L'Esprit de l'Escalier

Recently the Errant Aesthete reminded us of the French expression 'l'esprit de l'escalier' or stairway wit. It loses a bit in the translation, but that presents no problem with George Rousse's 1983 painting/photograph Escalier (at right), it's hectic ascent a play for the eye.
Stephane Marechalle's photograph of the Stairway to the Baths at Chateau d'Ecouen is a classic example of the Renaissance staircase, a cool, tempered entrance to a place of relaxation.
Moving forward in time, Albert Lafon designed this wrought iron spiral staircase for the second floor apartment in the home of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898). Moreau's home on Rue Larochefoucauld in Paris is now a museum, as you can see from this photograph.

The relationship of the stair and the spiral date back to Mesopotamia in the year 3000 BCE when the metaphysical ambition to link heaven and earth motivated humans to construct the legendary ziggurat.

Aristotle thought that the stairway symbolized the divine order of the universe.

The complexity of multiple variables is neatly encapsulated in a photo taken at the Villa Lante in Bagnaia, Italy of a stairway with a curvilinear sluice way running down its center, contrasting the "effortless descent of the water with the human energy expended on the upward walk." Just as energy is frozen in place by the spiral staircase, that corkscrew would as tightly as the Nautilus that may have inspired its invention. (photograph by Pandorea at flickr.com)

Thomas Schutte's drawing is part of a series The House made in 1984, the collection is at Pompidou Center, Paris.

Water To Drink: Daniel Spoerri

In 1961, Daniel Spoerri's The Shower was early to make the point that burgeoning prosperity had unseen origins. The 20th century shower head affixed to the 19th century landscape was also an early example of Pop Art or, as Spoerri calls it, Snare Art.

“(O)bjects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed and the table hung on the wall." - Daniel Spoerri

The river is also a rich origin of common words: rivals are two groups living on the same river, to derive means to divert water from a river, to arrive means to come ashore after crossing a river.

In the hands of an artful practitioner like Spoerri, assemblage by any name is never a random creation. A shadow cast by the shower head falls on a spot above the mountain like an appraoching rain cloud. What looked like a cyclical process in 1961 looks a bit more doubtful in a new century.

The son of a Swiss mother (Lydia Spoerri) and a Romanian father (Isaac Feinstein) , Spoerri was born Daniel Isaac Feinstein in 1930. He made his first assemblage in 1960 in Paris. His work combines elements of the new realism with Dada and his best-known work is the book Anecdoted Topography of Chance ( English translation, 1966).

An Unexpected Pleasure

Perhaps I should begin a series called 'Works By Artists I Thought I Didn't Like'. That was my reaction when I discovered this painting by the French academic artist Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) from the Museum of Fine Arts, Rouen. Gerome is remembered today, though not very kindly for his florid paintings of historical subjects and his exotic, or Orientalist, pictures. His initial dismissal and later grudging acceptance of Impressionism ("it was not so bad as I thought') put him on the wrong side of art history.

By the time Gerome created Portrait of My Father Pierre and My Son Jean (c. 1866) the artist had received the Legion of Honor for his work and was married to Marie Goupil, daughter of the art dealer Adolph Goupil, with whom he would have five children.
The elder Gerome, also an artist, sits, dressed for the afternoon and leans on his cane as the toddler Jean looks on, caught in a moment of indecision - come or go? Two dogs, one sleeping, the other sitting at attention - momentarily - complete the charm of this domestic moment. The simplicity of the scene suggests verisimilitude; I know of no other picture by Gerome that is so free of extraneous detail, perhaps because this is how the scene actually looked. When Gerome unleashed his imagination, things got overheated.

Come to think of it, this painting could also be part of a series of 'Paintings That Show the Influence of Photography.' What do you think?

Anne Morgan's Museum

The seed of the idea for a museum at Blerancourt was Anne Morgan's desire to share her collection of art and artifacts of the mutual history of France and the United States following World War I. Morgan had developed her deep interest in all things French as a child when her family made annual visits to Europe. As the daughter of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, Anne Tracy Morgan (1873-1952) became one of the richest heiresses in the world. Exposed early to her father's collections, she had the education and the wherewithal to become a collector herself.
Having restored the buildings at Chateau de Blerancourt for use in her war work, Morgan created a museum there in 1924, giving it to the nation in 1931 under the name of National Museum of Franco-American Cooperation. There is also a 'Garden of the World', made with plantings imported from America on the grounds.
Morgan's collection of 19th and 20th century art is both informed and eclectic, and includes several portraits of women, notably Portrait of the Artist (1914) by Romaine Brooks who was also active in war relief. Also living in France at the time were Ethel Mars and her partner Maud Hunt Squire, whose print Tea Time is shown at left. Morgan probably met Puggy Guggenheim (portrait in the red drees), who moved to Paris in 1920, through Brooks
I haven't yet tracked down information on Women of Tangiers (1914) or its creator Grace Ravelin (1873-1956), but it is a strong composition that suggests both individuality and community among its shrouded subjects, in striking contrast to the romanticized versions of people of northern Af

rica of its time.
American sculptor Henry Clews (1879-1937) is represented here by The Fabulous Lizard (1913), with its ingenious blending of geometric and curvilinear shapes. Clews and his wife, Mary, purchased Chateau de Napoule on the coast of Provence in 1918 and restored it, perhaps inspired by what they had seen Morgan accomplish at Blerancourt. In 1951, Mary Clews created the Musee Henry Clews de Napoule which specializes in cultural exchange

in the arts.

Although not so well known as it deserves to be, Anne Morgan's museum is now being supported by a transatlantic organization, the Friends of Blerancourt ( visit http://www.musee-cooperation-blerancourt.fr/), founded in 1995.

Images from the collection of the National Museum of Franco-American Cooperation.

Anne Tracy Morgan And Blerancourt

Some fifty miles northeast of Paris, on the Picardy plains, is a restored 17th century chateau originally owned by Salmon de Brosse. Now a remarkable museum that was founded by an American in 1924 - Anne Tracy Morgan. This is her story.
The young Anne Morgan met her two most important friends while organizing New York's Colony Club with Helen Hastings in the winter of 1902-03. The club offered women the social opportunities and athletic facilities that exclusive men’s clubs denied them; Anne's father, banker J.P. Morgan supported her effort. (The National Arts Club, also in New York and founded in 1898, was the only club at the time to admit women and men on an equal basis.)
Elsie de Wolfe, interior decorator, and Elizabeth “Bessie” Marbury, a theatrical agent, were unusual among the Morgan social circle: not only did they work, but they were women who worked. Marbury came from a prominent New York legal family, one of her ancestors was the plaintiff in the 1803 U.S, Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison. Biographers have speculated whether the two women, who lived together, were lovers. After meeting them at Parisian dinner party, Henry Adams described them as “the only men in the lot.”
In 1903 Marbury bought the Villa Trianon at Versailles, abandoned by the French royal family after the Revolution of 1848, so that Elsie could redecorate it. De Wolfe was enchanted by the building's historic connections to Marie Antoinette. Putting an ocean between herself and her domineering father got Anne out of her father’s house and enabled her to pursue her own interests. Soon the women acquired the nickname of "The Versailles Triumvirate".

When World War I commenced, hundreds of American women came to France to join the war effort. Horrified by the carnage she saw at Verdun, Morgan persuaded Henry Ford to donate Model T ambulances and she set up an encampment for the women in the courtyard of the ruined Chateau Blerancourt in 1917. She would finance her Chemin des Dames from her inheritance and with contributions from other Americans.
There Morgan also created the American Committee to asisist the devastated regions. She created a health clinic and mobile library there that still operate today, along with a furniture workshop to provide work and household items for families who had lost their homes during the bombings and a holiday camp for children.

In 1932 Anne Morgan became the first American woman to become a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.

Coming next is the museum's art collection.
Images from the collection of the National Museum of franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt, France.

Additional information from an article by Rena Pederson of the Dallas Morning News, 2004.

Amateur Photography

This poster by Burkhard Mangold seems just right for summer. It is in the collection of the Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

Burkhard Mangold & Berne 1914

A small city by international standards (250,,000 people in 1914), Basel, Switzerland boasted so many accomplished graphic artists, that it attracted such nicknames as 'The Basel School' and 'Helvitca on the Rhine.'

My own favorite from among the group is Burkhard Mangold (1873-1950) who spent several years 91894-1900) studying in Munich, then under the influence of the Jugendstil movement, and where he became proficient in glass-blowing as well as painting, lithography and woodcuts.

For the International Exposition of 1914, held in the capital city of Bern, Mangold designed a series of murals for the festival buildings. The Swiss were proud that their small country was hosting its third international exhibition; the others were held in Zurich in 1883 and in Geneva in 1896. The Horticulture mural (above) is Mangold's celebration of the attractive buildings and lush grounds overlooking the city from a plateau on its north. The textile industry, including fine embroidery, dated from the medieval period and the chemical industry was also well-established, but little Switzerland crowed over the size of their machinery exhibit - so much bigger than that of their mighty German neighbor at the Dusseldorf and Nuremberg Expositions.

Today, we know Mangold's work mostly through his illustrations. The mural commission allowed him to make exuberant use of pattern and decoration within discrete elements of the pictures. Looms, vats of chemicals and gears, all testify to the impressive ingenuity of human endeavors.

Visit http://www.berne-1914.org/ to learn more and to view the extensive collection of photographs of the Exposition's architecture.

Children And Dogs

Three years after he painted The Children's Meal (1895 - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) Pierre Bonnard took this photograph of his niece, Renee, as she hugged her dog, possibly at his family home Le Clos, in the village of Le Grand-Lemps, in the French Alps. At right, someone snapped a picture of Bonnard, his little Renee, and his beloved Kodak.

Marcel Bovis (1904-1997) is less well known than Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) but his picture of a mischievous little girl peeking at us over her puppy's head is just as memorable as Kertesz' somber little boy. Kertesz may have taken the picture for Vu, publisher Lucien Vogel's groundbreaking pictorial magazine of the 1930s and the inspiration for Henry Luce to create Life Magazine in 1936.

Images from the collections of the Musee d"Orsay and the Mediatheque, Paris.

Thank You

Thank you to Lee Randall of The Scotsman newspaper of Edinburgh for naming The Blue Lantern the paper's website of the week on July 18. To read what they had to say, Visit http://living.scotsman.com/online/Website-of-the-week-wwwthebluelanternblogspotcom.5462407.jp - 51k to read the review. .

Rose-Marie Pruvost Paints The Louvre

Who was Rose-Marie Pruvost (b. 1897 - ?) and what was she thinking about as she sketched at the Louvre? Information about the artist has proved elusive but we can attempt to see what she is telling us.

Closest to us is a museum guard, leaning back as he sits on a bench, perhaps a little tired or bored on this quiet day in the Grand Gallery. No need for the Aphrodite, modeled after Praxiteles, to shield her nudity. He's seen it before, he'll see it again, she needn't be so coy on his account.
Next Pruvost leads our eye to a student at work in his blue smock, making a copy of one of the Italian paintings that Louis XIV collected wholesale during his reign (1643-1710) when the Louvre was a royal residence. Built c. 1595-161o on the site of a former fortress, as were so many homes of the aristocracy, we can guess the long gallery's original function as a connecting hall with the Tuileries next door. Between then and now the Grand Gallery suffered indignities: used as the royal map room in the 1700s by the last Louis (the ill-fated XVIth); gutted by fire during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and then restored. And finally a group, perhaps a family with a small child in tow, gathered around a pedestal holding something we cannot make out. And an unseen painter, clearly enjoying recording them all.

In contrast to the bustle of activity on the first floor, ascend Hector Lefuel's (1810-1881) Second Empire Mollien Staircase to the Salle Mollien (named for one of Napoleon's minsters). You might expect the Escalier to dominate, but in Pruvost's painting we get only a glimpse at the far end. In Rene-Gabriel Ojeda's photograph, admire the detail of Benevenuto Cellini's bronze Nymph, created in the 16th Century and brought to the Louvre from Fontainebleau, another royal residence on the outskirts of Paris, in 1857.

The walls, decorated with allegorical stuccos celebrating the arts, may have provided Pruvost with food for thought. To have such a well-proportioned space to oneself, if only for a while, is something to be commemorated. Through the archways on our left lies the Cafe Mollien. Perhaps sounds of glass and silverware drift out into Salle Mollien, punctuating the active hum of pencil and brush.

Watermelon

A watermelon is a curious thing. Botanists classify it as an herb, but it is weighty, watery, and has a tough rind - not what you expect to find alongside the green and leafy herbs of Provence in your kitchen. Its first documented appearance was in Africa. but today China grows more watermelons than any other county. Japanese farmers, heirs to a long tradition of elegant packaging, discovered that watermelons, grown in cubical glass boxes, take the shape of their containers for easier wrapping and stacking.
The watermelon shown at left was painted by an artist of the Qing Dynasty in China, sometime between 1644 and 1911.

Farniente

It sounds like the name of a foreign country - farniente. Fare niente comes from the Italian, meaning to do nothing. To savor idleness, to disengage from physical activity, to let the mind wander, all without boredom.
The renowned French belletrist, Marie de Rabutin, marquise de Sevgne (1626-1696), who wrote more than 1,000 letters to her daughter over a period of thirty years, understood the concept, perhaps better than she practiced it.

"Don't worry at all about my stay here; I feel perfectly well; I live here in my own fashion; I stroll frequently; I read, I have nothing to do, and, although in no way lazy by occupation, no one is more affected than me by the farniente of the Italians." - Madame de Sévigné, from a letter to her daughter Francoise, Madame de Grignan, 16 September 1676

The early 20th century painters known collectively as the Divisionists, with their strong political concerns for the overworked and undernourished peasants of the Italian countryside, might seem an odd choice to illustrate this idea, but I think there are intimations of fare niente in thse pictures.

Vincenzo Irolli's The Lighted Dining Room is an image of unalloyed tranquility, giving equal weight to the warmth of the house and the shadowy coolness of the patio.

Prairie in Flower by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpdeo is a late example of Divisionism, a movement that took its name from the painterly technique of absolute color separations, but with very different results from their contemporaries, the Pointillists. Part of a series on the relationship between humans and nature, the children are captured in a moment of equipoise, surely intentional, as Pellizza usually painted people going about their daily activities as ineluctably as the sheep grazing nearby.

Angelo Morbelli's S'Avanza, an image often interpreted as one of sadness or abandonment, could also serve as illustration of self-abandonment or pleasant indifference. The dangling arm, the dropped book, the fallen flowers, taken together form a tiny still life of indolence. The nearby hills are freshly plowed, a promising sign, and the cloud, sometimes interpreted as a skeleton, is a rosy pink. Whatever actions the scene implies are, for a moment, unimportant.

Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs

On July 22, Christie's Ltd. of New York will auction a complete set of lithographs, called Rotoreliefs by their creator, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Possibly the auction will include a demonstration of how the Japanese Koi fish can be made to spin around and even levitate off the surface of the print.

By the time of the scandal of his Nude Descending A Staircase at the New York Armory Show in 1913, the French-born Duchamp was beginning to chafe at the limitations of easel painting. Withdrawing from the art world to work in a library, Duchamp studied the rapidly changing subjects of mathematics of physics.

Having moved rapidly himself through several art movements, Duchamp's playful side led him, during the 1920s and 1930s, to create a series of kinetic works that he conceived as optical toys. Making apparent the deceptions that visual perceptions play on our minds fascinated Duchamp.

Beginning as a series of lithographs, The Rotoreliefs work as a series of gyrating discs that the artist dubbed an "Anemic Cinema." When the discs are spun on a turntable, they appear as three-dimensional objects, making visual symphonies that also parody traditional art.

Sailor Girl

When this photograph of the young Mme Colette Willy was taken, c. 1896, it was illegal for a woman to appear publicly in men's clothing in France without an official government cross-dressing permit (to be renewed every six months). Exceptions could be granted to performers but, in general, the permit did not include public gatherings. Before Colette's time, the writer and noblewoman George Sand (born Auruore Dudevant) had flouted the law, often passing for a man to gain access to places barred to women. The artist Rosa Bonheur kept her permit for decades, claiming she needed comfortable garb when she visited horse fairs and slaughterhouses to make sketches.

Image credit: Unidentified photographer, reprinted in Secrets of the Flesh by Judith Thurman, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1999.

Seraphine: A Film

Seraphine, the film, debuted last year before the global economic turmoil became apparent; now as it arrives on American movie screens, its story of an artist whose life and career are crushed by the privations of the Great Depression is that much more poignant.
Seraphine Louis (1864-1942), from the Oise region of northern France, was orphaned at the age of seven. Cared for by relatives until she could begin to earn money as a shepherdess, it was while working as a maid in 1912 that Seraphine met Wilhem Uhde, the "discoverer" of Pablo Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau. Astounded by the self-taught artist's fully realized paintings, Uhde helped her to find an audience but with the onset of the war, the German art collector was forced to flee from France.
When Uhde returned to Senlis in 1927, he stage- managed a great success for Seraphine's work. She reveled in a new freedom in her life and in art, but her inner emotional turbulence

Without oversimplification or condescension, Seraphine allows us to understand something of the alchemy of visual perception, sensuality, and psychological dynamics at work in the life of this artist. Yolande Moreau, who won a Cesar Award (the French equivalent of the Oscar) for her performance as Seraphine, makes the film a revelation, worthy company for such films as Camille Claudel and Pollock.

The paintings speak boldly for themselves, careful observation of natural phenomena filtered through an earthy pantheistic/ Christian spirit, speaking of wild nature as surely as the ancient mythological goddess Diana could. Tendrils vibrate almost audibly, their asymmetry somehow coheres into a satisfying whole.

Franz Rontag: Art Of The Bromoil

Like the autochrome, often featured here, the bromoil was an early photographic process that became outmoded as newer, more reliable methods of taking pictures were developed. Essentially, the bromoil was an oil based print that allowed talented practitioners to make painterly photographs. A major drawback was the inability make enlargements from the original image.
Again, like the autochrome, the bromoil process attracts new photographers even today because of the beauty of the imagery the process makes possible. It was also a favorite technique of the Pictorialsts of the 1910s and 1920s.

Franz Rontag (1897-1980) was an amateur photographer from Austria. Rontag's aims were different than those of the Pictorialists; he did not manipulate images or try to create effects but only wanted to make the most faithful and pleasing color pictures he could. The images shown here were made in the 1930s and are from http://de.geocities.com/heinrich_kreissl/
Is there a nostalgic quality inherent in these pictures or does the process create the aura? We know that the middle European world depicted here was changed irrevocably by the ugliness of war, that was already inherent in events not captured in artful photographs of daily life. But looking at recent bromoils by Jill Skupin Burkholder (on The Errant Aesthete website) makes me think that the process itself is conducive to a distanced way of seeing things.