Pablo Picasso: Boisgeloup In The Rain

Paul Verlaine  described rain as "long sobs of Autumn's violins."

Admittedly, this painting by Picasso shows us spring rain but I think the epigraph fits.
 

Boisgeloup is an old stronghold dating from the Middle Ages. The town is located in the French region of Haute-Normandie. It became the home of Pablo Picasso in 1930. He Made a studio where he built sculptures in plaster, iron, and bronze. On the property there was a large outbuilding where he installed a press for engraving. He lived there for six years with his mistress Marie Therese Walter while his wife Olga stayed in Paris.  There is a small museum L'Atelier du sculpteur that displays his works. 

Image - Pablo Picasso - Boisgeloup in the Rain, 30 March 1932, oil on canvas, Musee Picasso, Paris.

Stella Polaris: Helen Frankenthaler

There was always more subject matter in abstract painting than artists were willing to admit. The title may have been an allusion to a work by the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire. Frankenthaler used the three primary colors; then white was layered over them in a series of ..gestures.

Her precociousness was well known; at twenty-three Frankenthaler was already able to command the controlled freedom (yes!) which became her trademark.

Her color field paintings with their stains and washes of color are always less monochromatic than they appear at first glance. She  usually laid the paint on heavily at first and then washed over with water. Marks, spatters and a wide variety of technical means.  At least once, in 1976, she employed a window cleaning blade on a long handle to get the effect she was after. A number of Frankenthaler's works have elements of overt subject matter in them.  Of Faerie Tale painted in 1976 she remarked matter-of-factly that is was a painting of a window but then added,  "I don't know whether I meant or just this second projected that image." 

In response to the strictly gendered stereotypes of the 1950s, Frankenthaler held herself aloof with the press. "There are three subjects I don't like discussing: my former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries."   Fortunately, Frankenthaler lived to see better days and greater appreciation of her work, living until at age eighty-two, she died in 2011.

Image: Helen Frankenthaler - Stella Polaris, 1990, acrylic on canvas, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, NYC.

 

Bob Thompson's Antique Figures

"The stars are scattered in the sky

irrespective of our need

for swans and lyres and charioteers

Our dreams are foolish

and our constellations

fictions

that wouldn't fool a child. We reach them anyhow

as if God were a coloring book

as if, like the blacksmith god,

we thought to catch Love

in a net."

 -- "Hephaestus" by Linda Bamber from Metropolitan Tang, Jaffrey, NH, David R. Godine: 2008.

Currently touring  major American museums is the first retrospective in over twenty years devoted to  the African American artist  Bob Thompson, This House Is Mine  (Smart Museum in Chicago, High Museum in Atlanta, Colby Museum of Art in Maine).

This House Is Mine stakes Thompson's claim to be the inheritor of European traditions of Greek and Roman mythology and Renaissance Italy.  It's no exaggeration to say that Thompson's output was voluminous - more than 1,000 works in oil, watercolor, gouache. In a period of full time painting that lasted eight brief years, really a mote in the eye of Western art, Thompson  was fiendishly productive; he moved so quickly, onlookers had trouble keeping up.

Riff is a term of art for Thompson whose friendships with New York jazz musicians are frequently  commemorated in his paintings. He riffed  on Piero della Francesca (illusionistic spaces) and Francisco de Goya (dark and doom) and, here and there, on surrealism, too. Old Masters were  deeply unfashionable at the time, leaving the field to Thompson and he made the most of it. He made hiss first trip to Italy in 196, thanks to a grant.

His paintings are populated with human and animal figures mingled together, if uneasily.  Crowds of  monstrous creatures emerge from the shadows (see the brown bat at the far right (above) in The Drying After. Theatrical scenes become allegories of contemporary nightmares through distorted perspectives. 

All are saturated colors like none seen since the time of the French Fauves (Wild Beasts).

Bob Thompson (1937-1966) died in Rome in 1966 following gall bladder surgery. 

Image: Bob Thompson - The Drying After, 1961, oil on wood panel, Art Institute of Chicago

Raoul Dufy: The Case For Beauty

"A well  painted turnip is more significant than a poorly painted Madonna." - Max Liebermann

Not many artists are so distinctive that an adjective is coined in their honor but here is one: "Dufyesque." 

Early on, Raoul Dufy (187-1953) became adroit at effacing the ugly, a talent that came in handy  for someone born in  Le Havre. Guidebooks agree the port  city is one of the least attractive cities in France. With its hustle and bustle, Le Havre provided the animation that was a characteristic of his work. But give Le Havre credit for its municipal art school where young Dufy began his art education.

Raoul Dufy had seen a retrospective devoted to Vincent van Gogh two years before he painted La Dame en Rose. Until then Dufy had shown little interest in painting human figures. Van Gogh's influence is obvious in the use of black outlining and  the halo of broken lines that makes the green room vibrate with energy.  The uninterrupted line of nose and eye brow is an elegant gesture. No chair is visible  although  she appears to be sitting. The pink dress barely suggests her figure; it is her face that is the center of attraction. A sliver of a gray door at left and an orange triangle. are the only hints of a location. At first the identity of La Dame en Rose (The Woman in Pink) was something of a mystery. She is thought to be Eugenie Brisson, his future wife. 

After his mandatory military service Dufy won a scholarship to L'Ecole  des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During its brief heyday, bracketed by the Autumn Salons of 1905 and 1906, Fauvism was an experiment in color for its own sake that shook the staid French Academy to its boots. Dufy soaked it all up as he worked on improving his drawing skills.

By the late 1940s Dufy's ability to paint was so severely limited by rheumatoid arthritis that he had to fasten the brush to his hand. He died in 1953; the cause was intestinal bleeding, likely caused by his treatment with cortisone

Toward the end of his life Dufy saw himself dismissed as little more than  an illustrator. Accused of lacking seriousness, his brilliant performance has been overlooked by his critics. In recent years though Dufy's star has been on the rise because so much contemporary art is cold and impersonal. Indeed, Dufy has been called a modern-day Watteau for his depictions of the divertissements of the bourgeoisie  and their charming impermanence. "If Fragonard could be so gay about the life of his time, why can't I be just as gay about mine?" he retorted.

Image: Raoul Dufy - La Dame en Rose, oil on canvas, 1908, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Jennifer Bartlett: Five In The Evening

"Bartlett is an artist in the Renaissance tradition, equally engaged in philosophy, naturalism, and aesthetics, constantly questioning herself and the world with her favorite mantra, 'what if'?' " - Terrie Sultan

"She was outspoken and seemed very sure of herself, and she made people angry, especially  men." - Elizabeth Murray,  a painter herself, as well as Bartlett's friend

What Bartlett did sounded like conceptual art but with its bright colors and clusters of objects it didn't look like it. 

Air: 24 Hours takes place around Bartlett's home and studio in Manhattan. To make  a cycle of passing time combined her fascination with the organizing possibilities of the grid and a feeling for the rhythms in nature. Arbitrary parameters stimulated her imagination, as they did for other artists in the 1970s like Sol Liewtt and Frank Stella. Things withheld hover over the paintings, giving them an air of  mystery. We are never certain whether we have recognized the artist's intentions fully. Bartlett revealed that ,"The Air paintings are derived very loosely from snap shots."

The clock is a time organizer while the natural elements add sensual detail. Notice in the lower left corner of  the canvas the small clock, its hands positioned at precisely five. The series is  enigmatic, but 5 PM  reads as a pond with goldfish circling four lily pads. They remind me of Japanese koi fish. The message of the Air series is that existence is  always in flux.

Jennifer Bartlett (1941-2022)  attributed her affinity to water to her childhood  in Long Beach, California.  She received an MFA at Yale University "I'd  walked into my life," she told Elizabeth Murray.

Image: Jennifer Bartlett - Air: 24 Hours -- Five o'clock, 1991-1992,oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Fairfield Porter: The French Connection

"Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness to come from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail.' - Fairfield Porter

"The same water -  a different wave,

What matter is that it is a wave. 

What matters is that wave will return.

What matters is that it will always be different.

What matters the most of all: however different the returning wave, 

It will always return as a wave of the sea.

What is a wave? Composition and muscle. The same goes for

lyrical poetry."

          - Marina Tsvetayeva

By what alchemy do flat patches of color look like the waves of an incoming tide? A non-realistic painterly style characterized by flat patches of color is how, and that wave rolled in from France. I see the whitecaps as decorations on the blue/green breakers. Fairfield Porter's interest in decorative motifs was inspired by his admiration for the French artists known collectively as Les Nabis, in particular Pierre Bonnard. In his paintings Porter combined realism with flat abstraction; among his friends was fellow artist  and abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning.  Porter was a figurative painter  in the post-war years when American abstract expressionism was triumphant. While at the Parsons School of Design, he  studied with Jacques Maroger, a French art restorer.

During the Christmas holidays of 1938, Porter attended an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago of works by Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. The exhibition came as a "revelation of the obvious" as Porter would recall to interviewer Paul Cummings in the 1960s. Why, he wondered, would he paint any other when way "it's so natural to do this." He also told Cummings, "I think that Ingres's remark that 'I leave it to time to finish my paintings' is true in a very wide and profound way."

Image: Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) -  The Wave , 1971, oil  on canvas, private collection

Leon Dabo: A Late Romantic - Part II

When Leon Dabo was an aspiring artist in Paris Japomisme  had taken the city by storm. Paintings, ceramic, posters, showed the French infatuation with all things Japanese. 

Artful arrangements were a specialty of  Dabo's floral paintings. You can see the influence of ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging in The Blue Vase. The origins of Ikebana date back at least a millennium.  Wabi sabi is an aesthetic that finds beauty in transience and  imperfection.. 

Feathery strokes are all he needed to suggest the evanescent life of flowers. A simple wash technique sufficed for the cobalt blue vase and its soft pink backdrop. Asymmetry is also present in the indeterminate turquoise plane the vase sits on.  This painting is an affectionate tribute to Japonisme.

Flower painting has long been the province of romantic painters; there just is something  about their loveliness that inspires sentiment. Dabo's interest in flower painting may have been stimulated when he worked under John La Farge in New York during the 1890s.. Like La Farge, Dabo worked in several media.

The vases are usually simple providing the pretext for  floral flights of fancy. The background only hints at a setting; the lightly outlined turquoise contrasts pleasingly with the cobalt blue vase but barely delineates its location. 

It came as a surprise to critics  in 1933 when an exhibition of Dabos' floral paintings went on view at the Knoedler Gallery in Manhattan. He had been keeping them private, some of them for two decades.  Who might we compare Dabo to?  Perhaps he is "the Manet of flowers."

Flower painting dates back to the days  of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs who used the lotus to symbolize the all-powerful sun. The figures in Medieval French tapestries, notably the Bayeux Tapestries, portray humans and animals against a background of cascading flowers; these too had specific meanings. Renaissance artists were inspired by these millefleur tapestries; for the first time flowers themselves became the subject. The century from 1750-1850 was the golden age of botanical illustration.

Image: Leon Dabo - The Blue Vase, 1952, oil on canvas, Sullivan Goss Gallery,Santa Barbara.

 

Leon Dabo: A Late Romantic - Part I

For Paul Cezanne Mont Sainte-Victoire was a magic mountain. Though not one of the tallest mountains around, it dominated the skyline over his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Monet had water lilies; Cezanne had his mountain. Garlanded in centuries of folklore, Vincent van Gogh imagined the artist reading Virgil on its slopes.

Cezanne even bought an acre of Mont Sainte-Victoire in 1901 and the next year he built himself a studio there to have ready access when the spirit moved him to painit.

Landscape painters following in the footsteps of the Symbolists knew what a potent medium color could be for evoking emotion.

Leon Dabo (1864-1960) had a career that spanned continents, from his native France to the Unite States and back again, and throughout his long life he tried different styles, from Japonisme and tonalism to a late-blooming romanticism. His candy-colored vision of the Provencal landscape makes clear the artist's fertile imagination

Image:Leon Dabo - Etang-de-Barre Near Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1951, oil on canvas, Sullivan Goss Gallery, Santa Barbara.

Louise Bourgeois: Material Girl

"Material is only material. It is there to serve you and give you the best it can.  If you are not satisfied, if you want more, you go to another material." Louise Bourgeois, New York, April 11, 1989

Painted in the late 1940s, Roof Story is a joyous work that gives no hint of its maker's life at that time. In this self-portrait Bourgeois, her hair blowing in air like angel wings, wears a smile from ear to ear. Keeping her company is  a piece of sculpture buoyantly rising with her. And her joy is palpable.

Her birth on Christmas Day was an auspicious debut; so too her parents, proprietors of a Parisian antiques gallery.  But childhood was a difficult time for Louise, leaving wounds  she would later explore in her art.

Paris in the 1930s, les annees folles (the Crazy Years as the French called them) was awash with ferment in the arts. Bourgeois  was a student at the Sorbonne who earned free tuition by tutoring other students in English. On the one hand the Surrealists repelled Bourgeois with their excesses and  self-regard; on the other she was impressed by the modesty and adherence to the formalities of design among artists who would be dubbed "Art Deco" only in the book of the same name by Bevis Hillier in 1966. 

Of the media that Bourgeois would turn her hand to, painting comes last, possibly because she abandoned it early in her career to concentrate on sculpture Her years of painting spanned about a decade  after she had moved with her husband in 1938 to New York. There she continued her studies at the Art Students' 'League. The birth of two sons only complicated her adjustment to life in America. Neverthelessshe completed around one hundred paintings, no small achievement.

Roof Story may not be a typical work but it is all the more treasurable for showing us that for Louise Bourgeois art was not only about storm and stress but also a source of joy.

Image: Louise Bourgeois -- Roof Story, 1946-48, oil on canvas, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

June 7, 1916: Charles Burchfield And A Hot Day In Ohio

We can intuit from looking at Poplar Walk (dated June 7, 1916) an extremely hot day.  It is no accident that the sidewalks are painted in a vivid orange, radiating heat even stronger than the yellow lawns; notice that the grass is only green where it is shadowed by the trees.

Those poplar trees are ecstatic, their branches arching upwaex into the light, their decorative foliage suggests that Burchfield had been looking at Asian art.

In 1916 Charles Burchfield graduated from the Cleveland School of Art.  At age twenty-three the artist was on the brink of the most creative period of his life. He spent that summer at his mother's home in Salem, Ohio.  

Burchfield's working method was to sketch outlines and make color notations in graphite, then apply watercolor over them. In Poplar Walk he left a few areas of the white paper show through drawing the eye deep into the distance.

The largest collection of Burchfield's work is housed in the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York across the street from the Albright-Knox Gallery.

Image - Charles Burchfield, Poplar Walk, June 7, 1916,  transparent and opaque watercolor on white paper with color notations in graphite Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, NY

Paula Rego: The Dance

I can' prove it but I think Paul Rego saw Winslow Homer's Summer Evening although she said that the idea for the painting came  from her husband. Rego's paintings are  full of her fascination with such disparate subjects fairy tales, politics, and sexual transgression so it is hardly a stretch to see The Dance as a symbol for 'the dance of life. We see a woman standing alone as she watches two couples dance, one perhaps courting, the other of an obviously pregnant woman.  In the background is a trio -  grandmother, mother, and daughter. All her possible choices are  arrayed  under a full moon with harsh lighting and its attendant strong shadows.

Rego was rewriting history from the female point of view all her work. By her emphatic seriousness and a style of archaic realism, Rego conferred a symbolic status on them, valorizing their struggles and compromises.

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1935, an only child in a privileged family. At the time the country was ruled by the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar.  His regime was hostile to women, a Latin version of kinder, kuche, kurche, So, although Paula's mother began to draw at the age of four there was no chance that she could make a career of art.

In 1951 Rego moved to England to study art at the Slade School under the care of a guardian; her family was quite conservative although strongly anti-fascist. Her father commissioned her to create murals for a workers' canteen in 1952 but it was a decade later before she began to exhibit her work in group shows in London. 

The British Royal  Academy has described Rego as "one of Europe's most influential contemporary figurative artists."  In 2010 she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth for her contributions to the arts. Indeed the British were so fond of Rego that they routinely referred to her as a Portuguese-born British artist.

Rego died on June 8, 2022. Her granddaughter Grace Smart, a theatre designer, tweeted : "Paula Rego  was a fantastic and world changing artist, and grandma. She taught us how to sew, draw, put on eyeliner, and tell uncomfortable stories." That last may be what the late critic Robert Hughes was referring to when he remarked that if there were two or more people in a Rego painting something bad would happen to one of them.

Image: Paula Rego - The Dance, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, Tate Museum, London.

Winslow Homer: Summer Night

It may surprise us today but during his lifetime Winslow Homer's work received a mixed reception. Potter Palmer, an early collector of Impressionist art from Chicago, turned down Homer's offer to sell of Summer Night. So the painting languished for the rest of the decade on loan to the Cumberland Club in Portland, Maine.

But all that changed in 1900 when Homer included the work in his entry to the Exposition Universelle in Paris.  Among its  admirers were Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne, two very different artists.  After Summer Night was awarded a Gold Medal, the French government bought the picture, which is how it is eventually found a home in the Musee d'Orsay.  Summer Night is included in the Lafayette Database, a project of the Louvre museum that inventories all the American artworks held by French museums.

Summer Night was painted in Prout's Neck where Homer was living in the 1890s. We can almost hear the music two young women are dancing to and the crash and roar of the waves that their comrades on the shore  are spellbound by.  To make sound come at us off the canvas is nothing short of amazing. One of Homer's great gifts was his ability to evoke sensations in the viewer, arguably the  aim of the Impressionists, but to do it with a realist technique.

Image: Winslow Homer - Summer Night, 1890, oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Judy Chicago: Rediscovering Praxilla of Sikyon

 

"Most lovely of the things I have loved and lost; the sunlight,

"next, bright stars, the moon,

ripe gourds, the fruit of apple trees, the pears."

               - Praxilla, circa 441 BCE 

Anyone who has studied ancient Greece has probably heard of Sappho of Lesbos. Born around 630 BCEm Sappho lived for about six decades and her lyric poetry earned her the sobriquet "the Tenth Muse."  Higher praise cannot be imagined. 

Praxilla was a native of Sikyon, a city-state on the Gulf of Corinth. It took Judy Chicago's Dinner Part  to pay proper tribute to Praxilla of Sikyon, one of thirty-nine women honored with hew own specially designed place setting at a non-hierarchical triangular table. You can see in this photo some of the 999 women whose names are inscribed in gold on a white tile floor. More than four hundred women participated in making The Dinner Party.

Lesser known than Sappho, in her day Praxilla was called "immortal tongued'", in a time and place  where women participated in public and religious events. Today her lyric poems survive only in fragments and paraphrases; primarily "table songs" they were meant to be sung after dinner as guests imbibed wine from drinking gourds. 

Image: Judy Chicago - Praxilla,  (from The Dinner Party), ceramic, textile, porcelain with rainbow and gold luster, 1974-1979, Brooklyn Museum, photo courtesy of the museum.

Raoul Dufy: The Picture Stares Back

 

It's time to take Raoul Dufy more seriously than we usually do. We take the measure of the ills of this world by comparing them to the pleasures and happiness that are the stuff of Dufy's art.  It was in the shadow of the oncoming Second World War that he created his largest and most joyous work La fee electricite for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, after all.

Dufy (1877-1953) was born into a large family in Normandy. He didn't begin to paint until he turned eighteen.  Inspired by Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupte, Dufy was in the process of honing his own style when he painted this still life in 1919.

What the French call nature morte (dead nature) in English is called still life. Let's imagine what these  live  fruits are thinking. It's daunting to think that they  could judge us as we judge them, but they are alive so it's possible.  Are they nursing any grievances against their fate? Cherries are difficult to grow, easily damaged and so are highly prized. Of course they get their own special bowl  placed close to the viewer.  Bananas, at a dime a dozen, sulk in the background.  Other lesser fruits are jumbled together to the side but two strawberries are having none of this hierarchal arrangement.  They have pushed their way to the very edge of the canvas as though calling 'look at us'. 

Image; Raoul Dufy - Nature morte aux fruits , circs 1919, oil on canvas, Collection of Pierre Levy.

Gabriel Orozco: A Porcupine Eats A Tortilla

 

It sounds like the beginning of a shaggy dog story, A Porcupine Eats a Tortilla. This cutest member of the rodent family munches on a tortilla, secure in the knowledge that those sharp spines will protect from any other creatures who might be tempted to steal its food. Hanging over the image is a question: where did that tortilla come from?

"I've found that sometimes the studio is an isolated place, an artificial place like a bubble - a bubble in which the artist is by himself. It becomes too grand as a space. What happens when you don't have a studio that you have o be confronted with reality all the time.

"I try always to be intimate with the world...with everything I can, to feel love for it, or interest in it.

"For me photography is like a shoebox. You put things in a box when you want to keep them, to think about them. Photography is more than a window for me; photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations." - Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco  is a Mexican artist who refuses to be pinned down; he has lived and worked in many places and has made art in various media-  photography, painting, and sculpture.

Image: Gabriel Orozco - A Porcupine Eats a Tortilla , 2021, pigmented photo print, Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC.

Nils-Udo: Garden By A Stream

This stunning photograph by Nils-Udo highlights the fragility of nature's beauty through an image of bindweed flowers reflected in a  tranquil stream.

The Caring Gallery is the first charity art gallery in Paris. Now is playing host to its third exhibition, Close to the Eyes, Close to the Heart, dedicated to biodiversity and safe-guarding the environment.  Thee gllery will donate ten per cent of its receipts to the French branch of the Jane Goodall Institute. It is curated by Anne-Sophie Berard.

Its first exhibition, Let's Dream of Better Days, was a n invitation to emerge from our pandemic isolation to connect with others and with the natural world. After this initial success, the gallery presented Politically Intimate, focusing on women's lives.

Nils-Udo is an artist from Bavaria who has been creating environmental arts for decades. He uses photography to capture the ephemeral aspects of the natural world we are part of.

Image: (courtesy Connaissance des Arts) Nils-Udo - Lit de ruissseau, fleurs de liseron (Streambed with bindweed flowers), detail, Galerie Pierre-Alain Charllie, Paris.

Charmaine Watkiss: Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well

"I learned to make my mind large, as the world is large, so that there is room for paradoxes."  -  Maxine Hong Kingston

Charmaine Watkiss iis a British artist whose parents emigrated from Jamaica.  She finds inspiration in the culture of the African Caribbean diaspora.

Watkiss works primarily with pencil and paper to create life-sized figures.  She uses material from history in ways that demonstrate the relevance of the past to the present. Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well is a self-portrait; the woman warrior wears a ceremonial floral collar and she radiates the power of the sun. Her hands are clasped calmly as she gazes into a distance we can't see.  The greenery behind her looks like Chinese brush painting so' looks like bamboo. to me!

Image: Charmaine Watkisss - Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well, 2022, watercolor and pencil on paper, courtesy of the artist, London.

Odilon Redon: A Green And Pleasant Woodland Floor

"What is it that makes April and May the most pleasant months of the year? It is the verdure of the fields, which prompts the small birds to sing  and to praise Spoung and its delightful gay green livery." - J. de Courtois, Le blason de toutes de toutes armes et escutz, 1495, translation by Michel Pastoureau

Like spring leeks and onions whose .saturation goes from nearly white bulbs to emerald green, this scene is a bosky dell indeed. 

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) His artworks fall into two very different aims...prints haunted by macabre and fantastic creatures  or situations.     His oil paintings and  pastels showed such adroit use of color that even the great Matisse was an admirer.  Sous-bois au printemps is so delicately done that it appears it could be a pastel.

Image: Odilon Redon - Sous-bois au printemps, no date given, oil on paper, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Jean-Baptiste Leroux: A Green Thought In A Green Shade

To those of us who love spring best of all the  seasons, we cherish it for the reemergence of the sensual world. Le jardin (French for ornamental garden)  and le potager (French for vegetable garden) compete for our ministrations. 

In "The Garden,"  British poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1878) imagined it as a place for  place for contemplating the beauty of nature, albeit  a highly  cultivated version.  As anyone who has ever donned a pair of gardening gloves knows there is a world of work that goes into cultivating that serenity.

Jean-Baptiste Leroux was born in Touraine, France. The Loire River meanders through the region and this  geographical  happenstance, made it a favorite of  Renaissance French kings. During the Hundred Years' War, Torraine became the seat of king, safely away from Paris. For its many elegant chateaus, the region was nicknamed "the Garden of France/" 

The young photographer Leroux made that journey in reverse.. In Paris he became the director of the Nikon Gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. After meeting the owner of the nearby Chateau de Courance, Leroux began to exhibit his garden photographs. His favorite subjectss are gardens and architecture. His eponymous  Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux is part of the Reunion of French National Museums.

Image: Jena-Baptiste Leroux - Potager, undated, color positive photography, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

Spring: Weather of Expectation

Very little is known about this painting other than its title  Le printemps de la riviere du sud (Spring on a Southern River), said title likely given by the Musee Guimet where the painting lives. The artist's name and era are unknown but painting of colored inks on paper is  "antique" and China is the country where it was made.  Just because we don't know much doesn't mean we can't enjoy its  vision of flowers bursting from the cloudy winter waters.  I like to think of the flowers bursting up and out of the earth,\.

Musee Guimet was founded in 1879 by wealthy industrialist  Emile-Etienne Guimet to display his extensive collection of art  from southeastern Asia. He had assembled the collection at the behest of France's minister for  public education. On his travels Guimet visited Greece, Rome, and Egypt as well, so the breadth of the museum's treasures makes it a must-visit museum on a trip to Paris. 

Image: Le printemps de la riviere du sud, Musee Guimet, Paris.