Dahlia: A Flower Of Late Summer

When they appear in August, dahlias are like many-petaled suns: large, round, and radiating fructiferous color.  This is no flight of fancy; for centuries Mexicans (the dahlia's native country) have eaten its boiled stalks.

Irma Stern's highly personal and spontaneous responses to her subjects are typical of the expressionist style she used so vividly for her Dahlias.  Stern averred that she never retouched a painting after it was finished but looking at Dahlias

we see a sophisticated harmony of color and movement.  The petals move like pinwheels in motion and, although there is no objective reason for the colored stripes that bend up toward the flowers, they suggest the artist's delight in paint.

Irma Stern was born in the Transvaal of South Africa, the daughter of German Jewish parents who had emigrated to the Cape Colony before her birth in 1894.  When her father was interned during the Boer War, Irma was taken to Germany by her mother Hennie to be near relatives, to return  after the war's end.

At nineteen Irma Stern once again traveled to Germany to enroll at art school in Weimar but, becoming disillusioned with the teachers, she transferred to a studio in Berlin.  Only when she met the expressionist painter Max Pechstein did she find the best teacher for her.  By the time she returned home to South Africa at age twenty-five, she had already received her first solo exhibition in Berlin (1919).

Her first exhibition in Cape Town the next year revealed how different and provincial that city was.  Instead of praise, Stern's work was ridiculed mercilessly, "Insults to human intelligence" and "Lunatic Inspirations" being just two of the denunciations that appeared in print.  There was even a police investigation of what some perceived as obscenity.

Another sign of the provincial sense of inferiority was the volte face by critics and the public that followed in the wake of Stern's successful exhibitions in England, Germany, and France where Stern was awarded the Prix d'Honneur at Bordeaux in 1927.  Two years later she was chosen to represent South Africa at London's Empire Art Exhibition.  She went on to represent South Africa at four Venice Biennials in the 1950s.  By the time Stern died in 1966 she had more than one hundred exhibitions to her credit. 

Irma Stern (1894-1966)
The Irma Stern Museum is located on the campus of the University of Cape Town.

Image:
Irma Stern, Dahlias, 1947, private collection, courtesy of Strauss & Company, Cape Town.

Ruby Sky Stiler: Holding Up The Sky

"When the skies are going to fall, fall they will..."
     - excerpt from "The Revolutionary" by David Herbert Lawrence

She stares out at us  holding up the weight of ages.

At first glance, it seems odd to describe sculpture as consisting of two and three dimensions at the same time but looking at the work of Ruby Sky Stiler, it becomes clear that this is exactly her intention.  Stiler's intentions are grand and so are her models.

Th formal feeling in Stiler's figures evokes the caryatids, those stoic female figures who perform in perpetuity their hieratic functions on the Acropolis.  Stiler often makes use of classical models whose origins are obscure but usually attributed to the sculptors in early Greek states.  A fortuitous find at a yard sale, Ernest Arthur Gardener's 1905 classic  A Handbook of Ancient Greek Sculpture, and a subsequent visit to the ruins of Pompeii in Naples a few years, led to Bust of  a Woman,  confronting us with familiar forms and distant meanings.  Or, as Stiler titled her 2017, exhibition Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Inherited and Borrowed Types.

Her iconography also incorporates feminist imagery (the curved  arm raised as if in a dance). You can see the influence of Louise Bourgeois  in the fractured perspectives of Stiler's figures.  She often works in bas relief, the low relief sculpture often incorporated into the facades of buildings and also a strong feature of Native American pottery.

Ruby Sky Stiler was born in 1979 in Portland, Maine, studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University.  At present she lives in Brooklyn Museum.   Stiler's work was included in the inaugural exhibition at the Wellin Museum of Art in 2012 on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the college's founding.  Her work is on  display at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Neew York City.

Image: Ruby Sky Stiler - Bust of a Woman, 2014, glass, fiber, reinforced concrete,  Nicelle Beachine Gallery, NYC.

Clarice Lispector Interrogates The World

"Be careful with Clarice.  It's not literature.  It's witchcraft." - anonymous

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was a writer whose work is as central to the literature of Brazil as Borges to Argentina or Garcia Marquez to Colombia.  Now, thanks to new translations of her books and a biography, Clarice Lispector we can read her in English.

Lispector's writing can be difficult to describe.  She draws on Kabbalah and mysticism, more generally, and its volatility is sometimes surreal.     Elizabeth Bishop, the austere American poet who lived for decades in Brazil, was surely an odd match when she chose to translate five of Lispector's stories into English in 1963.  Two of them  - The Hen and The Smallest Woman in the World were published in Kenyon Review in 1964.   Helene Cixous, the French philosopher, says that Lispector's keen interest in Kabbalah and mysticism made her what Kafka would have been if he had been a woman, and "if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty.  If Heidegger could have ceased being German."  

Lispector often despaired but she never stopped searching for the God she believed had abandoned her.

Her first novel Near to the Wild Heart was published in 1943 when Lispector was a twenty-three year old university student; her last novel The Hour of the Star was published two months before her death in 1977.   In between there were several novels, short story collections, children's books, and journalism written from locations in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States.  Both her sons were born abroad.

Born in a shtetl in western Ukraine, Lispector was the youngest of three daughters.  Mania Lispecctor, her mother, was raped  during the pogroms that raged unchecked in the aftermath  of the Russian Revolution of 1917.  The family fled, first overland to Romania and then by sea to Brazil where Lispector's mother already had relatives living.  Her health broken, Mania was paralyzed by her injuries, dying when she was only forty-two and Clarice was nine.

Changing her name from Chaya to Clarice, Lispector grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern province of Pernambuco.   You can taste the flavor of this hard, dry region in the poems of  the great Joao Cabral de Melo Neto.  Born in the same year as Lispector, Cabral de Melo Neto  became a diplomat, whereas Lispector married one.  At twenty-three, she became a naturalized citizen of Brazil, married Maury Valente, and published her first novel Near to the Wild Heart to immediate acclaim.

As the wife of a diplomat, Lispector watched the retreat of Hitler's armies from Italy in 1944 and tended to wounded Brazilian troupes in Naples, while reading Katherine Mansfield's stories (in Italian) in her spare time. Other postings to Bern, Switzerland in 1946 and England in 1949 were always interspersed with trips home to Brazil.  The exception was seven years spent living in Washington, D.C. from 1952 to 1959.

With such a history, death is often a presence in Lispector's stories and she imagined her own death in many of them, as in this excerpt from An Apprenticeship (1969):  "She had never read dying before - what an opening she had before her."   Nevertheless Lispector warned readers not to  mistake her work  as mere autobiography.  They were, she explained, "true but invented."

According to those who knew her,  The Hour of the Star is the truest expression of Lispector's  personality.  Its protagonist Macabea, is named for a hero of early Jewish history.  Born in Alagoas  where Lispector's family had lived, the climate  is so  harsh and dry that the the local patron saint is Our Lady of the Good Death.  Macabea shares her creator's fascination with the void: "Was she a saint?  So it seems.  She didn't know that she was meditating because she didn't know what the word meant. It seems to me that her life was one of contemplation of nothing."  Macabea is an orphan who leaves home to look for work in the big city, as un-self conscious as she is unschooled.

When the story begins,  Macabea  is working as a typist in Rio, so poor that she makes less than the minimum wage.  She makes mistakes at work every day because she is shriveling from hunger yet she takes pleasure in her job and she enjoys Coca-Cola.  When she acquires a boyfriend, he is a ne'er-do-well who drops her for a more affluent girl. Gloria deigns to offer Macabea advice, sending her  to a psychic who assures Macabea that her life will be changed forever by this visit.   Believing the fortune teller means that Jesus has finally come to take care of her, Macabea walks out the door with a smile on her face, only to be struck by a big yellow Mercedes.

The Hour of the Star was published in October, 1977.   Lispector died on  the day before her fifty-seventh birthday in December, 1977 from an untreatable ovarian cancer.  She was never informed of her diagnosis when she was admitted to the hospital in Rio.

  

About the artist:  Lygia Clark (1920-1988) was an artist from Belo Horizonte in northern Brazil 

who studied  in Rio de Janeiro  with the ecologically-minded landscape architect Roberto Burle Marz (1909-1994). Her desire to erase the demarcation between two and three dimensional works gradually drew her from painting to sculpture.   During the 1960s she took part in the Tropicalia movement of theater, art, and music, that included Caetano Veloso,  Gilberto Gul, Tom Ze, and Gal Costa.  Whether in combining geometry and organic forms or healing and abstraction, Clark was always searching for new combinations in her work.

For further reading:
1. Why This World: a Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser, New York, Oxford University Press: 2009.

2. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispecotr, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser, New York, New Directions: 2011.

3. Education By Stone by Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith, Brooklyn, Archipelago Books: 2005.

And more about Clarice Lispector in translation from Three Percent.

Images:

1. Lygia  Clark - Bicho (Critter) or Maquino (Machine), 1962, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

2. Lygia Clark - Superficie Modulada, 1956, Associacao Cultural, Rio de Janeiro.

Tomma Abts: A Perfect Enigma

Abts practices what some critics refer to as geometric abstraction (think of Piet Mondrian's later works such as Broadway Boogie Woogie), opposing it to expressive abstraction as represented by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, for example.  At heart, geometric abstraction is an optimistic style,   its belief in rationality buoyed by painters' efforts to create a truly international visual language.  As  so often happens,  these two competing schools have much more in common than their squabbling suggests.

Her paintings are all the same size: 48 cm x 36 cm (a 4 to 3 ratio). Their surfaces are painted, scraped, embellished, and polished and, although it is difficult to see in reproductions, there is an animated quality to them that may make the viewer think of Pop Art.  The way the artist manipulates the lines as she puts them on canvas tricky, in the way that an Escher is tricky.  Her method has evoked unusual attempts at description: Andrian Searle, writing in The Guardian, compared an Abts painting to driving the wrong way down a one way street.  The way She gives them titles that have no recognizable meaning to outsiders; perhaps given how long she labors over each one they are names, as in old friends.




Sometimes the lines in an Abts painting appear to be raised above the canvas in a third dimension.  The greeand yllow lines that zigzag downward in Inte look like lightening or fractured light rays.  Another painting, Oke, could be music made visible,the looping curves staves weaving in and out of one another and overlapping as instruments do but words rarely can.  You get to decide whether pink an d mauve or olive and spring green best represent the treble or the bass clef.

Tomma Abts was born in Germany in 1967 and attended art school in Berlin before moving to London in 1995 in search of a more stimulating artist community.  She won the much sought after Turner Prize (bestowed by the Tate Gallery) in 2006.  The prize, first awarded in 1984, was named for the 19th century British painter J.M.W. Turner.

An exhibition of paintings by Tomma Abts is now at the Serpentine Gallery in London and will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago in October.

Images:

1. Tomma Abts - Inte, 2013, private collection, Cologne.

2. Tomma Abts - Oke, 2013, David Zwirner Gallery, NYC.

3. Tomma Abts - Taade, 2003, Art History Archive.

Sally Michel: Every Color Loves Every Color

Have you ever looked at  a Matisse or a Derain and noticed how colors in their paintings seem to compete with each for the viewer's attention?  It was for this characteristic that a critic derisively dubbed them les fauves (the wild beasts) at an exhibition in Paris in 1905. Something  different is going on in the paintings of Sally Michel.  Her blocks of color are definitely modern yet coexist in a state of harmony, so are her lack of  conventional modeling and chiaroscuro.  Even without them, figures in her paintings are lively and full of personality.   Mane flying, legs practically dancing off the ground, head turned toward the young girl in the cart, Harness Racing captures a moment of shared joy in movement on a dusty circular track. Just so, we feel the Guitar Player lean into her instrument.  Knowledge stored in the hand has been rehearsed in the mind.

Sally Michel was born in Brooklyn in 1902 and died in Manhattan in 2003.  She studied at the Art Students' League, easily becoming an accomplished painter.  At the age of twenty-two she met Milton Avery; he was thirty-nine and also struggling to make his way as an artist.  Two years later  they married and Michel (she always exhibited her work under her own name) worked as an illustrator to support her husband, giving him the time and sustenance that enabled him to mature as an artist. 

They met in 1924 in Gloucester at a summer artists' retreat in Gloucester, Massachusetts made popular by its native Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865) whose luminist paintings were a revelation to mid-nineteenth century Americanartists.   First Winslow Homer arrived in 1873, and then John Henry Twatchman and Childe Hassam, and by the time  John Sloan arrived in 1914, he remarked, exaggerating only slightly,  "There was an artist's shadows beside every cow in Gloucester, and the cows themselves were dying from eating paint rags."  Nevertheless, Sloan spent his five most productive years there and convinced his friend Stuart Davis to come too.

In the fall Michel  returned to New York and soon Avery moved there from Hartford.  Fearful that the Michels would look askance at their twenty-two year old daughter bringing home a thirty-nine year old man, Avery decided to shave a few years off his age.  The two married in 1926 and soon after critics were noticing a new freshness in Avery's work, as she and her painting began to influence him.

Michel was known for her optimism, her wit, and her ready laugh;  it was she who introduced the element of fun into Avery's work.  We know that she chose the titles for almost all of his paintings. The two often painted side by side in the living room of their apartment but Avery's increasingly public career credited him alone for the "Avery style." Without Sally Michel, Milton Avery might have continued on the conservative path he had started down, a mild version of second generation New England impressionism.  Her Field in a Hilly Landscape Michel rearranges that landscape, mixing perspective illusions  to create a strangely realistic yet trompe-oeil world.

Images:

1. Sally Michel - Autumn Fantasy, 1957, D. Wigmore Fine Art, NYC.
2. Sally Michel - Harness Racing, 1977, D. Wigmore Fine Art, NYC.
3. Sally Michel - Guitar Player, no date given, D. Wigmore Fine Art, NYC.
4. Sally Michel - Field in a Hilly Landscape, no date given, D. Wigmore Fine Art, NYC.
5. Sally Michel - Wooded Landscape, no date given, D. Wigmore Fine Art, NYC.

Danish Moderns

After all the talking in the audience dies down, one can begin to make out some whispering voices from behind the screen.    Then a couple of footsteps can be heard, something that is dropped on the floor, a door  that slams shut.  For a while there is silence, then the whispering voices can be heard again, and like this it keeps alternating between the silence and the sound of voices.  When on the way home I complain how there wasn't a movie, I'm informed I lack imagination.  "It isn't people when they are fictitious, who have my interest," I try to explain, but of course in vain.  The one we talk to, when we talk to ourselves, always gets the last word.

  - "Movie Theater" by Carsten Rene Nielsen

At the back of the store, where dusty porcelain was piled from floor to ceiling, I found a plate so deep that one day in my kitchen by accident I dropped  an entire cauliflower into it, and I didn't  find it again until days later,, as I, crawling on all fours on the bottom of the plate, reached the edge, where in a radiance  and as far as the eye could see, hung thin, white curtains calmly waving back and forth, as if it were the room itself that was teetering from side to side.

  - "Plate" by Carsten Rene Nielsen

Carsten Rene Nielsen's poems take flight from his neighborhood in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, located on the east coast of the Jutland peninsula.  In Nielsen's giddy vision Aarhus is a place where comedic errors lie in wait, where questions go without answers, and stairways and alleys lead anywhere but to the expected terminals.   Nielsen's prose poems take everyday urban places,  florists,  department store fitting rooms, sidewalks, and objects we take for granted such as garbage cans, shoelaces, shirts, and the daily mail and get them up and involved with humans in surprising ways.   The dish may not run away with the spoon, as in the nursery rhyme, but it may entrap an unwary shopper.  A little bit of fear but more magic is created.  Modern, in the sense of being stripped of decoration, surreal in defying the conventional laws of physics, Nielsen's world becomes a recognizable place by the end of Household Inspections. 

Vilhelm Hammershoi's painted world also often focuses on domestic settings.  An early example,  A Baker's Shop, is surely an edited version of  a patisserie, its lines and neutral colors going against our expectations of plenitude.  By implication the baker is an acolyte tending a floury altar to the staff of life.  By contrast, during the same year Gauguin was painting bright blue trees at Arles and Van Gigh was working on two versions of his starry nights. 

House Inspections by Carsten Rene Nielsen, translated from the Danish by David Keplinger, Rochester NY, BOA Editions: 2011.

Image:
Vilhelm Hammershoi -  A Baker's Shop, 1888, Copenhagen.

Hammershoi's Many Shades Of White

They've started a discussion:
What is it to be Danish?
I must admit the question
Has almost turned me Spanish.
How could I ever answer this,
What is it to be Danish?

  - excerpt from "Being Danish" by Kaj Munck (1898-1944) from A Second Book of Danish Verse, translated by Charles Wharton Stork, Freeport, NY, Books for Libraries Press: 1968.


The cliche of the melancholy Danish temperament hovers over the enigmatic art of Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916);  his work has been compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet or a setting for an Ingmar Bergman movie.  And yet it stands out in company with other art of  Danish Golden Age (approximately 1830-1870), work that can be as bright and boundless as the preternaturally blue summer nights of the north.  Hammershoi stood apart from other artists of his day;  he chose to paint portraits only of people he knew and his palette was one of tones rather than colors.

Was his art cold and repressed or tranquil and intimate?  I incline to the latter interpretation but understand the impulse to try to wrest from these paintings stories, whether made-up or drawn from the artist's own life,  that justify our strong responses.  Surely, there must be much ado about something.

In Dust Motes Dancing In Sunbeams), painted in 1900, the artist offered a bravura demonstration of visual sensation by subtracting all the furnishings from a wood-paneled room with a door leading to an interior courtyard.  Even the round knob on the door is unnece In Dust Motes Dancing In Sunbeams), painted in 1900, t ssary to his aims.  But oh, those shades of white, mixed with bits of color, described by a friend who saw the artist's palette as resembling "oyster shells." 

Photographs, on the other hand, provide evidence of the accouterments of everyday life in the Hammershoi home:  paintings hang on the walls, curtains flutter at the windows, and china is laid out on the table.  The Hammershois possessed some aesthetically pleasing furniture, a white Hepplewhite chair gracing several paintings.

Ida Ilsted wrote to a friends that Hammershoi "had always wanted to live" in the apartment at 30 Strandgade after the couple moved there in 1898.  A large apartment dating to the 17th century that connected two buildings in the old Christianhavn section of Copenhagen, 30 Strandgade comprised a series od connecting rooms that had the air of a gallery intended for art or as art itself in Hammershoi's pairings.  Hammershoi himself wrote in a letter "Personally I am fond of the old, of old houses, old furniture, of that quite special mood that these things possess."  No surprise then that Hammershoi was attracted to archaic Greek sculpture that he painted in the museums of Paris and Rome that the couple saw on their honeymoon tour.

Hammershoi was fortunate in being supported by wealthy patrons who eagerly snatched up his domestic interiors and his scenes of old Christianhavn.  Carl Jacobsen was a brewer whose family business underwrote the establishment of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek to house the family collections, and tobacco manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung donated his collection to the state which built it a museum in Copenhagen finished in 1911.  Ironically perhaps, Hammershoi, a smoker, died of throat cancer five years later.

I wish I could remember
whether I've done anything
the letter you received
was full of hidden meanings
the burning bush
did not burn me
this morning I got up too late

I wrote the letter
and never did send it
I lay at the stake
but never was burned
you sit in your chair
and nothing has happened

I wish I could remember
whether I've done anything

 - "Father - Son" from Light by Inger Christensen from Light (1962), translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied, New York, New Directions: 2011

Images:

1. Vilhelm Hammershoi -  Interior, Strandgade 25, 1914,  85 x 70.5 cm, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen.
2. Vilhlelm Hammershoi - Dust Moats Dancing in The Sunbeams, 1900, 23.2. Ordruppgaard, Copenhagen.
3. Vilhelm Hammershoi -  Interior, Strandgade 30, March 1904, 55.5x 460.4 cm, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

The Woman On The Seawall

Hours ebb.  The horizon
sags into sea.  Not much left of the day:
towels that checkered the beach

folded away.  No children
tumbling from castes like pawns.  Last
walkers leave: a man and his mutts,

the woman who clutched
her shoes to her chest for hours -
all chased away by the night tide exhaling

 - excerpted from "Night Tide at Ostend" by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from Small Gods of Grief, Rochester, BOA Editions, Ltd.: 2001

This is a strange night world where seabirds fly and the docks and beaches are so many stripes illuminated by a mysterious source, backlit like a Hollywood movie yet painted a century and more ago by Leon Spilliaert of Ostend (Ostende in French, Oostende in Flemish), an important distinction in his native West Flanders.

Similarly poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar paints in words a visual equivalent to Spilliaert's world.  For both, the night and the sea become seemingly fathomless and static, unlike the usual characteristics  of night and sea.  Both Bosselaar and Spilliaert are true Oostendenaars, fluent in both Flemish and French, their imaginary worlds are split at the root, as Luc Sante described it in The Factory of Facts, "Belgian art, the id of the nation, manages to be extravagant and tight-lipped at once..."

In art the beach at Ostend is as familiar to Belgians as the beaches of Normandy are to lovers of French Impressionist painting and for the same reason: during the late 19th century swimming and sun-bathing became popular pastimes for a growing middle class with newly acquired leisure. 

Ideas, applied indiscriminately as they almost always eventually are, prompt a reaction.  As the German philosopher  Hegel put it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Well, maybe the first two but in art synthesis is no sure thing.  At the end of the 19th century European arts were marked by a fascination with irrationality in response to philosophical positivism with its claims to explain every phenomenon by scientific and rational means.

Symbolism was a literary movement first: the poet Jean Moréas published what became its manifesto Le Symbolisme in Le Figaro in 1886.  Symbolism's attraction for visual artists was immediate, followed closely by the critics.  In Le symbolisme en peinture and other books, Albert Aurier defined symbolist painting as one that would "clothe the idea of ​​a sensitive form" in suggestion and mystery.  It would be subjective, it would have its own recognizable language of forms, and it would have decorative elements.   Although Aurier was only twenty-seven when he died (from typhoid fever) he had not only made a reputation as an astute critic but had assembled a considerable personal  art collection.  His Van Goghs were acquired after his death by another astute collector, Helene Kroller-Muller for what eventually became the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands

In Brussels and in Paris, Leon Spilliaert, painter,  frequented literary circles. He particularly admired the French-speaking Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. Verhaeren was so highly regarded that he was considered for the Nobel Literature Prize but considered a long shot after his countryman Maurce Maeterlinck won the prize in 1911.  Although it is difficult to pin his poetry in modern terms, Verhaeren was close to the art of  Fernand Khnopff and the expressionist James Ensor, two Belgian painters whose works he analyzed.

Spilliaert was a night walker; he came by his deep feeling for the quiet atmosphere that attends theouble to hear it. restless ocean for those who take the tr

The Belgian poet Laure Anne Bosselaar grew up in Flanders,in Bruges and Antwerp; her native tongue is Flemish.  She worked for radio and television stations in Belgium and in Luxembourg before moving to the United States in 1987.   She has taught French poetry and published a collection of her own French poems, Artemis.  Widow of a fellow poet, editor, and translator Kurt Brown,  Bosselaar currently lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

For additional reading:
The Factory of Facts by Luc Sante, New York, Random House: 1998.

Image:
Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) - La femme sur la digue (The Woman on the Sea Wall), 1907, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

Museum Of Man

At the Museum of Modern Art you can sit in the lobby
on the foam-rubber couch; you can rest and smoke,
and view whatever the revolving doors express.
You don't have to go into the galleries at all.

In this arena the exhibits are free and have all
the surprises of art - besides something extra:
sensory restlessness, the play of alternation,
expectation in an incessant spray

thrown from heads, hands, the tendons of ankles.
The shifts and strollings of feet
engender compositions on the shining tiles,
and glide together and pose gambits,

gestures of design, that scatter, rearrange,
trickle into lines, and turn clicking through a wicket
into rooms where caged colors blotch the walls.
You don't have to go to the movies downstairs

to sit on red plush in the snow and fog
of old fashioned silence.  You can see the contemporary
Garbos and Chaplins go by right here.
And there's a mesmeric experimental film

constantly reflected on the flat side of the wide
steel plate pillar opposite the crenellated window
Now objective taxis surging west,on Fifty-third,
liquefy in slippery yellows - dusky crimsons,

pearly mauve - an accelerated sunset - a roiled
surf,or cloud curls undulating - their tubular ribbons
elongations of the coils of light itself
(engine of color) and motion (motor of form).
    -  "At the Museum of Modern Art" by May Swenson from To Mix With Time, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons: 1963.

If everyone who works in the art world shares one belief, it is that nothing is more important than art itself.   Some really believe it, some merely pay lip service, but a correlative belief is that the social elements of the art world are irrelevant.  Never mind that Jean Stafford's famous short story "Children Are Bored on Sunday" which appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 is about  the "children," young single adults named Emma and Alfred.   Emma is at the Metropolitan Museum on a mission of self-improvement.  Emma grew up where children played hide-and-seek behind lilac bushes and now, having moved to New York, she realizes that urbanites like Alfred have an advantage "because they had grown up in apartments, where there was nothing else to do but educate themselves."   This  story of girl meets boy did not go well and now Alfred, the witness to her previous embarrassment, turns up and, what is more annoying, he is blocking her view of the very Botticelli painting she was hoping to study.

Stafford, perhaps sooner than most, intuited that contemporary art has become a substitute for religion. One possible explanation for the popularity of conceptual art and one made plausible by historical precedent: western art of the medieval period was a tool for teaching used by the Church.  Another theory that art has become mass entertainment as it has become monetized - and we are talking here about vast sums of money that bear no relation to the aesthetic or social value of the art work itself - is of more recent vintage.   Money, power, beauty - how to tease apart these sticky threads?

Poet May Swenson uses the language of aesthetic description applied to the exhibitions and events the Museum of Modern Art is known for to suggest that people watching is not only an event that brings visitors to the museum but can be viewed as an exhibition itself.   Those "strolling feet" making "gestures of design" have all the frisson of art plus something extra, a sense of performance with all its human contingencies.

Humor helps, too; the French certainly seem to think so.  Looking at  Francois Boisrond's Museum of Man we cannot see the face of the sketcher although we assume he is looking at the artworks assembled in the cases before him but the artist leaves us in no doubt that the creatures are looking at him, with what thoughts we are invited to imagine.   This notion is made explicit in David Prudhomme's delightful book Cruising the Louvre.   On one page we see a crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa as seen from the viewpoint of La Joconde herself.  In another panel, a group of museum visitors struggles to stay upright on a bench before Delacroix's Raft of the Medusa, making them appear physically  in synch with the struggling sailors in the painting.  Prudhomme's book is full of amusing and bemusing moments as museum-goers attempt to position themselves in relation to the art works.  As Prudhomme observes, "We try to hold onto what cannot belong to us" by which I take him to mean experiences. 

Note on the artist: Francois Boisrond was born in 1959 in the western suburbs of Paris and was a student at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris when he made Musee de l'Homme in 1980.  His mother Annette Wademant (1928-2017) was born in Brussels, Belgium and became the screenwriter of such well known films as The Earrings of Madame de (1953) and Lola Montez (1955).  His father was the Frenchman Michel Boisrond (1921-2002) whose debut film as a director was Naughty Girl (1955), a musical starring the young Brigitte Bardot.

For additional reading:

Cruising Through the Louvre by David Prodhomme, translated from the French by Joe Johnson, Paris, Louvre Editions: 2016.

Image:
Francois Boisrond - Musee de l'Homme (Museum of Man), 1980, Pompidou Center, Paris.

The Rivals: Diego Rivera

A festive scene in Oaxaca is always an occasion for music and dance. Diego Rivera's chromatic colors are so vivid and saturated that they seem to emit light from the canvas.  Of course, light and color go together naturally in southern Mexico.  We  know by the way Rivera used color here to create layers of pictorial planes that he is a modern artist. We can also admire the distinctness he brings to each figure, an affectionate recognition of this gathering.  If the lavender and green decorative border reminds you of  Matisse, it is curious to note that Diego Rivera was only the second artist to be given a solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art - the first was Henri Matisse.

It sounds like the pitch for a novel or a screen play.  She is the daughter of an influential United States senator and the wife of one of the nation's richest and most powerful businessman.  He is a young Mexican artist and one of the leading artists of his generation and, by the way, an outspoken member of the Communist party who has visited Moscow on a number of occasions.  His wife, also an artist, paints unconventional self-portraits that combine elements of Mexican folk art and surrealism.

She was Abby Aldrich, a Quaker from Rhode Island and the dynamo behind the founding of New York's Museum of Modern Art and her husband was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (think: Standard Oil).
He was Diego Rivera, founder of a union of artists and the painter of murals in Mexico City that brought revolutionary ideas to the people, ideas as strikingly modern as his modernist aesthetics.  His wife was Frida Kahlo, a painter who drew on the popular culture in her work: she met Rivera in 1927 when she joined the Communist Party.

Rockefeller had  seen Rivera's work when she traveled to Mexico and, liking what she saw, she decided to commission a painting from him; the result was The Rivals.  Rivera painted The Rivals on board ship as he and Frida were on their way to New York to meet the Rockefellers.  They were  also looking forward to Rivera's New York debut, a solo exhibition at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art.   Rivera was just the artist that Rockefeller and museum director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. hoped the museum would introduce to the nation and the world, a modernist a s well as one whose work embodied the Americas.

When Rivera and Kahlo visited the Rockefeller home on Park Avenue, Abby's son David was impressed: "He was a very imposing and charismatic figure.."  As for Abby Rockefeller, she was so pleased with The Rivals that she gave it as her wedding gift to her son David when he married Peggy McGrath in 1940.   The young couple gave the painting a prominent place in the living room of their summer home in Maine, where it remained until David's death in 2017.   The Rivals  has rarely been seen by the public since then; the last occasion was a Rivera exhibition at MoMA in 2012.

As for the Rivera - Rockefeller connection, what most people remember is how Abby Rockefeller's next commission, a mural for her husband's own major project, the construction of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, went very wrong.  Originally intended as an uplifting fresco highlighting cooperation and scientific advancement ...into a more of a  political statement by the artist, including a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and evidences of the evils of unchecked capitalism.  When the artist and the millionaire could reach no compromise, the mural was destroyed yet Rockefeller bore no personal animus toward Rivera.  "The mural was quite brilliantly executed but not appropriate."  (Memoirs by David Rockefeller, 2002)


Image:
Diego Rivera - The Rivals, 1931, David & Peggy Rockefeller Collection, courtesy of Sotheby's, NYC.

Small Worlds

Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves.  Molt.  Rest. Molt
again.  Self-reinvention is everything.
Spin many nests.  Cultivate stinging
bristles.  Don't get sentimental
about your discarded skins.  Grow
quickly.  Develop a yen for nettles.
Alternate crumpling and climbing.  Rely
on your antennae.  Sequester poisons
in your body for use at a later date.
When threatened, emit foul odors
in self-defense.  Behave cryptically
to confuse predators: change colors, spit,
or feign death.  If all else fails, taste terrible.

 -"Advice from a Caterpillar" by Amy Gerstler from Dearest Creature, New York, Penguin Books: 2009.

The word enjambment comes from the French where it means to step over or to put legs across.  In poetry, its function is similar; it means to break a phrase, a sentence, or a thought between two lines without benefit of punctuation.   This sends a mixed message, increasing the attention of the reader/auditor.  Who started the practice?  The Elizabethan poets made much of it and, like many other things poetic and historic, it seems to date back to the catchall answer that was

Homer.

.

The caterpillar, curled in upon itself is like the painter. It seeks perfection through its solitary efforts.  Like the artist leaning over his easel at night, the caterpillar will achieve a magical transformation.  As you can see in Charles Seliger's Caterpillar with Sky, although the subject and the scope of the picture may be small, the artist's intentions are expansive, and no more sentimental than poet Amy Gerstler's imagined Lepidopteran monologue.

Charles Seliger (1926-2009) was an early abstract expressionist but, like a number of others I have mentioned in these columns, not so abstract as all that.  Although it is not obvious from reproductions, Seliger worked with small canvases, eschewing the gigantic proportions of so many of his contemporaries, the better to achieve a sense of intimacy with his subjects.

Although he did not complete high school or attend art school, his interests encompassed biology, natural history, and physics.  "My work, even when most abstract, reflects the natural world," Seliger wrote. His technique attracted the attention of New York artists in the 1940s; his paintings were shown at Peggy Guggenheim's famed "Art of This Century" gallery when he was just nineteen. Nevertheless, he worked at ordinary jobs during the day throughout his adult life.

For further reading: a tribute to Charles Seliger by Addison Parks at Artdeal magazine.

Image:
Charles Seliger - Caterpillar with Sky, 1949, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica.

Frieze: The Renaissance Art of Marcia Marcus

The end of World War II unleashed energies pent up by years of Depression and war, and not just marriages, babies, home buying,college education, and even commercial aviation on a large scale.   That was all expected but also and  suddenly New York became the center of the art world; artists from all over converged on the city where everything was fresh, exciting, and controversial.  The contrast with the pre-war years was stark: before WWII American galleries rarely displayed American artists.  Abstract Expressionism influenced even the figurative painters of the period. In retrospect, some of the most interesting work being done melded aspects of both: flattened forms and  an ambiguous relationship with pattern and decoration.

Frieze: The Porch (1964) gets it title from Marcus' encounter with Byzantine art and Renaissance frescos in Florence when she studied there in 1961.  Florentine Landscape (1961)  features a reclining semi-nude Red Grooms in the foreground, a male odalisque.  We take this to be an Italian locale thanks to the woman in a toga standing in the background,  more clearly grounded in the landscape than Grooms who appears as convincing as the nude in Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe.  (Florentine Landscape is now in the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase.)

Looked at from left to right -
Jill Johnston (1929-2010), wearing a red bowler hat and holding an equally dapper cane, was born in England to an American mother and a British father; she grew up on Long Island. 

Having earned an MFA, Johnston became dance critic for The Village Voice in the 1960s.  Her column gradually expanded into a diary of her adventures in the New York art world.

In 1971 Johnston took part in a panel discussion at Town Hall  "Battle of the Sexes" that, in retrospect, was bound for notoriety.  Johnston was by then an announced lesbian, her fellow panelists included Australian author Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) who had only just been dubbed "saucy feminist that men love" by the mainstream American press,  and Norman Mailer who was - well - Norman Mailer.  Johnston became an early contributor to MS. magazine after it was founded in 1972 and  her best known writing is contained in the book Lesbian Nation, published in 1973.  Johnston published a number of other books and was one of the more intriguing practitioners of the New Journalism but her boldness was too much for most of her male colleagues and even editors at  The Village Voice expressed qualms about her activism and her outspokenness. 

Barbara Forst studied at the Art Students League in New York City where she would spend most of her adult life teaching theater and producing plays off-Broadway.  She died in Washington, D.C. in 1998.

Marcia Marcus (b. 1928, New York, NY) looking over her shoulder at the viewer and wearing  a patterned cape that suggests a familiarity with Gustav Klimt's portraits, also studied at the Art Students League and also at Cooper Union where her contemporaries included Alex Katz and Lois Dodd,  also figurative painters during the high tide of Abstract Expressionism.  Their work shared similarities, flattening forms, strongly articulated figures and attention to pattern.  All these characteristics are represented in Frieze: The Porch painted by Marcus in 1964, three years after her stay in Florence where she immersed herself  Byzantine art and Renaissance fresco painting.

At the far right  is a grisaille image (in black and white) that Marcus painted from a photograph of  herself as a child and her father.

Although Marcia Marcus no longer paints, as Frieze: The Porch demonstrates, she  deserves the attention that has been lavished on her close contemporaries and fellow downtown art luminaries: Allen Kaprow,  with whom she collaborated on Happenings in the late 1950s, Red Grooms and Bob Thompson whose Delancey Street museum featured her self-portraits (they received highly favorable reviews).  Also, for a quarter of a century from the early 1950s until the late 1970s, Marcus spent her summers painting in a shack on the dunes near Provincetown. MA,  another intensely art-centric locale.  Marcus can claim an impressive list of exhibitions at such galleries as Pace, yet her name and her paintings have become invisible.

Image:
Marcia Marcus - Frieze: The Porch, 1964, Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC.

Odilon Redon's Renaissance Portrait

She could be descended from a Renaissance woman, or at least the portrait of one.  Odilon Redon's Madame Arthur Fontaine (Marie Escudier) was made in 1903 but its subject is presented with all the signifiers of an unusual Renaissance painting that Redon and his contemporaries had seen and studied at the Louvre. Here is an obviously well-born woman, beautiful and virtuous as well can see by her modish dress and elegant profile as she bens studiously over he needlework.  The left-facing profile and the arabesque-like arrangement of flowers as a framing device are part of a fascinating story told by David Alan Brown of the National Gallery of Art in the book Virtue and Beauty. Mme Fontaine  was the wife of a wealthy French industrialist and a patron of the arts whos circle included such forward-thinkers as the writer Andre Gide, composer Claude Debussy and several painters including Redon.

Antonio Pisanello's Ginevra d'Este had no precedent in the style of 15th century Florence.  Rather than adorn his subject with precious jewels to suggest the wealth of her family he chose to portray Ginevra virtues otherwise: situating her in a virginal garden (hortus conclusus)  where he surrounded her with shimmering spring leaves, perfumed carnation flowers and fluttering butterflies (symbols of the human spirit).

We may wonder whether Redon was partaking of a no-classical moment in French art, as evidenced by contemporary paintings by Cezanne and particularly La belle Angele by Paul Gauguin (1889, Musee d'Orsay).  edon makes an appearance in a painting by his friend Maurice Denis, member of the once secret brotherhood of artists known as the Nabis (Prophets, in Hebrew).  Although Gauguin was not included in the picture himself, it is a painting he owned by Cezanne (Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples) on the easel that the other artists are gathered around.  Redon stand a little separately from the group at their left,  in the painting as in life.

Redon's early graphic works in black and white are a virtual dictionary of bad dreams, and now as familiar from reproductions as the philosophical oddities of Rene Magritte.

What makes Redon's pastels outstanding is his sure feather-light touch with the chalks themselves.  The nameless blue flowers, interspersed with tiny starbursts of white and yellow seem to hang weightlessly in the air, with no other reason than to frame Mme. Fontaine's person as the white lace collar frames her face on her yellow dress.  For Redon nothing in his work was ever merely decorative, it was part of a visual language to translate the mysteries inherent in the natural world for our eyes.  Flowers, opined the artist, are "admirable prodigies of light" and, perhaps like Monet, Redon, rendered sensations in response to the contemplation of visible objects through invisible light.

For further reading:

Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci: Renaissance Portraits of Women by David Alan Brown, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press: 2001.

Images:

1. Odilon Redon - Madame Arthur Fontaine (Marie Escudier), 1903, pastel on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

2. Pisanello - Ginevra d'Este,  c.1435-49, tempera on wood, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Spring Rounds: Takahashi Rikio

Early Spring is a remarkable work on its face, a combination of realistic and abstract elements  for the eye to feast on and the imagination to wonder at.  A dash of a primary color that may be a feather and a large thumb-print like black stroke leading off the edge of the paper are the strong marks in a composition of delicate pinks, lavenders, yellows, and amber.

Takahashi Rikio (1917-1991) was admired by his peers for his use of these delicate hues associated with the Kyoto practitioners of sosaku hanga or 'creative prints.'  Takahashi maintained a consistent luminosity, difficult to achieve in woodblock prints, that has been likened to yayoi, the aspect of calm and elegance of the Japanese spirit.  He achieved this difficult feat by printing in extremely thin layers while, at the same time, adding irregular blocks of color that look as though they had been applied with a paint brush. 

When a wood block is printed on, the texture of the wood grain will appear as if it had been sprayed on the block's surface.  This evanescent  appearance becomes the background for cuts made by a knife or burin.  When two or three colors are overlapped in this manner the grain takes on the look of a layer of gauze.

Takahashi began working with abstract forms but the intensity of his concentration always suggested possible layers of meaning.   Just so, the longer we look at his images the more we convince ourselves of the inevitability of incident.

Takahashi was born in Tokyo: his father was an artist and by the age of seventeen the young man was the assistant manager of the father's photographic studio.  In 1944 he was conscripted into the Japanese Navy as a war photographer.  After spending two years, 1962-63 at the California Institute of Art, Takahashi's work became known in the West.  His own words are worth remembering  as we admire Early Spring.  "It is impossible to speak about my work while looking at a book or a photographic reproduction of it.  It is like scratching an itch while wearing an overcoat. Flat reproductions are different from the actual work."

Image:
Takahashi Rikio - Early Spring, 1963, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

William Henry Hunt: A Master Watercolorist

Primroses and Bird's Nest,  the flora and fauna of early spring.  I  had a close look at a bird's nest when a robin built one atop the air conditioner on my balcony a few years ago.  The south-facing balcony provided warmth and shelter from the wind and air conditioner stayed mute until the nest was vacated. 

At first glance you could easily take Primroses and Bird's Nest for a photograph. But it is a watercolor painted by William Henry Hunt and it is a startling yet altogether typical example of his work.  The Englishman was known for the marvels of his technique in this notoriously tricky medium, combining transparent washes of color to tint the paper with opaque areas of gouache sitting on the paper like acrylics or oils, sometimes scraped to create texture, as you can see in the velvety primrose leaves.  And there is his unerring eye for color evident in those robin's eggs.  

John Ruskin, arguably the most influential art critic in 19th century England, described William Henry Hunt as the finest still life painter the country had ever produced.  Hunt (1790-1864) lived a long and apparently uneventful life in London, only uneventful if you discount his paintings.

Image:

William Henry Hunt - Primroses and Bird's Nest, 1840s, Tate Gallery, London.

Spring Violets And A Perfect Poem

In this little urn is laid
Prudence Baldwin, once my maid,
From whose happy spark here let
Spring the purple violet.

 - "Upon Prue, His Maid" by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), from The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Edition, ed. Arthur M. Eastman, New York, W.W. Norton: 1970.

Like the wood violets (and the daffodils) of March, this perfect little poem moves beyond the dichotomy of life and death to the transcendent vision of regeneration.

A child of Cheapside and one of seven children, Robert Herrick's father died when the boy was only a year old.  Apprenticed to an uncle at sixteen, Herrick went on to graduate from Cambridge University in 1617 and was ordained as a minister of the Church of England in 1623.  Ousted from his vicarage in 1647 during the English Civil War, he campaigned for his own restoration after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660.  Herrick never married.  Hesperides, published in 1648, is a collection of some 1,200 of Herrick's lyric poems.

Image: Jean-Francois Millet - Narcisses et violettes (Narcissus and Violets), 1867, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Consider The Olive Tree

"Nobody knows how long it takes to kill an olive.
Drought, axe, fires, admitted failures.  Hack one down,
grub out a ton of mainroot for fuel, and  next spring
every side-root send up shoots.  A great frost
can leave the trees seedless for years; they revive.
Invading armies will fell them.  They return
through the burnt-out ribs of siege machines.

Only the patient goat, nibbling its way down the ages
has malice to master the olive. Sometimes, they say,
a man finds an orchard, fired and goat-cropped
centuries back.  He settles and fences;
The stumps revive.  His grandchildren family prosper
by the arduous oil-pressing trade.  Then wars
and disease wash over.  Goats return.  The olives
go under, waiting another age.

Their shade lies where Socrates disputed.
Gethsemane's withered groves are bearing yet."

 -  "The Olive Tree" by Mark O'Connor, Collected Poems, Alexandria, (N.S.W.), Hale & Iremonger: 2000.

Perhaps it was because I had been thinking about olive trees, but when I looked at Robin Gowen's painting Shades of Shadows VI, I  thought what a civilized landscape.   The trees and, even more, the hedgerow in the background at right are signs of a well tended meadow.   And the light washing over everything could easily be the light in Provence although it is not.

Writing to his editor, Richard Olney, an American expatriate painter and cookbook author, gave his reasons for living in France and the penultimate one was "the presence of olive trees in the landscape."  A civilized answer

Lost in the labyrinth of history, the Olea europea, or  edible olive, was first collected in the wild, probably in the Levant; certainly it is one of the earliest cultivated crops that we know of.   Evidence that the olive tree was farmed successfully on the island of Crete dates back to c. 3500 B.C.

The oil of the olive has been sacred to many cultures.  By the time of Homer (c. 900 B.C.), olive oil had become a luxury good, used to anoint the human body for ceremonial occasions.  (An olive tree appears in Book XXIII of The Odyssey, being the center post of the marriage bed).    In The Odes (c. 13 B.C.) the Roman poet Horace testified to the olive's delectable qualities as food: "As for me, olive, endives, and smooth mallows provide sustenance.  According to the Bible, it was an olive leaf that the dove brought back to Noah's ark. 

Mark O'Connor (b. 1945) is an Australian poet who has collaborated on projects with nature photographers.

Robin Gowen (b. 1957) is an American artist who was raised in New Hampshire and Nigeria.  In recent years she has moved around the western United States.

Image:
Robn Gowen - Shades of Shadows VI, 2017, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.

Patricia Chidlaw: Space.Time

Wonderful is this wall of stone,
wrecked by fate.
The city buildings crumble,
the bold works of the giants decay.
Reefs have caved in, towers collapsed.
Barred gates have gone,
gateways have gaping mouths,
Hoarfrost clings to the mortar.
  - anonymous poet, from The Battle Of Malden And Other Old English Poems, edited by B. Mitchell, London: 1965

Caught between the Romans and Christians; caught between a thousand year old organization of space and a new one taking form that we are too immersed in to fully comprehend, we are of (at least) two minds about the vernacular landscape we have made.

Superficially, they may look like street photography, but the paintings of Patricia Chidlaw are the creations of a different sensibility in a different medium.  A photographer may choose among negatives for the best one and that one may implicitly refer to moments before and after the picture was taken, whereas a painter works - and reworks - a single canvas until it satisfies her intentions.

In the current exhibition Patricia Chidlaw: The Moving Picture Show at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery in Santa Barbara, California, the show in the title is often viewed from the vantage point of an implied passerby, possibly on foot but more likely  inside a car.  This immediately gives us a sense of the familiar, that we have seen these places before.  But look longer at many of the paintings and you notice that time is just as much their subject. 

The clock was introduced in Europe circa 1300 and the coordination of times from place to place was a byproduct of the demands of modern transportation, specifically of the railroads.  Paul Tillich,  theologian,  defined tragedy as coming from the gods of space, whereas justice belongs to "the God who acts in time an through time, united the separated spaces...."

And so a question arises: do we value a  sense of space more  than a sense of time, the medium through identify the brain as the seat of sight.   Whichever side of the question one comes down on, there is widespread agreement that roads disturb the peace and cause radical change by muting the distinction between the private and the public.

In Under the 280 an elevated highway casts a mammoth shadow over its surroundings and also functions as a de facto proscenium framing the view of a low rise street from an earlier era.  The woman in No Vacancy stands inside a "vintage" and rare phone booth that stands under a motel sign that announces their rooms have cable television.  It may be titled Sunrise at the Palace but the Art Deco style theater looks as though its best days were over when the Deco style became passe.

The pedestrian ordering of life that goes back hundreds of thousands of years has only recently been forced to live side by side with a new type of road and a myriad of new metaphors.  Easier to impose on the sparsely settled North American continent by newcomers than on Europe, where most of them came from, the freedom to move from place to place and the freedom to use space as you see fit are not necessarily harmonious.

Streets are not just for movement from place to place; they are also places of work and socializing, sometimes they are even used for a refuge of privacy and solitude, uses that became problematic once humans got behind the wheel.  I'm guessing that The Red Chair is not a castoff but rather a seat for sociability.  And I fancy the idea  that the goldfish in Fish Bowl, looking out the window may have the red chair in view.


John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1991), was a pioneer in the study of cultural landscape and founder of the magazine  Landscape in 1951. He was known for his complex and humane stance on the state of what we call the environment than some radicals of recent decades, commenting that "death is seen as merely the first step in the producing of compost," a credo that resembles an early but short-lived Christian heresy.  Jackson, who was born in Dinard, France, taught at Harvard and lived in the American southwest for several decades.  His peripatetic life supplied the intimate familiarity with both new and old  landscapes that characterized his writing. Jackson had a toleration and, more than that, a taste for the contradictions  in human actions.

Although she was born in San Francisco, Patricia Chidlaw's childhood was, like Jackson's   a peripatetic one; her father was a military officer who was stationed in Germany and then in France, where Patricia first encountered art in its museums, cathedrals, and even flea markets.  When she began her university art education in 1969, she settled in Santa Barbara, where she now lives.

Images: by Patricia Chidlaw, 2017, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara
1. Under the 280
2. Sunrise at the Palace
3. No Vacancy
4. The Red Chair
5. Fish Bowl

Gaslight: Jozsef Rippl-Ronai's Park At Night

"Paris will be very beautiful in autumn...The town here is nothing, at night every thing is black.  I think that plenty of gas, which is after all yellow and orange, brightens the blue, because at night here the sky looks to me - and it's very odd - blacker than Paris.  And if I ever see Paris again, I shall try to paint some of the effects of gaslight on the boulevard."

 - Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, in a letter #500 

Ethereal and atypical, this delicate pastel by Jozsef Rippl-Ronai is suggestive of  much that is specific to the period when it was created (c.1892-95).  If you think of the works being created at the time by the Belgian symbolists, you can imagine its atmosphere is vaguely anxious.  The cluster of tree trunks appear as insubstantial as a group of hovering ghosts.  Rippl-Ronai creates this effect by making them appear as they would in a photographic negative: they are pale against the dark night.  And speaking of the Belgian, we will see similar trees in the 20th century paintings of a another Belgian, Leon Spilliaert (1861-1946), their (primarily) vertical lines suggesting interpretations as various as their individual trunks.

Like William Degouve de Nuncques' pastel Nocturne in the Parc Royale, Brussels, also in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Rippl-Ronai's Un parc la nuit is a love letter to artificial illumination.   We moderns may think about light pollution or the Dark Sky Society that supports the mission of astronomers but to people of the 19th century, gaslights offered the tantalizing prospect of nightlife, the nocturnal excitement offered by theaters, cafes, clubs, and bars.  We enjoy Un parc la nuit for the evanescent aesthetic it embodies but it can enrich our experience if we understand some measure of what its contemporaries saw in it.

Although the artist does not identify a location, he was living in Paris at the time and the cast-iron lamp posts peppered the French capitol; there were many thousands of them in place by the 1890s.  Robert Louis Stevenson, an enthusiast of the new lamps, called them "domesticated stars."  When they were superseded  by arc lights, he mourned their passing.  The lights hint at the presence of houses and roads in the distance, or maybe just more gaslights

Jozsef Rippl-Ronai (1861-1927) was from Kaposvar, Hungary.  He arrived in Paris in 1888, where he lived until 1901.  His  painting My Grandmother attracted the interest of Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, who invited him into their group Les Nabis (Hebrew for Prophets), where his nickname was, naturally enough, the Hungarian Nabi.  When Rippl-Ronai returned home to Hungary he brought back with him the latest developments in art. Nothing the Hungarian artist ever did rivaled the glitter and magic of Un parc la nuit.

While in France he also became friends with the sculptor Aristide Maillol.  His portrait of Maillol won a gold medal at Vienna in 1914. In 1925, Rippl-Ronai was invited by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to contribute a self-portrait to their gallery of self-portraits.

To read more about the friendship between Jozsef Rippl-Ronai and Aristide Mailloll.

Image:
Jozsef Rippl-Ronai - Un parc la nuit (A Park at Night), c.1892-185, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.