Paintboxes of The Artists

At the beginning of every school year, like my schoolmates, I used to look forward to receiving a pristine new paintbox. After a few weeks use, I had the paintbox of a great artist, complete with messy dabs of color overlapping everywhere, but not the results.

The artists and their works here are Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) , Edgar Degas (1834-1917) , Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), and Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1915). You can click on the palettes for expanded views.

Daughters Of The Artists

Artists don't have to rely on keeping a camera around to capture memorable images of their children. Pastels, pencil, and gouache are fine tools for fixing a moment on paper.
The pensive little girl, seen in profile, is six year old Annie Caroline Pontifex-Fernhout Toorop, called Charley. Also six years old and engrossed in her needlework is a bespectacled Madeleine Spilliaert.

These images charm me with their earnestness. Childhood is a time of great seriousness with so much to learn and to think about. The smiling face that is often demanded by the parent pointing the camera is not enough for these artists.

Charley Toorop (1891-1955), the daughter of Javanese-Flemish artist Jan Toorop and an English mother, Annie Hall, grew up to be an artist herself.
Madeleine Spilliaert (b. 1917) was the daughter of Belgian artist Leon Spilliaert and and his wife, Rachel Vergison. Leon Spilliaert was an admirer of Jan Toorop's work, which he first encountered during his twenties in Brussels. The works of both artists have been described as Symbolist.

Stuffed Animals

When I saw Louis Valtat's Child Sitting on a Carpet I was transported back to early childhood and hours spent in rapt contemplation on the living room carpet. The colors and the vegetal/geometric motifs altered as the sun moved across them. They moved me to an early attempt at artistry - I used my crayons to mimicthe patterns in the blank interstices. I never forgot my surprise at how unhappy my mother was with my efforts when she had crowed over my Little paper drawings. I resolved to remember the event so I could figure it out when I grew up.

My other favorite pastime when I sat on the magic carpet was talking with my stuffed animals. Our earliest confidants, these empathetic creatures listen, understand, and agree. No wonder we never forget them.

We also like to imagine their adventures when we are away, like Jean-Emile Laboureur's little dog, bravely investigating the overturned box of chocolates, just as we would do. The dachsund drawn by Dagobert Peche may have the latest haircut but it looks annoyed, just as we would if we had to sit still for that much fussing.
Finally, two imaginary animals designed by Bauhaus artist Gunta Stolzl (1897-1983) for her children. Excellent playmates, I am sure.

The View From The Window

It seems passing strange to recall how Peter Galassi was criticized in 1981 for an exhibition he curated at the Museum of Modern Art-New York on the relationship between painting and photography - Before Photography.
To point out how the photography mimicked painting and, conversely, influenced painting was considered unseemly, a bit like throwing a dead skunk into the middle of a tea party.

The story of how Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) deconstructed the gait of a galloping horse through photography is well-known, but photography altered our perceptions in unnumbered ways.

It's obvious from the photos here, that inside and outside exist in separate dimensions visually. It is almost as though we lived in a perpetually darkened cinema.
Amateur or professional, it makes no difference: designer Rene Lalique obtained the same effect when he photographed the view outside his home study at La Benetterie as Edouard Steichen would when, in 1920, he shot Constantine Brancusi's sculpture Endless Column through a window at Voulangis.

In Man at the Window - Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1935, Gisele Freund showed how the contrast between interior and exterior both illuminated the view and obscured the viewer.
By 1949, Tore Yngve Johnson (1928-1975) could foreground a glass of wine in a cafe, rendering the magnificant Cathedral of Notre-Dame a mere backdrop.

How unremarkable these once revolutionary ways of seeing are now.

The Light In Holland

It's a title that the British writer Anthony Bailey used for a book about Vermeer, but the light in the paintings of Jan Mankes is the light of a different century, motivated by different ideas.
De Knipje, painted in 1914 (at left) owes more to the work of William Degouve de Nuncques in The Pink House (1892) and Nocturne au Parc Royal de Bruxelles (1897) than it does to Rembrandt or Vermeer. This is perspective used to deconstruct itself, lines and angles that suggest a fourth dimension, if we could only understand it.
No matter the ostensible realism of the landscape, the architecture, or the persons portrayed, Mankes is a painter of the unseen, making consciousness visible.
The inward-turning orientation of Mankes' human subjects is familiar from the works of other Symbolist artists we have looked at, notably Marguerite Burnat-Provins.

We may not share the visual language of the Symbolists, but we still puzzle over the questions of consciousness, memory, and sexuality that they did. We try to make sense of the content of our dreams, even though we have moved beyond Freud's interpretations. We look at these landscapes with an uneasy sense of recognition, as though we had experienced them in another dimension.

Which brings us back to Vermeer, or at least to what Lawrence Gowing called "the envelope of quiet air" that he perceived to surround the objects of the painter's gaze,

Making Objects Sing

In a world full of objects, Dutch artists have long excelled at their display. Think of carpets draped across 16th century tables. The objects that Jan Mankes (1889-1920) chose for his contemplation are something different. With the exception of the Vanitas, its well understood symbolic shorthand for the brevity of life resonant to one whose short life was shadowed by tuberculosis, these objects appear to exist in their own space.

Perhaps some combination of that shadow with the methods of the Symbolist movement shaped these paintings. Here is a world of possibility that Jan Mankes never got to experience first hand. A cluster of Japanese jars, a jade green Chinese vase, and the shimmering jasmine, native to Indonesia and imported to the Netherlands by Dutch colonialists.
A swarm of coral dots hovers over the little lustre ware jug, seemingly from another dimension, otherworldly by implication, blossoms anchored by the flimsiest of stems. More coral dots represent the remnants of drying bittersweet in the green jar.
The Low Countries had proved a congenial incubator for Symbolist aesthetics in the 1890s. Mankes may have had his own particular need to investigate the unseen and the inscrutable. In the outdoor scene behind the curtain in his Vanitas I see echoes of early Dutch landscapes, those vignettes that begin to assert their presence in 15th century religious paintings. In any case, Mankes allows us to see more than we could without him.

Jan Mankes

The lazy biographer's mistake is to read a life backwards, a special temptation when there is not much information available in English about an artist. Jan Mankes (1889-1920), who died on his 31st birthday from tuberculosis should not be reduced to one melancholy fact, especially when we consider the large body of work he left us, approximately two hundred fifty paintings, and one hundred twenty sketches.

Mankes was only 22 when he wrote about his work: "I paint or rather wish to paint paintings, silent but singing, singing indeed by their silence. " At this same time, he painted the Self-Portrait with his pet owl.
His large love of nature could have appeared sentimental but Mankes had a sure sense of composition and a lambent way of applying color. This, combined with close attention to his subjects makes each one individual to us, The Old Goat, Wyandotte the Rooster, and the rabbits.

Wyandotte, in his hungry self-absorption, is more than personable, out-sized, almost surreal, a character who makes a strong impression on the viewer. Mankes' settings, as you can see in the background of The Old Goat owe something to the Symbolists, too.

The Arnheim Museum of Modern Art presented The Mankes Perspective in 2007, a new look at the work.

http://www.mankes.nl/ (mostly in Flemish) is an admirable webiste with much more Mankes.

'Holland’s mostly tranquil painter' - Roland Hollowest, 1923.

The Incoherent Years

You could call them premature Surrealists; they called themselves the Incoherents. Their goal: to make their fellow Frenchmen laugh, by all means.

It began with an informal exhibition (think: party) that Jules Levy gave at his home 2 Ocotber 1882 for his artist friends. It must have been quite a party, because a year later the Incoherents had an official exhibition at the Galerie Vivienne in Paris, introducing the world at large to their heady mixture of parody, puns, and general absurdity. And the world, at least 20,000 people, came.

Official recognition was nice, but galleries and museums proved too confining to the Incoherents, who inaugurated their first annual costume ball in March, 1885. They decked the walls with floating aphorisms like "Melancholy not welcome here" and "Please do not spit on the ceiling." An Incoherenet Ball? What a delicious idea!

As extravagant spirits sometimes do, the Incoherents began to lose steam just as the critics had begun to take note of them. Incoherence proved exciting and exhausting for all involved, so Jules

Levy declared the movement at an end in 1887, with one last ball. A varied group of artists and writers, their names are both more and less familiar to us now.

Antonio de la Gandara, Caran d'Ache, Toulouse-Lautrec, the poet Charles Cros and the journalist Alphonse Allais, whose absurd/abstract works included The Apoplectic Cardinal Harvesting the Red Tomato by the Red Sea.
Images: by Emil Cokl - 1886, Marie Neumont - 1892, Dillon - 1893, and Anonymous - 1896, from the Museum of European & Mediterranean Civilization, Paris.

From The Vine To The Table and Beyond

Hidden amidst the glitter, grace is in the details. The hand that proffers the glass of wine, mimicked by the bowl of grapes on the table, is a small vignette from The Wedding Feast of Cana (1563) by Paolo Veronese, a Venetian painter. A 16th century Cecil B. De Mille, Veronese easily deployed a cast of thousands in his monumental artworks.

Now on view at the Louvre in Paris, the painting has been subjected to unspeakable indignities in its past. Napoleon smuggled it into France by cutting in in half, the better to hide it, and during the Franco-Prussian War it was rolled up in a tube, like a map.
In the northern hemisphere, this is the time of year when the grapes are harvested. The grape vines are beautiful in themselves; the hard work of harvesting is made beautiful by painters. Although they look decades apart at least in time and style, Edouard Debat Ponsan's Coin des Vignes (1886) was painted only two year before Vincent van Gogh's Picking the Red Grapes at Arles.

Soon to come, the Art Nouveau style inspired fanciful decorative works that put the humble grapes and vines to uses only Bacchus could have dreamed. The bowl by Albert-Louis Dammouse is from the collection of the Musee D'Orsay. It doesn't even need grapes.

Some Women By Edouard Vuillard

Although individuals often figured in the paintings of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), the pictures are not usually characterized as portraits. A few well-known examples that do, date from the late 1920s and early 1930s, like the well known La Comtesse Jean de Polignac and Jeanne Lanvin, creatrice de la mode (both in the collection of the Musee D'Orsay, Paris).

Madame Hess in a Hat and The Elegant One, circa 1902 are examples of his looser style. Madame Hess is caught in a pleasantly relaxed moment.

Most intriguing is Portrait of the actress Jane Redouart from 1927. The artist evidently fretted over the right setting at Mlle Redouart's Saint-Cloud apartment, and finally settled on the luxurious bathroom. We notice the Deco details and the mirrored reflection, but what we can't see is that Vuillard, insistent on the perfect angle, set himself up to paint in the bathtub.

Vegetal Design Circa 2000

Jean-Francois Fouilhoux, (b. 1947) Montpres-Chambord, is renowned for the celadon glazes he uses on his ceramics. We usually associate green, the vegetal color, with celadon but the term denotes a transparent glaze developed by the ancient Chinese, but given its common western name, given by its early French admirers in the 18th century.

The glaze, also characterized by its crackled surface, is well-suited to other pale, evanescent shades, as the blue pieces here show, especially the group portrait at top.
Fouilhoux's work places itself in a long line of ceramics decsended from the Chinese, much of it created by persons whose names are lost to us.

Even a relatively static shape, like the blue pleated bowl, suggests movement from within, like the living vegetal forms his pieces evoke. The blue bowl and the enfolding green bowl on a tiny pedestal appear as alternative moments of one being, breathing in and breathing out.

Even the formal Ovoid Vase hints at movement, perhaps fixed as in a photograph, like ice melting down the side of a tree. It is the formality of Fouilhoux that links his work to the Art Nouveau of 1900.

Images: Works by Jean-Francois Fouilhoux from the collection of the French National Ceramics Museum, Sevres.

Photographs by Martine Coppola-Beck.

Vegetal Design Circa 1900

Art Nouveau Revival, an exhibition that just opened at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, raises the maddening question of where does influence stop. Or, to look at it through the other end of the lens as Oscar Wilde wrote, “If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you end your story.”

Which brings me to this charming little Chinese bowl, decorated with blossoms and green leaves, that has long struck me as the ceramic essence of freshness, and of a hopeful view of the changing seasons. So with the works here, in vegetal style, an important part of Art Nouveau.

The artists of L'Art Nouveau collapsed the distinctions between animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds in their work, eschewing the literal, as they had learned from the Japanese. While Siegfried Bing concentrated on the arts of Japan at his establishment, Emile Guimet's eponymous museum contains, cheek by jowl, works from China that Parisian artists of 1900 could admire and study.
Leon Kann's gourd-shaped vase, wrapped around with vines, and a snail crawling around at top is a little world unto itself.

The two Rorstrand vases incorporate something of their vegetal subjects into their shapes. The grape vase sports a lip with perforations that mimic the leaf cuts and the algae vase is all sensuousness.

Where words almost fail is in assessing Emil Galle's 1904 masterpiece, The Hand Decorated with Seashells and Algae from a two-dimensional photograph. A piece that seems prematurely surrealistic, the hand points upward from beneath unseen waters, circled by moving algae, shells stuck to its fingers, as though attempting to tell a tale or gesture toward its moral.

French Drawing: Granet At Versailles

Having made some remarks about the works of Francois-Marius Granet recently, I now present a group of drawings with watercolor that contradict myself. But this about Granet.
He was near the end of his life when he painted these scenes of Versailles in the 1840s. Appointed as Conservateur of the artwork at Versailles by Louis Philippe in 1826, Granet became intimately familiar with the place, if one person can be so, with a palace of 700 rooms and the buildings and grounds needed to support its operation.

We can intuit the amount of time Granet devoted to his post in his arcane choice of subjects. Here are no fountains, statuary, or cavernous salons. The tiered structures at left are the stables, practically a village in themselves, though sparsely populated When Granet assayed the Swiss Pond a second time, he called it a lake so it must have been larger than a typical farm pond.

Even the parterre gardens, under snow and a cloudy winter sky suggest a vast choreographed space that has lost its purpose. One half a century after the Revolution, Versailles is already a museum piece.

Transcendental Transparency

Between the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine and Leon Bonvin's watercolor drawing of Glass on a Table there are 143 years - and a connection.

The magical characteristics of light, its reflections, refractions, and transparency, has been the inspiration for artists of all kinds.

In a cruelly short life, Leon Bonvin (1834-1866) managed to create a series of impressive works from ordinary objects. The glass in the picture here astonishes me, for itself and in its relation to the ceramic mug at its left. It would be understandable if the artist had regarded his finished work with the thought: "There. I can do anything."

Eva Almond and William Nicholson use similar palettes in their still lives here, but Almond's 1907 Cafeteria Still Life (at the Musee D'Orsay, Paris) is a discovery, like nothing else she ever painted that I can find. You can almost see a Vermeer interior in the teapot, a tantalizing hint against this uninflected background.

The Chateau Combourg and its Reflection in the Water (1949) could be a gentle jab at the many post-WW II, camera toting tourists who descending on a war-weary continent. A harbinger of photorealism, perhaps, it appears to be a close relative of the Kodachrome.
Augustin Rouart's 1947 Glass of Water is an atypical work; it's almost as though he anticipated the work of the American artist Janet Fish ( b. 1938), without realizing its potential. Her Poppies and Fish Bowl is a recent work, a medley of discrete layers of transparent color.

And what of the sari-clad woman sitting before the television, and her encounter with light? Revolution in a Box by Charles Kenny, in the November-December issue of Foreign Policy describes surprising ways that the often despised medium may offer light - and even art - to a developing world. (http://www.foreignpolicy.com)

French Drawing: Henri-Joseph Harpignies

There's a lot to see in this late (1909) work at left, The Studio of the Artist, now on display at the Frick Collection as part of the exhibition, French Drawing from Watteau to Degas: The Frits Lugt Collection. The red coat of the ninety year-old Harpignies sits on a chair, reminding us the man who made the works hanging on the wall. The works reflect the vicariousness of an artist who belonged to no school: sketches, prepared canvases, finished projects, framed paintings..
The life of Henri-Joseph Harpignies (1819-1916) began in the wake of Napoleon's exile to the island of Elba and ended during the First World War. So it does not surprise that after overcoming a long period of opposition to his chosen career, Harpignies displayed uncommon energy and curiosity in his art.

The pieces assembled here are typical only of his last two decades, among his various styles. Here are echoes of Impressionism in subtle effects of light and an affection for trees reminiscent of the Barbizon woods and its painters. In the depiction of his studio, for instance, Harpignies cautiously assays abstraction and in Menton, to the left of a substantially rendered palm tree is another tree that as it meets the water line of the sea, casually reminds us that it is a depiction of a tree on a flat paper.

Stream Bordered by Grand Trees at Twilight (c. 1900) with the sinuous lines of the tree trunks in the forefront suggests an appreciation of the uses of the vegetal in Art Nouveau. Harpignies won both the Legion of Honor and a Grand Prize at the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1900.

Images 2-5 are from the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

A Little Princess Of The Marshes

One hundred years ago the Munich Secession came to America, by way of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the Art Institute of Chicago. New art and also new ways of displaying art evoked such adjectives as "impulsive, energetic, and extremely various" from viewers. So it seems appropriate to celebrate the centennial of that occasion in a new way, in a web magazine.
At the same time that Arthur Wesley Dow's works in woodblock printing and photography revealed the poetry of the marshes of his hometown, Ipswich, Massachusetts, Americans were introduced to a German artist of the marshes, Ludwig Dill (1848-1940).
Dill had won a prize for his work at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. He also carried on a lengthy correspondence with James McNeill Whistler, so his work was known to American artists even before the works visited this country.
As both Dow and Whistler demonstrated in their work, so Dill was fascinated by the place where land and water meet and the effects of light on water (reflection) and of water on light (moisture-laden air over the marshes). The little girl walking barefoot through the field, twisting a reed in her mouth (1886) is an early work, pre-Secession, but a timeless reminder of the pleasures of living near the shore. The birch grove and the cranes by the water are post-1900 works, pared down in detail and with blocks of color that define the mood, in a japoniste-secessionist style of enduring popularity.

I can almost smell the salt in the air.

"The Poplar Tree's Effacement"

"The hurricane is stripping the woods
I lull the tender-eyed lightning to sleep.
Let the great wind where I tremble
Marry the earth where I grow.

Its breath sharpens my vigil.
How turbid it is, the hollow
Of the sullied streambed’s lure!

A key will be my dwelling,
The feint of a fire the heart confirms;
And the air whose talon held it."

- translated by Nancy Kilmer, from RENE CHAR: SELECTED POEMS, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas, New York, New Directions: 1992

Image: Ludwig Dill - Poplars in a Bog, 1910, via Artnet.

French Drawing: Francois Marius Granet

"First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is..."

Lines from a song written by British folksinger Donovan Leitch in 1967 come irresistibly to mind before this sun-infused watercolor. We don't see the sun, of course, but we think we do from the centrality of the jardiniere of yellow flowers on the garden wall. The name of this work: View of Mont Saint-Victoire from the Terrace at le Petit Malvalat.

Now the violet-blue strokes in the background catch our attention, resolving themselves into a mountain that would become the property of the painter Cezanne. But he was only a five year old boy at the time, while Granet (1777-1849) had returned to his childhood home in Aix-en-Provence after a successful career in Paris and seventeen years in Rome. While in Paris, Granet lived in a cell in a converted Capuchin monastery that had been 'nationalized' during the French Revolution, much as old factories are converted to artists' lofts today. Here, in the company of other artists, Granet encountered the arches, tunnels, and stairways that he would use so expressively in his work.
Granet's Mont Saint-Victoire is emblematic; a painter whose pleasure in his work is evident, as is his enjoyment of framing devices and a mischievous trickery of the eye. You look at these harmonious compositions, and then wonder where the eye is meant to focus. Ostensibly quiet scenes of Roman convents and villas become games of angles and shadows. Nothing is ever only one thing in Granet's pictures.

View is a highlight of Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Fritz Lugt Collection, on view at the Frick Collection in New York City until January 2010.

All other images are from the collection of the Louvre Musuem, Paris.

The Star Lemon

Earlier this year, Francisco Zurbaran's 375 year old Still Life of Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose was on display at the Frick Collection in New York City. Its owner, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California was eager to show off the results of their recent restoration of the Spanish still life that removed a veil of discolored varnish and various patches that had been tried over the years. The painting revealed is almost surreal in its clarity.

Is the lemon the most sexual of fruits? With its nipples, its dimpled surface, and its shape, the question presents itself. Scientifically speaking, we know that lemons have life-giving properties. It was experiments with the juice of lemons in the 18th century that solved the dangerous problem of scurvy for seamen.

Arguably, the lemon is the raison d'etre for each of the art works assembled here. In Gustave Moreau's picture, the dramatically splayed magnolia seemes to be pointing to the serene lemon poised behind it, just as Cezanne's lemon stands out even in the company of orange and lime, for its realism. Casorati's lemons are the most influenced by cubism and abstraction, positioned firmly on a grid of blue and white.

The loving realism of the two lemons, painted by Jan Mankes when he was only seventeen years old is an astonishment.
Images:

1. Francisco Zurbaran - Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose, 1633, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California.

2. China - Plate with Lemon and Persimmon, Qianlong Dynasty, 1736-1795, Musee Guimet, Paris.

3. Paul Cezanne - Flowers And Fruit, c. 1879-1892, Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris.

4. Gustave Moreau - L'Enlevement d'Europe, before 1898, Musee Gustave moreau, Paris.

5. Charlotte Rollins & Emil Orlik - Still life with Fruit, Azaleas, and Pheasant, Chazen Museum of Art, madison, Wisconsin.

6. Jan Mankes - Lemons, 1906, Museum Belvedere, Heerunveen, Netherlands.

7. Felice Casorati - Lemons, 1930, Christies,Rome.

8. Moise Kisling - Still Life with Fruit, 1953, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Weeping Willow

I had always thought it was a human conceit of the most self-regarding kind that inspired a song like Willow, Weep For Me. And I still do, but in Despair (1891) by Carlos Schwabe there is an imaginative sympathy that is moving. Schwabe, a German-Swiss Symbolist painter, had a literary bent and in several of his allegorical works he included willow fronds, for instance in the well-known Death of the Grave-Digger (1895). Here, though, the simile is made part of the subject, organically, if you will. The fronds seem to be attempting to shelter the weeping woman as she covers her eyes. A moving work of art is made from a hackneyed comparison.

Image: from the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

"Conversation Class"

"I redden to the roots when Jacqueline Dupont zuts
at my French. She cocks her ear and smooths her coif and sits me on a poof, settles herself on a chaise-lounge.

'Encore une fois,' she zaps, and taps her nails and sips
her Perrier. Mt tongue is jammed, my teeth are in a
brace, Her hands fly to her face. 'Mon Dieu,' she cries,

'Mon Dieu, q'est-e que qu'on peut faire?'

I fiddle with my cuticles. She checks her watch and snaps
'Ouvrez la bouche!' Her forty clocks tick on, tick on,
Her cuckoos coil behind their yodel- flaps.

lined up against the wall, come every fifteen minutes
with a boing. 'Finie la classe!' She pours herself
a glass of Armangnac. 'Vous voulez un petit peur?'

I sluice the liquor back.

My tongue is loosed. My eyes are glazed. I sing
the Marseillaise. I feel a revolution
in the red flare of my skirt."
- from Hare Soup by Dorothy Molloy, London, Faber & Faber: 2004

An accomplished painter as well as a poet, Dorothy Molloy (1942-2004) was a native of Ireland. She lived for several years in Barcelona and died shortly after the publication of Hare Soup. And what a book it is. A book of reds, for the color appears frequently, the color of life, sex and passions of all sorts. Molloy's gift for vivid narrative never turns garish, her subtle choice of words and her witty use of internal rhymes may have come easily or have been hard won. The result is never labored, even on repeated readings.

Image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Two Women at a Cafe, 1893, Louvre Museum, Paris.