Chekhov, Our Contemporary

Sonya: "....it's incredibly interesting.  He (Astrov) plants new trees every year; he's already gotten a bronze medal and a certificate.   And he's a leader in the campaign to preserve the old-growth forests.  He says that trees are earth's most precious ornament, they teach us to recognize beauty!  Forests help to temper a severe climate, and in regions with temperate climates, people spend less energy trying to combat nature, so the people themselves are kinder and gentler.  And they're better looking, and taller, and more at ease with their emotions; even their speech and their motions have a natural grace.  Wherever there are trees, the arts and sciences flourish, and a positive attitude to life, and they treat women with respect - "

Vanya: "Bravo, bravo! That's a very lovely speech, dear, but it doesn't convince me.  So...(to Astrov) please don't hate me if I keep on cutting wood for the stove and timber to build a new barn."

Astrov: "You can burn turf in your stove and use bricks for your barn.  Look, I'm not against cutting wood, but why destroy the forests?"

Vanya: "Why not? To listen to you you'd think the only thing forests were good for is shade for picnics."

Astrov:  "I never said that.  But all our great woodlands are being leveled, millions of trees already gone, bird and animal habitats destroyed, rivers dammed up and polluted - and all for what?  Because we're too lazy to look for other sources of energy..."

          - excerpted from Act I of Uncle Vanya, translated from the Russian by Paul Schmidt in The Plays Of Anton Chekhov, New York, Harper Collins: 1997 (1897).

Vanya is Sonya's uncle, which points to the importance of her character to her creator, in a play that points to her by indirection.   Idealistic, dedicated, struggling to reconcile the narrow confines of the estate where she lives with her large spirit, Sonya speaks for Chekhov's aspirations,  as Astrov, a doctor  (like his creator) whose experience speaks to their inadequacy.

In the background there was Russian  agriculture, using the most primitive means to the least productive ends in Europe during the late 19th century. Two thirds of the population worked the land that was owned by the wealthy few.  Living outside the cities, the landed gentry of Chekhov's play felt themselves marooned in a sea of dependents with whom they shared the land but little else.  The need for croplands and pastures was contributing to the destruction of forests, leaving ugly scars on what had appeared primeval.  With blinders on, we may think concern about the stewardship of nature is our  own enlightened invention.  Against that presumption of superiority, Chekhov created characters haunted at once by a sense of the insignificance of their actions and the calamitous consequences.  Chekhov, the poet of that which remains unresolved, is our contemporary.

Paul Schmidt (1934-1999) was the great Chekhov translator of his time, balancing the melancholy with humor,  giving a more fully rounded view of what it means to be a Chekhovian character.
His last published work was an anthology The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems  (New York Review Books:2007), discussed in  articles published  here dated 29 September 2011 (Scream When You Leave) and 30 April 2012 (Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Printmaker).

Images:

1. Grigoriy Myasoyedov- Forest Creek. Spring, 1890, courtesy of Wikipedia.
      Myasoyedov 
2. Ivan Shishkin  - Near the Dacha, 1894, Tatarstan State Museum of Fine Art, Kazan.
     Shishkin (1832-1898) was a Russian painter who studied in St. Petersburg and also abroad in Switzerland and Germany.  He belonged to a group called The Itinerants and was a painter, in oils and watercolors, of the forests of his native country.
3. Ivan Shishkin - Lumbering, 1867, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

"Everything Was Already There": Jan Groover

"I pretended I was  a painter, for awhile.  Almost as soon as I got out of school I started photographing - photographing the history of photography, repeating lots of things.  I was still pretending I was a painter, that way I could relax and make photographs, even make stupid  photographs, and it didn't matter.  I didn't have to take it too seriously....And then one day I had the thought that I didn't want to have to make everything up, so I quit painting.  Then I found out that you have to make everything up anyway."


The late photographer Jan Groover's work belongs to the type known as  formalism,  wherein the relationships between objects are implied through their formal properties. The older and more familiar Pictorialist photography told stories deliberately.    Paradoxically, Groover's concentration on the formal properties of objects  resulted not in dryness but rather in a rich visual experience.  

Like Daniel Boudinet in France, Jan Groover demonstrated that color and artistry in photography were not incompatible, an idea that was still debatable  in the 1970s.   In that struggle for recognition,  Groover's exhibition at the Museum of modern Art in 1978 was a milestone.  John Szarkowski, who curated the exhibition, wrote that "her works were good to think about because they were good to look at."    The public was dazzled and when Groover's forks appeared on the cover of Artforum, she was  vindicated.

Groover studied painting at Pratt Institute, inspired by the works of Morandi, de Chirico, and  Fra Angelicao, and the thrill of seeing Cezanne's painting of a lemon.  Around 1970, she turned to photography at the moment that a minimalist aesthetic looked fresh, after a decade of Pop Art.   With some success in New York under her belt, Groover received her first NEA fellowship  in 1978.  She bought a different camera anf tried photographing stille lifes of dried flowers but her efforts proved fruitless.  "They were disgusting" Groover later recalled.

 "You're having a hard time?  Why don't you go to the kitchen sink and take a look?' suggested her husband, the art critic Bruce Bois.
"So I did.  I was there for a long time, in one way or another, with those kinds of objects.  It was great.  I could deal with all the things that I knew about art."
Things like foreshortening and playing around with space. In her kitchen still lifes, Groover reprised the history of photography, calling up the ghosts of such French masters as Nicephore Niepce and Dauguerre.

The next year Groover began to work with platinum printing, a process used by many 19th century photographers.  Platinum prints were  known for their subtle tones, from silvery-greys to rose-browns, and were weel-suited to Groover's formal, restrained style.

"What does a lemon do?  A lemon lies down.  It can't do anything else but lie down.  an apple sits.  It doesn't lie down, it doesn't do anything but sit.  A pear lies down and stands up... So all these objects have these attitudes.  Now some objects have bigger attitudes.   An apple could have a big attitude, depending on what it sits with.  A lemon has somewhat of a private-language attitude to me because Manet did a beautiful painting of a lemon.  Then there are some objects like bottles that are containers, and its containership means something. ...So building up still life to have all these characters - I don't know what the sentences are, but I know the sentences make sense to me, when they make sense."    As for the plastic fish and little dog in the lower right corner, the viewer can only speculate.

On Fox Talbot: "His photograph of his dining room table with a ll that stuff on it just drives me nuts.  And I've tried to do that picture... It's such a great thing to have this round table with all these guys on it that don't touch other.  It's an odd little puzzle.  I''m just crazy about his photographs.  Well, he did everything - he mapped out the territory.   I mean, to have to fight today with the first guy to do photography is pretty amazing."    Groover's reaction to Talbot's table explains a lot about the droll aspect that we sense in her arrangements.  There is nothing inherently limiting in Groover's still lifes; it is more like a full table.

Jan Groover was born in Plainfield, New jersey, in 1943.  Groover and Boi move to France in 1991.  In 1994, Tina Barney produced the documentary Jan Groover: Tilting At Space.   Jan Groover died on January 1, 2012  in Montpon-Ménestérol, France. She was 68.

For further reading: Pure Invention: The Tabletop Still Life: Jan Groover by Constance Sullivan, et al, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. :1990

Images:
1. Jan Groover --untitled, 1988, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
2. Jan Groover - untitled, 2006, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
3. Jan Groover - untitled, 1979,  Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
4. Jan Groover - untitled (tabletop), palladium print, 1983, from Pure Invention, Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
5. William Henry Fox Talbot - Breakfast Table, 1840, photogenic drawing, Science Museum, London.
6. Jan Groover -  untitled, 1979, Galerie Paul Frehces, Paros.


                                                                                                        

Antonin Personnaz: Our Contemporary

Subtle washes of blue and pink are what we notice first, then the jaunty red hull of the little boat that steams along an unnamed  but strangely familiar-looking French river.   In spite of those muted tones a luminosity emanates from this century old image.  Autochrome, the first widely used color photographic process, was  notoriously  difficult to work with, its colors fixed but not stable, in grains of starch that migrated over time.  And yet, amateur photographer were eager to try. Antonin Personnaz   a wealthy Frenchman, was so keenly attuned to aesthetic values that his  photographic experiments achieved  exquisite effects that have survived the depredations of time and exposure. 

Antonin Personnaz (1855-1936) was born in Bayonne, the capital of the Basque region in southwestern France.   He made his fortune as a professional exporter of goods. Through his friendship with Leon Bonnat,  a portrait painter in Paris and also a native of the Pyrennes.  Personnaz met the artists whose works he began to collect.   Their names are a roll-call of Impressionist masters: Mary Cassatt,  Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec.

Personnaz began taking pictures desultorily aorund 1896, after seeing  photographs by Constant Puyo, one of the first Pictorialists.  But there was something about color photography that clicked with Personnaz's own  imaginative capabilities.  As soon as  autochrome  was introduced by the Lumiere Brothers in 1907, Personnaz began taking pictures in earnest. 

For an ardent collector like Personnaz, the attraction of making his own images to correspond with the paintings he loved was irresistible.   These intimate associations acted as a force field as he trained his eye through the viewfinder.  With recent investigations into the deliberate staging used even by photographers as early as Gustave le Gray (Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before The Age Of Photoshop by Mia Fineman), we know that Personnaz was far from alone in creating his photographic equivalent for Alfred Sisley's wintry masterpiece La neige a Louvecinnes (1878, Musee d'Orsay).  The warm weather image (above) may well have been his version of Sisley's Louveicennes - the Path to the Hieghts of Marly (ca. 1873),  a painting Personnaz owned.

Monet's influence on Personnaz has quite natural, given the enduring friendship that grew up between the two men.  Personnaz often visited the artist in his later years at Giverny.  Nevertheless, Personnaz had a poetic sensibility of his own.  He seems to have been drawn to the individual subject, whether a person, an animal, or an inanimate object.  The woman holding a red parasol may be pure Monet but the young girl hoisting a hay bale comes from an earthier tradition in French art, perhaps by way of Berthe Morisot's Dans les bles a Gennevilliers (1875), another Personnaz acquisition.   The little packet boat plies its industrious way without the cheering crowds or waving flags of an Impressionist   regatta, but then Personnaz didn't own one of those pictures.  
















The impassioned amateur photographer became a proselytizer for the new  medium.  The lecture Personnaz gave, inaugurating  the Peligot Medal (named for chemist Eugenie Peilgot) helped to popularize the autochrome in France. Then, at the International Congress of Photographers held at Brussels in  1910, he presented a paper The Aesthetic of the Autochrome Plate in response to criticisms by painters that the colors produced by fixatives and grains of starch were "lacikng in exactness".  Personnaz replied with  a  comparison of the new process to pointillist techniques in painting, even employing a magnifying glass to illustrate his ideas.

In a footnote to the tale of the Personnaz collections, one of the Monets that became part of the Personnaz bequest to the Musee d'Orsay  - Le pont d'Argenteuil  - was in the news when, on October 6, 2007,  one of a party of drunken visitors struck the painting, making a four inch tear in the canvas.  The painting suffered more wear and tear than even his photographs.

 Personnaz served as the General Secretary to the Societe Photographie Francaise from 1911 to 1919, publishing several articles on topics close to his heart in the Bulletin: the technical aspects of autochrome practice and the relationship between painting and photography. A man fully engaged in contemporary art and technology his time and,  in his aesthetic predilections, prophetic.  The more we learn about early photographers and their relationships to painting, the more Antonin Personnaz becomes one of us, not a distant figure at all.
 A year after his death in 1936,  his widow donated the Personnaz photography collection to the SPF.  The Personnaz paintings were were donated at the same time to the Louvre.  As a result of the realignment of  national museums in Paris, they are now in the Museed'Orsay/

 Images:
1. Red-hulled Boat, 1908, SPF. 
2. A Street, c. 1907-1910, SPF.
3. Woman Carrying a Sheaf of Corn,   SPF.
4. Woman With A Parasol,  no date, SPF.
5. Claude Monet - Le pont d'Argenteuil, 1874, Musee     d'Orsay, Paris.
6. Fishermen, 1909.SPF.
7. Sun Rises Over the Fields in Winter, ca. 1910, SPF.

Searching For A. H. Fish

John Held, Jr. Miguel Covarrubias, A.H. Fish. All  illustrators,  all important contributors to magazines of the 1920s, all represented in anthologies of graphic art.  Held was the one who produced the humor of collegiate hijinks for the humor magazine Life.  Covarrubias was the Mexican-born transplant whose caricatures for Vanity Fair and New Yorker made Al Hirshfeld possible.  But who was A.H. Fish?

Anne Harriet Fish  was an illustrator,  writer and designer of porcelain figurines.   Conde Nast (1873-1942) was the  powerful magazine publisher whose name lives on in his signature publications:  Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and House & Garden.   Nast launched  Vanity Fair in 1914 and, with Frank Crowninshield as editor, the magazine  attracted not only the best writers and illustrators but also that important magazine metric: most advertising dollars in its first year.  Between 1914 and 1927, Fish was the cover artist for more than thirty issues of Vanity Fair.  She was the only artist to outpace Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), whose caricatures of the rich and famous became as well known as their photographs.  So why has she gone missing from history?

In his new book What Was Contemporary Art?, Richard Meyer of Stanford University pulls back the curtain to reveal just a bit about Fish - and then drops it once again.

The connection goes like this.  In 1927,  a  twenty-five year old was hired  to teach at Wellesley College for women.  Still a doctoral student himself at Harvard, he was  already a comer who had competing  offers but chose Wellesley because it was the only one to accept his proposal for a course on modern art.   His name was Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr.
 Art 305:Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting attracted only nine students but a lot of attention.  Barr's definition of art was eclectic, including objects from diverse sources as North Americans natives, African  Bakubas, and   Melanesian islanders.  By the following summer, word   reached the pages of Vanity Fair,  where its editor, Frank Crowninshield took note.  Crowninshield was also a member of the Board of the new Museum of Modern Art, where he would help to install Barr as its first director in 1929.
 Barr, who had subscribed to   Vanity Fair since his undergraduate years at Princeton, later identified the magazine as a seminal influence.  And A.H. Fish was one of Vanity Fair's signature artists.  "One can look back and I suppose down, upon these magazines as diletante, the one [The Dial] highbrow, the other [Vanity Fair] fashionable, but both succeeded in awakening in me, and many others of my generation, an interest in the work of living artists in various media - from painting and sculpture to movies and photography."  Barr wrote in 1940.

Information about A. H. Fish, including why she chose to obscure her identity is difficult to come by.    Born in Bristol, England in 1890, Anne Harriet Fish began publishing in Vogue and Vanity Fair during World War I, perhaps seizing her chance while her male competitors were away at the front.  Between 1914 and 1927 A Vanity Fair. Her gamines are as much exemplars of the gaiety of that era as Held's flappers. She married Walter Sefton, an Irishman, in New York City in 1918.   Fish died in 1964.

The Fish style was more versatile than Held's, which was basically a polished version of collegiate humor.  Fish introduced a different perspective, one that roughed up the dominant male version of events.  True, her lovers are oblivious to the envy they inspire in others, pets are openly skeptical of human emotions but, tellingly, husbands are never so much fun as boyfriends.   The little white dog of 1921 could have told her that those sweet words coming over the phone line would be replaced by indifference when it came time to pay the bills in 1923.

The earliest work that I uncovered (at archive.org) is  Behind the Beyond: And Other Contributions to Human Knowledge by Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1913),  illustrated by A. H. Fish.  An edition of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubiyat Of Omar Khayam, with illustrations by Fish, was published by John Lane, London in 1922. Fish later produced her own books,  hard-boiled but humorous epistles from High Society: A Pictorial Guide To Lief In Our Upper Circles (1920) to  Awful Week-ends - And Guests (1938), becoming so well known that she was identified on their covers simply as "Fish."

The fate of A.H. Fish is a common one for accomplished women.   Although her work was admired while she was living, the guardians of reputation have found little room her for in their retrospectives.   She was there but she is not there now or, if she is, she is hidden in plain sight.  Sometimes, even being alive and well-connected is not enough.  Witness the current petition by architect Robert Venturi and supporters to have the Pritzker Foundation  amend its 1991 award to him to include his partner Denise Scott Brown.
It was while Alfred Barr was teaching at Wellesley that he first got the idea for his famous 1936 chart showing the interconnections in the development of modern art. Although much was included, some of the clusters that emerged from the spider web of lines looked more important, because more connected, than others.   Anne Harriet Fish,  British-born, comes readilyto mind.

Note: What Was Contemporary Art? by Richard Meyer, Cambridge, MIT Press: 2012.

Images: Conde Nast archives.
Vanity Fair - September 1924.
Vanity Fair -  January 1921.
Vanity Fair - January 1923.
Vanity Fair - February 1926.
Vanity Fair -  August 1927.

Rene Vincent: May At The BNF

Bugatti, Peugeot, Michelin: all names associated with speed and all companies whose reputations were enhanced by their association with the Frenchman Rene Vincent (1879-1936).   Vincent began by studying architecture at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but soon  turned ti illustration.  His  success can be measured, in part,  by his many imitators.  In 1909 he illustrated Aeorpolis, a predecessor of today's graphic novels,  the story of Henry Kistemaeckers, an early stunt pilot.   Was  all this a coincidence or evidence of a fascination with acceleration?  It may be a stretch, but it is possible that the golf ball, shot by the woman in Golfe de Sarlabot,  traveled at a speed fast enough to pass a Bugatti.

Image: Rene Vincent - Golf de Sarlabot, 1930, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.

The Late Flowers Of Leon Dabo

 "We come like water, go like wind."

That's not an exact quote from the 28th verse of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam but, after reading Maurice Maeterlinck's The Intelligence of Flowers, it strikes me as the right epigraph for Leon Dabo's flowers.

Exactly what prompted Leon Dabo (1864-1960) to embrace flower painting around 1915 is unclear. He was already a successful artist (Theodore Roosevelt reportedly admired a Dabo landscape shown at the New York Armory Show in 1913), yet Dabo chose not to make a public display of this interest until 1933,  with  an exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York.  In the time-honored manner of a town crier, the gallery’s press release announced breathlessly: “…his studies of flowers have been hidden away….These flowers were not exhibited and never shown in his studio, with the result that not even his intimate friends had the faintest inkling that the painting of flowers constituted a secret and jealously guarded passion.”   Purple prose may have seemed appropriate to introduce these surprisingly vivid works by a painter of subtle landscapes but there is no particular evidence to support any of these claims.  And there was no need to hype these pictures; full of life and interest as they are.

Dabo, who was born in France and traveled there as a young man after his family moved to Detroit,  knew  the pastels of  Manet, Mary Cassatt,  and Odilon Redon,   Redon’s early watercolor landscapes from the 1870s prefigure the delicate colors  of tonalism.  In the late 1890s, the French symbolists would turn to pastel, reinvigorating a medium, that had been popular during the 18th century but had lately been  relegated to  school children and amateurs.

In Dabo's use of chalks and conte crayons, there may be the hint of a motive for his flower pictures.  Unlike in his large oil landscapes, Dabo used pastel  to  draw, sharpening his points to create contrapuntal effects against the characteristic shimmer and shadow.  La vie en rose, as the title implies, is a tonalist picture but what a riot of vivid colors and sharply defined spaces it contains.  In it, you can see a recurring feature of Dabo's flower pictures:  a background alive with movement, as though to remind us of the  water and wind that birthed  the blossoms. So Dabo uses shimmer to suggest a mis-en-scene for his flowers.  Cascade of Floral Fireworks (at top) positively glitters with movement, a virtuoso presentation piece for an underrated medium.   His use of asymmetrical arrangements suggests that Dabo .had looked at Japanese prints.   Arc-en-ciel and  La vie en rose look like he also knew ikebana (living flowers), the Japanese discipline of floral arrangement.

While Dabo was late to show his flower paintings to the public, Edouard Manet's flowers were late by necessity.  Manet created a group of sixteen flower paintings during the final years of his life.  Confined to home in the winter of 1880 by the ravages of syphilis, Manet concentrated his waning energies on the parade of floral bouquets brought to him by his friends.  (That the pre-eminent painter of the modern city was felled by a disease spread through the freedom that he had portrayed in his great works, was  ironic.)  In his flower paintings Manet used everything he knew about painting light to paint as much life as any small canvases have ever contained.  Two artists, for different reasons,  achieved the same results, works smaller in size but by no means diminished in art. 

 

Like Manet, Dabo  produced flower pictures in both pastels and oils. Dabo’s brushstrokes often recall the short, thick marks of Manet’s  lilacs.  Notice the similarities between Manet's Bouquet of Lilacs (Prussian State Art Museum, Berlin) and this early Dabo work titled Flowers in a Blue and White Vase.   Where they differ is in the backdrops; what is uninflected in Manet's pictures is invested with drama by Dabo.  He makes backgrounds that seem to speak, to be in conversation with the flowers through the medium of light.  The publication of The Pastels of Leon Dabo, admirably designed and executed, is long overdue.

ADDENDUM:  In this, the one hundredth anniversary year of the Armory Show, held in New York City, I should have mentioned that works by Leon Dabo were included in that important exhibition, including a  landscape of Canada in winter and Evening North Star.

 
The Pastels of Leon Dabo  by William Gerdts et al, is published by Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, Santa Barbara: 2012 in connection with their exhibition Leon Dabo: Toutes Les Fleurs.

The Last Flowers of Manet by Robert Gordon, New York, Harry N. Abrams: 1986.

Images: by Leon Dabo courtesy of Sullivan Goss Gallery.
1. Cascade of Floral Fireworks, ca. 1916, private collection
2. Abstraction Melancholique,  ca. 1915.
3. Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow), ca. 1915.
4. La vie en rose, 1916.
5. Flowers in a Blue and White Vase, 1899.