Look, What the Birds See

After listening to a recording of Darius Milhaud's Le Bouef sur le Toit (1920), I began to think about what the birds see when they fly overhead. We take the roofs over our heads for granted, except when they leak, and like so many ordinary things, they become invisible to us.
In his book Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (1997), landscape historian John R. Stilgoe prods the reader to look with the mind as well as the eyes. There is geometry in the air above our heads: planes, angles, and triangles. Here are examples of how things look to humans who try to imagine a bird's eye view. How it actually appears to a bird is more subtle - most birds have one eye on each side of the head and see things differently from even the most imaginative artist. Who knows, you might even see a bull on the roof.

Images:
1. Carl Blecher View of Roofs and Gardens, between 1798-1844, National Gallery, Berlin.
2. Edouard Vuillard - The Red Roofs, c. 1889, Bellier Gallery, Paris.
3. Alvin Langdon Coburn - Gabled Roof, 1904.
5. Henri Riviere - On the Roofs, from 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower, 1900, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.
6. Bernard Boutet de Monvel, View of Nemours, before 1949, Chateau-Museum, Nemours, France.
7. Georges Tatge - View of the Countryside in the valley of Elsa near Certaldo, 1992, Alinari Archive, Florence, Italy.

Also, for more information about Darius Milhaud and Le Bouef sur le Toit, read "How the Bull Got on the Roof" at Musica Brasilieras (see Music links section).

Under Water

Souvenir of the Paris Flood of 1910 is a special newspaper edition commemorating the rescue efforts of Breton sailors in the great inundation that lasted almost a month. During that time the main rail station was flooded, as was the basement of the Louvre Museum and, on some boulevards, wooden walkways of the kind usually seen in pictures of Venice were the only safe way of travel on foot.
Come forward in time nearly four decades (to 1948) as the couple in Ralph Bartholomew's publicity photo for General Electric appliances encounter "The Mystery of the Flooded Basement."

A genuine mystery is how Edouard Denis Baldus took this panormaic photograph of the Rhone River inundation of Avignon in 1856. My guess is that he went up in a balloon.
I had been looking at flood pictures recently, after reading Helen Constantine's vivid translation of Emile Zola's The Flood (from the book French Tales, Oxford University Press: 2008). In The Flood, Zola imagined the Garonne River as an animal attacking a tiny village. He based his story on accounts of a flood near Toulouse on 22 June 1875, that he read about in L'Illustration. Told through the voice of Louis Roubeau, a seventy year-old farmer just retired, whose younger daughter Veronique is engaged to Gaspard, a nice young man who adores her, Roubeau expects to end his days in contentment.
“In the preceding days it had in fact rained for sixty hours without stopping. The Garonne ne had been very had high since the previous day; but we trusted it and as long as it didn’t rise above the banks we did not consider it a bad neighbor. It served us well!”
Then tragedy strikes.

“Behind the people who were running between the trunks of the poplars, in the middle of great tufts of grass, we had just seen something that looked like a pack of wild beasts, grey with yellow spots, advancing toward us.”

“Now the waves came in one unbroken line, rearing up and collapsing again, with the thunderous noise of a battalion charging. In the first onslaught they had broken down three poplar trees; their tall branches crashed down and disappeared. A wooden hut was overwhelmed; a wall collapsed; unharnessed carts were swept away like straws. Bur mostly the water seemed to be pursuing those who were fleeing.”
“Of the collapse all we could see was the water in turmoil, and waves splashing up again under the debris of the roof. Then it was calm once more; the vast lake found its level once again around the black cavity of the drowned house with its carcase of broken planks sticking up out of the water.”
These pictures seem too aesthetically pleasing somehow, no match for Zola's words in portraying the reality of inundation, although both Marcel Bovis (Paris, 1935) and Rene Jacques (the Marne, 1949) are fine photographers. And when flood waters recede, what they leave behind seems unbelievable. Perhaps so did the fabled City of Ys as it vanished beneath the waves near Finistere.

Felix Regamey Goes To Japan

In Promenades Japonaises (22 September 2008) I wrote about Eugene Guimet, a wealthy industrialist from Lyon, France who was an early European advocate of Asian art. Unlike Siegfried Bing, who is better known in the English speaking world, Guimet's interest came from his years studying painting, ceramics, and sculpture before he assumed his family's successful business in 1860, rather than from any desire for profit.

Behind the book Promenade Japonaises is the story an artist, Felix Regamey (1844-1907). An established artist whose work was regularly featured in Le Rire, Le Boulevard, and Harper's Weekly, Regamey was able to offer financial assistance to his friends, poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. The prospect of a two-year world tour in the company of the scholarly Guimet appealed to his desire for new material.
On their way 'East', the two men visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite viewing such inventive wonders as an electric dynamo, the Bell telephone, and the Remington typewriter, nothing there made the impression that the art of Japan would.

Perhaps Regamey's expertise as a caricaturist contributed to his unusual (for the time) portrayal of Japanese life and arts. Missing is the romanticism in style and subject common to Western artists in such scenes as M. Guimet conversing with a monk through an interpreter, and the party crossing The Bridge Between the Scared and the Profane at Nikko.
One trusts Regamey's interpretive accuracy enough to wonder at the significance of the variously colored robes worn by the monks at their meeting with Guimet. The more intimate scene, with seminarians at the Hongan-ji Temple in Kyoto surrounds the group with lovingly detailed depictions of their items of everyday use (the ewer and the bowl in front) and the decorative (the hanging screen, the crane, and bouquet of flowers in back), suggesting the harmony of these things, rather than any differentiation. I am charmed by the small boy, waiting patiently in the corner, perhaps an apprentice.
When he relaxed, Regamey painted watercolors like View of Arayashima, Viewed from Kyoto.

When they returned to France, Guimet wrote his book and opened a museum in his home town (1879) but, disappointed to the lackluster municipal welcome that greeted his collection, he donated it to the nation in 1884. The museum that bears his name, Musee Guimet, opened in Paris in 1888.

Regamey published his own book from their journey, The Japanese Walks of Guimet (1878) and also participated in the production The Theater of Japan at Lyon in 1884. The last two illustrations shown here were designed as posters for the occasion. Even here, Regamey charts the treacherous waters of portraying women from another culture with unusual delicacy and respect: we believe in these women as individuals. Also upon his return from Japan, Felix Regamey became the official Inspector of Drawing for the schools of Paris.

Note: Images from the collection of the Musee Guimet, Paris.

The Seahorse

Bobbing among the mangroves and coral reefs in shallow ocean waters like so many hobbyhorses, the seahorse has been a favorite trope for artists from every corner of the earth.

Now, thanks to the researches of marine biologists, we know that their mating habits are as charming as their miniature, spiny, horse-like appearance. During courtship, seahorses swim in tandem, are oblivious to outsiders, change colors, and even entwine their tails. When the female gives the male her eggs to fertilize and incubate, he swells up. She visits him each morning until he gives birth.

1. Joseph Mathurin Meheuet - Seahorses, 1912, Pompidou Center, paris

2. Japan - New Year's Card, Showa Era, Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

3. Takahashi Haruke - New Year's Eve Card, 1928, Boston museum of Fine Arts.

4. LeHaye for Rozenburg Pottery - Seahorse vase, 1900, National Cermaics Museum, Sevres, France.
5. Emile Galle - Seahorse vase, 1889, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

6. Henri Dubret - Seahorse pendant, 1919, MuseeD'Orsay, Paris.

7. Gerhard Munthe - Horses of the Sea, 1907, Trondheim Museum.

Marisol: On the Occasion Of Her Birthday, May 22

Two men on a horse, George Washington and Simon Bolivar, a toy horse with a mouthful of gold teeth and, if you could see the side of the heads, an imprint of the artist's hand. The Generals (1961), at the Albright-Knox Gallery, were my introduction to Marisol (Escobar).

It was while studying at the New School in New York that Marisol became interested in making wooden sculptures. A distinctive feature of her work is the mixture of two and three dimensional elements in these pieces. Facial features are drawn or painted on, sometimes carved, serious or comic, but always individually rendered. The photograph that appeared in Life magazine in 1957 shows the artists seated among The Hungarians, her commemoration of the disastrous uprising of 1956.

Many of Marisol's best known works are assemblages and The Cocktail Party (1965-1966) includes the figure of a spectator (in black, back to the viewer) who wears the artist's face, a signature gesture.

For a young woman from a wealthy Venezuelan family, raised in Paris, to make her way in the male American art world of Abstract Expressionists, Pop and Op artists, while maintaining her own focus suggests a strong artistic personality She divested herself of her patrimonial name but Marisol Escobar (b. 1930) chose reticence in the face of questions about the intent of her works, at first denying the specific identities of The Generals.

Kinship groupings from Migrant Workers (at right) to typical middle class families are often her subject. One famous piece shows a giant President Lyndon Johnson holding his tiny wife and daughters in his cupped palm, a blunt expression of power. And although the Pop Art movement made it easier to appreciate what Marisol was doing, she brought from her study of pre-Colombian art a vocabulary of geometric and decorative tropes to bear on the creation of new works. Sometimes when the members of an assemblage are rearrange, the individual reveal a new demeanor.

Beginning in 1967, Marisol's commissioned set pieces appeared on the cover of Time magazine, taking the measure of men like Hugh Hefner, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and broad social changes such as The U.S. Family and Women Face the '90s.
Marisol's ideas come out in serpentine curves, as when art critic Cindy Nemser asked her about her teacher, Hans Hofmann, known for his sarcastic put-downs of female students. No, she replied, "He would take off his hearing aid, and there was never any communication. I would go into class and I was very intimidated." Marisol, herself, has been noted for her reticence, perhaps to counterbalance the frequent (and possibly diminshing) references to her beauty. As for the comparisons with Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few other successful women artists when Marisol began her career, also financially independent and successful at a young age, Marisol remarks, "That's why she doesn't like to be with other women artists and doesn't think they have problems." Then Marisol adds that Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan pushed back against the barriers, paved the way for her. I have chosen to focus on the aspect of Marisol's art as I first became acquainted with it. Her American Merchant Mariners' Memorial (1991) at Battery Park in lower Manhattan is a work of tragic impressiveness that deserves a separate consideration.

These subversive sculptures, bright and bold, larger than life, bring to bear a satirical vision that yet allows for the possibility of good cheer. In recent years, the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte, has been a frequent subject. In Magritte VI, we find him under his umbrella. This totemic shape was already part of the artist's repertoire in 1961 when she created On Madison Avenue. Is that a hat, a hairdo, or a ponytail palm that has alighted atop the woman's head? Marisol's work is not precisely surrealistic, but surrealism made intelligible such leaps of the imagination.

Young Woman Stretched Out On A Bench

As a picture of pure enjoyment Young Girl Stretched Out On A Bench is difficult to equal and I would not have given it a second look had I not been reading The Guardian Angel at Adventures In The Print Trade. Carl Larsson, a purveyor of sentimentality I would have said.

The deliciousness of the scene is the first thing to appreciate. The utter relaxation of the little dachshund lying along her side, as the young woman reads the paper and cradles the cat, seems pictorially uncontrived. The tree offers protection from the sun just as it frames the scene, arcing toward the red pillow that has obviously been upended into its most comfortable position.

Only enumerate the feast of diagonals here. The green of the bench is counterpoised by the multi-colored cushion underneath her, complete with candy-striped fringe. The red stripes at the top of the blanket join with the red printed cushion to frame the young woman in her green and white striped dress. To put all this into words makes it sound busy and stiff, which it is not. Carl Larsson's masterpiece, I think.

Carl Olaf Larsson - Young Woman Stretched Out On A Bench, 1913, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Swan's Way

"Two swans on the Seine" is the title of this photograph - that's self-explanatory. But then you notice the street light the swans appear to be swimming toward. Perhaps they were as surprised by the lamp post as we are. Yes, it turns out that the Seine did overflow its banks around Paris in 1981.

Denise Colomb "Deux cynges sur la Seine", 1981,

Médiathèque de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris.

A Duck Bicycle

There is, quite simply, no reason for this post except the pleasure I imagine in riding this bicycle on a spring day. I guess that the stick has something to do with steering and braking. Excellent balance must be required and notice the lack of pedals.

Or, on second thoght, could it be a canard? Canard is the French word for duck, but in English it refers to something that is untrue. To paraphrase Rene Magritte, when is a bicycle not a bicycle?

Anonymous - Duck Bicycle, late 19th century, Musee de la Voiture, Compiegne, France, photograph by Rene-Gabriel Ojeda.

Charles Angrand's Monochromatic Pointillism

You may have seen reproductions of Couple in the Street by the French artist Charles Angrand (1854-1926) that look different than the image at left, that are much more brightly colored. This is how the image appears on the website of its home, the Musee D'Orsay in Paris.

"(H)is drawings are masterpieces. It would be impossible to imagine a better use of white and black...These are the most beautiful drawings, poems of light, of fine composition and execution." - Paul Signac on Charles Angrand

"A touch is only one of the infinite colored elements which will, when assembled, compose the painting," Signac also wrote, explaining the importance of pointillism in the making of his pictures.

It is that touch that is displayed so effectively in the pictures in The Finer Points of Pointillism (Adventures In The Print Trade 13 may 2009) and in A Different Sunday (posted here 5 April 2009), and now here.

Angrand's portrait of his son, Antoine Sleeping (1896, Louvre Museum, Paris) is a work of great delicacy, conveying something of the aura that we intuit surrounds a sleeping infant.

We sense nothing missing in these monochromatic works, possibly for the same reason we accept the verisimilitude of black and white photography. While the cones on our retinas give us color vision, the rods at the periphery are not color sensitive (think of how everything is drained of color at dusk). Our brains compensate for the disjuncture by convincing us that we see color where, in fact, we do not.

Translating Colette

“…Colette always wrote only about what she knew about, including the characters in her novels. She invariably borrowed them from the limited life she already knew, mostly in a provincial setting. This left her free to utilize her literary gift for perfecting her style of writing rather than in creating imaginary human beings.”
- from the Afterword to The Cubical City by Janet Flanner, New York, G. P. Putnam: 1926, reprinted 1974.

Image: Gisele Freund - Colette writing in bed, 1939, Pompidou Center, Paris.

As translator of Cheri (1920, translated into English in 1929) and other works by Colette, Janet Flanner knew the French author's work as well as anyone could who had not written it in the first place. Such deceptively simple advice seems applicable to any writer; the genius was in the execution.

On A Clear Day: The Light Of Arnold Bocklin

The concentrated intensity of his greens, the rich moistness of his ochres, suggest the clear air following a good rain. How did Arnold Bocklin do it?

For Bocklin (1827-1901) born in Basel, Switzerland, who spent most of his adult life in Italy, to become the most influential artist in the German speaking world in a parochial era is impressive.

To the young Paula Modersohn-Becker, Bocklin was a heroic figure. Reading her letters, we begin to see what she saw (admittedly difficult with images on the Internet). Bocklin ground his own pigments (his blue skies were much admired) and, still unsatisfied with the results, invented an adhesive agent that made it possible for him to paint on an almost transparent base. This rendered his brushwork nearly invisible, unless he chose otherwise.
The preternatural character of the light in Bocklin's pictures is intensified further by his subject matter: classical mythology and a turn to a personal mysticism later in life. Even Garden of the Villa Fiesole (above right), a straightforward landscape subject, has an aura that makes the viewer investigate the corners, looking for portentious figures.

Bocklin's best known works are the five versions he painted of The Isle of the Dead - two shown here. The first, painted in 1880, came about as a commission by Maria Berna, an acquaintance who wanted a work in memory of her late husband. The subject had found an artist. When composer Sergei Rachmaninoff penned his symphonic poem Isle of the Dead (1907) after seeing one of Bocklin's paintings in Paris, he gave sound to the oars of Charon rowing on the River Styx.

Images:
1. Cultivated Ground - Early Spring, National Gallery of Berlin.

2. Garden at Fiesole , Gallery of Modern Art, Pitti palace, Florence.
3. The Sacred Grove, 1856, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany.

4. The Isle of the Dead, 1880, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.

5. The Isle of the Dead, 1883, National Gallery, Berlin.

6. Summer Day, 1881, Dresden State Museum, Germany.