How To Take A Bath

Recently, I was looking at a photograph of the Emperor's salle de bains (bathroom, like so many words, sounds more impressive in French) in Napoleon's grand apartment at the Chateau Fontainebleau. The striated white marble walls and black-and-white diamond patterned tile floors looked familiar. Even the bidet, although not a standard fixture in American homes, was self-explanatory. The galvanized tub on its raised platform, edged with an organdy ruffle, did look a bit like a baby's bassinet but the four chairs arranged along the walls brought me up short: the Emperor didn't bathe alone.

As a child, I learned from my mother that, if there is one thing a busy modern woman craves in her bath time, it is near monastic solitude. June liked nothing better than to close the door and sink into a fragrant bubble bath with a good book. (There was a southern window in our bathroom that provided plenty of light.) If a child knocked on the door, she called out her usual advice: "Go read your book."

There are other ideas on how to take a bath. The caricature (at right) was included in a letter from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, wife of architect William Morris. It shows Jane in the bath tub, apparently drinking a glass of wine, as her husband reads to her. Rossetti captioned it: "To drink bath water is better than to listen Morris read the 7 volumes of his new book The Earthly Paradise." (1868) The glasses lined up by the tub look inviting, though.
The two well-muscled 'mer-men' holding up Aphrodite look charming in Georges Barbier's illustration for the book, Aphrodite: Antiques Moers (1928 edition) by Pierre Louys, but it takes a goddess to relax so imperviously, above it all. I'll take the solitary bubble bath.

Image: Leonardo Cremonini - Les Parenthese de l'Eaux, 1968, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Iberia

Iberia is music. From the songs of medieval troubadours and Renaissance polyphony, to instruments like the bandurria, tambourine, castanets, and tabor pipes (one-handed flutes), a unique sound was created. Three thousand miles of coastline and the Pyrenees Mountains contained it. And now, Spain's greatest pianist has died, Alicia de Larrocha (1923-2009).

Born in Barcelona to a family of pianists, Alicia demanded to play the piano when she was three and gave her first public concert at age five at the Barcelona World's Fair.

In an obituary published in the New York Times, it was reported that the child Alicia was so determined to play that one time when her aunt locked the piano, she banged her head on the floor until her aunt relented. She grew to only four feet nine inches tall, yet her reach on the keyboard (major tenths) was extraordinary.

When de Larrocha began including music from her native Catalonia in her concerts and recordings, such as Iberia (1909) by Isaac Albeniz and Goyescas (1911) by Enrique Granados or the delicate piano pieces of expatriate Federico Mompou, some critics dismissed them as examples of local color, with their tone paintings of Spanish towns and evocations of Goya's paintings.

But Iberia, admired by Claude Debussy, and Goyescas are mountain peaks of the piano repertoire, immensely difficult to play. The ornamentation in Goyescas require great dexterity but, ideally, as de Larrocha played them, sound almost improvised.
When I look at these paintings, I hear her playing. Rest in peace.

Images:

1. Santiago Rusinol y Prats - The Valley of the Naranjos, 1911, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

2. Pablo Picasso - Landscape in Catalonia, 1906, Musee Picasso, Paris.

3. Mario Fortuny y Marsal - The Burro on the Patio, 1872, Priavte Collection - Christes.

4. Robert-Hubert Crommelynck - Woman in the Country Near Avila, 1934, Pompidou Center, Paris.

5. Marie Louis Sue - The Fountain at Lindajara, undated, between 1875-1968, Museum of Modern Art, Troyes, France.

6. Joaquin Sorolla y Basteido - The Sorollas' Patio, 1917, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

7. George Daniel de Monfried - Angoustrine Church In Catalonia, 1887, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

The Doge's Palace: A Photographic Experiment

In 1881, when this photograph was made, color techniques were limited and imprecise. Even so, this black and white image, with the partial application of a blue tint is a strikingingly realistic image. It looks like the sun that bleached the color out of the Doge's Palace. You could question the color of the clouds in the background but their formation is a dramatic setting for the seat of a fabled empire.

Image: Anonymous photographer -The Doge's Palace -Venice, 1881, Museum of Photographic History, Florence, Italy.

Celeberating The Ballets-Russes

"I, personally, can be of no interest to anyone: it is not my life that is interesting, but my work."- Sergei Diaghilev

On May 19th, a year-long celebration of the centenary of Diaghilev's Ballets-Russes began at the Theatre du Chatelat where the company made its Paris debut in 1909.

We should be grateful that Sergei Diaghilev was out of favor with Czar Nicholas of Russia, as that provided the impresario with the impetus to look abroad. His prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina remembered that, after Diaghilev's Ballets-Russes debuted in Paris with the Borodin's Polovetsian Dances, the audience broke the door locks and streamed onto the stage to express their approval. (Karsavina also played the doll in the fitting response to the unruly creativity unleashed by Diaghilev's company.

Diaghilev wasted no time after arriving in Paris, inviting the young composer Igor Stravinsky to join his company and hiring two young conductors, Pierre Monteux and the Swiss Ernest Ansermet. Monteux premiered The Rite of Spring, Petrouchka, and Daphnis et Chloe, before handing the baton to Ernest Ansermet in 1915, who introduced The Three-Cornered Hat, Prokofiev’s Chout and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.
The Ballet’s first scandal was not the well-known riot at the 1913 debut of The Rite of Spring. Pride of place goes to L’Apres-midi d’un faune in 1912. The hectic suggestiveness of the Faune's pursuit of the Nymphe offended some critics, who found it "indecent", although Odilon Redon and Auguste Rodin were among the ballet's vocal defenders. It is said that when Diaghilev approached Debussy for permission to create a ballet based on his tone poem, the composer responded : “Why?” (You'll notice in the Bakst sketch that begins this article, the characters are those small decorative beings in the bottom right corner.)

When Diaghilev took the Ballet on tour to Spain, in 1916, he was smitten by the possibilities he sensed in flamenco dances and Andalusian folk tales. He was accompanied by the composer Manuel de Falla, who agreed to create ballet music for Pedro de Alarcon’s ribald tale The Three-Cornered Hat. (The delicious plot involves a lascivious magistrate, Don Eugenio who is frustrated in his efforts to seduce the virtuous Senora Frasquita, the miller’s wife.) Back on the train with Diaghilev and de Falla, one morning the impresario awoke to the shocked discovery of a bald-headed stranger sleeping across from him: during the night de Falla, who customarily wore a very convincing wig, had leaned out the window and it blew away.

Visit http://ballets-russes.com.

1. Leon Bakst - Set design for L'Apres-midi d'un faune, 1912, Pompidou Center, Paris.

2. Unidentified photographer - Portrait of Tamara Karsavina, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.3. Jacques-Emile Blanche - Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1915, Museum of Muisc, Paris.

4. Valentin Hugo - Nijinsky, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

5. Mikhail Larianov - Set design for Kikimora, 1915, Pompidou Center, Paris.

6. Pablo Picasso - The Corregidor from The Three-Cornered hat, 1919, Musee Picasso, Paris.

Visions Of Insurmountable Desire

MESSAGE AT SUNSET FOR BISHOP BERKELEY

"How could nothing turn so gold?
You say my eeyelid shuts the sky;
In solid dark I see stars
As perforations, loneliness
As a heavy weight, what is
As nothing if it’s not ephemeral.

But still the winter world
Could turn your corneas to ice.
Let sense be made. The summer sun
Will drive its splinters straight
Into your brain. Let sense be made.
I’m saying vision isn’t insight,
Buried at last in the first
Person’s eye. You

Should see it: the sky
Is really something."

- from A World Of Difference by Heather McHugh, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company: 1981

"Esse est percipi" (To be is to be perceived) wrote the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753).

For biologist turned artist Eugene Gabritschevsky, the unexpected was the key to knowledge, not an unusual view for a scientist.

Heather McHugh has said that she writes poetry because she needs the structute of discrete lines. "I'm drawn to finding the grammar that can make the thing that can't happen happen."

Images by Eugene Gabritschevsky from the collection of Daniel Cordier at the Museum of Modern Art, Toulouse, France.

The Statues

THE STATUES
"Statues of naked beings
With long legs
Stand soiled in their ancient postures
Sometimes a breast has even been wounded
By stones or a hand
Fall sin the evening mud
There was no hate
But so many lips
Have trembled near pedestals
Heads have been held
In tender hands
Suddenly the bells ring
Without anyone knowing why
A glum voice calls
But can’t make itself heard."
-from D’APRES TOUT: POEMS BY JEAN FOLLAIN, translated from the French by Heather McHugh, Princeton University Press: 1981

Heather McHugh (b. 1948) is a poet claimed by both the United States , where she was born, and Canada, where her parents are from. She has just been honored with a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Her new book, Upgraded to Serious, is to be published in the U.S. by Copper Canyon Press and in Canada, by House of Anansi.

Photograph: Eugene Atget - Statue of Autumn at Vertumne, 1923, Mediatheque, Paris.

A Scientist Reinvents The Butterfly

Looking at these gouache images of winged insects is a magical experience. A series of precisely detailed abstract and geometric forms resolved into a harmonious whole, living creatures that can fly. The backgrounds, in their subliminal reminder of familiar-seeming earth and sky, ground these extravagant fliers in a world we can recognize.

The Russian-born Eugene Gabritschevsky (1893-1979) knew them well. A respected insect biologist who specialized in studies of mutation and heredity, Gabritschevsky worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
After being diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1929, Gabritschevsky was confined to a mental hospital in Munich. That is also where he died.
Turning to art, with what training I cannot say, Gabritschevsky created a plethora of works, mostly watercolor and gouache, that envision a world that may be his meditations on how the creatures he had studied might see it.

I am not persuaded by the notion of outsider art, which is where you usually find Gabritschevsky's art catalogued. A term that was coined in the 1970s to describe certain aesthetic attributes for purposes of grouping artists (think: marketing) it continued the ever-popular and overworked mission to "Epater les Bourgeoises."

Eugene Gabritschevsky was a tormented man but, as is often true when confronted with human vulnerability, this is about us, as much as about him. Why not call Odilon Redon an ousider artist? Gabritschevsky's portrait of his beloved dog, Luce, is a work of radiant affection. (I will post it separately.) A brilliant man, confronted with a bleak diagnosis, who chooses a new metier for his energies, is someone I want to share my corner with.

Images from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Toulouse, France.

Luce, The Dog

Luce, The Dog was painted c. 1947 by Eugene Gabritschevsky.

Luce is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Toulouse, France.

Our Autumn Number Starts Here

"A cool day, a fine Fall." - Hsin Ch'i Chi.



Cover for House & Garden, Novmber-1925, by Andre Marty.

The Absence Of Carl Moll

What absences do we see in paintings, and does it matter?

Looking at these unfamiliar  luminist  paintings, with their ethereal atmospherics, suggests the question: why don't we recognize them and who made them?  There must be a back story here.

Vienna in 1886 was an incubator of young artists. Its energy, edginess, and enervation made for a heady mix, but one of every six residents of Vienna came from the poor outposts of the Habsburg Empire and lacked a permit to live there.  You can't see them in The View from Schindler's Window.
Carl Moll (1861-1945) painted the scene at left scene from a window in the home of his teacher, Emil Schindler, that same year. Soon after Schindler died in 1892, Moll married Schindler's widow Anna. In marrying Anna Schindler, Moll became the stepfather of seven year-old Alma, who would grow into the beautiful, temperamental, and much-married Alma Schindler Mahler Werfel Gropius.

Among his contemporaries, Moll was noted for his foresightedness. Hel was an early member of the Vienna Secession in 1897, and he seceded from the group in 1905, along with Gustav Klimt.  He promoted Klimt's art and introduced the Viennese to Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. He later became an early supporter  of Hitler's National Socialism in the 1920s. Fast forward to 1945, when  Carl Moll committed suicide, together with his daughter and son-in-law, as the Soviet Army entered Vienna.  We begin to see things that are not obvious in Moll's paintings.
Of course, we see none of this in The View From Schindler's Window. When looking at Moll's self-portrait (1906) or the view of his snow-covered studio from the outside (c. 1905) we see a world of calm introspection, of a new aesthetic in painting masterfully applied. His use of diagonals and bird's eye views allows a subtle lightness in his landscapes, an aesthetic of  verisimilitude, resembling something, but not the thing itself, rather like the Schindler-Moll family perhaps.

There is some flattening of the picture plane, as in the work of other Secessionists, although not in the interiors; they pull us into the Finance Ministry chambers and a domestic interior through a series of diagonals created by open doors.

Many of Moll's paintings hang in Viennese museums, but his work is often absent from retrospectives of his generation because his personal history is unpalatable in so many ways.  He assumed the mantle of all that had been Schindler's as his by right. His supplanting of  Emil Schindler in his family and his art world never sat well.   He was not enthusiastic about having Gustav Mahler join the family, unwelcome on at least two counts as a Jew and as a rival artist.
Far from being a great man, Moll (whose name translates from the German as 'minor') was far from a minor artist. But the work remains, waiting for a time when it will win out over history, as beautiful work always does.

Images:
1.  The View From Schindler's Window, 1886, Essl Collection, Austria.
2. Verschneites Studio on Theriesiengasse, c. 1905, Dichaud Collection, Austria.
3. The Artist In His Studio, 1906, Academie der Bilder Kunst, Gemaldgalerie, Vienna.
4. Winter In Preibach, 1904, private collection, Vienna.
5.
6. Winter Scene -Heiligenstadt, c.1904.
7.  View Of Heilienstadt, 1906, Dichaud Collection, Austria.
8. The Interior Of The Ambassador's Residence.
9. Interior In Dobling, 1908, private collection, Vienna.
10. Twilight, c. 1900, Osterresiches Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Venus In The Atrium

Situated on the north shore of Long Island, about halfway between New York City and its eastern end is Setauket. Here, in 1906, the international traveler and acclaimed muralist (Library of Congress-Washington, D.C., Algonquin Hotel-NYC, Helen Hayes Theater-NYC) William de Leftwich Dodge (1867-1935) built his dream home, a Greek Revival style mansion, Villa Francesca, named for his wife. Through the atrium window you can see Long Island Sound close by. Behind our antique Venus you will notice a modern radiator and even more plants visible in the large mirror. From the looks of the branches visible outside the window, it may be either late autumn or late winter. In either case, the potted plants have taken up a warmer seasonal residence indoors and the scene is one of domestic coziness with art at its center. A century later, you can see the painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On The Road With Varlin

It was an art dealer, Leopold Zborowski, who advised the young Willy to change his name because the one he was born with did not suggest artistic success: Guggenheim. At this point you need to know that the place was Paris and the time was 1923 - no museums in New York and Bilbao yet. Zborowski suggested the name Varlin, and so Varlin it was.
Guggenheim (1900-1977) had recently arrived from his native Zurich to study at the Academie Julien, after a short detour to Berlin where he had studied with Emil Orlik. (For more on Orlik see article here 9 August 2008.) Thanks to Zborowski and to his own talents, Varlin began to exhibit at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Humoristes.
Humor loomed large in Varlin's work and in his world view, in spite of losing his father and his older sister by the age of twelve. Varlin claimed that he gave up lithography because it was too much like work and that he took to drink after being surrounded by the waters of Venice. Some called him a "slacker" but his art suggests that it was only work organized by others that he avoided.

Also Varlin lacked interest in authority, and that may be the reason why he kept on moving. We see circus wagons, gypsy lunch wagons, and devil-may-care flame-brandishing cooks in Varlin's work. Even the church-goers are pictured on the road, not in the pews. He set up his studio wherever he happened to be, one time in an abandoned farm house.
Varlin's work exhibits a keen appreciation for the uses of abstraction ( see Chappell de Lorette - Fribourg, 1940 at right above) but is unapologetically anchored in daily life.

Visit http://www.varlin.ch (in German)

The Evolution Of The Apple

No, not the apple from the Garden of Eden, but the apple according to Paul Cezanne. "I will astonish Paris with an apple," Cezanne said.

It would be a mistake to think that it took less artfulness to create apples of the verisimilitude of Jean-Jacques Henner's than the optical experiments of Paul Cezanne many apple paintings.

What still astonishes is that Cezanne's intently careful brushwork and his exploration of human visual perception led toward abstraction and away from what we like to think of as realism.

The Florentine painter Alberto Magnelli (1888-1971) was in the thick of artistic Paris and experimenting with abstraction when he painted his apple still life in 1914. Here various elements of still life have been compartmentalized; the viewer does the work of putting them together in time and space. Perhaps the apple is a token of new thinking in the sciences.

Serge Mansau (b. 1930), an artist in pate de verre glass created his Apple In the Form Of Emptiness, for the Daum Brothers Studio in Nancy. Now the apple is a metaphor for the linguistic sport of philosophers.
Images:

1.Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905)- Still Life With Apples, undated, Musee Henner-Paris.

2. Paul Cezanne - Study Of An Apple, c. 1885, Bergruen Gallery, National Museum, Berlin.

3. Alberto Magnelli - Still Life With An Apple, 1914, Pompidou Center, Paris.

4. Serge Mansau - An Apple In The Form Of Emptinesss, 1988, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Edouard Steichen's Vanity Fair

Looking at these photographs from the magazine Vanity Fair, it is difficult at this remove to credit the criticisms of Edouard Steichen's work in the 1930s. Steichen (1879-1973), a native of Bivange, Belgium, began his career as painter and then joined with Alfred Steiglitz to form the Photo-Secession in 1905 in New York. His early pictorialist photographs are quite similar in mood to his paintings (I've added one of each at the end of this piece - see if you can guess which is which and then right click on the image to see the credit information.)

Under the ownership of the estimable Conde Nast, Vanity Fair was America's arbiter of taste, style, and elegance, and hiring Edouard Steichen as the magazine's chief photographer ( his tenure was 1923-1936) was an inspired move. As early as 1924, when Steichen photographed the 'Titan' Stradivarius violin on its first visit to the States, he demonstrated a new and different (for him) style of photography. Clearly, he came to relish his mastery of light and shadows as you can see in these pictures of Norma Swanson and her husband, Irving Thalberg, Colette, and, in 1932, the ingenue Loretta Young, perched on a curving stairway.
Opening on 26 September at the Royal Ontario Museum http://www.rom.org in Toronto, Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008 has already delighted European audiences.