Making Objects Sing

In a world full of objects, Dutch artists have long excelled at their display. Think of carpets draped across 16th century tables. The objects that Jan Mankes (1889-1920) chose for his contemplation are something different. With the exception of the Vanitas, its well understood symbolic shorthand for the brevity of life resonant to one whose short life was shadowed by tuberculosis, these objects appear to exist in their own space.

Perhaps some combination of that shadow with the methods of the Symbolist movement shaped these paintings. Here is a world of possibility that Jan Mankes never got to experience first hand. A cluster of Japanese jars, a jade green Chinese vase, and the shimmering jasmine, native to Indonesia and imported to the Netherlands by Dutch colonialists.
A swarm of coral dots hovers over the little lustre ware jug, seemingly from another dimension, otherworldly by implication, blossoms anchored by the flimsiest of stems. More coral dots represent the remnants of drying bittersweet in the green jar.
The Low Countries had proved a congenial incubator for Symbolist aesthetics in the 1890s. Mankes may have had his own particular need to investigate the unseen and the inscrutable. In the outdoor scene behind the curtain in his Vanitas I see echoes of early Dutch landscapes, those vignettes that begin to assert their presence in 15th century religious paintings. In any case, Mankes allows us to see more than we could without him.

Jan Mankes

The lazy biographer's mistake is to read a life backwards, a special temptation when there is not much information available in English about an artist. Jan Mankes (1889-1920), who died on his 31st birthday from tuberculosis should not be reduced to one melancholy fact, especially when we consider the large body of work he left us, approximately two hundred fifty paintings, and one hundred twenty sketches.

Mankes was only 22 when he wrote about his work: "I paint or rather wish to paint paintings, silent but singing, singing indeed by their silence. " At this same time, he painted the Self-Portrait with his pet owl.
His large love of nature could have appeared sentimental but Mankes had a sure sense of composition and a lambent way of applying color. This, combined with close attention to his subjects makes each one individual to us, The Old Goat, Wyandotte the Rooster, and the rabbits.

Wyandotte, in his hungry self-absorption, is more than personable, out-sized, almost surreal, a character who makes a strong impression on the viewer. Mankes' settings, as you can see in the background of The Old Goat owe something to the Symbolists, too.

The Arnheim Museum of Modern Art presented The Mankes Perspective in 2007, a new look at the work.

http://www.mankes.nl/ (mostly in Flemish) is an admirable webiste with much more Mankes.

'Holland’s mostly tranquil painter' - Roland Hollowest, 1923.

The Incoherent Years

You could call them premature Surrealists; they called themselves the Incoherents. Their goal: to make their fellow Frenchmen laugh, by all means.

It began with an informal exhibition (think: party) that Jules Levy gave at his home 2 Ocotber 1882 for his artist friends. It must have been quite a party, because a year later the Incoherents had an official exhibition at the Galerie Vivienne in Paris, introducing the world at large to their heady mixture of parody, puns, and general absurdity. And the world, at least 20,000 people, came.

Official recognition was nice, but galleries and museums proved too confining to the Incoherents, who inaugurated their first annual costume ball in March, 1885. They decked the walls with floating aphorisms like "Melancholy not welcome here" and "Please do not spit on the ceiling." An Incoherenet Ball? What a delicious idea!

As extravagant spirits sometimes do, the Incoherents began to lose steam just as the critics had begun to take note of them. Incoherence proved exciting and exhausting for all involved, so Jules

Levy declared the movement at an end in 1887, with one last ball. A varied group of artists and writers, their names are both more and less familiar to us now.

Antonio de la Gandara, Caran d'Ache, Toulouse-Lautrec, the poet Charles Cros and the journalist Alphonse Allais, whose absurd/abstract works included The Apoplectic Cardinal Harvesting the Red Tomato by the Red Sea.
Images: by Emil Cokl - 1886, Marie Neumont - 1892, Dillon - 1893, and Anonymous - 1896, from the Museum of European & Mediterranean Civilization, Paris.

Except the following: Jules Cheret - Exposition des arts Incoherents poster, 1886, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

From The Vine To The Table and Beyond

Hidden amidst the glitter, grace is in the details. The hand that proffers the glass of wine, mimicked by the bowl of grapes on the table, is a small vignette from The Wedding Feast of Cana (1563) by Paolo Veronese, a Venetian painter. A 16th century Cecil B. De Mille, Veronese easily deployed a cast of thousands in his monumental artworks.

Now on view at the Louvre in Paris, the painting has been subjected to unspeakable indignities in its past. Napoleon smuggled it into France by cutting in in half, the better to hide it, and during the Franco-Prussian War it was rolled up in a tube, like a map.
In the northern hemisphere, this is the time of year when the grapes are harvested. The grape vines are beautiful in themselves; the hard work of harvesting is made beautiful by painters. Although they look decades apart at least in time and style, Edouard Debat Ponsan's Coin des Vignes (1886) was painted only two year before Vincent van Gogh's Picking the Red Grapes at Arles.

Soon to come, the Art Nouveau style inspired fanciful decorative works that put the humble grapes and vines to uses only Bacchus could have dreamed. The bowl by Albert-Louis Dammouse is from the collection of the Musee D'Orsay. It doesn't even need grapes.

Some Women By Edouard Vuillard

Although individuals often figured in the paintings of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), the pictures are not usually characterized as portraits. A few well-known examples that do, date from the late 1920s and early 1930s, like the well known La Comtesse Jean de Polignac and Jeanne Lanvin, creatrice de la mode (both in the collection of the Musee D'Orsay, Paris).

Madame Hess in a Hat and The Elegant One, circa 1902 are examples of his looser style. Madame Hess is caught in a pleasantly relaxed moment.

Most intriguing is Portrait of the actress Jane Redouart from 1927. The artist evidently fretted over the right setting at Mlle Redouart's Saint-Cloud apartment, and finally settled on the luxurious bathroom. We notice the Deco details and the mirrored reflection, but what we can't see is that Vuillard, insistent on the perfect angle, set himself up to paint in the bathtub.

Vegetal Design Circa 2000

Jean-Francois Fouilhoux, (b. 1947) Montpres-Chambord, is renowned for the celadon glazes he uses on his ceramics. We usually associate green, the vegetal color, with celadon but the term denotes a transparent glaze developed by the ancient Chinese, but given its common western name, given by its early French admirers in the 18th century.

The glaze, also characterized by its crackled surface, is well-suited to other pale, evanescent shades, as the blue pieces here show, especially the group portrait at top.
Fouilhoux's work places itself in a long line of ceramics decsended from the Chinese, much of it created by persons whose names are lost to us.

Even a relatively static shape, like the blue pleated bowl, suggests movement from within, like the living vegetal forms his pieces evoke. The blue bowl and the enfolding green bowl on a tiny pedestal appear as alternative moments of one being, breathing in and breathing out.

Even the formal Ovoid Vase hints at movement, perhaps fixed as in a photograph, like ice melting down the side of a tree. It is the formality of Fouilhoux that links his work to the Art Nouveau of 1900.

Images: Works by Jean-Francois Fouilhoux from the collection of the French National Ceramics Museum, Sevres.

Photographs by Martine Coppola-Beck.

Vegetal Design Circa 1900

Art Nouveau Revival, an exhibition that just opened at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, raises the maddening question of where does influence stop. Or, to look at it through the other end of the lens as Oscar Wilde wrote, “If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you end your story.”

Which brings me to this charming little Chinese bowl, decorated with blossoms and green leaves, that has long struck me as the ceramic essence of freshness, and of a hopeful view of the changing seasons. So with the works here, in vegetal style, an important part of Art Nouveau.

The artists of L'Art Nouveau collapsed the distinctions between animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds in their work, eschewing the literal, as they had learned from the Japanese. While Siegfried Bing concentrated on the arts of Japan at his establishment, Emile Guimet's eponymous museum contains, cheek by jowl, works from China that Parisian artists of 1900 could admire and study.
Leon Kann's gourd-shaped vase, wrapped around with vines, and a snail crawling around at top is a little world unto itself.

The two Rorstrand vases incorporate something of their vegetal subjects into their shapes. The grape vase sports a lip with perforations that mimic the leaf cuts and the algae vase is all sensuousness.

Where words almost fail is in assessing Emil Galle's 1904 masterpiece, The Hand Decorated with Seashells and Algae from a two-dimensional photograph. A piece that seems prematurely surrealistic, the hand points upward from beneath unseen waters, circled by moving algae, shells stuck to its fingers, as though attempting to tell a tale or gesture toward its moral.

French Drawing: Granet At Versailles

Having made some remarks about the works of Francois-Marius Granet recently, I now present a group of drawings with watercolor that contradict myself. But this about Granet.
He was near the end of his life when he painted these scenes of Versailles in the 1840s. Appointed as Conservateur of the artwork at Versailles by Louis Philippe in 1826, Granet became intimately familiar with the place, if one person can be so, with a palace of 700 rooms and the buildings and grounds needed to support its operation.

We can intuit the amount of time Granet devoted to his post in his arcane choice of subjects. Here are no fountains, statuary, or cavernous salons. The tiered structures at left are the stables, practically a village in themselves, though sparsely populated When Granet assayed the Swiss Pond a second time, he called it a lake so it must have been larger than a typical farm pond.

Even the parterre gardens, under snow and a cloudy winter sky suggest a vast choreographed space that has lost its purpose. One half a century after the Revolution, Versailles is already a museum piece.

Transcendental Transparency

Between the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine and Leon Bonvin's watercolor drawing of Glass on a Table there are 143 years - and a connection.

The magical characteristics of light, its reflections, refractions, and transparency, has been the inspiration for artists of all kinds.

In a cruelly short life, Leon Bonvin (1834-1866) managed to create a series of impressive works from ordinary objects. The glass in the picture here astonishes me, for itself and in its relation to the ceramic mug at its left. It would be understandable if the artist had regarded his finished work with the thought: "There. I can do anything."

Eva Almond and William Nicholson use similar palettes in their still lives here, but Almond's 1907 Cafeteria Still Life (at the Musee D'Orsay, Paris) is a discovery, like nothing else she ever painted that I can find. You can almost see a Vermeer interior in the teapot, a tantalizing hint against this uninflected background.

The Chateau Combourg and its Reflection in the Water (1949) could be a gentle jab at the many post-WW II, camera toting tourists who descending on a war-weary continent. A harbinger of photorealism, perhaps, it appears to be a close relative of the Kodachrome.
Augustin Rouart's 1947 Glass of Water is an atypical work; it's almost as though he anticipated the work of the American artist Janet Fish ( b. 1938), without realizing its potential. Her Poppies and Fish Bowl is a recent work, a medley of discrete layers of transparent color.

And what of the sari-clad woman sitting before the television, and her encounter with light? Revolution in a Box by Charles Kenny, in the November-December issue of Foreign Policy describes surprising ways that the often despised medium may offer light - and even art - to a developing world. (http://www.foreignpolicy.com)

French Drawing: Henri-Joseph Harpignies

There's a lot to see in this late (1909) work at left, The Studio of the Artist, now on display at the Frick Collection as part of the exhibition, French Drawing from Watteau to Degas: The Frits Lugt Collection. The red coat of the ninety year-old Harpignies sits on a chair, reminding us the man who made the works hanging on the wall. The works reflect the vicariousness of an artist who belonged to no school: sketches, prepared canvases, finished projects, framed paintings..
The life of Henri-Joseph Harpignies (1819-1916) began in the wake of Napoleon's exile to the island of Elba and ended during the First World War. So it does not surprise that after overcoming a long period of opposition to his chosen career, Harpignies displayed uncommon energy and curiosity in his art.

The pieces assembled here are typical only of his last two decades, among his various styles. Here are echoes of Impressionism in subtle effects of light and an affection for trees reminiscent of the Barbizon woods and its painters. In the depiction of his studio, for instance, Harpignies cautiously assays abstraction and in Menton, to the left of a substantially rendered palm tree is another tree that as it meets the water line of the sea, casually reminds us that it is a depiction of a tree on a flat paper.

Stream Bordered by Grand Trees at Twilight (c. 1900) with the sinuous lines of the tree trunks in the forefront suggests an appreciation of the uses of the vegetal in Art Nouveau. Harpignies won both the Legion of Honor and a Grand Prize at the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1900.

Images 2-5 are from the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris.