"A Green Thought In A Green Shade"

"What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head ;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine ;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach ;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.



Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade. "
- excerpted from The Garden by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) , in The Metaphysical Poets, edited by Helen Gardner, Oxford University Press: 1967.

The phrase delighted me, from the first time I read Marvel's poem in school, even as it mystified me: a green thought in a green shade. It couldn't be just any green, but the newly-minted greens of spring, fresh with rain. Pierre-Louis Jacob's The Play of Rain seemed to fit perfectly and then came the others, with their deliciously pointed titles: green thoughts from another century. Cragg's Green Bottle, arranged to look like sea glass washed up on the shore, is photographed spout down, the better to pour with. A metaphysical message in a bottle.

1. Wassily Kandinsky - Parc de Saint-Cloud, 1906, Strasbourg Museum of Modern Art.

2. Pierre-Louis Jacob - Jou de Pluie, 1965, Museum des Beaux-Arts, Quimper.

3. Anthony Cragg - The Green Bottle, 1980, Pompidou Center, Paris.

4. Henry Valensi - Green Symphony, 1935, Pompidou Center, Paris.

5. Gunter Brus - The Vengeance of Watteau, 1983, Pompidou Center, Paris.

6. Denis Laget - Mars Path Finder, 1996, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

I kept looking at these three contemporary glass pieces, wondering why I wanted to put them together. Then the right word (I think) came to me - Rococo. The exuberant line that comes to us via Art Nouveau, the heir of the figura serpentina, the line that turns on itself, in its joyous display. Remember that the nouveau Belgian architect Victor Horta (1861-1947) called it the Stem Style.

There is something else, too, an intriguing combination of color and transparency, that misleads and delights the eye. The leaning cactus holds up a clear bowl, the clear disembodied hand clasps a delicate blue seashell, and in the place on the braided stemware glass that the early Murano glass makers might have embedded a multi-colored bead - there is a purple head, and why not. (There is a frontal view of the glass at the website of the National Ceramics Museum that makes it appear to be a vehement wind god.)

Hilton McConnico is an American who has designed glass pieces for the presitigious manufactures of Sevres and Daum in France.

Milvia di Melasso Maglione (b. 1934) is an Italian artist and designer whose work is also included in the collection of the Pompidou Center, Paris.

Lucio Bubacco, also Italian, designs in glass using the lampworking technique, in which a gas torch is used to melt and bend rods or tubes of glass.

1. Hilton McConnico - Cactus Bowl, 1987, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nancy.

2. Milvia Di Melasso Maglione - Cloud, 1969, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nancy.

3. Lucio Bubacco - Purple-headed Glass, 1999, National Ceramics Museum, Sevres.

Burnished Beauty

Lacquer ware shares some of the mysterious quality of glassware, an extra unnameable dimension combining reflection, shimmer, and sparkle.

Along with Buddhism, lacquer ware came to Japan from China sometime before the Common Era began. Lacquer can be made from a variety of substances but Japanese lacquer is made from the sap of a native Sumac tree.
At one time a rarity reserved for the Imperial Household, lacquer came to be used to decorate items of everyday use like cosmetic cases, writing desks, and containers for storing or eating food (think: bento box). The handled case is decorated with flowers of autumn, chrysanthemums, campaniles, and carnations, a reflection of the importance ascribed to the changing seasons.

To create the effects we see here, first the lacquer is painted on the wooden surface and allowed to dry for 24 hours. Then to be made durable, the process needs to be repeated several times. Although we usually think of varnishes as being clear, colored lacquers became fashionable during the 18th century.
One of the loveliest variations is the “sprinkled picture” or maki-e, wherein gold or silver powder is painted onto the wet lacquer. The gold and midnight blue ink stone case, c. 1630, from the Saint Louis Art Museum intimates shadows and soft winds as it shimmers.
Another technique is nashiji or “pear-skin ground”. Gold or silver flakes are sprinkled into the lacquer, usually for background, then burnished with a specially prepared lacquer, creating a creamy appearance.

Boxes made in the sh ape of the melon flower and the lute are examples of harmonizing the the design and the use of a container.

Ingenious entertainments are provided by the "deer boxes" that fit together like a puzzle or the black and gold chrysanthemum boxes that fit into each other - if you follow the correct order.

Representations of beauty in nature are common and often refer to familiar verses of the great traditional poets. (It helps to know your Japanese poets when looking at pictures.) Thereby they offer a window into human emotions. There are also Meisho, images of recognized scenic places, like the one below that illustrates an episode from The Tale of Genji.

And Now For Something Truly Obscure

It was a brief exhibition, to be sure; five days in March, 1914 from the 2nd to the 7th. But it took place at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, ground zero of avant-garde art in the Paris of its day. The Bernheim brothers had published the first book about Paul Cezanne in 1908.

The three featured artists, Janine Aghion (no dates), Madeleine Bunoust (1885-1974), and Juliette Roche (1884-1982), were all young women.
The dizzying confection of color and pattern (top, left) was printed in the (now) rare portfolio The Essence and Mode of the Day in 1920 by La Belle Edition, Paris.

The striking portrait of a Sudanese Woman was painted by Madeleine Bunoust and is now in the collection of the Musee de Quai Branly.

The other pictures are the work of Juliette Roche, whose good fortune was to have a painter husband, Albert Gleizes, with whom she set up a foundation that preserves her artwork. Strollers in Los Ramblas was painted in Barcelona; the Nightclub Dancers in Brooklyn. Roche, who made experiments in Dada in the 1920s, also did portraits, such as the Woman with the Little White Dog and Self-Portrait. Roche was all painted by her friend, Marie Laurencin.

For more, visit http://www.fondationgleizes.com/ and
http://www.bernheim-jeune.com/.

Ida Rubinstein: She Knew What She Wanted

"Ida wanted to dance, so she was entered at the (St. Petersburg) Opera school; Ida wanted to see Greece, so she was sent to Athens with a famous Hellenist." - Philippe Jullian

It is a truism, not to be underestimated, that to get what you want in life, it is very useful to be born to a wealthy family. Ida Rubinstein (1885-1960), though orphaned at an early age, learned this lesson well. By the time Rubintsein was twenty-five and had learned the value of good publicity, she had gotten herself painted by the premier portraitist in Russia, Valentin Serov (1865-1911).
In the fiercely compettive Ballet Russes of Pavlova and Karsavina, Rubinstein fasioned starring roles for herself that demanded no balletic pyrotechnics, as Cleopatra, where she was carried across the stage by slaves. She made her 1909 debut in Paris, dancing with Nijinsky in Scheherazade.

Ida triumphed in the theatre as well, mesmerizing audiences with her miming skills to cover her thick Russian accent. The poet Robert de Montesquioi championed her and it was likely through him that Rubinstein met the American painter Romaine Brooks. She also persuaded Leon Bakst to design a production of Strauss' Salome for her that she performed only a few times. A

nd in 1911 the Archbishop of Paris assured her success in Gabriele D"Annunzio's The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (music by Claude Debussy) at the Paris Opera by forbidding Catholics from attending it. Brooks painted Rubinstein as the masked archer, but the painting's current whereabouts are not known.

"She seemed to me more beautiful when off the stage; like some heraldic bird delicately knit together by the finest of bone-structures giving flexibility to curveless lines." - Romaine Brooks Ida's affair with Romaine lasted for three years, its end coinciding with the beginning of the First World War. For her work in setting up a hospital for wounded soldiers, Rubinstein received the Legion of Honor in 1934. She became a French citizen the next year but, as a Jew, spent the years of World War II on the run, in exile in a series of countries in Europe and Africa. As a producer, Rubinstein commissioned the tour de force, Bolero, from composer Maurice Ravel in 1928.

Tall, exotic, even vulpine in appearance, Rubinstein was able to employ her erotic glamour without it becoming her mistress. Said to live on a diet of champagne and biscuits, she was moody and unpredictable as a sitter, posing a challenge for artists, including Brooks. Openly bisexual at a time when the term was barely understood, Rubinstein lived her life expansively. One thinks of Walt Whitman's joyous declaration (in Leaves of Grass): "I contradict myself...very well, I contradict myself. I am vast...I contain multitudes." Though we encounter her name today, usually in the stories of other lives, the works that were made memorable by Rubinstein's participation are still with us.
For more about Ida Rubinstein, visit http://www.theatrex.net/ida/index.htm

For more about Romaine Brooks, see "A Woman Appeared to Me", posted here 29 October 2008.

1. Valentin Serov - Portrait of Ida Rubinstein, 1910, Russian Museum of St. Petersburg.
2. Georges Barbier - Ida Rubinstein as Zobeide in Scheherazade, 1913, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
3. Leon Bakst - Costume for Ida Rubinstein as Cleopatra, Groningen Museum, Netherlands.
4. Leon Bakst - Design for Ida Rubinstein in Le Martyre de Saint Sebastian, 1911, via Russian Avant Gard.com.
5. Romaine Brooks - The Weeping Venus, c. 1916, Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
6.Romaine Brooks - La France Croissee, 1914, Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
7. Unidentified photographer - Ida Rubinstein in costume for Ravel's Bolero, 1928, from theatrex.net

A Bad Hair Day

"Painting is life, the real life, my life."

Victor Brauner (1903-1966) was a Jewish Romanian artist, a Surrealist of uncommon charm. Although his images incorporate his anxieties, Brauner created a world that contains humor and kindness, along with its darker counterpoints.

Victor Brauner, Heron d'Alexandre, 1939, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Piazza del Panda

On April 19, Rome's Piazza del Popolo (Piazza of the People) experienced another transformation just as dramatic, in its way, as Giuseppe Valadier's in the 1820s. Like legions of ancient travelers, the pandas entered Rome from the north via the Via Flaminia. When we last saw the World Wildlife pandas they were enjoying the late summer sun in Bordeaux, France.

The pandas are in Rome to celebrate World Oasis Day (April 19) and to survey the damage to human and animal habitats caused by the recent earthquakes in central Italy. Rumor has it that the pandas will visit Siracusa on the island of Sicily and make an appearance at the G8 Summit, to be held in Italy this July. Diplomatic as pandas naturally are, they have not expressed any views on the Filippo Panseca- Silvio Berlusconi paintings imbroglio. (Read more about it on Art Daily - link at right).

Photographs by Riccardo de Luca, and Republica-Franceschi, Rome.

With assistance from a Celtic Princess.

The Dangling Conversation

"It's a still life water color,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room.
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
The borders of our lives. "
- from The Dangling Conversation, lyrics by Paul Simon, 1966.

It's an oil painting titled Summer Shower (1891) that Santiago Rusinol painted, using his friends Suzanne Valadon and Miguel Utrillo as models. Rusinol was living in a rented room above the fabled Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre. (The subdued colors are typical of the Catalan artist's Parisian works, in contrast with the bright colors he used for his scenes of Iberian gardens.)

During that same year Henry James was working on a novella, The Real Thing, about making art. It concerns an unnamed painter whose models may be "the real thing" but who lack the necessary verisimilitude; the aptly named Monarchs are not aristocratic enough. A bit like a cat with a mouse, James played with the relationship between illusion and reality.

And then listen to Paul Simon's The Dangling Conversation. I had forgotten it until last week and, hearing it again, thought of Rusinol's painting. Were Valadon and Utrillo a couple? Difficult to define, although we know now that Miguel was not the father of Suzanne's son, Maurice, although he gave the future painter his name. How is it that short distances are so difficult to cross?

Women In A French Garden

When I first saw this image, I immediately imagined myself sitting at Henry van de Velde's desk, typing away on my laptop, glancing up at Pierre Bonnard's Les femmes au jardin occasionally. I know...but it's a nice dream.

Bonnard is credited with being the first of the Nabis to present decorative panels in the style of Japanese pillar prints (kakemonos) to a French audience at the Salon des Independents for 1891. The panels have been commonly understood to represent the garden in four seasons.

The first viewers were baffled by this beautiful work. Felix Feneon, usually an astute critic, wrote: "M. Pierre Bonnard likes to develop his compositions behind an arabesque motif that partly obliterates it." The critic for La Plume in Geneva simply threw down his pen after disparaging the works as "impossible."
But these are also pictures of real woman. The two center panels resemble Bonnard's cousin, Berthe Schaedlin, and the woman on the right watching the cat is the artist's sister, Andree Bonnard. She is likely the woman on the left, playing with her dog.

This was an eventful year for Bonnard; he met fellow artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1891 and also showed his work for the first time, that autumn, with the Nabis at Le Barc de Boutteville. In 1894 Bonnard designed a famous poster for La Revue Blanche (The White Review) and in 1898 Henry Van de Velde designed this oak desk for the Revue offices.

So it it fitting that the two works are united at the Musee D'Orsay, allowing us to see them as their creators might have wished.

Photograph by Rene-Gabriel Ojeda, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

A Bowl Of Cherries

It could be a token of tough economic times but songs from the 1920s and 1930s are cropping up on song lists, and sounding right at home alongside more recent lyrics. Canadian vocalist Holly Cole included a thoroughly modern version of Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries on her recent debut cd with the French Dreyfus label that is as catching as a virus. The song was written for the Broadway revue, The George White Scandals of 1931 by the popular Tin Pan Alley team of Ray Henderson, Lew Brown and Buddy De Sylva. The idea is a happy one, suggesting the joie de vivre on view in these images: an idea that was in the air waiting for someone to write a song.

"Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't take it serious; life's so mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so,

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall,

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all. "

Just look at those luscious cherries in Giovanna Garzoni's painting; perhaps the bee is drunk on the juice from them! After that, the other images are an anti-climax, though each is charming in its own fashion.

1. Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670) - Bowl of Cherries, Galerie Palatina, Pitti Palace, Florence.

2. Francois Garnier - Basket of Cherries, before 1658, Louvre Museum, Paris

3. Henri Rousseau - Still Life with Cherries, 1907, Pompidou Center, Paris.

4. Raoul Dufy - Still Life with Bowl of Cherries, 1919, Museum of Fine Arts, Troyes, France.

Audrey Munson: Her Brilliant Career

“I know of no other model with the particular style that Miss Munson possesses. There is a certain ethereal atmosphere about her that is rare. She has a decidedly expressive face, always changing.” - Daniel Chester French

If you have walked Manhattan streets, visited Central Park, or stood in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing, you have seen the art of Audrey Munson. An extraordinary artist’s model and a brave, adventurous young woman, Audrey was born in Rochester, NY, in 1891. Her parents divorced when Audrey was small and her mother worked as a seamtress to support them. When fifteen year-old Audrey and her mother Katherine entrained for New York City from Syracuse, they knew no one. But Audrey, who loved music and dance, was ready to seek her fortune.

Amazingly, Audrey was approached on a Manhattan street by photographer Ralph Draper, who introduced Audrey to the sculptor, Isidor Konti. Konti's “Three Graces”, modeled by Audrey, made her career. The plucky Munson had no qualms about posing in the nude and later in life, she told an interviewer, “I detest false modesty. For my part I see nothing shocking in our unclothed bodies.”
Munson impressed the artists she worked with by her talent for finding a pose capable of expressing an abstract idea and infusing the pose with emotion that carried over into the finished sculpture. Sherry Edmundson Fry, who used her as his model for the pediments that grace the front entrance to the Frick Collection, said: “Audrey Munson is one of the really intelligent models who can catch an idea and enter into the spirit of the work.”

Audrey also appeared in several Hollywood films and, on returning to New York in 1919, Audrey and Katherine were befriended by a wealthy couple who invited them stay at their Long Island estate. The wife became convinced – apparently with good reason – that her husband was in love with Audrey and asked the women to leave. Shortly after, Julia Wilkins was found murdered on the lawn. Her husband was arrested and, although he tried to

convince authorities that burglars were responsible, the overwhelming physical evidence led to a conviction and death sentence for Dr. Wilkins. He hung himself in his jail cell.
As the unwilling object of tabloid attention, Audrey began to, in her mother’s words, “lose her concentration.” The two sought refuge from the notoriety in the quiet upstate town of Mexico, New York, where Katherine again did sewing to make ends meet.
In April, 1922, The Syracuse Herald reported that Audrey Munson was engaged to an aviator from Michigan. On May 27, Audrey attempted to poison herself. Journalists investigated, but could find no evidence that the man existed. Movie Weekly's headline blared The Awesome Story of Audrey Munson's Strange Life!"

After that, Munson kept to herself but her erratic behavior was noticed; when several barns in the area burned down (a common occurrence in 1920s rural American), the locals suspected Munson. In 1931, a judge committed the 39 year old Munson to a mental hospital where she spent the rest of her life – another 65 years.
A niece, who sought out Munson in the psychiatric hospital, found a woman intelligent, charming, and without bitterness. Munson died on February 29, 1996 at the remarkable age of 105.

Although her life was bracketed by hardship and tragedy, Audrey Munson, as artist, is a triumphal figure. Drawing on inner sources of intelligence and courage, she made a life that no one could have imagined for her and left a legacy that invites wonde

Addendum as of 12/10/11 for the Audrey Munson Project, with thanks to Marilyn Slater.

American Venus by Diana Rozsas and Anita Bourne, Los Angeles, Balcony Press: 1999, is an invaluable source of information about Audrey Munson's career and life.

1. Daniel Chester French - Memory, 1917-1919, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
2. Daniel Chester French - Mourning Victory, 1906-1908, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

3. Karl Bitter - Pomona, 1916, Central Park at 59th Street, NYC.
4. Augustus Lukeman - Memory: The Straus Memorial, Broadway at 107th Street, NYC.

For a more complete inventory of Audrey Munson's works, visit http://www.newyorkcitystatues.com/audrey-munson/

Note: The Mexico (NY) Historical Society is working to provide a monument for Audrey Munson's grave. If you would like to know more, or to contribute to their effort, please contact them at: Audrey Munson Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 331, Mexico, NY, 13114-0331.

Being Philosophical About Rain

Aristotle believed that the universal exists within each thing; Plato believed that the universal existed in ideal forms that are separate from things. So we have the question posed by spring rains, rephrased by these anonymous Japanese artist-philosophers: is the essence of rain that it falls over half the world or that it rains and then it doesn't rain?

1. Unknown artist - Raining Over Half The Globe, 1909, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Lauder Collection.

2. Unknown artist - Now Raining, Now Not Raining, 1908, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Lauder Collection.

A Plum Poem For Isabelle Lemmonier

"A Isabelle
cette mirabelle
Et la plus belle
C'est Isabelle."

You don't need to know much French to understand that this little quatrain, decorated with a plum, is a love poem.
Along with the other illustrated letters here (from the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris), they were written by the artist Edouard Manet (1832-1893) to a young woman named Isabelle Lemmonier in the year 1880.

Manet was already suffering painful symptoms from the syphilis that would kill him when he was commissioned to do a portrait of Mlle. Lemmonier in 1879. In the event, Manet painted at least six portraits of the young woman, his final crush, if you will.

Isabelle was the daughter of a wealthy Parisian jeweler who might well have chosen another famous artist to paint his daughter. Isabelle's older sister, Mme. Charpentier, had been painted by Auguste Renoir, a friend of her husband. Georges Charpentier was the publisher of such well-known writers as Emile Zola and the Goncourt Brothers, and also the proprietor of La Vie Moderne, a gallery where avant-garde artists, including Manet, showed their work.
Manet, of course, had focused the twin energies of his artistry and affection on other women before, most memorably on fellow artist Berthe Morisot. Young Isabelle seems not to have been overly impressed by the older man's attention; she is reported to have found Manet tiresome. Nevertheless, these letters garlanded with roses, Venetian lanterns, and almonds, make charming reading and are fine little works of art.

The drawing of the bather was the product of wishful thinking. Manet rarely saw the young Isabelle after he finished her portrait and definitely not in the summer of 1881 when he sent this to her.

Nevertheless, like Manet's last flower paintings, they remind us of what was lost when Manet died, nine days after losing his foot to gangrene, at the age of fifty-one.

The portrait of Isabelle Lemmonier by Edouard Manet (1879) is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.