflattering sobriquet for 'the new woman' would make a neat subject for a doctoral thesis.  I can see the footnotes clustering already. I hereby offer a few hints. 
 When the New York publisher A.C. Boni issued The Hard-Boiled Virgin by Frances Newman in 1930, the term was already understood to denote a woman who chose - dared even - to remain single.  Newman's previous novel Dead Lovers Are True Lovers had been published in 1928.  The New Georgia Encyclopedia (where you can read about Newman's life and works) describes her "writing within a feminist tradition of southern fiction that has been nearly forgotten."   I'd say obliterated is more like it.  I read both novels in the Arno Reprints series when I was in college and wondered at her determination, as a translator fighting encroaching blindness, as a woman who saw too clearly and too soon the price and who paid it for misogyny, racism, and their deformations of female sexuality.  Newman died at age fifty, too soon.

Somewhere between the forgotten Frances Newman and the celebrated Djuna Barnes is Mina Loy (1882-1966).. Born in London, Loy's life was restlessness personified (where didn't she go?) and her poetry was agreed to be sui generis from the the moment her Lunar Baedecker (sic) was published in 1923. Sardonic about love and also beautiful, Loy managed to offend many avant-gharde male writers and artists but that seems not to have slowed her down one bit.

 “You should have disappeared years ago: -

so disappear

on Third Avenue

To share the heedless incognito

Of shuffling shadow-bodies

animate with frustration

whose silence’s only potence is

respiration

preceding the eroded bronze contours

of their other aromas

through thr monstrous air

of this red-lit thoroughfare.

Here and there

saturnine

neon-signs

set afire

a feature

on their hueless overcast

of down-cast countenances.

For their ornateness

Time, the contortive tailor,

on and off,

clowned with sweat-sculptured cloth

to press

upon these irreparable dummies

an eerie undress

of mummies

half unwound.

     2

Such are the compensations of poverty

to see –

Like an electric fungus

sprung from its own effulgence

of intercircled jewelry

reflected on the pavement

like a reliquary sedan-chair,

out of a legend, dumped there,

before a ten-cent Cinema

a sugar-coated box office

enjail a Goddess

aglitter, in her runt of a tower,

with ritual claustrophobia.

Such are compensations of poverty

to see –

Transient in the dust,

the brilliancy

of a trolley

loaded with luminous busts;

lovely in anonymity

they vanish

with the mirage

of their passage."

- On Third Avenue by Mina Loy from The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy, New York, Noonday Press: 1996.

None of this was met with enthusiasm by the male writers, celebrated or otherwise, of the time.   In The Lady Poets With Footnotes (1924) Ernest Hemingway, under the guise of satirizing the style of T.S. Eliot, took aim at six poets including Edna St. Vincent Millet ("College nymphomaniac"), Sara Teasdale ("Favorite of State University Male Virgins"), and Amy Lowell ("She smoked cigars all right, but her stuff was no good").

The Book of Repulsive Womenby Djuna Barnes was published in 1915, at a price fifteen cents, too much of a bargain as it turned out, for the price soon more than tripled as Barnes' sassy, hard-boiled  vision of female sexuality became an underground sensation.

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a literary modernist whose Collected Poems were reprinted by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2005.  The Book of Repulsive Women remains, as always, a difficult to find gem.

It is readable online here, thanks to Johannes Beilharz. 

Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology, edited by Robert Haas & Paul Ebenkamp, Berkeley, Counterpoint Press: 2014.

 

Images:
1. Chana Orloff -  Torso of a woman, 1918, Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval, Paris.
Chana Orloff's Torso of a Naked Woman was purchased from the artist  by the American expatriate painter Romaine Brooks in Paris shortly after it was completed.
2. Chana Orloff -private collection, France.

Beach Books: Martin Gumpert And Andre Malraux

July 26, 2014, 9:52 am

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“Is there anything sadder than a provincial American Main Street?  Everywhere there are the same shops, the same products, the same posters, everywhere the same uninspired architecture – the undertaker, the grocer, the movie house, the community center. “

“This is the way it is – and yet again, that is not the way it is.  For this dreariness that so frightens us existed over there too.  There were the tenements in the north of Berlin, the worker’s quarters in Essen…slums in Britain and slums in Vienna, there were small towns in Brandenburg that left nothing to be desired in dreariness… But we never thought that we should be at the mercy of this backwater of culture that exists everywhere in the world.  There are no longer situations against which we are protected, agonies against which we are proof.”

“Where did our arrogance get us?  We were suddenly face to face with the silently grown masses of the European continent – an anonymous assemblage of creatures without historical memory, without a traditional picture, for whom the scenery and the way of life of the old continent merely serve as a costume and a backdrop.  To gratify their rightful claim to existence, they had to be educated, fed, clothed.  We thought we were speaking in their name.  But we did not understand them, nor did they understand us.  All that took place in politics, in public life, in the spiritual or religious sphere, was clothed in an unworldly jargon that had meaning for us, but meant only nonsense to them.”

-  excerpts from in Heil Hunger! Health Under Hitler by Martin Gumpert, New York, Alliance Book Corporation: 1940.

Martin Gumpert (1897-1955) was a German Jewish physician who became an early refugee from Nazi Germany, arriving in New York in 1936. He is remembered today, if at all, as a footnote to the literary career of Thomas Mann with whom he shared information on the course of syphilis that Mann used in writing his novel Doctor Faustus (1947). 

Gumpert's book  Heil Hunger! Health Under Hitler, published in 1940, was an early explication of what a reviewer in New Masses called "the farrago of 'Arayan' science."  In it, Gumpert systematically dismantled Nazi claims to improved public health for the German public under its regimen. Embedded in the text was a message, imperfectly understood at the time, that is still resonant.  Even if you do not agree with Karl Marx that the material conditions of existence determine consciousness, there is reason to be uneasy at the withdrawal of the meritocracy from the rest of us. 

In his woefully under-appreciated volumes The Psychology of Art (1947-49), the French writer Andre Malraux wrestled with the same implied question: is culture a means to transcendence or is it divisive?  (The Twilight of the Absolute by Andre Malraux, translated by Stuart Gilbert, Pantheon Books : 1950).

“We speak of the past as though we planted it in our culture, like an ancient monument in a modern city;…. For a small minority, keenly interested in history, it is fraught with meaning, and its elucidation means a gradually won victory over chaos.  For the vast majority it comes to life only in some large legend…” – excerpt from  The Metamorphism of the Gods by Andre Malraux translated by Stuart Gilbert, Doubleday, New York: 1960.

It seems to me that one thing that happens when we erase certain writers or artists is that their ideas are reused without the gift of remembrance.  How this can happen in a sea of endlessly chaining academic footnotes is hard to understand.  But when Andre Malraux began disappearing from the library shelves I decided I'd better get reading.

Image:

1. Kate Traumann Steinitz - Berlin, 1909, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Note:   Kate Traumann Steinitz(1899-1975)  was a German-born artist who was associated with the Bauhaus and worked on various projects with Kurt Schwitters before being banned from working by the National Socialist government in 1936.   She moved to first to New York City and died in Los Angeles.