The Romance Of The Hotel

Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has been gone now for almost as long as it existed (1923-1968), yet it looms large in Wrightian mythology. Finished just in time to weather the great Kanto earthquake, waters from the reflecting pool enabled firefighters to douse the fires that threatened it as a result of the quake. Wright encouraged the notion that his building was unscathed; in truth, his floating foundation was a conductor for seismic tremors that caused interior buckling.

The undated photograph of Wright, sitting in the hotel's lobby, shows a man whose confidence at least equaled his talents. A major collector of Japanese art, when Wright came to design a hotel funded by the Imperial family of Japan, he chose a style that could be described as Mayan Revival. Romantic, to be sure, but there is something subversively romantic in the very notion of a hotel, the mixing of an ever-changing cast of transients, meeting promiscuously, observed only by the group of strangers that constitute the hotel's staff.
If there is not, somewhere, a book about the hotel as novel, it is merely an oversight. The Edwardian novelist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) wrote two novels, Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) and Imperial Hotel (1930), that are thought to be based on London's prestigious Savoy Hotel where Bennett often stayed after he became a successful writer and where an omelette named for him is still on the menu. Austrian novelist Vicki Baum (1888-1860) became one of the earliest of international bestselling novelists based on her 1929 Menschen im Hotel, which in turn became the film Grand Hotel (1932) starring John Barrymore and Greta Garbo. It is Garbo's character, the ballerina Grusinskaya, who utters the words often attributed to Garbo herself: "I want to be alone."

A good hotel novel is like a banquet, offering an array of stories to feast on and the genre is cross-cultural. The Bengali writer Mani Shankar Mukherjee's delightful 1962 novel Chowringee, only recently published in English, revolves around Shankar, a young man working at the reception desk of Calcutta's Hotel Shahajahan. A servant knows more about the masters than the masters know about the servants, as Shankar understands. "When I had checked in here, it was filled with known and familiar faces. Some left after breakfast; a few disappeared after lunch; others went away after tea. Now it was time for dinner, and no one was left ... I, the patriarch, seemed to have sat down at an empty table."
At one point, Shankar assures the reader, "At least a dozen novels about hotels are written in this country every year." Who knows? There may be one about Wright's Imperial Hotel.

Images are from the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with the exception of the frontispiece, from the Getty Archive.

Marc Chagall's Magic Flute

"For me there is nothing that approaches those two perfections, The Magic Flute and The Bible." - Marc Chagall

On paper it doesn't sound like perfection: the marriage of Mozart's effortlessly beguiling melodies with German Singspiel; the pairs of star crossed lovers with the oddly mixed up plot elements of the Enlightenment and the mysticism of Freemasonry. But there it is, one of the most popular operas in the world.

Who better to create sets and costumes for The Magic Flute than Marc Chagall, apostle of the joy of life in the face of all evidence to the contrary? And so the Metropolitan Opera turned to Chagall to design its first ever production of Mozart's last opera (1791) for their new home in Lincoln Center in 1967. These sketches from the collection of the Pompidou Center in Paris offer pleasures of their own.

Addendum posted 06/15/09: Now at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco is Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,

on view until September 9th.

La Treille Muscate

When the writer Colette and her future husband Maurice Goudeket bought a country home near Saint-Tropez in 1925, the port was the chief source of activity in the area. That was about to change: a seasonal migration of wealthy Parisians, primarily from the fashion industry would bring congestion to the narrow streets as sports cars triple parked in front of small shops and the Mediterraneann shore was crowded with the ugliness of new villas. Colette complained bitterly about the intrusions of “the sort of people photographed by Vogue” but attended their events, such as the "Noodle ball" where where the guests dressed in costumes decorated with dried pasta. Ironically, Coletter had sold her previous villa, La Gerbiere to the couturier, Coco Chanel.
Colette insisted that their new villa have a new name: La Treille Muscate (The Grape Vine). Its previous name of Tamaris les Pins sounded to the writer like a train station. There Colette walked in the woods, weeded her tomatoes and worked on a new book, Break of Day. When it was published in early 1927, it included illustrations by one of her new neighbors Luc-Albert Moreau (1882-1948).

Indeed, the neighborhood was well populated with artists. Moreau and Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac (1884-1974) liked to set up their easels and paint in Colette's garden. Moreau's landscapes of the Provencal countryside were much admired in his day.Dunoyer du Segonzac also shared a workshop in Montmartre with Moreau. It may be Segonzac who introduced Colette to another of his friends, Andre Derain, for one of the few paintings to grace the walls of Colette's last apartment in Paris, was by Derain.

Colette admired the work of André Dignimont (1891-1965), writing of it: "When I want to find myself, only with you, I contemplate your acrobats, your sailors and your under officers in their red hats ... I turn the angle of an empty house whose shutters beat, like calmly pulsing blood, and I meet you under a flower-blooming lamp of narcissuses and mixed columbines.” (translation mine)
Also in the 1930s, Dignimont played supporting roles in films by Jean Renoir.
John Gabriel Daragnès (1886-1950) was an illustrator, whose credits include Oscar Wilde’s The Ballads of Reading Gaol (1917). Daragnès opened his gallery in Montmartre, in 1925, that became the place to see celebrated writers of the day, Pierre Mac Orlan, Jules Supervielle, and Jean Giraudoux.
During the lean years of the 1930s, Colette and Maurice tried a subscription book club of new writings by Colette, illustrated by the artists of La Treille Muscate. Though it made little money at the time, it is now a highly sought collectors’ item.

With the beginning of World War II in 1939, and the close proximity of the border with fascist Italy, everything changed. Mussolini was not a good neighbor.
Images:

1. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - picture postcard of his villa near Saint-Tropez, c. 1925, Musee Eguene Delacroix, Paris.

2. Charles Lhermite, photo of the port of Saint-Tropez, early 20th century, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

3. Florenec Henri - Macaroni La Lune, 1929, Pompidou Center, Paris.

4.. Anrde Dunoyer de Segonzac - Port of Saint-Tropez with Flowering Almond Trees, early 1929, Museum of Modern Art, Troyes.

5. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - La Mi-Careme (Mid-Lent), 1911, Pompidou Center, Paris.

6. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - Woman with Grey Hosiery, 1923, Museum of Modern Art, Troyes.
7. Andre Dignimont - Bar, no-date, Pompidou Center, Paris.

8. Andre Dgnimont - Black Cat on a Red Cushion, no dtae, Palace of Fine Arts, Lille.

9. Jean-Gabriel Daraganes - Cambodian Dancers, 1939, before 1939, Pompidou Center, Paris.

10. Luc-Albert Moreau - Blonde Child, no date, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Leonard Foujita: An Arriviste In Paris

Tsuguhara Fujita (1886-1968) was the son of a general in the Imperial Army of Japan. In his campaign to become a successful artist in Paris, the young man demonstrated tactical skills that any military commander would admire. Upon arriving in Paris in 1913, he contrived to meet Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Fernand Leger, all in one night, followed shortly by establishing friendships with Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso.

Foujita installed a bathtub with running hot water in his first studio in Montparnasse, thereby attracting models with this exotic luxury. Among them, Man Ray and Kiki, who collaborated with him to produce a sensational installation at the autumn Salon of 1922, that sold for more than 8 000 francs.
His choice of a bowl haircut and toothbrush moustache were a canny use of personal style to create a memorable public image. Just so, in his art he combined admired elements of Japanese aesthetics with figurative elements at a time when the public was struggling to absorb such challenging new trends as cubism, Dada, and surrealism.

There is exoticism and good humor in the artist's best work. At the Cafe with its falttened perspective and strong simple lines looks like a japanese version of a typical French scene. More broadly even, Nude Couched in Toiel de Joie is an Oriental Olympia.
Financial success came, bringing honors in its wake: Foujita was decorated with the Order of Leopold and made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1925. When he returned to Japan in 1933, he was welcomed as a star. But Foujita was always restless when he was away from France. Three marriages, assorted trips to China, Brazil, and Latin America, and a tin ear for the political realities of his day, led to criticism and neglect after World War II.

Returning to France one last time in 1955, Foujita converted to Catholicism in order to "feel more French." He died in Zurich, Switzerland, and is buried in a chapel he designed at Reims.

Images:
1. At The Cafe, 1949, Pompidou Center, Paris.
2. Self-Portrait, 1926, 1921, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon, France.
3. Nude Couched in Toile de Joie, 1922, Museum of the City of Paris.

4. My Paris Interior, 1922, Museum of Fine Arts, Nancy, France.

5. Young Woman, c. 1920-1930, Chazen Museum, Wisconsin.