The View From Eagle Rock

This peaceful hilltop overlooks northern New Jersey, facing east toward the Hudson River and New York City (about a dozen miles away).

Even in 1932, according to Ripley's Believe It Or Not, you could have seen the homes of twelve million people from Eagle Rock.

The four hundred acres that is Eagle Rock Reservation is a little heralded marvel, sitting as it does in the middle of the most densely populated county in the most urbanized state in the nation. Red oak forests and red maple wetlands are among its natural bounties. As a child, I picked bags full of acorns there, later admiring each one at length, spreading them out with great satisfaction on the living room carpet in our home - one of the many at the bottom of the hill. (At right, the same view, this time from the roof of my mother's apartment building.)

Originally intended as part of Llewellyn Park, Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange, New Jersey became part of the Essex County Park System, the nation's first, in 1895. Thomas Edison’s research lab was located in nearby East Orange, and Edison purchased a home in Llewellyn Park in 1886. Edison would conduct secret sonar research on the Reservation for the U.S. Navy during World War I, not the first time it contributed to the war effort,. In the American Revolution, General Washington's army had set up a chain of lookout posts on Eagle Rock.
Llewellyn Park, located on the eastern fringe of the Watchung Mountains, was founded in 1853 as the first planned community in the States, and can plausibly claim that the suburbs started here. A map of Llewellyn Park, circa 1857, shows the Eyrie, a home designed for Mr. Haskell by noted architect Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892). Later, during a violent storm, its tower toppled and Haskell narrowly escaped death. A. J. Davis is buried in nearby Bloomfield Cemetery. The house was demolished in 1924, but the gatehouse to Llewellyn Park was designed in its image. Mountain Avenue (also known as Undercliff Road, an accurate description) borders Eagle Rock Reservation on the east. Early visitors climbed the Hundred Steps from the end of the trolley line to the summit. There is also Snake Road, named for its circuitous route up the mountainside.

"George Inness, had the temperament, the talent and the gift for attracting attention (which he professed to despise, and possibly did) that caused critics to trip over their tongues in their searches for superlatives." – Russell Lynes in The Art Makers (1970)

Innes' paintings of the meadowlands (several of them in the collection of the local Montclair Art Museum) have introduced the larger world to Essex County. Although born in Newburgh, New York, Inness greatly enjoyed the quiet time he spent in his studio at Montclair. Dubbed after the fact as a tonalist painter, Inness was influenced by the ideas of the 18th century Swedish philosopher Swedenborg, as well as by the time he spent at Barbizon in France. Such a landscape is familiar in many places along the Atlantic coast, with its gentle progression from meadowland to marshland to sandy beach. One also meets it in the works of Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett, and Arthur Wesley Dow.

The Bourbaki Panorama

"I hope to show that the pictorial panorama was in one respect an apparatus for glorifying the bourgeois view of the world; it served both as an instrument for liberating human vision and for limiting and "imprisoning" it anew. As such it represents the first true mass medium." - Stephen Oetermann, in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1997)

Or perhaps not. The Bourbaki Panorama (1881), designed by Swiss artist Edouard Castres and executed with the help of fellow painters, including Ferdinand Hodler, strikes me as a critique of war worthy to be compared to Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

Castres' scene of never-ending bleakness depicts the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War. In February, 1871, General Bourbaki and his troops, exhausted by defeat, were driven by the advancing Germans across the border into neutral Switzerland at Les Verrieres. In this first test of international law, foreign troops were given refuge, provided they lay down their arms until war's end.

Surely this medium that debuted as a popular amusement for Londoners in 1791 became something else altogether in the hands of the visionary from Geneva. The man in the top hat (at right - c.1850s) was standing in front of a moving panorama about the Arctic, shown in San Francisco.
You can see the entire panorama at http://www.bourbaki.ch

Dreaming Of Spring

Lillian Gish photographed by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair in December 1932.

Marie Prevost In The Godless Girl

Working with Cecil B. DeMille could be hard on actors. In 1920 Lillian Gish was chased across drifting ice floes during the shooting of Way Down East for D. W. Griffiths (How I Feel About Winter - 01/05/09) . At the other end of the decade, Lina Basquette's Judith in The Godless Girl (1929) endured repeated takes of being rescued from a (real) fire, thus restoring her faith in God. We know that Basquette's faith in her director was severely shaken; she never forgot how close she came to being burned alive in the name of cinematic verisimilitude. As for Marie Prevost's bad girl, negotiating her way out of reform school (above), she was strung up by her wrists and beaten during one scene. The public was shocked and titillated but DeMille maintained that he was merely reflecting "real life" for the sake of art, just the kind of thing Griffith said, too. No wonder Mae West said that "Whenever a girl goes bad, there go a whole lot of men right after her."

Charles-Marie Dulac

A short life, a few evocative works, this was the lot of Charles-Marie Dulac (1866-1898). Yet in that time he traveled far from his native Paris, visiting Avignon, Ravenna, and Assisi.

After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1893, Dulac illustrated a new edition of The Canticle of the Creatures by St. Francis of Assisi, published by Lemercier in 1894. The original of Sister Water, Brother Fire (top left) is now in the collection of the Musee D'Orsay. Dulac also changed his name to Marie-Charles, complicating the search for biographical information.

His art suggests that, like St. Francis, Dulac did much of his traveling on foot. Also, if the evidence of these tranquil works is accurate, Dulac seems to have preferred solitary contemplation above all. The late dates (1897, 1898) of his Italian scenes suggest that his pilgrimage was Dulac's final journey. He died in Paris at age thirty-two.

The Twilight World Of Charles Guilloux

"A magnificent series of landscapes sent in by an unknown who is a master." - Unknown writer in Le Temps (Paris), 1892.

Two recent exhibitions have this in common: an enthusiastic response to the symbolist landscapes of Charles Guilloux (1866-1946). The first was Paris 1900, on view last year at the Oklahoma City Art Museum and, now on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Expanding The Boundaries: Selected Drawings from the Yvonne & Gabriel P. Weisberg Collection. It was only two years ago that the Musee D'Orsay acquired its first two works by Guilloux, although several other French museums own his works.

Apparently, it is Guilloux's fate as an artist to need rediscovering. A self-taught artist, who supported himself with a position at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Guilloux began submitting pictures to the Salon des Independents in 1891. Critics compared his work to another Charles (Marie Dulac, of whom, more soon), although the artists are easy to tell apart, despite similar subject matter, and dubbed him a Symbolist.

Intriguingly, Gulloux achieves his harmonious, veiled effects with extreme color separations. In his landscapes the hour is one between day and night when soft light naturally blends colors, yet a Guilloux landscape possesses the sculptural qualities of a silhouette. To my eyes, there are similarities here to the art practiced by the Nabis that Guilloux quite probably knew. The atmospherics suggest that Gulloux had also studied the ukiyo-e prints of Ando Hiroshige.

Fairy Tale Fashion

Along with Isabel Toledo, twenty-six year old Jason Wu is the fashion designer of the moment. The Cuban-born Toledo designed the coordinated outfit in this season's hot color - lemongrass - that Michelle Obama wore on Inauguration Day while Wu, a native of the Philippines, created the sparkling white on white Inaugural ball gown that will become part of the Smithsonian Museum's collection.
In discussing his collections, Jason Wu credits the fairy tale illustrations of Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) as an inspiration. It is one of the vagaries of the fashion world that reporters explain Wu's intention to make women look beautiful with his clothes as being sweet, even remarkable.

Here are some drawings by Arthur Rackham interspersed with photographs of Jason Wu's dresses, courtesy of the New York Times.

Fields Of Gold

According to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Harvest In Provence was painted "circa June 12, 1888" (sic). Vincent Van Gogh had come to Arles the previous year, writing to his brother Theo soon after his arrival, “Here my life becomes more and more like that of a Japanese painter.” Under the bright skies of early summer he painted a dozen pictures in one month.
Only two years later, in a wheat field, the artist shot himself, fatally as it turned out. Thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of his devoted sister-in-law Jo Bonger, two huge retrospectives of Van Gogh's work stunned Paris in 1905.

Three years later the Daum Brothers glass works at Nancy produced this evocative vase, quite possibly an homage to that occasion. Here, in three dimensions, the summer sky and harvest fields seem more tranquil, the heat that fanned Van Gogh's genius has cooled, along with the pate de verre.

Fragments Of Blue And Gold

All that James McNeill Whistler remembered of the genesis of Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl was the request for a figure that hinted at spring. After a few months work, Whistler was visited in his Paris studio by Charles Lang Freer who was delighted by the progress on his commission. That was in November of 1894; Freer would wait almost nine years for the painting to be finished. In the event, Whistler could not bring himself to part with it during his lifetime.

His wife Beatrix had become ill and died of cancer in May, 1896 but Whistler could not bear to send the news to Freer for ten months. The song bird that Freer had imported from India to cheer Beatrix' final months seemed to the grief-stricken husband to implore him to finish The Little Blue Girl - but how?

Sadness seems embedded in the layers of paint that surround her. Just compare these two 'fragments' from Freer's collection, satisfying in their own way, to what the artist made of flowers and porcelain in the furnished work when Beatrix was no longer there to offer her interest and enthusiasm for the project. Even the inanimate objects seem wan and forlorn.

The Woman In The Straw Hat Reading A Book was painted by Beatrix Whistler sometime between 1886-1892. These were her colors, too.

Valentine

The Snow Is Melting

"The snow is melting

and the village is flooded

with children. "

- Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)

Container in the shape of a snow goose, from the collection of Charles Lang Freer, Meiji Era, late 19th century.

St. Petersburg Woodcuts Of Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva

Three revolutions began in the city where she lived and she studied with a revolutionary painter, but events left subtle marks on the work of one of Russia's greatest printmakers, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (1871-1955).

In her lifetime, St. Petersburg was the scene of three revolutions and it was there that Lenin emerged from a sealed train at the Finland Station to declare the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
Yet St. Petersburg was the proud capital of Russian arts, its Mariiinsky Ballet nurtured the dancers Vasily Njinsky and Anna Pavlova and the Stray Dog Cabaret rang with poems of Anna Ahkmatova, Alexander Blok, and Osip Mandelstam.

She studied first at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, then in Paris at the Whistler Academy from January to May, 1899. Whistler was a reluctant teacher at best and, although he pleaded with Ostroumova-Lebedeva to come to America with him for further study, he had initially dismissed her contemptuously: "But you can do nothing, you know nothing, I can't teach you!" In her memoirs, published in three volumes between 1935 and 1951 (translations by Larissa Haskell), Ostroumova-Lebedeva offered startling descriptions of Whistler's teaching methods.

"Many things surprised me or even seemed quite funny to me: the complete lack of freedom or any independence and the absolute obedience to all rules insisted on by Whistler."
"To mix colours on the palette one had to use a special method invented by Whistler and if you try to do it your own way your neighbors grab hold of your hands because they watch you the whole time."

After four months the young woman was ready to move on to Italy, having got what she could from preparing a weekly 'etude' for her quixotic teacher.
In Ostroumova-Lebedeva's prints we see the city that Dostoesvky described as "abstract" and intentional." Very often there is a strong horizontal axis, reflecting the city's location on the flat lowlands by the Gulf of Finland. Yellow is a favored color, suggesting the importance of the sun in this northern place, otherwise the artist worked in muted shades.

The horizons are broad, the northern light is diffuse, the canals are orderly and pleasant to stroll along. Architecture and the natural world may have served as the still points in a life made tumultuous by events. The border with Finland was not far away; these works suggest what made her stay through the dark decades.

Images courtesy of Russian Avant Gard Art (see Dispatches list at right).

Martine Franck, Photographer

"Once people ask you to take their photograph, you know you have been accepted." - Martine Franck

A perfectionist who never crops her negatives, Martine Franck is constantly on alert for the right shot. Sometimes, as with the boy and his tutor at Shenchan Monastery in Nepal (Paris Match-1996), the unexpected flutter of a bird suggests a visible reminder that the boy is a Tulku, or reincarnated lama. But another aspect of Franck's simpatico with her subjects lies in knowing where to look, unlike most other photographers at the funeral of President Charles de Gaulle, Franck turned her lens to the mourners rather than the hearse.

Her pleasure in disguises and carnivals is evident in Funfair (1985) photographed outside her apartment near the Tuileries gardens.
Another found picture came to her as she walked by a phone booth at the Tuileries Metro station, capturing a woman, watched over by her cat.

Franck also has an exacting compositional sense; see how she takes advantage of the mirrors behind the fashion models to set up a repeating pattern of figures, a trope also used by Cecil Beaton.
The black box at Sceaux, observed closely, reveals itself to be a box hedge and reflections on the Arsenale wall in Venice suggest a ghostly parade of boats.

Martine Franck (b.1938) was born in Antwerp, Belgium, but grew up in Arizona, New York, and London. Her interest in art was encouraged by her parents and by her grandfather who knew artists James Ensor and Rik Wouters. Restless, following her studies in art history at the Louvre, Franck found her vocation while traveling around Asia. In 1971, Franck married fellow photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. She became a member of the Magnum photography pool in 1983, one of the first women to do so.

The photo of the couple on the Riviera is Franck's only nude.
The photo of Martine Franck was taken by Willy Ronis in 1980.