"A Winter Twilight"

"A silence slipping round like death,

Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath,

One group of trees, lean, naked, and cold,
Inking their crest 'gainst a sky green-gold;
One path that knows where the cornflowers were;

Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,

One star that I loved ere the fields were brown."
- Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958)

from Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke, edited by Carolivia Herron, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers: 1991.

Augusta Payne Rathbone

Looking for pandas, I found Augusta Payne Rathbone. The giant panda is as rare a sight in art as in life. Search high and low, but you will find few images of pandas in Chinese art - or any other - until quite recently, simply because humans seldom encountered the elusive bears. Panda at the San Francisco Zoo (1943) is an aquatint, Rathbone's favorite medium, and it piqued my curiosity about her. As anyone who watches pandas on the live web cameras (Smithsonian National Zoo, San Diego Zoo, and Memphis Zoo) can see, this is an image based on close observation.

A native of Berkeley, California, Rathbone (1897-1990) moved to France in the 1920s, where her prints were published regularly in Paris, from 1928 until the late 1930s, by Alfred Porcabouef. It seems that the artist and the printer often disagreed about what colors should be used for her images, and M. Porcabouef often carried the day. Perhaps the young American woman deferred to the man who had worked with the Impressionist artist, Berthe Morisot.

Rathbone uses two distinct color palettes in her work; I prefer the more muted one, without knowing whether it, or the brighter one, was her personal choice. When I first looked at Rooftops of Paris (1940), it reminded me of Henri Riviere's work. The image was created from memory, as Rathbone had returned to California in the late 1930s.
Quimper Cathedral and Breton Woman Praying both display Rathbone's personal sense of space , visible in her pictures, most obviously in the landscapes. The Roquestrian Village by Rathbone is hers just as surely as Cezanne's Mt. Saint-Victoire was his creation.

With people - and pandas - she conveys a respect for their truths.

The Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial, as seen from the Mall in Washington, D.C.

This painting was made by Peggy Bacon (1895-1987) sometime between 1933 and 1943.

It is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, situated just off the Mall.

Winter White

Ah, the vagaries of reputation. (Nicholas Claude) Alexandre Sandier (1843-1916), French creator of ceramics and exhibitor at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, has been mostly forgotten. Then there is his contemporary, Georges de Feure (1868-1943), child of a Belgian mother and a Dutch father, so well regarded that the French claim his as their own, posthumously.

Yet Sandier was the artistic director of the reknowned Sevres Porcelain et Cie for the last twenty years of his life and his works were shown and admired at international expositions in Paris (1900) and Gand (1913).

The three pieces shown here are typical of the elongated ovoid shape that Sandier often favored. These are masterpieces of Art Nouveau, the designs appear to spring from the curvilinear shape, as the salmon pink flowers seem to be lolling in a gentle breeze (above). And at right, when our eyes move down from the water lilies, we notice the fish swimming along, almost as shadowy as they would appear if we were looking at them through water. In contrast, Georges de Feure's Woman In the Snow, lovely as it is, is a two dimensional image image applied to a three dimensional form.

An Apartment In Paris

Perhaps French artist and designer Armand Albert Rateau (1884-1938) would be better known today if he had taken a booth at the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris. But Rateau declined the invitation to what became a historic occasion in the design world. He was busy creating a Paris apartment with a very special client. Coutouriere Jeanne Lanvin had commissioned Rateau to decorate her home at 16 rue Barbet-de-Jouy in 1924.

Lanvin and Rateau had much in common, both working their way up from positions of apprenticeship to head major design firms. Lanvin began to work at sixteen for a milliner; Rateau was as apprentice ceramicist.

Both would become known for the craftsmanship of their creations. Lanvin's dresses set the standard for exquisite use of beading, embroidery, etc. in the 1920s and 1930s, while Rateau's specialty was the creation of luxurious objects using a deliberately restricted but striking mix of materials such as oak and black marble or alabaster and bronze. His style was forged by disparate influences, the Wierner Werkstaette and visits to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy.

Lanvin's dyes were another of her trademarks; indeed the designer had opened a dye factory in Nanterre n 1923, producing items in her "Velazquez green" and the eponymous "Lanvin blue", said to be inspired by the blue skies of Fra Angelico's frescoes.


Today, the one familiar example of Rateau's work is his design for the flacon of Lanvin's perfume, Arpege, taken from a drawing of Jeanne and her daughter Margeurite, made by Paul Iribe in 1907.
A recent auction of items from Lanvin's art collection and the sale of a Rateau chair by Christie's, Ltd. in 2004 for nearly $1 million may bring renewed attention to this artistic collaboration.

"Gently, Softly, Silent Snowfall"

When Walter J. Phillips emigrated to Canada from his native Lincolnshire, England in 1913, he chose to settle in the prairie province of Manitoba simply because it was in between Vancouver and Toronto, both cities in which relatives lived.

Phillips had tried watercolor and etching, but he began making the color woodcuts he is known for in 1917.

His adopted home of Manitoba has both sunny skies and blizzards during the winter. Phillips captured both, beautifully. Though his work shows similarities to Japanese woodblock prints and the works of the French master Henri Riviere, Phillips apparently hadn't much interest in what other artists did.

For more, visit http://www.sharecom.ca/phillips/contents.html

On The Menu

Look closely at the daisy-garlanded menu at left to see how culinary fashions change in just a century. The occasion was a dinner given for President Estrada of Cuba in 1906 by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, new bride of Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth and daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. The twenty-one year old Alice had been married in the East Room of the White House earlier that year, and we can see early evidence of her fearless nature in the way her chosen menu invokes the names of such formidable women as Queen Victoria and Madame de Pompadour for gastronomic purposes.

Also intriguing is the menu for the Fifth Annual Banquet of the Syracuse, NY Automobile Club - from 1907.

Menus may not be high art but they display the artistic lingua franca of their day: typefaces borrowed from Jugendstil posters, elongated, sinuous female figures from the Symbolist movement, waterlilies, and the conventions of ukiyo-e prints.

All the menus reproduced here come from the Miss Frank E. Buttolph Collection at the New York Public Library. No one seems to know why she began her collection, but by the time Buttolph died in 1924, it numbered some 25,000 items.

For more, visit:

http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/menus/index.html

How I Feel About Winter

Yes, I know it is only the beginning of January and, yes, I know that I am being melodramatic. So be it. I think I know how Lillian Gish felt, trapped on that ice flow out there in the middle of the Connecticut River. Winter in the Northeastern States is no paltry thing, as British immigrants of the 17th century learned to their dismay. Two centuries later when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance in 1852, set in southeastern Massachusetts, his protagonist Hollingsworth trudged through a landscape that reads like East Alaska. We take our winters hard here.
Those white hills in the background are the Green Mountains of Vermont. Nearby is the village of White River Junction, where the cast and crew of the film Way Down East stayed during the unusual (for 1920) location shooting. When you are the legendary director D. W. Griffith and you go to any length to achieve verisimilitude, of course you will dynamite the river to get the ice to cooperate. "Lights! Camera! Action! Cue the ice flows!"

There was an uncontrolled explosion and someone got hurt, and Gish, who had to flee from flow to flow during repeated takes, deserved as much credit for her courage as for her affecting performance as the innocent but indomitable waif, Anna. Do you need to have the "psychotic nuttiness" of a D. W. Griffith to survive winter in the Northeast? No, but it can't hurt.

Asta Nielsen: An Actress From Hammershoi's World

"She is everything! She is the drunkard's vision and the lonely man's dream." - Guillaume Appollinaire, writing about Asta Nielsen in 1920.

It was unusual for the daughter of a working class family in Denmark to pursue an acting career at the turn of the last century, but Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) dazzled her teachers at the Royal Theater of Copenhagen. Her spirit and determination can be inferred from the way that she greeted what must have been a shock: an unintended pregnancy. Nielsen kept right on with her career, her courage intact in spite of unwed motherhood. I can imagine her striding down the streets painted by Vilhelm Hammershoi.
After success as Strindberg's Miss Julie on the stage, and against the advice of her colleauges, Nielsen made her film debut in The Abyss. Cinema was a new medium then and it lacked the prestige of the theater, but its story of an unconventional young music teacher must have been a congenial part for the pretty young actress, because the picture was a hit all over Europe and it made Nielsen the first great European movie star. Her acting style was praised for its subtlety and naturalism.

'Die Asta', as she became known, soon married her director, Urban Gad (see photo). You can intuit the source of the chemistry between them when you read that film historians regard The Abyss as the most erotic silent film ever made. In one scene, Nielsen's character lassos a man and, after tying him up, brushes against him with her derriere.

A versatile actress who excelled in comedy as well as melodrama, Nielsen played the character of Lulu in Erdgast (1923) before the great American actress Louise Brooks did.

At the zenith of her popularity, Nielsen played the title role in Shakespeare's Hamlet in 1920. (Interestingly, she was not the first woman to play the Danish prince. An actress who involved herself in other aspects of production such as casting, costumes, and props, Nielsen collaborated with screenwriter Erwin Gepard to give the plot a unique twist. Hamlet had been born a Princess, but for the purpose of royal succession, a secret masquerade as a man was made.

The great G. W. Pabst directed Nielsen in another of her famous roles, as a kept woman in Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) in 1925, where she played opposite a young actress named Greta Garbo.

During her 22 year career Nielsen made more than 70 films, many of them apparently lost. She retired from the screen in 1932 after making one For more about Asta Nielsen, visithttp://www.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/Nielsen.htmen.htmsound picture.

Warming Her Hands At The Fire

Charming and naive it may be; this image is also strangely moving. The young peasant woman sits, warming her hands at the fire. Flakes of snow are falling, yet the clouds seem to be backlit by the sun. Smoke rises from the fire, making mist as it meets the snow. We look and hope that the fire's warmth is sufficient to the woman's need. The picture is called Winter and it was painted by Paul Cezanne in 1859.

Cezanne was barely twenty years old when his father purchased a new home for the family, Le Gite des vents (Refuge from the Winds), near Aix-en-Provence. The young painter decorated the house with a series of frescoes depicting the four seasons. All four have been transferred onto canvas and are preserved now at the Musee du Petit Palais in Paris.

Image: Paul Cezanne - Winter, c.1859-1863, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.