THE BLUE LANTERN

Vienna in winter is more than a picturesque backdrop in Jem Cohen's latest film Museum Hours; it is a participant in this hybrid of drama and documentary, its streets become animated paintings. Cohen considered calling the film Museum, Ours out of his conviction, germinated in childhood visits to the Metropolitan Museum with his parents, that museums only come alive when visitors engage with their collections. Watching Museum Hours I sensed an erotic aspect to that relationship, as people see themselves mirrored in art. Cohen's film is sophisticated but not cynical and his choice of another comprehensive museum for his setting seems to be a love letter to the Met.

Located on the city's Ringstrasse, the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum opened in 1891 to display the formidable collections of the Hapsburg emperors. The camera glides past the museum's medieval and classical works, settling in on the early modern Dutch and Flemish paintings that are the heart of the picture gallery; paintings that were revolutionary in their time for making art out of everyday life. And everyday life streams through the museum, too, individuals and groups of tourists and schoolchildren.. Watching the spectators is Johann (played by Bobby Sommer, a musician and promoter at the Vienna Film festival where Cohen and his work have often appeared) a museum guard, sitting behind a velvet rope when not answering questions, a man obviously relishing each moment.

Entering the gallery one day the film's second character, Anne (played by the Canadian singer Mary Margaret O'Hara) appears. She is not a tourist; rather she has been summoned to Vienna after her name was discovered in the address book of her distant cousin, a woman who now lies alone and comatose in a Viennese hospital. Anne does not speak German and has little money to spare. A person on whom little is lost, Johann senses that Anne is adrift and as they walk together through the galleries and talk about the pictures, he offers to act as her translator and advocate. On this modest scaffolding the film unfolds.

From Memling, Goya, and Velasquez, the two move on to Johann's favorite gallery, the Brueghel room. Here is the largest collection of Breughels in the world, including The Tower of Babel, Peasant Wedding, Winter, and The Conversion of Paul, the last three purchased by the acquisitive Hapsburg in one year. Brueghel's paintings are among the most complex expressions of humanism on canvas. Dirt, poverty, misfortune, and arbitrary fate cannot extinguish the spark of happiness. The canvases are large and bursting with activity. The camera travels like a human eye around each painting as a tour guide explains to a group that Brueghel's ostensible subject is never the whole story and is sometimes hardly noticeable, just as in life important events go unnoticed even when they take place in plain sight. I was reminded of historian Robert Delevoy's wonder at Brueghel's eye: "a gaze so eager and ruthless."

Although Johann is gay, there is a gentle romantic quality to the relationship between these two. Johann's deadpan humor as he recalls his younger days as a heavy metal musician complement Anne's occasional bursts of singing. They smile together at children who lose their boredom when they notice the museum's large number of paintings featuring severed heads and, again, at teenagers who perk up at the realization that some of these old paintings were the erotica of their time. Where else can one contemplate a man's tender ass without being censured? Underlining that point, Cohen includes a brief fantasy of the spectators, as naked as the characters in the paintings. When they walk through the streets and stop at cafes, the flea markets and street vendors with their hodgepodge look like extensions of the museum.
Shuttling back and forth between museum and hospital, Anne's situation suggests an unanswerable question. If art endures and life is short, is art timeless or does it transcend time, and what values does the question suggest? Museum Hours reminded me of Wim Wenders'Wings of Desire in a way I can't yet put my finger on but, still, that is a compliment.

Museum Hourswas filmed at the Kunsthirstorisches (Art History) Museum in Vienna, using high-definition digital video and super-16-millimeter film. Cohen made a virtue of his low budget and the resulting need to use mostly non-professional actors, getting outspreading works from cast and crew.

Jem Cohen has worked as writer/director outside commercial cinema, a sad comment on what's inside today. Cohen has often expressed his admiration for the French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker. Cohen has also made a short film Anne Truitt, Working (2009) about the artist and Amber City, a film about an unnamed city that is actually Pisa, Italy (1999). All three films are included on the Cinema Guild dvd release.

All images are still from Museum Hours, distributed in the U.S. by The Cinema Guild.

" I have lost the train of my discourse.
It does not matter if we find it."
- Gertrude Stein, excerpt from Stanzas in Meditation, Los Angeles, Sun & Moon Press: 1994, first published in Poetry magazine, July, 1957.

Freud thought leaving things unfinished was Leonardo da Vinci's primary "symptom."

Image: Roger Parry - illustration for banalite by Leon-Paul Fargue, 1930, Pompidou Center, Paris.

"And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;"
- excerpt from "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" by Wallace Stevens

To make a bronze rabbit look alive, to achieve what Wallace Stevens called "rabbit-light+, and, further, to make a cocked ear that looks as though it will twitch at any moment, takes the combined talents of a polymath, someone who knows the properties of the materials, the ways of animals, and a deep spatial sense. Someone like Edoaurd-Marcel Sandoz. The same master of verisimilitude who could carve a falcon on a branch, out of a branch, could also make porcelain appear to be origami paper birds (saliere en forme de cocotte en papier), a winsome feat trompe-l'oieil.

Edouard Marcel Sandoz (1881-1971) was born in Basel, Switzerland. His father, Edward, founded the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company (now Novartis).

After a period in Rome, Sandoz studied at the School of Industrial Arts in Geneva from 1900-03. Then he enrolled at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris for two years of training with sculptors Antonin Mercie (1845-1916), Antoine Injalbert (1845-1933), and the painter Fernand Cormon (1854-1924). Sandoz was most influenced by a sculptor he apparently never worked with, Francois Pompon (1855-1933). Pompon had worked as an assistant to Auguste Rodin. His L’Ours Blanc (1922), some translated as The Polar Bear in Stride, is one of the most loved works at the Musee d’Orsay .

The career Sandoz fashioned from his many interests encompassed painter-decorator, engineer, physicist, chemist (researching dyes and their applications), inventor (the invention of the black light has been attributed to Sandoz. “Art must include love, nature, and science,” Sandoz wrote (the translation is mine). His heart belonged to sculpture, with a special chamber for his love of animals.

It was a shortage of bronze and stone for sculpture during World War I that led Sandoz to begin working with porcelain and to his association with the Haviland Limoges firm from 1915-1952. His porcelain boxes, bottles, carafes, tea and coffee services were among its most sought after items. Sandoz worked with other materials, such as marble, bronze when he turned to sculpture. Stylistically, Sandoz easily embraced the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco. Even today, these styles may seem peculiarly foreign, even though Rockefeller Center is the center of a mythic Art Deco Manhattan, but Sandoz would surely be better known in North America if his work could travel, no small undertaking for sculptures.

That deep spatial sense I mentioned enabled Sandoz to create his masterpiece, The Crossroads of Life (1967), that stands in the garden of the Musee Oceanograhpique in Monaco. The four-sided figure represents the stages in the life of a woman: infancy, youth, maturity, age. Viewed from the front, she is a nubile young woman, in the curvilinear Art Nouveau style. On the back of the statue, her hair becomes a drape, she is covered with a robe and it is the child who is naked. The right profile, under a veil of hair, is the face of a mature woman. The left profile shows the face of an old woman.

Sandoz founded the French Wildlife Society in 1933 and, with his brother Aurelius, an animal sanctuary. Sandoz's relationship with animals was deep. There are photographs of him at work in his studio at Denantou in Lausanne surrounded by a panther, fennecs, monkeys, cubs, fish, frogs, turtles, dogs, cats, parrots, and even a cheetah.

In recognition of his many and various achievements, Sandoz was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and also a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

He died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1971.

For more, visit Fondation Sandoz.
Images:
1. Edouard-Marcel Sandoz - Lapin a l'oreille dressee (Rabbit with a cocked ear), La Piscine, Roubai.
2. Edouard-Marcel Sandoz - Falcon on a Branch, Fondation Sandoz, Basel.
3. Edouard-Marcel Sandoz - Owl, private collection, France.
4. Edouard-Marcel Sandoz - Saliere en forme de cocotte, La Piscine, Roubaix.
5. unidentified photographer - Sandoz in his studio.

Think of Gauguin, then think of Paul Serusier, Emile Bernard, Charles Filiger Armand Seguin, among many others. What binds the members of the Pont-Aven School of artists that coalesced in Brittany is color. Bright colors, boldly applied used to produce an effect similar to cloissonne. Black lines used instead of shadowing and a noticeable lack of perspective.

Although he was part of the group, Paul Colin drew on other skills to make art and, in doing so, brought to our attention other aspects of life and landscape in late 19th century France. Brittany was an antique land, inhabited by humans for hundreds of thousands of years, but not for its hospitable climate. Winters were hard and people struggled to farm the rocky lands and fish the treacherous waters of the Atlantic. Colin's three apple tress in winter (Trois pommiers en hiver) exists in a different universe from Emile Bernard's Madeleine in the Bois d'Amour (1888) but they were created from the same sources, in the same neighborhood, so to speak. To pursue the point, the dreamy young Madeleine is an image all about symbolism as she daydreams in the Woods of Love while the woman in Colin's Resources d'hiver, bent by age, is blown along by a cold wind, a symbol of those forces of nature that imprinted themselves on the human inhabitants as much as the humans made their imprints on the land. No bright colors but lines that tell a different story.

So who was Paul-Emile Colin?

His name sounds vaguely familiar, one of those names that flesh out a list of friends of (insert name of indubitably famous person here) but the French artist Paul-Emile Colin (1867-1949) merits our attention for something more than the company he kept. He began with engraving in the 1890s and, after the turn of the century, he executed several prestigious commissions as an illustrator that benefited from his ability to put such varied worlds on paper as the mysticism of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and the 19^th century tales of Gothic horror by Edgar Allen Poe. And all this resulted from Colin's experiments as carving wood with a pocket knife.

Colin's more famous friend, a man he described as “a fairground barker, a troubadour, or a pirate” able to “exude energy from every pore,” was Paul Gauguin. The two young men met at Le Pouldu, a fishing village on the the coast of Brittany in the summer of 1890. Much lateer in life, Colin experimented with color, influenced as he admitted by the powerful colors of Gauguin. But he did not need color and it added little to the impact of his work. Colin needed, and took, from his encounter with the Post-Impressionists, the determination to compose line-defined images. An intriguing choice given that Gauguin, the artist who so inspired him, was anything but a skilled draftsman. Perhaps Colin sensed an opening for his own work to find its place in the dynamic group that surrounded Gauguin.

Depending on who tells the story, Colin was either a medical doctor who amused himself making art during his vacations of a man with a passion for art who needed to support himself by more certain gainful employment. By 1901, Colin had achieved enough success with his engravings that he felt confident enough to give up practicing medicine to become an artst full-time.

Images: Paul-Emile Colin, Bibliotheque de l'INHA, Jacques Doucet Collection, Paris. The collector Jacques Doucet (1853–1929) was a French fashion designer and art collector, known for his elegant dresses in pastel colors.

1. Trois pommiers en hiver (Three apple trees in winter).

2. Resources d'hiver, 1902.

3. Eglise de Galluis.

"I wish Mrs. Claus hadn't been so impressed by that artist who talked her into welded steel Xmas trees!"

Three years ago I received this Xmas car from Joanne Molina.. A Chicagoan herself, she was familiar with the satirical lithographs of Richard Aberle Florsheim. I was not. But when I looked at the card again, I was unwilling to recycle it and decided to see what more I could. find. As the brief biography below demonstrates, I didn't find much information, but I wonder now what Florsheim learned during his time working with the French post-impressionist Emile Bernard.

What I did uncover were hundreds of Florsheims in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Florsheim's native city. Many of them are evocative landscapes that take steps beyond the techniques that Florsheim learned in Paris and are worthy of attention. But it is Florsheim's delight in the foibles of artists and their followers that I want to present here.

These 'cartoons' were drawn during the second half of the 1950s at a moment of high seriousness in politics and also in the art world where American triumphalism was the preferred mode in art critics. Foremost among them was Clement Greenburg who regarded the United States - and probably himself, truth be told, as the guardian of "advanced art" after the philistine rampage of the Nazis through the art collections of Europe before and during World War II. For Greenberg, the American abstract expressionist painters were the point toward which all previous developments pointed. For such high seriousness, Pop Art would prove vexing but that wouldn't arrive until the 1960s.

The pompous tone that Greenberg set is still the accepted one today for those who want to have their ideas on art taken seriously. The terms have changed if only because there are new graduates hoping to make careers for themselves. It is that tone that makes Florsheim's deflationary tactics so charming. He was no mean-spirited Philistine; he was a serious artist with credentials. There may be exponentially more money floating around in the art world today but human nature is much the same as it was when Florsheim created the Florsheim school of artists.

In Florsheim's world, sculptors are an especially wacky bunch. Take Shistokovich whose scrawny, angular work resembles a generic Giacometti man. Or Bolofinsky ["(He) always did say that someday the world would catch up with him."}] whose outdoor metalscape anticipated the television antenna. An apartment dweller thinks that the profusion of antennas atop his building indicate that Bolofinsky's work is "selling like hotcakes." A work by Messovich (!) titled Bald Ego looks like nothing so much as an escapee from a psychoanalyst's couch. His delight in naming his charactersreminds me of a comment made about Constance Garnett, the British translator of some seventy books from the Russian, who introducedthe great Russian novelists to English readers in the early 20th century. Her achievement was considerable but she has also been accused of creating one giant lumpen Russian writer in all those works -Tolstoyesvky.

Richard Aberle Florsheim (1916-1979) came from a wealthy Chicago family. After studying at the University of Chicago, Florsheim spent two years traveling abroad (1936-38). While in France Florsheim worked in the atelier of the painter Emile Bernard, a member of the Pint-Aven circle that developed around Paul Gauguin. During the late 1930s Florsheim exhibited with the Salon des Refusés, . He returned to Chicago in the summer of 1939 where he rented a studio. There he began to produce lithographs and had his first exhibition in 1942.

Images: by Richard Aberle Florsheim, c. 1956-58, are in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

1. Welded steel Xmas trees.

2.I think it should hang this way.

3.I see what you mean by some "art lover"s being socail climbers.

4. Life class at the School of Contemporary Art.

Fa la la la la, la la la la!

A plane crashes into your boudoir? Quel domage! These things happen. A girl has to finish her makeup before she greets the day.
A school girl's riddle from my mother's adolescence. Why do males disappear before Thanksgiving and reappear after New Year's? If you've heard this and know the answer, then you are hard-boiled.

To be hard-boiled is an attitude, first incubated in Manhattan, a product of the bouillabaisse that made the first truly sophisticated American city. Before The New Yorker there was Vanity Fair, the home of the diamond cut on the hardness scale.

In 1915, the Canadian Stephen Leacock wondered in its pages, "Are The Rich Happy?" To begin with, he had trouble finding them. "Very often I have thought that I had found them. but it turned out that it was not so. They were not rich at all. They were quite poor. They were hard-up. They were pushed for money. They didn't know where to turn for ten thousand dollars."

During the next two years a young writer, Dorothy Rothschild Parker (as she was then known) appeared in the magazine's pages with a series of "Hate Songs," satirical verses on various subjects: office life, actresses, relatives and, of course, men. Although she was only twenty-three, Parker was already a walking anthology of sharp edges. Husbands, she opined, were "The White Woman's Burden" and concluded, "I wish to Heaven somebody would alienate their affections."

An unlikely novelist of the hard-boiled was Frances Newman (1883-1928) from Atlanta. I discovered Newman's two published novels when I was at college and have never forgotten them. It was the titles that seduced me: The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928) Newman was a literary modernist who layer cake structuring of time and space reminded me of Virginia Woolf. Newman also preferred to use interior monologue rather than dialogue to move her novels forward. If Newman didn't read Dorothy Richardson' multi-volume epic Pilgrimage (1915-1935) , then great minds do think alike.
The daughter of a prominent judge, Newman was sent to finishing schools, in anticipation of a genteel adulthood to be spent as a librarian. But Paris and the Sorbonne changed her mind. Newman had finished her first novel at twenty-three but was never able to get it published. Undeterred, she kept on writing and when The Head-Boiled Virgin appeared it was immediately hailed by the eminent James Branch Cabell as "brilliant." In it, Katherine Farraday chooses independence over marriage.
Two years later the publication of Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers caused a sensation of a different sort. Newman's hometown of Atlanta was outraged and the book was banned in Boston. Modernism was acceptable among a select group of readers but personifying the misogyny and racism of southern life through the characters of an angelic wife and a seductive 'other' woman was not to be tolerated. Newman died too young and the guardians of literature were happy to forget her. Thanks to Barbara Ann Wade, we now have a reconsideration of Newman's works.

For further reading:

1. Frances Newman - The Hard-Boiled Virgin, New York, Arno Reprints: 1977

2. Frances Newman - Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers, New York, Arno Reprints: 1977.

3. Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair, edited by Grayfon Carter, New York, Penguin Press: 2014.

Image: Tim Walker - for Vogue UK, London.

“Snow is falling, leaving the whole world unmanned,
in the minority. Now your private detective
agency comes into its own and
you catch up with yourself because your prints are so
recognizably defective.

Not that you're about to collect a reward
for turning yourself in. A noiseless, nothing of note
precinct. With the onset of night, so much light's packed
into one star-shard.

It's like refugees packed into one boat.
Mind you don't go blind. You, yourself are on the street,
an orphan, a social pariah, an outcast
who, for all your pocket slapping, have come up with sweet
damn all. From your mouth there issues only a dragon blast
of hot air. Maybe the time has come for you, another
Nazarene, to offer

up a prayer for all those hotshot
wise men, from both sides of the planet, schlepping along
with their groaning coffers,
for all th little children in their carry cots.”
translated from the Russian by Paul Muldoon, 1986, in Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2001.

From the time he was a young man, Joseph Brodsky tried to compose a Christmas poem each year “as a sort of birthday greeting.” To Brodsky, Christmas was a holiday and Christianity as a religion were markers of the passing of time. Christianity, with its ordering of time – B.C. And A.D. – showed its “temerity.” “What is included in this 'before” he asked.? Although as a native of Russia, Brodsky might have been expected to follow the Russian Orthodox Church, he pointed out that celebrating Christmas is a more important event in Roman Catholicism. Because water is about movement and therefore connected to chronos, Brodsky liked to celebrate the holiday in Venice.

In,"Snow is falling" we can find elements from the Christmas story, refracted through the realities of life under the Soviet regime. Brodsky undoubtedly had read the early satirists of the regime: Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. You don't have to read The Twelve Chairs to get Brodsky' slant here, but you shoudl treat yourself.

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad. He began writing poetry in his twenties while working a s a geologist’s assistant. His work attracted the attention of the great poet of Russia’s ‘Silver Age’, Anna Akhmatova. Less fortunately, it also attracted the attention of the authorities. Brodsky was a writer who believed the maxim “Everyone is entitled to my opinion. Notwithstanding that when he was forced to emigrate, first to Vienna and then to the United States, his application was supported most strongly W.H. Auden, a homosexual, when Brodsky came to write a book about Venice (Watermark,1992 ), he included a number of gratuitous swipes at homosexuals, sounding like nothing so much as a cranky old man. Brodsky, who died at age fifty-six, looked like an old man even in his forties. Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize in 1987.

Image: Mikhail Lemkhin - untitled (Xmas star) from Nativity Poems.

In sweet rejoicing,
now sing and be glad!
Our hearts' joy
lies in the manger;
And it shines like the sun
in the mother's lap.
- excerpt from In dulce jubilo , a carol from the Medieval period, originating in a mixture of Latin and German.

To readers of The Blue Lantern and those who have shared your thoughts, my wish for peace and joy to all.

Image: Giovanni Agostino da Lodi - The Holy Family, c.1495-1520, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Not much is known about the.painter Giovanni Agostino da Lodi. He was active in the period roughly bounded by 1495 and 1520. For this reason attributions of his work has been fluid, to say the least, for centuries. Nevertheless, the quiet work represents the wonder oc creation in a manner that transcends the particulasr of religious beliefs. The folds of the fabric of their clothing carry expressive weight , and the austere linear style were not particularly characteristic of Agostino da Lodi's work, but they do share the style of the 12th-century Lombard school of painting.

“…;suddenly coppery bright as a patch of sunlight moved across them. The field beyond was a sudden emerald, with sprouting aftermath; and there were distances of deep, aqueous blue.” - Janet Lewis

"Her books possess a quality of deep repose, a kind of distilled wisdom in the face of human disaster and pain, which is difficult to describe and impossible to imitate, but which, once encountered, is unforgettable." - Dick Davis, British poet, writing about Janet Lewis

The pairing of paintings of Nell Brooker Mayhew with the writings of Janet Lewis strikes me as a happy one. Both women were born in Illinois, studied in Chicago (Brooker Mayhew at the School of the Art Institute, Lewis at the University of Chicago) and eventually moved to California, where they experienced a feeling of simpatico with its alien landscape. Both also experienced the pull of French art; Brooker Mayhew's paintings display an Impressionistic handling of paint and the effect of light in her perception of landscape and for Lewis, her writing was the richer for her living in Paris. Left alone with two daughters to raise, Brooker Mayhew worked hard to support them in southern California while Lewis married a professor at Stanford University.

Having written about Nell Brooker Mayhew before, I'll concentrate here on Janet Lewis and the question of how the author of "one of the most significant short novels in English" is so seldom honored. Janet Lewis (1899-1998) certainly lived long enough and her admirers were a constellation of stars, among them W.H.Auden, Louise Bogan, and Evan S. Connell who wrote "I cannot think of another writer whose stature so far exceeds her public recognition."

Lewis majored in French and began to write poetry while at the University. She met her future husband, the poet Yvor Winters at the campus Poetry Club and, although she always loved poetry best, eventually turned to writing fiction to earn a living. “I began as a poet. Very small sized too. My first published poems, or practically the first, were about Indians, about Manibozho, and the legendary Indians of the Ojibways.”

For her graduation in 1920, Lewis's father gave her a round-trip ticket to Europe. In the event, she stayed in Paris for nine months, working at a passport office near the Arc de Triomphe. She returned on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1950. In retrospect, the three novels Lewis wrote that have been called "novels of circumstantial evidence" read as trans-Atlantic love letters.

"Blood in Paris, after Saint Bartholomew,
Blood of Awatobi, for a cause so similar,
and it was only yesterday. In time,
Less than three centuries.
Purcell was only lately dead. Racine
Lived almost inot the hour of disaster.
Above the careful gardens of Versailles.
Madame de Maintenon and Louis styled the Great
Dreamed of a single faith for France,
And the Huguenots of France
Were fled to England..."
- excerpt from "Awatobi" by Janet Lewis, in The Ancient Ones

It must havestruck Lewis as a divinely pointed finger when she received a copy Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a 19^th century expose of cases of justice gone wrong. The Stanford community was in shock when a man named David Lamson, was accused of killing his wife in their campus home. The evidence was circumstantial and speculation was the result.. Was the woman's death murder or an accident? The case was tried, appealed, and tried again, before Lamson was ultimately acquitted.

Inspired by contemporary events, Lewis began a series of novels based in historical events, notably the tale of a 16th century French peasant, Martin Guerre. The bones of the story were these: Martin Guerre deserted his wife Berrtande de Rois for eight long years - and then he returned, a changed man. Where once he had been harsh and unkind, now he was a loving husband. But the wife and the community that welcomed him back eventually began to have doubts. Was Martin Guerre really a changed man or an imposter? Eventually a trial was held and Martin Guerre's fate rested on the testimony of Bertrande. Lewis wisely chose to tell the story in The Wife of Martin Guerre through Bertrande, as the moral dilemma was hers. Completed in 1935, the novel went unpublished until 1941. Lewis was not done, with this moral tale and returned to it again, writing the libretto for an operatic version in 1958. (She also wrote the libretti for other operas: Mulberry Street, based on a story by O. Henry, Birthday of the Infanta from a tale by Oscar Wilde and The Last of the Mohicans.) Twenty-five years later historian Nathalie Zemon Davis was researching a book about the trial and also co-wrote the screenplay for a film version,The Return of Martin Guerre, starring Gerard Depardieu as Marin and Nathalie Baye as Bertrande. Critics hailed it as one of the most historically accurate movies ever made.

“ It appeared with the colors of a pearl, pinkish, white, faintly green and flecked with pale gold, as if all the colors might be the effect of the late sunlight.” - Janet Lewis, lineswritten about the coast of Normandy above Le Havre while living in northern California, from The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron.

The other novels of circumstance were The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron and The Trial of Soren Qvist

Lewis considered Scarron her best novel. Also set in France,in 1694, it is the story of a poor Parisian bookbinder. Into the lives of Jean Larcher, his wife and son, comes Scarron, an opportunist and distributor of incendiary political pamphlets. Three humble lives are pitiably ruined and an innocent man is hanged for treason. Also dating from the 17th century, but this time set in rural Denmark, the characters are a poor pastor named Soren Qvist, the wife of a taverner, and a traveler.

For further reading:
The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis. Denver, Swallow Press: 1941
The Trial of Soren Qvist by Janet Lewis. New York, Doubleday: 1947.
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron by Janet Lewis. New York, Doubleday: 1959.
The Ancient Ones: Poems by Janet Lewis. Portola Valley Calif, No Dead Lines Press: 1979.
Women Writers of the West Coast, edited by Marilyn Yalom. Santa Barbara, Capra Press: 1984.

Images:
1. Nell Brooker Mayhew - Sycamores In A Mountain Landscape, 1910, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.
2. Nell Brooker Mayhew - Lone Tree And Poppies, no date given, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.
3. Nell Brooker Mayhew - California Cottonfields, c. 1915, Sullivan Gosss gallery, Santa Barbara

I was introduced to the photography of Kent Shiraishi by Suzanne, the Errant Aesthete, in 2011 when Shiraishi received an award from the magazine National Geographic. Shiraishi, who is Japanese, describes himself as a Samurai photographer. He lives on the northern island of Hokkaido, an island whose shape is oddly similar to that of Newfoundland, another semi-detached province halfway around the world. And then, like peeling back layers of an onion, I discovered that there is something curious about the Blue Pond that put Shiraishi on the photographic map: the blue pond sometimes turns green.

During October and November, when winter arrives on Hokkaido, the pond at Biei where Shiraishi lives changes colors, and not just the ordinary colors you might expect. In spite of overcast autumn skies, the pond changes from turquoise to emerald green. Although it is known to local people as Blue Pond, the pond is an artificial excavation, part of an erosion control system built to protect the town from damage if the nearby volcano, Mount Tokachidaka, erupts. The cause of this dramatic color change has yet to be determined but scientists speculate that aluminum hydroxide in the water causes blue light to refract at shorter wavelengths than usual through the earth's atmosphere. Shiraishi's explanation is more succinct: "the weather." The weather is, of course, a compelling preoccupation of Japanese artists at least since the time of ukiyo-e or 'the floating world.'

“Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.” - excerpt from Beauty And Sadness by Yasunari Kawabta (1975)

Yasunari Kawabata’s prose is admired its combination of spareness and lyricism. To his countrymen, Kawabata was the writer who best carried forward ancient traditions in his novels, such as The Old Capital, Snow Country, and A Thousand Cranes. Yasunari Kawabats was the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

Orphaned when he was four years old, he went to live with grandparents and by the time he was fifteen, both of them had died as well. This left him alone in the world, and as a young writer living in Tokyo, Kawabata experimented with several styles before finding the voice for his stories of love's difficulties set against the the inexplicable beauties of nature.

In Beauty And Sadness, Kawabata wrote, “I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.” In the event, Kawabata died in 1972, an apparent suicide, although the exact circumstances were not determined.

“It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night colour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.” - excerpt from Snow Country (1956)

At some point during the winter the blue pond freezes over. Above the pond Sirius appears to the naked eye as the brightest star in the night sky but it is composed of two stars, a circle of light. Like Kawabata or the British poet Don Patterson in "Phantom IV" we bring to our contemplations "nerve and hand and eye."

Images: Kent Shiraishi, photographer, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.
1. Blue pond in winter.
2. Blue pond at first snow.
3. The blue pond at Sirius.

"To swim
in air. No. Not in
this wiry winter air."
- James Schuyler, excerpted from" In Wiry Winter" in Hymn To Life: Poems, New York, Random House: 1974

Music can inject warmth and moisture into the thin winter air. Listen to a fugue by the German composer Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), wherein multiple voices chase each other around the melody. Winters were cold in Lubeck where Buxtehude held an appointment as a court organist. Reputed to be the greatest organist of his day, Buxtehude the composer was admired - and still is - for bringing the sunny congeniality of the Venetian Baroque style to the stern Protestant style of the north. Buxtehude taught himself to play the violin while accompanying himself on organ, using the foot pedals, surely one way to keep warm in rooms without central heating.

Image:
Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le potager du roi a Versailles, arbres fruitieres en hiver, (The royal vegetable garden at Versailles - fruit trees in winter), Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, RMN, Grand Palais, Paris.

Two women walking in the snow under an umbrella bent against the wind. We have seen this kind of image before in Japanese prints from the floating world (ukiyo-e). But the Louvre Museum and the glass pyramids in the background are something new, or are they?
This could be the unidentified photographer's sly recognition of a fortuitous combination of pictorial elements drawn from japonisme, the French term for their infatuation with all things Japanese, aterm coined in the late 19thc century. What the French love, they appropriate as their own. Henri Riviere (1864-1951), an artist nicknamed the 'Little Hokusai" by the Japanese, turned Paris and then Brittany into his own versions of the floating world. Whether etching, color woodcut, or photography, Riviere demonstrated the influence of Japanese art on western aesthetics. The print below comes from Riviere's series Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902), an homage to Katsushika Hokusai's ukiyo-e masterpiece Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji (1826). But there is something else, something remarkable, going on in Riviere's work.

During the two years from 1887-89 when the Eiffel Tower was under construction, the project that would alter the Parisian skyline was controversial. Gustave Eiffel was only granted a permit for his proposed tower to stand for twenty years, a fact overlooked now that the tower has become one of the most beloved landmarks in the world. At the time, engineers debated whether the four legs could support the proposed tower. Riviere who spent his summers in the ancient Celtic landscape of Brittany was equally interested in modern inventions and became an important early photographer. Riviere was granted privileged access to the construction site and his photographs from inside the growing tower are thrilling and deserve to better known outside France.

If I had to choose one photograph to whet your appetite for the entire set (view here) it would be this bird's eye view of the Seine from the tower's Campanile. I don't know of another photographer in the 1880s who was doing this kind of thing. We've become accustomed to photographers going to extreme lengths to capture what we imagine aerial views in the photos of Margaret Bourke-White and others. Riviere, either fearless or nerveless, began documenting the site excavation in January 1887 and followed the construction up until it was completed in March 1889, in time for the opening of the Exposition Universelle on May 15th.

Exactly one hundred years later the Pyramide du Louvre, designed by the Japanese architect I.M. Pei opened to the public. Like the Eiffel Tower, it too was controversial and has also, with time, become a Parisian landmark.

As soon as I was struck by the similarity between Henri Riviere's famous woodcut of the little woman walking past the looming tower I suspected the photographer had it in mind, too. Riviere's Eiffel Tower series are almost as well known in France as the tower itself. The prints are charming but the photographs are a unique event.

Images:
1. Architectural Digest - walkers in the snow with umbrellas cross the plaza near the Louvre pyramid in Paris, January 2015.
2. Henri Riviere - a solitary walker in the snow holding an umbrella passes the Eiffel Tower under construction, 1888, from the series Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, Bibliotheque nationale de france, Paris.
3. Henri Riviere - photograph of the Seine taken from a scaffolding on the Campanile of the Eiffel tower under construction, 1888, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Antoine Mongodin - the Louvre and the pyramid in the snow, taken from in front of the Sully Pavillon, no date given, Louvre Museum, Paris.

In 2013 the Polish photographer Michal Iwanowski (b. 1977) set out to retrace the journey taken by his grandfather and his uncle after they escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow. Anatole and Wiktor had no way of knowing whether they would be able to make their way home to Poland in the tumultuous final months of World War II, but they were determined to die trying. Their 2200 kilometer trek took the two men through Belarus and Lithuania and all the way to Wroclaw where they were ultimately reunited with their relatives.

They made their journey on foot, moving mostly at night.. With no way to know who might be friend or foe, they avoided all human contact; hence Iwanowiski's title for this photo portfolio, Clear of People. The men survived on a meager diet of wild berries and mushrooms, and the occasional stolen potato or cabbage. What preserved their spirits through cold, dark and sleeping on the ground was the strength of their mutual bond and, perhaps, the diary in which Wiktor chronicled it all.

In his introduction to the exhibition of Clear of People, Iwanowski write that his grandfather lived a long life in Wroclaw, surviving until the age of ninety-two and that his uncle Wiktor is still living in Szczecin, Poland. Clear of People was presented in February 2014 at Ffotogallery, University of Wales, Newport. Iwanowski, who lives in Cardiff, was supported in this project in part by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.

At about he same time that Iwanowski was moving from west to east across Central Europe, Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski (b. 1957) was tracing a similar path in the other direction. To make Ida (pronounced Ee-da) Pawlikowski returned to his native country for the first time since childhood. Although the film is set in the early 1960s just as youth culture was beginning to trickle through the Iron Curtain, the Polish countryside appears impervious to the passing of time.

The filmmaker's own mixed ancestry led him to the relationship between Catholics and anti-antisemitism . "I come from a magnetic field of Catholicism, " Pawlikowski says, adding that his father's mother died in Auschwitz.
A film needs a narrative hook to hang more on than photograph does, so Pawlikowski created two characters loosely based on two people he has known: a Catholic priest and a former prosecutor, Teresa Wolinska.

Anna, a novice, played by first-time actress Agata Trzebuchowska, has been raised in a convent to a religious vocation. She knows that she was abandoned there as a baby, but no more than that. As Anna prepares for her final vows, the prioress sends her to Lodz to meet her only surviving relative, Wanda Gruz.

Wanda, played brilliantly by Agata Kulesza, reveals to the young woman that her real name is Ida Lebenstein and that her parents were killed during WW!!. snorts derisively “A Jewish nun,” she says derisively. Wanda is also no longer the person she once was; a former state prosecutor for the Communist regime who staged show trials that sent innocent people their deaths, she has fallen out of favor with the Party, demoted to presiding over petty domestic disputes. She drinks and picks up faceless men but her anguish has less to do with guilt over the blood on her hands than with the fate of her sister, Ida’s mother.

Their road trip in search of the truth takes them through the bleak countryside and brutal urban architecture of Communist Poland. In her nun's habit, Ida elicits reflexive respect from people but it is Wanda, wrapped in the tattered shreds of her judicial authority, who intimidates information out of anyone who would obstruct her. When they eventually track down the farmer who appropriated the Lebensteins’ farm, he is dying so Wanda pitilessly wrings the truth out of his son: Ida survived through the kindness of the man who killed her parents because she was the kind of Jewish little girl; she looked Christian and could pass. Her parents were killed because they could not.

This is not a film about salvation through religion or divine love; history does not allow it. In the final scene as Ida flees Lodz, her agitation surfacing at last, we see a godless landscape.

The cinematographers used the unusual aspect ratio of 1.37:1 and static camera shots, effectively weighing the characters down to the lower part of the screen, suggesting the weight of Polish history. Shot in natural light, the framing is all right angles and parallel lines; window frames, doorways, railings, and even the trees appear to stand up straighter. Only during Ida’s final flight from Lodz does the camera mimic her agitation.

Ida, a film that cost $1.8 million dollars to produce, has just been nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film.

Images:
1 - 5. Michael Iwanowski - Clear of People, 2013, Ffotography, University of Wales, Newport.
6. Pawel Pawlikowski - Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska, still from Ida, 2013, Soloban Films, Poland.

“if not, winter

]no pain

]

]I bid you sing

of Gonglya, Abanthis, taking up

your lyre as (now) again) longing

floats around you,

your beauty, For her dress when you saw it

stirred you. And I rejoice.

In fact she herself once blamed me

Kyprogeneiea

because I prayed

this word:

I want

]of desire

]

for when I look at you

]such a Hermione

} and to yellow-haired Helen I liken you

]

among mortal women, now this

]from every care

]you could release me

]

]dewy riverbanks

]to last all naught long"

- If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson, New York, Alfredd A. Knopf: 2002 (Note: Carson places brackets in the text to indicate breaks in the original, caused by wear.)

Winter is hard. So is love. Halfway through the season, winter seems unbearable without thoughts of warmth. So, dreaming of spring, if not, winter.

One of the great lyric poets of ancient Greece, Sappho remains an artist in the shadows, and the more attractive for it. Through the lacunae we dare to approach her. The beauty in her writing never disappoints but it is warmed by the liveliness of the personality is apparent, even in translation. Lesbos, the island in the Aegean Sea, attained mythic status because Sappho lived there. She was born circa 630-612 BCE, before the common era, into a culture with no Christian referents. What interests us today is her poetry which haqs survived, although mostly in fragments on delicate rolls of papyrus. To her contemporaries Sappho was a musician, an artist of evanescence. She played the lyre, a stringed instrument that looked like a small harp. But she invented a plectron to pluck it and made othe refinements to the instrument itself. She is credited with inventing the mixolydian mode (or scale), a refinement of the lydian mode, that was used for expressions of the romantic an erotic A restless spiirit then, one not content to leaves things as she found them. In a word: bittersweet. Anne Carson, translator of Sappho and other classical Greek writers is coincidentally author of Eros, the Bitterseweet.

Max Klinger (1857-1920) was a German symbolist artist. You could say that symbolism is romanticism noir. Historians detect in Klinger’s etchings, particularly the series Parahrases about the Finding of a Glove, the illustration of the erotic use of objects, or fetiches, predating both Sigmund Freud and Kraft Ebbing. Once you know that, it becomes that much harder not to see eros everywhere in the artist’s works.

Max Klinger may not be on the average American museum-goer’s radar; there are only fifteen collections that include in his works but his work is spread widely: his bronze statue of Ludwig van Betthoven was shown at the Vienna Secession in 1902 and there is an asteroid, discovered in 1993, named for him.

Image:

Max Klinger - Le debut du printemps, c. 1874-77, Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig.

I saw three of the Tales of the Four Seasons by French director Eric Rohmer as they appeared in the 1990s and assumed that I had merely missed the fourth one. Until last year, when A Summer's Tale (1996) was released on DVD with a note explaining that it had never been distributed in the United States before. And now, with too much snow and too much cold, the DVD arrives in my library box. Perfect timing.

Rohmer, who died in 2010 two months shy of his 90th birthday, was a journalist for the hugely influential New Wave journal Cahiers du Cinema before becoming a filmmaker himself.

You could also make a case for Rohmer the landscape painter, using A Summer's Tale. The film is set on the coast of Brittany, in picturesque towns stretching from Dinard to Saint-Malo. Even before the railroad century made it accessible to vacationers in the 19^th century , the bays of Brittany were familiar through the charming and realistic watercolors of Eugene Isabey (1803-1886). Train cars full of Impressionists in search of the perfect spot to set up their easels en plein air soon followed, not to mention that art historians pinpoint 1886 as the year that Georges Seurat and Paul Signac invented pointillism at Dinard. Does anyone have an accurate count of the number of paintings Picasso made of the beach at Dinard with its blue and white striped beach huts?

Rohmer knew all this as evidenced in several of his early films, such as Place de l’Etoile in 1963 and a documentary about the effects of industrialization on the French landscape. Rohmer brought this background with him when he began making feature films. He took his camera outside to film in natural light, creating harmonies between his characters and the places they inhabit. "To give consistency to the history, I need to know the comedians and the places.” (Eric Rohmer, my translation) Rohmer also preferred to use natural sound; music is introduced into scenes only when the characters perform it or listen to it. When Gaspard arrived in Dinard, his drags his suitcase through the streets accompanied by sounds of conversations and footsteps accented by the sea. In contrast, his borrowed room envelopes him in silence until he begins to play his guitar.

Gaspard is a recent mathematics graduate who would rather be a musician than take the routine office job that awaits him in September. All Gaspard’s problems are related to his one clear intention: to visit the island of Ouessant beyond Finistere (meaning: the end of land), the westernmost point of Brittany. For centuries the island has been famed for the music made by its rugged fishing community, sea chanteys with Celtic undertones. Gaspard, too, writes songs in the old style. He has been working on one about a “piratesse” that he plans to give to Lena. But he has gone off without Lena's phone number or the name and address of her Breton relatives so he gives the song to Solene. Seemingly happy to let chance makes his decisions for him, the film implicitly asks the viewer whether he should be.

Gaspard's personal silence is broken at a local crepe shop when he meets Margot, a friendly waitress.Margot, however is not a small town girl; rather she is a well-traveled anthropologist with a PhD and a boyfriend away doing fieldwork on another continent. The two meet again at the beach and, as if to underline a turning point, there they are enveloped in noise, shrieking children, screaming gulls, and the continual roiling of waves. Much of the film was shot on and around Dinard's famous La plage de Prieure. Prieure is the French word for the prioress of a convent.

They fall into a pleasant routine, taking long walks along the shore. Gaspard expatiates on romance (“I have to be loved to be in love; since no one loves me, I don’t love anyone.”) all the while deploring his bad luck in love. Never before, Gaspard tells Margot, has he had a genuine friendship with a woman. Margot, the wiser one, rolls her eyes and tries to prod him out of his cul-de-sac. Rohmer often allowed his characters to improvise dialogue yet they always manage to give voice to the director's interest in platonic friendships between women and men, where transformation is always possible. “It's easier to be yourself with a friend than with a lover,” Margot tells Gaspard. “You don't have to pretend.” But pretending or dissembling are parts of speech as much as verbs and nouns are It seems that the harder we try to make ourselves clear, the more confusing we become.

Looked at from a conventional angle, A Summer’s Tale is the story of a young man’s romantic confusion, but in Rohmer's late films there are always alternatives. The character Gaspard functions as a human maypole around which other characters dance. Margot's social ease contrasts with his discomfort. Lena can be elusive or decisive by turns, but either way she is no easier to pin down than Gaspard himself. And then there is Solene, a more flirtatious young woman, who yet has principles that she expresses more succinctly than anything Gaspard says. Eventually, he makes overlapping commitments to each one of them with no idea how to resolve things.

Rohmer, a devout Catholic to be sure, employed the word moralistein its French sense, meaning the thoughts and feelings about behavior. Hence his emphasis on dialogue. In his Six Moral Tales, made during the 1960s and early 1970s, Rohmer's intentions seemed more certain than they became later in his career but that may have been partly a feint on his part, like brushing branches across a path to obscure one's footprints. By the time Rohmer made Tales of the Four Seasons the viewer is hard-put to take the position of any one character for long.

Images:

1. Le Monde - Bathers At Asnieres by Georges Seurat superimposed on the beach at Dinard.

2. Gaspard (Melvil Poupad) and Margot (Amanda Langlet) - still from A Summer's Tale, a film by Eric Rohmer for Les Filmes de Losanges.

3. same credit as 2. above

In a New Yorkerreview of Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, an exhibition now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, Vince Aletti “ described Maurice Tabard as “ a French photographer ripe for rediscovery”. Anyone who dips into art history as told by the French would be startled by this assertion. As James Elkins wrote in Stories of Art (Routledge: 2002) there is no perfect history of art and, if there were, we probably would find it indigestible. As for Maurice Tabard, he was an inventive Surrealist photographer who made the mistake of becoming friends with the American-born Man Ray, thus contributing to his invisibility on the west side of the Atlantic.

But look at Gant et flacon sous les toits de Paris. Just a glove and a flask placed on a table in an indeterminate room, illuminated by indeterminate light (is it sun or moon over the familiar Parisian rooftops?). All the elements are there for a detective story and Tabard’s photographs have often been used for book covers. By the time he was thirty, Tabard had perfected an efficient visual style, brooding as a Giorgio de Chirico painting.

Photography began with a Frenchman, Nicephore Niepce. He invented a process he called heliography in the 1820s. The process was elegant; using Syrian asphalt, a familiar substance from ancient times, Niepce figured out that its light-sensitive properties when applied to glass or metal plates, would produce an image if the plate was washed with lavender oil. Niepce was also the one who built the first internal combustion engine, so the relative obscurity of his name is at odds with the pervasive influence of his ideas on modern life.

You could say something similar about the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere who were producing 15 million photographic plates a year by 1894 when their father Antoine saw a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in Paris and brought word back to Lyon. Its importance was not lost on the brothers who presented the first animated film projection at the Grand Café on boulevard des Capucines in December 1895, beating Edison by five months.

The first knownphotograph by Niepce is View From the Window at Le Gras(c.1827) but, given the long exposure times needed to fix an image on the plate, early photographers achieved their most memorable results with inanimate objects. Mundane objects seemed to leap out of the background as never before to the naked eye.In the process, they developed a common vocabulary that photographers still use today. Admittedly, their works were often intended as teaching materials for use in drawing classes. Still, being French, they soon diverted their efforts to aesthetic ends.

In this fascination with objects we can see a forerunner of the surrealist fetich for making arrangements of objects in risible or frightening combinations. Le Jeu (The Game) is a commercial postcard from Allain de Torbechet & Cie was published in 1863. The singularity of its title is contradicted by the mixture of several identifiable board games.

Henri Le Secq (1818-1882), an early and major figure in still life photography from the 1850s, was a friend of Gustave Le Gray. Le Gray’s work has been revisited, thanks to the success of The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting along the Normandy Coast, 1850–1874 (Carol McNamara, University of Michigan Museum of Art 10 October 2009 – 3 January 2010). Le Secq’s most admired photographs were a series of still lifes in negative form. With no evidence to the contrary, its has always been assumed that Le Secq wanted these negatives to be considered as completed works. What he couldn’t foresee would be their eerie similarity to modern x-ray photography, notably the micro-photographs made by Laure Albin-Guiilot in the 1920s and 1930s.
Something about his pitchers and plates suggests an accidental discovery of another dimension to reality. Being accidental takes nothing away from the marvelous permeability the objects. We may have become blase from exposure to infrared and microscopic photography but it would be a shame if we could no longer retrieve the wonder that Le Secq reveals in his combination of detail and the
insubstantial.

One of the first photographers to use plants for decorative purposes was Charles Aubry (1811-1877). A self-taught photographer, Aubry worked first as a designer and teacher of industrial arts where he employed his still life photographs as teaching models. Hoping to profit from nationwide classroom distribution of his pictures, Aubry opened a workshop in Paris in 1864. Unfortunately, this was the moment when decorative artists were being encouraged to draw from nature, as painters were doing, and by January 1865 Aubry was forced to declare bankruptcy.

The arrangement of Hellebore strikes me as something similar to butterflies pinned to a memory board. Aubry's best work is admired for his ability to reveal the form and structure of plants as never before. It is obvious that he used extremely bright light; what is surprising is that he dipped his plants in wet plaster, turning them into hyper-natural versions of the originals.

Objects isolated, arranged, and presented to the viewer in accord with the artist's intentions are not so far from the anarchy of objects that the Surrealists made, after all.

Images:

1. Maurice Tabard - Gant et flacon sous les toits de Paris (Glove and flask under Parisians Rooftops), 19129, Bibiliotheque nationale de France, Paris. (BNF)

2. Allain Torbechet & Cie - Le Jeu (The Game), 1863, BNF.

3. Henri Le Secq - Pichet et assiette numero 27 (Pitcher and plate number 27) , c. 1852-60, BNF.

4. Charles Aubry - Ellebore noir, dit Rose de Noel (Black Hellebore, also known as Christmas Rose) , 1864, BNF.

Of all the French contributors to modern art, arguably none have had a more far-reaching impact than its photographers. Photographers took the lead in cross-pollinating with other media - literature, painting, film, etc., and in the process energized as they were by advances in camera technology, anything seemed possible.

Also, importantly, Paris in the 1930s was a good place to be a woman photographer. Denise Bellon, Therese Bonney, Florence Henri, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, and Lisette Model, all were successful there, regardless of where they were from originally. Above them all, there was Laure Albin-Guillot, her body of work a search for new ways of seeing through the lens.

Laure Meifredy was born in Paris in 1879 and made her public debut in traditional female fashion when she was married in 1901 toDr. Albin-Guillot, a specialist in microbiology. Together they collected specimens of plants, animals, and crystals and Laure began taking pictures of the weirdly wonderful structures revealed by the microscope. As the spouse of a microbiologist, she undoubtedly had access to Johannes Kepler's pioneering book Micrographia (1665) on the complexity and uniqueness of each snowflake. With her interest in photography she may even have been aware of the work of an American photographer, Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, who began photographing ice crystals in 1885. Looking as both photographers work it is easy to see why Germans coined the term Eisblumen or ice flowers
During WWI Laure Albin-Guillot began to publish her landscape photos and in 1922 the French Revue of Photography awarded her its gold medal. Her work appeared in magazines from Arts & Metiers Graphiques to Vogue and Vu, the magazine that inspired Henry Luce to found Life magazine in the U.S. In 1925 Albin-Guillot had her first solo gallery exhibition. Also that year she photographed the designers and architects who participated in the wildly successful and extremely influential International Exposition of Decorative Art. It is intriguing to wonder if Albin-Guillot there crossed paths with an American expatriate, Therese Bonney, founder of one of the earliest photo agencies (Agence Bonney) that specialized in architecture and design. Like Bonney, she was determined to make Thea case for photography as art.

After the death of her husband in 1929, Alin-Guillot never remarried but she published her first book Micrographie decorative(Draeger Freres, Paris: 1931), a tribute to their years of collaboration over the microscope, to immediate international acclaim. Her micro-photographs, as she called them, struck a chord with constructivists, surrealists, and anyone interested in new discoveries in psychology. By chance or choise, Albin-Guillot had chosen the perfect moment to change direction. Twenty unprecented images were the culmination of hundreds of hours of painstaking observation

Another new venture, just as complex but controversial, was photographing the nude. Ablin-Guillot had begun portrait photography in the early 1920s, often working from home, photographing her friends and neighbors. She also opened a studio in the rue de Ranelegh where she carried out her commissioned projects.

For her nude studies Albin-Guillot adopted a quasi-pictiorialist style, by now safe and even conservative, for images that she knew would provoke a frisson when their creator was a woman. And, interestingly, there has been speculation ever since about her relationships with her male models. Controversial, yes, but like her micro-photography, a critical success. Her reputation was such that Albin-Guillot had no trouble finding a variety of stunning models or partners for book projects.

For La cantate de Narcisse (1936) she worked with longtime friend, the symbolist poet Paul Valery. The Symbolists had had a decades-long fascination with the myth of Narcissus, redolent of beauty and interiority, of the self engaged in a search for its soul. Albin-Guillot chose to photograph her male nudes against a palimpsest of otherworldly shreds of vegetation and water. In her vision the male is a always classical in aspect,sculpted by the photographer's lighting to recall Greco-Roman statuary,

By the time Albin-Guillot illustrated La deesse Cypris(The Goddess Cypris) by Henry de Montherlant in 1946 she had published many female nudes. The nude had become a popular subject for women to photograph during the 1930s, Albin-Guillot's works suggest a singularly simpatico or woman to woman relationship with her models. Hers are images of collaboration between artist and model, rather than the appropriation of a woman by a male artist. Their hands are as expressive as faces, whether the face is turned away from the center of the image or even withheld altogether, the viewer receives an impression of a unique personality. Typically, Albin-Guillot photographed her female models against a solid featureless background. The lighting was carefully placed to do the work of a chisel; we know from several extant sketches that the photographer plotted these aspects with geometric precision. I see a new level of the emancipation of female sensuality in these admittedly idealized images.

"immense scope
silent
who
shirks his responsibility by
itself
and
by this withdrawal
shows that any
possession
is a lie"
" Nudite" from Le reste du voyage, La lumière du noir by Bernard Noel, Points Le Seuil 2006, p.157 (translation mine)

["immenseétendue
silencieuse
que
se dérobe
en elle- même
et
par ce retait
montre
que toute possessions
est monsonge." ]

During the inter-war period, known in France as Les Annees Folles(The Crazy Years), nervous energy was the engine driving art; not so much the energy of machines as was the case in Italy where futurist art goried in the replacement of human energy by modern technology. Think of the current buzz over the idea of robotics replacing human energy and you get the idea.

Her energies not completely depleted by her own work, Albin-Guillot worked to secure official government recognition and support for photography, serving as the first Archivist of Photography at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1933. During the same year she helped to found the Cinematheque nationale in a new architectural complex, the Palais de Chaillot decorated with quotations by ehr friend Valery, where she envisioned a home for a museum of photography. That last had to wait for the end of WWII. She organized an International Exhibition of Contemporary Photography at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in 1936. A member of Union feminien des cariieres liberales et commerciales, Albin-Guillot as its president single-handedly organized an exhibition of European women artists in 1937 at the Jeu de Paume. The Jeu de Paume, originally built to house the tennis courts of Napoleon III, is now home to one of several museums in Paris devoted to photography. Even World War II did not deter her work. Her photos of artworks being packed up and spirited out of the Louvre to safety are poignant historical documents and the publication of her book of love Splendour of Paris in 1945 after the war's end earned her the gratitude of her fellow citizens.

In 2013 the museum mounted a multi-gallery retrospective Laure Albin-Guillot: L'enjeu classique, Yes, Alin-Guillot excelled at images of classical perfection as the exhibition reminds us but, as even the curators acknowledge, her work encompassed so much more: science, current events, and even ground-breaking work in advertizing.

Finally, I cannot resist the temptation to point out the obvious similarity between Albin-Guillot's 1935 portrait of Andre Gide in his study to I Lock my Door Upon Myself painted in 1891 by the Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff, Khnopff the symbolist and his work were well known in Paris in the circles that Albin-Guillot frequented. Both men were admired in their time for the hints of perversity scattered throughout their work. In Khnopff's case there was an undertone of incest, not unfamiliar to a culture whose founding work of theatrical art was Le Cid. And Gide, especially during his lifetime, was known as the creator of l'act gratuit in his 1914 novel Les caves du Vatican (in English Lafcadio'a Adventures), an example of energy gone crazy resulting in an act of senseless violence.

For further reading:
Laure Albin-Guillot ou La volonte d'art by Christian Bouqueret, Marval, Paris: 1996.

Images: unless otherwise noted, Laure Albin-Guillot, photographer, Colletcion Roger-Violett, Paris.
Micrographie in black and white, c. 1929.
Illustration for Narcisse, 1936.
Nude study, c. 1940.
Nu masculin, 1936, Pompidou Center, Paris.
Nu feminine, 1938, Pompidou Center, Paris.
Andre Gide, 1935.
Fernand Khnopff - I Lock My Door Upon Myself, 1891, Neue Pinakoteck, Munich.

Study for La Cantate de Narcisse, 1936.

Packing Venus de Milo at the Louvre Museum, 1940.

Publicity photo for la pommade-vaccin Salantale, c. 1942.

Facade of the Palais de Chaillot, from Splendour de Paris, 1945.

My introduction to Mary Hunter Austin came through a revelatory series of Arno reprints by early 20th century writers in the late 1970s. Here were the women I had been waiting for all throughout adolescence; women whose existence I had no reason to believe in, according to the men who taught literature. The Story Of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Iowa Interiorsby Ruth Suckow, They Stooped To Folly by Ellen Glasgow, The Narrow House by Evelyn Scott … and A Woman Of Genius by Mary Hunter Austin. The Arno books were easy to pick out in the library stacks even at a distance, with their light blue covers and handsome green lettering; they were built to endure for works that deserved to.

By the circular reasoning with which we are all too familiar, we are told that Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) has been overshadowed by her more famous friends. But they weren't more famous at the time. If anything, their names should pique our curiosity. When Austin visited England for the first time, she was the guest of Lou and Herbert Hoover (A Woman Of Genius is dedicated to Lou Henry Hoover). In Joseph Conrad, Austin found a kindred spirit whose emotional bond with the sea mirrored her own with the California desert. But even the worldly Hoovers raised an eyebrow at Austin's visit with H.G.Wells, too much the free spirit with his numerous lovers. Austin herself would say back in New York City that chastity was no longer necessary for women.

Austin and Willa Cather attended the 1912 dinner held at Sherry's Restaurant on Park Avenue to honor William Dean Howells, "the Dean of Permian Letters" and longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly, the magazine that had serialized Land Of Little Rain before the books' publication. Cather wrote part of Death Comes For The Archbishop in 1926 at Casa Querida, Austin's adobe house in Santa Fe. The two authors shared many interests, in the history of the Southwest and in the struggles of women to become artists. Although Austin published A Woman Of Genius three years before Cather's The Song Of The Lark appeared in 1915, no one praised Cather's novel more enthusiastically than Austin.

A Woman Of Genius, published in 1912, is a novel about a woman Austin knew well from the inside. Its protagonist, Olivia Lattimore, is an artist, an actress stifled by her Midwestern hometown and her childhood sweetheart. She endures the opprobrium that leaving them behind brings down on her as she pursues her career. By 'genius', Austin meant that each of us has a guiding spirit, that a person should be "faithful to one's experiences". rather than put intellect or creativity on a pedestal. In the novel, Taylorville was a thinly disguised stand-in for Austin's homeotwn Carlinville, so Austin was bemused when, later in life, her hometown lionized its most famous native.

Austin attributed her involvement in radical politics (feminism, birth control, socialism) to her pioneer ancestors. Her mother Susannah had been an ardent supporter of Frances Willard, leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, a woman whose advice to others was “do everything.”

Born in small town Illinois, Mary Hunter graduated from Blackburn College at age twenty and shortly after she moved, with her widowed mother and brother to Rancho El Tejon in eastern California. The names given to the towns where Austin lived are redolent of romance - Lone Pine, Independence - but the reality was raw settlements thrown together by greed. At first, Austin found the land hard; she broke down within months from malnutrition. After marrying Wallace Stafford Austin, an engineer and speculator, Austin published her first story in 1892, naively assuming that she could earn a living by writing. Reality was grimmer; she was forced to turn to teaching at the same time coping with the care of a mentally disabled daughter, she who had hoped to be the mother of "the smartest child in the world." Wallace Austin's finances collapsed, the couple separated and, in 1905, Mary Austin was forced to place her daughter Ruth in a sanitarium so she could earn a living. A fellow writer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman knew well the corn that

was leveled at a woman who had to choose between what was best for her child and the means to provide it without a husband. "To hear what was said and read what was printed, one would think i had handed over a baby in a basket, " Gilman said.

But Austin had fallen in love with the place Indians called “the Country of Lost Borders” and the people who lived there. She published her first book The Land Of Little Rain, a classic of nature writing in 1903. Her vision of humans living in nature was recognized as something new, an experiment in parallel levels of existence; "an insistent experiential pang for which the wise Greeks had the clearest name...Beauty-in-the-wild, yearning to be made human."
Within half a dozen years Austin published books, on Paiute lore for children, The BasketWoman (1904), an account of life in the Spanish mission period inspired by Austin's stay at the budding art colony of Carmel, Isidro (1905, and TheFlock (1909) stories of the lives of Basque sheepherders in the Owens Valley. Travel, speaking tours, friends among her artistic peers, and love affairs with, among others, the muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens took her far from the land of the High Sierras. But her words make it come alive even for those who have never been there.

"Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil."

“This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive… The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits.”

“Extreme aridity and extreme altitude have the same dwarfing effect, so that we find in the high Sierras and in Death Valley related species in miniature that reach a comely growth in mean temperatures.”

“Above the lower tree-line, which is also the snowline, mapped out abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of piñon, juniper, branched nearly to the ground, lilac and sage, and scattering white pines.”

“If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and cattlemen, will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing the land and going back to it.”

The excerpts above are from The Land Of Little Rain 1903, Doubleday, Page & Company. The book has been reissued several times, including a 1950 edition by Houghton, Mifflin, illustrated with photographs by Austins' friend Ansel Adams and most by recently Penguin Press (2014) with an introduction by Terry Tempest Williams.

The life of print-maker Frances Hammell Gearhart (1869-1958) shares similarities with that of Mary Hunter Austin. Gearhart was born one year after Austin, at Sagetown, Illinois; she moved to California in 1888 and graduated from college at what is now UCLA in 1891.

Images:

1. France Hammell Gearhart - Winter Is Near, c.1930, James Maine Fine Art, Santa Barbara.

2. Frances Hammell Gearthart - Untroubled Waters, c.1930, James Main Fine Art, Santa Barbara.

3. Frances Hammerll Gearhart - Red Rock Canyon, 1936, Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa.

4.Frances Hammell Gearhart - Serenity, Swann Galleries, NYC.

5. Charles Fletcher Lummis - Mary Hunter Austin, c1900, Autry national Center of the American West, Los Anegeles.

"Paris was where the twentieth century was."- Gertrude Stein

The years between the two world wars, Les Annees Folles (The Crazy Years) as the French called them, were heady ones for modern design. The official name of the 1925 Wold's Fair was Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, in preparation for more than a decade, postponed due to war in Europe, the French were eager to reassert their role as the world's arbiter of good design. Post-war prosperity made it possible again for the middle classes to shop freely, and the designers and department stores that participated at the fair were eager to lure the public with grand pavilions, each one more dazzling than the next.

Like the 1925 exposition itself, modern design was mostly a Parisian phenomenon, extending piecemeal to the suburbs with an occasional outpost on the Riviera (think the Villa Noailles designed by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens). Much of what was on display at the exposition was commercial in nature, aimed at encouraging the war-weary public to spend its newly-acquired wealth. Most of it turned out to be conventional and not radical at all. The iconic Cubist trees at the French pavilion were a cheeky exception, subjected to ridicule in the contemporary press; “one cartoon depicted a baffled gardener debating whether to water them.”

Although we now associate the year 1925 with Art Deco, that term was only coined in the 1960s by Bevis Hillier, a British art historian. At the time, the style was generally referred to as Paris moderne and its chronicler was an American expatriatenamed Therese Bonneywho had founded the first American illustrated press service specializing in French design and architecture, the Bonney Agency, which eventually supplied as many as 350 photographs a month to publications in dozens of countries. So who was Therese Bonney?

She was born Mabel Therese Bonney in Syracuse, N.Y in 1894. Her mother was a bookkeeper and her father was an electrician. The family included a sister Louise, born in 1889. The Bonneys had lived in New York State for several generations, so the move to California around 1903, first to Sacramento and then to Oakland, was a momentous change for a family of modest means.

While in high school, Bonney began earning money by tutoring other students in French and Spanish. She dropped her first name, considering it too prosaic and not French enough; from then on she would be known simply as Therese Bonney.

After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1916, Bonney returned east alone to attend Radcliffe College where she earned a master's degree in Romance Languages. New York City had many attractions, not least in halving the distance between a West Coast Francophile and Paris. Bonney found her first job in the city with the Theatre du Vieux Colombier, then on tour in North America. From this foothold, Therese was able to send for her sister Louise; the two young women opened a bookshop specializing in French theater, with Therese doubling as the official English translator for the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.

Within months of the Armistice, Bonney sailed for France early in 1919, supported by a newly-created position for the American Association of Colleges, she was to set up a student exchange program. Om arriving in Paris, Bonney received a scholarship from the Sorbonne to complete doctorate (Begun at Columbia University) on the theatrical works of Alexandre Dumas. She earned her doctorate in just two years (the youngest person and only the e fourth woman to do so).

Torn between an academic career and promoting Franco-American cultural relations, Bonney turned to journalism to support herself.by serving as correspondent for newspapers in Britain and the U.S. It may have been her stint as Paris fashion correspondent for the New York Times (1923-28) that led her to try modeling or it may have been her friendships with fashion designers Jeanne Lanvin and Sonia Delaunay. At any rate, word reached her hometown where the Syracuse Herald reported that Bonney had been "acclaimed the most perfect da Vinci model in the world."

Among her circle of friends several artists painted her portrait: Robert Delaunay, Alicia Haicka, Raoul Dufy (three times) and Georges Rouault (six times!). Bonney snapped Tamara de Lempicka touching up a portrait of her husband Tadeuz, possibly an insider's joke at the rumors that Bonney affixed her name to work done by other photographers. In another, she photographed the impish Italian caricaturist Paolo Garetto in an uncharacteristically somber pose, framed by his creations that wink and roll their eyes as a signal to the viewer that they know better.

Bonney often liked to shoot from curbside, calling streets the “true democratic museum.” Among her memorable street shots are Jean Carlu's decorated soap truck and the sign for the emporium L'escargot d'or (The Golden Snail). Her sensitivity to what made something 'moderne' extended to the effects of artificial light. Which is the more surprising discovery: that the bar of Hotel de Ville is transformed into bottle of booze or that the Citroen showroom in the rue Marbeuf looks like a parking garage?

“Our furniture and our homes are of the past, ”Bonney lamented the homegrown American design. In the New York publisher Robert McBride she found a publisher for a series guidebooks including Buying Antique and Modern Furniture in Paris, A Shopping Guide to Paris, Guide to the Restaurants of Paris, and French Cooking for Americans. .This lastanticipated Julia Child by decades For the New York department store Lord & Taylor, Bonney would arrange an exhibition Modern French Decorative Art in 1928, followed by a number of traveling exhibitions that appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Therese Bonney donated 4,000 of her photographic prints to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in the late 1930s, while she and Louise, an industrial designer, were involved in the planning for the 1939 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows at the same time Therese served as an official of the 1937 Paris World's Fair. In 1985 the museum presented the exhibition Paris Recorded based on the Bonney collection. It surveyed her work from the 1920s documenting the evolution of interior design following the watershed Exposition Internationales des Arts Decoratifs held in 1925.

For further reading:

The Invention of Chic: Therese Bonney and Paris Moderne by Lisa Schlansker, New York, Thames & Hudson: 2002

Images:

1. Therese Bonney - Grand Bazaar of the Hotel de Ville, 1920, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.

2. Therese Bonney - Models wearing outfits designed by Sonia Delaunay pose in front of concrete trees at the World's Fair, 1925, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.
3. Therese Bonney - Paolo Garretto and his desing for the Nestle Copnay, c.1929, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
4. Therese Bonney - Citroen showroom in the rue Marbeuf, c.1928, Bibliotheque nationale de France.
5. Therese Bonney - A corner of Tamara de Lempicka's maison-studio in the rue Mechain, Mediatheque, Charenton-le-Pont.
6. Therese Bonney - Living room designed by Elise Djo-Bourgeois, no date given, Mediatheque, Charenton-le-Pont.
7. Therese Bonney - L'escargot d'or insigne (sign of the Golden Snail), Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC.
8. Lee Miller - photograph of Therese Bonney, British Vogue, April 1942, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC.

Three pears ripen

On the ledge. Weeks pass.

They are a marriage

The middle one's the conversation

The other two are having.

He is their condition.

Three wings without birds,

Three feelings.

How can they help themselves.

They can't.

How can they say that?

They can.

II.

The pears are consulting.

Business is bad this year,

D'Anjou, Bartlett.

They are psychiatrists,

Patient and slick.

Hunger reaches the hard stem.

It will get rid of them.

III.

The pears are old women;

They are the same.

Slight rouge,

Green braille dresses,

They blush in unison.

They will stay young.

They will not ripen.

In the new world,

Ripeness is nothing.

- "Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire" from White Dress by Brenda Hillman, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press: 1985.

"Monsieur Erik Sate is crazy... He talked a lot and spoke very well. He believes his new invention is superior to everything that has been written up till this day; perhaps he is wrong; but it would not do to tell him; he would not believe it." (my translation of remarks made by a music critic that were relayed in a letter from Erik Satie to Claude Debussy after the premier of Satie's Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire for piano four-hands in 1903. The Impressionist composers, of whom Debussy was one, had been accused of creating music that lacked form. In reply to the charge Satie asked "What form? In the form of what?" He answered with Three Morsels In The Form Of A Pear ; in fact there are seven movements to the piece. Satie was never one to let sleeping dogs lie.

Is it the asymmetrical shape that makes the pear an appealing form for sly humor? The British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie collected numerous puns, riddles, etc. based on the wayward fruit. The origins of the pear are so ancient that every civilization can lay claim to it. It may come as a surprise to realize that not all its varieties are 'pear-shaped.'

Today is the birthday of the poet Brenda Hillman.

I am indebted to Jules Janick's delightful essay The Pear In History, Literature, Popular Culture, And Art (Purdue University)

Images:

1. Mario Avati - Pour un baladin, 1996, Musee de l'Oise, Beauvais

2. Andre Marchand - La Boutelle et les Fruits, 1945, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Museum, Ours: Jem Cohen

Life Is Short, Desire Endless

The Polymathic Career of Edouard-Marcel Sandoz

Paul-Emile Colin & Pont-Aven

Richard Florsheim. Who?

'Tis The Season To Be Hard-Boiled

The Nativity Poems: Joseph Brodsky

A Giovanni Agostino da Lodi Christmas

"Extraordinary Simplicity" - Janet Lewis & Nell Brooker Mayhew

In Snow Country. With Shiraishi And Kawabata

In Wiry Winter

Henri Riviere: Photographer Of The Floating World

Polish Palimpsest: Iwanowski and Pawlikowski

Dreaming Of Spring: From Sappho To Max Klinger

In Winter. A Summer's Tale

Lost In Translation: Some Early French Photographers

Laure Albin-Guillot: Art And Desire

Mary Hunter Austin In The Land of Little Rain

Therese Bonney & Paris Moderne

The Three Pears