Taking Leave Of A Friend

Anonymous artist - Emperor Wu Ti Welcoming A Man Of Letters, 17th century, Biblotheque Nationale de France

This silk screen, though it appears to illustrate a poem by Li Po, also known as Li Bai (701-762 CE), was created a millenium after he lived. This is the kind of anachronism that one is prone to when on unfamiliar foooting in another culture. These two translations make fascinating reading side by side, and suggest that translation is worthwhile, no matter how imperfect the result. Four of Li Po's poems, in German translation, are also part of Gustave Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song Of The Earth).

TAKING LEAVE OF A FRIEND by Li Po

- translation by Ezra Pound in Cathay (London, Harry Mathews: 1915).

"Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go through a thousand miles of dead grass.
Mind like a floating white cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each other as we are parting."
A FAREWELL TO A FRIEND by Li Po
- translation by Witter Bynner in The Chinese Translations (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 1978)

"With a blue line of mountains north of the wall,
And east of the city a white curve of water,
Here you must leave me and drift away
Like a loosened water plant hundreds of miles…
I shall think of you in a floating cloud;
So in the sunset think of me.
…We wave our hands to say goodbye,
And my horse is neighing again and again."

Li Po: Drinking Alone With the Moon

DRINKING ALONE WITH THE MOON
"From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me –
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make of three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To Cheer me through the end of spring…
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
….Shall good will ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars."

-Li Po, trnaslated by Witter Bynner in The Jade Mountain, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1920.

I have been reading Witter Bynner's The Jade Mountain, translations of Chinese poetry from the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 CE) lately. The poems speak movingly across centuries, even to those of us without specialzed knowledge of Chinese history. The period is considered the Golden Age of Chinese literature, with works by more than 2,00 authors surviving. A stable, prosperous time when accomplishment at composition was a highly valued asset, seems to have provided fertile ground for writers.

Witter Bynner (1881-1968) was an enthusiast of Asian culture, but highly critical of what he considered insipid borrowings and overblown translations. He preferred Chinese arts and literature to those of Japan, writing that the translation of Chinese poetry gave him "a newer, finer, and deeper education than ever came to me from the Hebrew or the Greek." (quote from Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University).

Image credit: Francis Jourdain - Obscure Moon, c. 1920, Museum of Art & History, Saint-Denis, France.

Nasturtiums

You know that spring has arrived in Boston when nasturtiums festoon the courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the Fenway. The vines, measuring between 15 and 20 feet long, take most of the rest of the year to grow to such extravagant lengths, but Mrs. Gardner would wish for no less.
The vivid orange-red nasturtiums appealed strongly to the museum's founder who introduced the annual display in the spring of 1903, during Easter weekend. The bright color is complemented by the villa's pale pink stucco walls - no accident as Gardner rejected yellow nasturtiums as an unaesthetic choice. During her lifetime, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) won awards for her gardening and was a pproponent of integrating art and beauty with daily life.

It may be that the nasturtium became a popular motif with turn of the century artists because of its resemblance to the butterfly (see the Rozenburg-Holland plate at left), another popular decorative symbol at the time.
The Nasturtium was introduced to Europe from its native Peru by Spanish conquistadors. It is an edible flower that has a peppery taste, similar to watercress, and it is sometimes used in place of capers.
1. Photograph of Courtyard At Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum-Boston, Providence Journal.

2. Walter J. Phillips - Nasturtiums, 1928, Sharecom.ca.

3. Rozenburg (Holland) Nasturtium Plate, late 19th century, Musee de Boulogne-sur-Mer.

4. Tiffany Studio, possibly Clara Pierce Wolcott Driscoll - Nasturtium Lamp , c. 1899, Boca Raton museum of Art-Florida.

To the Chinese, the humble daffodil symbolizes good fortune, to the Greeks, vanity. Another association might be with Imagism in early 20th century poetry. In the March 1911 issue of the magazine Poetry, two manifestos of the new movement were published. One was by Ezra Pound, the other by history of poetry for his statements later in life, but Flint has been unfairly neglected. In the anthology Some Imagist Poems (1915), Flint's work occupies a deserved place next to that of Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Richard Aldington. His poem Lunch is really about the daffodil.


"FRAIL beauty,
green, gold and incandescent whiteness,
narcissi, daffodils,
you have brought me Spring and longing,
wistfulness,
in your irradiance.
Therefore, I sit here
among the people,
dreaming,
and my heart arches
with all the hawthorn blossom,
the bees humming,
the light wind upon the poplars,
and your warmth and your love
and your eyes . . .
they smile and know me."
- F. S. Flint - Lunch from Some Imagist Poems : An Anthology (Boston, Houghton Mifflin: 1915).
Emile Galle - Narcissus Vase, 1884, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

The Blue Sky Of Spring

Henri Le Sidaner (1862-1939) - Spring Sky, 1913, Municipal Museum of Le Touquet.

The artist first visited the village of Gerberoy in 1900 and was so taken with the Norman domestic architecture and the local gardens that he bought a home there (now open to the public). The soft blue of the spring sky in Picardie hovered over the scenes of domestic tranquility that Le Sidaner painted. He died before those skies were clouded by the smoke of a second world war.

Also visit http://www.lesidaner.com/ and http://www.lesjardinshenrilesidaner.fr/.

Our Spring Number Begins Here

House Beautiful - cover for March 1932 - Antonio Petrucelli.

When westerners first discovered the prints of China and Japan in the late 19th century, they mistook the faded colors for the original intention and copied them, sometimes so carefully that a cursory glance at these pochoir prints might lead the viewer to take the French print (at right) of a woman walking in the snow as authentic.

But that word is difficult to pin down in a mobile world and the pochoir (stencil) technique that originated in China at least one thousand years ago, reached a new level of refinement in the early 20th century magazine illustrations and print portfolios of such artists as Georges Barbier, Georges Lepape, and others.
At the same time there were Japanese artists, particularly those designing for export, who experimented with color lithography, using a similar palette. Woman Sitting On A Bed By A Pink Plant is an especially fanciful example, the shadows reflected on the walls and the bed appear to be cut out like stars.

The roundelay of influences is fun to tease out and the Lauder Collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is a good place to explore them.

1. E. Blanche - for La Guirlande, 1921.

2. Kato Masao - Woman Sitting On A Bed By A Pink Plant, 1919, Boston Museum Of Fine Arts.

3. Kato Masao - Woman In Pink Holding A Letter By A Lamppost. Taisho-early Showa period, Boston Museum Of Fine Arts.

4. Uzaki Sumikazu/Tanaka Bookshop - Smoke, Taisho-early Showa period - Boston Museum Of Fine Arts.

“Seven billion years before my birth I was an iris.” wrote the poet Arno Holtz (1863-1929) in Ver Sacrum, Volume 2: 1898.

1. Iris Brooch by Georges Fouquet, c. 1906, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

"The Bitter Winds Of Spring"

"On a wet pavement the white sky recedes

mottled black by the inverted

pillars of the red elms,

in perspective, that lift the tangled

Net of their desires hard into

the falling rain. And brown smoke

is driven down, running like

water over the roof of the bridge-

keeper's cubicle..."

- excerpt fromThe Bitter Winds of Spring by William Carlos Williams in The Clouds, New York, New Directions: 1948.

1. Vincent van Gogh - Drawbridge At New Amsterdam, 1883, Groningen Museum, Netherlands.

Rue de l'Evangile

"The smoke from the rail networks of the East and the North mingling with the smoke from the factories blackened the jerry-built tenements, and the never busy roads resemble run-down provincial streets marooned in a wasteland of rust and coal. This is a literary landscape where a sensitive walker, hearing the trains whistle in the grimy fog, might be surprised to find himself praying that life won't last forever." - from Rue de l'Evangile ( originally published in The Walker Through Walls and Other Stories- 1943) by Marcel Ayme, translated by Helen Constantine, Oxford University Press: 2008)

This affecting story of a man from a nameless country in northern Africa, homeless and living on the streets of wartime Paris, haunts me.
Jules Romain also wrote about the Rue de l'Evangile in The Men of Good Will (1932-1946), reputed to be one of the longest novels ever written. At fourteen volumes, one can hardly argue the point. Ah, the influence of Proust.

Model Children

Les enfants modeles the French call them. The ideal child has good manners, is neatly dressed and speaks the French language flawlessly.

Sophie, Countess de Segur (1799-1871), author of popular French children's books, is credited with spreading the concept, most notably in Les petites filles modeles (1858), and the newly federated nation found it a useful tool for inculcating "French" values in young students.

Artists have made charming images of the ideal child, often presenting their own offspring as models. Nelly and Marguerite (above) were daughters of the Symbolist painter Eugene Carriere (1849-1906) and the little girl in the red dotted dress painted by Maurice Denis may have been his daughter Noele.

Alone or in groups, at home or away, they are quintessentially civilized miniature adults.

To see more art by Eugene Carriere, visit: http://www.eugenecarriere.com

With Tongue In Cheek: Henri Ottmann

After looking at his pictures I can't help thinking that Henri Ottmann (1877-1927) possessed a gift for not taking life too seriously, along with a dazzling talent for painting. His contemporaries were convinced that, but for the fatal auto accident that took his life at fifty, Ottmann would have occupied a deserved place as a major artist.
Consider Sleeping Courtesan (left), an apparent comment on Manet's Olympia. In the intervening half century Manet's odalisque had gone from shocking affront to the bourgeoisie to priceless national treasure. There is something almost loopy about Ottmann's sleeping beauty, lolling with her hair hanging off the edge of the bed as an impassive servant watches over her mistress.

Again, in Woman In Blue Stockings (right), our preconceptions are nudged by her quiet seductiveness playing off the words 'bluestocking'.

As a young man, Ottmann had exhibited with the Belgian avant-garde group La Libre Esthetique, qualifying his admiration for the work of the supremely bourgeois Renoir by judging his colors too "harsh."

Ottmann's portrayal of himself at work gives no hint of his early poverty or his struggle to support his art through commercial work. Able to absorb new influences, from Fauvism to Art Deco and Cubism with ease and distinctiveness, Ottmann was at work on a series of large canvases on the theme of modern life when he died.
We can imagine what was lost by looking at an early Ottmann work, The Luxembourg Train Station In Brussels from 1903. His palette was still under the influence of Impressionism, the steam rising from the trains recalls Monet, but how different the overall intention. Reportedly painted from a bridge overlooking the rail yard, the larger portion of the canvas is a decorative swirl of tracks gleaming in the light as they spiral and slice their way across two thirds of the canvas. The puffing smokestacks and the propulsion of the engines are largely positive phenomena as presented here, a world away from the railroad as a destructive monster presented in Frank Norris's novel The Octopus (1901).

1. Sleeping Courtesan - Henri Ottmann, 1920, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

2. Portrait Of the Artist In His Studio - Henri Ottmann, no date, Musee des Beuax-Arts, Nantes, France. 3. Woman With Blue Stockings - Henri Ottmann, 1917, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

4. The Luxembourg Station In Brussels - Henri Ottmann, 1903, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

"Man Makes The Beads Of Life But Woman Must Thread Them"

The art of Frances MacDonald (1873-1921) would be better known today if her husband had not destroyed much of it after her death. So it is fitting to celebrate International Women's Day by giving her work pride of place (at left).

1. Frances MacDonald (MacNair) - Man Makes the Beads Of Life But Woman Must Thread Them - c. 1911 - Walker Art Gallery - Liverpool, England.

2. Edgar Degas - Woman Ironing - 1882-1886 - Reading Public Museum - England.

3, Edgar Degas - Woman Ironing Against The Light - c.1887 - National Gallery Of Art - Washington, D.C.

4. Henri Riviere - Lavoir Au Haut Trestraou - 1890 - Les Amis de Henir Riviere.

5. Henri Riviere - Women Haying - 1890 - Les Amis de Henri Riviere.

6. Theopile Alexander Steinlen - Washerwoman With Children - 1898 - Albertina - Vienna.

7. Henri Fantin-Latour - The Embroiderers 3 - Saint Louis Art Museum - Missouri.

8. Ellen Bernhard Pyle - Children Of The People - Century Magazine - December 1903.

9. Carl Moser - At The Fish Market - 1905 - Albertina - Vienna.

*** Visit http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/doves/ for an exhibition about the work of Frances MacDonald.

Waiting For A Girl Like Dusty

“What people don’t understand about singers like her is that they’re as rare as diamonds.”

At her funeral, Elton John said that it was the only time he had ever seen a hearse receive a standing ovation and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys thanked the gods for allowing him to be part of her fabulous career.

When the philosopher Kierkegaard noted that we live life forward but understand it backward, he wasn’t recommending the practice. Calling Dusty Springfield(04/16/1939 - 03/02/1999) a ‘diva’ is crude. The defining years of her career were a time when touring could best be described as a ‘slog’, when there was no entourage, you carried your own luggage, and a woman on the road was often isolated by being the token female in the group. There were those who criticized Springfield for being nervous when her manager, Vic Billings, wasn’t around. But in November, 1966, Springfield was persuaded that a two-week nightclub engagement at Manhattan’s Basin Street East was necessary for her career. She didn’t choose to work with the notoriously arrogant drummer Buddy Rich and Rich consistently refused to let his band rehearse with her. On opening night, she was kept waiting to go on for two hours, though she was the headliner. Divas have people to take care of boors like that.
Yes, she had been an awkward, spotty, glass-wearing adolescent and her emotional pain was intense, but her deliberate transformation into a young woman of remarkable talent and presence is often noted as if there were some neurosis involved in making the best of yourself, not to mention more than anyone expects.
As is often the way, people have dwelled on Springfield's personal life and her sense of privacy. What I love is that voice, reaching out of thin air, that gift.