Oribe

"Oribe, wasn't he a French fashion designer from th 1920s? His pottery looks as though he was influenced by Joan Miro. After all, Miro made ceramics, didn't you know? And you must see the influence in the deft way those small motifs manage to make their statements in large spaces. And what a modern, witty mix of the curvilinear and the geometric in each design and the tendency toward abstraction...truly a modern artist."
Nothing wrong with those imaginary statements, except that Furuta Oribe died in 1615. It's just a way of highlighting the assumptions we sometimes bring to bear on matters of style. If nobody does it better, we must be the ones that are being talked about.

The Japanese ceramics Oribe ware looked modern, even shocking, in their lack of 'refinement' when they were created, beginning in the late 16th century, but quickly gained acceptance.

Oribe pottery is known for its whimsical charm, though it came out of the somber style of wabi tea ware, with its symmetrical forms in Raku tea bowls in subdued colors. In the hands of the Oribe potters the copper and green glazes became the medium for avant-garde designs. Intriguingly, for the pottery that bears his name, Oribe was not himself a potter but rather the 16th century Japanese equivalent of an artistic director. The wares take their name from the Japanese tea master Furuta Oribe (1544-1615).

Images:
1. Oribe incense burner in the shape of a rooster, Freer gallery, Washington, D.C.
2. Oribe side dish with fern design, Boston Museum of fine Arts.
3. Oribe tea caddy, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.
4. Oribetea kettle with blossoming plums, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.
5. Oribe side dish with vine design, Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Dagobert Peche: Ornamental Grotesquerie

Long before there was Mackenzie-Childs, as in Victoria and Richard, there was Dagobert Peche. The eccentric mixing of black and white geometrics with bright colors, the layering of pattern on pattern, the ideas taken to exaggeration and beyond - it's all there, in every conceivable medium. You could furnish an entire home with nothing else, although the result would be hectic.

When the Austrian designer Dagobert Peche (1887-1923) died of a malignant tumor, at first his illness was blamed on his damp, derelict apartment. Photographs taken by friends, who hoped to convince the authorities to aid the ailing artist, show a water-stained, caving ceiling, and an equally hole-pocked floor, so the (mis)diagnosis is easy to understand. What jars is the contrast or coexistence of the smart black and white geometric designs on the warped cabinetry, the accents of jaunty color amid the mildew. Grotesque was the word that came to me.

How curious, then, to discover that Peche had credited the graphic style of Aubrey Beadrsley for awakening him to the grotesque possibilities of ornament.

Peche joined the Wiener Werskstaette in 1914 and became its director in 1916. His specialty - aside from everything, it seemed - was the totally designed interior, something about which Peche had distinct views.

"It would be a blessing for every woman to have a presentment, then to shut them away alone with only beauty, with no sound, with heavy curtains, gold chandeliers, with candlelight now flickering gently, now flaring. I think that is where they were all born, for the batik curtain, for white-and-gold furniture, for rooms with infinitely high ceilings, for delicate ribbons and silk. "

The quotation is typical of Peche's writing, moving between tenses, creating temporal confusion. Just as in the objects Peche designed, proportions are distorted for effect.

What surprises is that things work, at least if you acquiesce to the Peche aesthetic. The blue showcase has its legs wrapped in silk cords, as if things need to be held together, as perhaps they do. A black and gold lacquer cabinet seems to have wandered out of an opium den with extra pairs of legs. You might question why the covered silver bowl has four pagodas sticking out of the lid until you notice the improbably matching pagoda-legs.

While a student in in Zurich, Peche had painted the fruit on an apple tree with gold leaf, causing his friend Adolf Loos to decry the ruining of an entire season’s crop. But eccentric experimentation was what spurred Peche's designs. No surprise then, that he considered Daphne, the goddess who mutates into a plant, to be his muse. After a time spent studying in Paris and absorbing the 18th century Rococo that he saw around him, Peche seems to have begin his pursuit of the marriage of harmony and distortion.
Peche married the suitably eccentrically named Petronella Daberkow in 1911; the couple had two daughters, Doris and Viola.

Towards the end of his life, Peche fretted about the narrowness of his audience among the well-to-do. He wrote an occasionally coherent manifesto for the reorganization of the Wertstaette along lines he had long eschewed. As usual, it is difficult to know what Peche had in mind. This is the same man who described the legs on his furniture as 'organic' expressions of form: "ornament seems to grow naturally from the material." The corollary was that his ornamentation had not been "imposed by human thought." What could he have meant? It is for the imposition of his quirky human thought on materials of all kinds that we still marvel at what Peche wrought.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos are from the Neue Galerie, New York City.

Happy Thanksgiving

Wolong Pandas, class of '07, enjoy leaf-eater biscuits together. These are some of the cubs who were rescued from the 12 May 2008 earthquake in southwestern China. They spent six months at the Beijing Zoo, earning themselves the nickname of 'Olympic Pandas.' Pandas, like humans, are constructed to be carnivores but they choose to be vegetarians.

Photo: China Daily News

Clara Driscoll: Let There Be Light

Thanks to the detective work of Margaret K. Hofer and others, we now know what Louis Comfort Tiffany knew: that many of the spectacular leaded glass lamps that came out of the Tiffany Studio in New York City after 1898 were designed by Clara Pierce Wolcott Driscoll (1861-1944).

We also know that Tiffany covered up that fact - at least in his native country. Driscoll won a prize for her designs at the International Exposition at Paris in 1900. But with the lacunae of long distance communications of a century ago, it was easy to forget what was inconvenient to to remember. Tiffany acknowledged Driscoll's work in Paris but never contradicted those who credited him with the work back home in New York.

On December 8th, Christies, Ltd. will hold an auction of the Gluck Collection of works from the Tiffany Studio at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Several lucky bidders will take home these Clara Driscoll lamps .

Photo of Clara Driscoll, from the New York Times. All others, from Christies.com.

Weekend Advice: Curl Up With A Good Book

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." - Dorothy Parker

Bookworms of the world, take heart. Men do appreciate a woman who’s engrossed in improving her mind. And while you’re removing your glasses, get really comfortable.

Jean-Emile Laboureur's Premature Art Deco

Poor Jean-Emile Laboureur. It seems that whenever I think about the inadequacy of artistic labels, whether for movements, styles or periods, there he is. Such is fate of the multi-talented Frenchman.
Now consider the term 'Art Deco.' Thanks to the huge success of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925 and attended by some six million visitors, the name was affixed to a style. But the style already existed, a sideways relative of cubism. Some sources point out that an exposition had been planned for 1915, but postponed because of World War I and others, like the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dodge the term altogether in their index.
I did not have to look hard to find Deco style works by Laboureur before 1925. The Violet Seller (1914), Springtime In Artois (1916) and The Balcony By The Sea (1923) are but a few from many fine works in the Laboureur catalogue that demonstrate the streamlined look. In one of Laboureur's finest works, Suzanne Laboureur, the artist's wife, posed for The Balcony By The Sea at their home in Le Croisic. An unnamed critic on the Laboureur website writes patronizingly that the artist didn't know Cubism was over when he made this engraving. Maybe Laboureur could have saved himself the trouble.

You will notice that, in two of these pieces, a new style of lettering stands out. The expatriate American photographer Therese Bonney (1894-1978) took note of this feature as soon as she arrived in Paris to study at the Sorbonne in 1918. She would focus on this feature quite obsessively in her own work.Images: from http://www.laboureurprints.com/.

A Nocturnal World: William Degouve de Nuncques

"To make a painting, all you need to do is take some paints, draw some lines, and fill the rest up with feelings." - attributed to William Degouve de Nuncques

It was Nocturne at the Royal Park, Brussels, painted in the same year as Lake Como (1897), that sent me in search of William Degouve de Nuncques. The personal sense memories this picture aroused in me are important only because they provided a way into the artist's work. Though it is unfashionable and even parochial to emphasize this kind of appreciation in writing on art, it is worth remembering that major art collectors (Henry Clay Frick, to name just one) have assembled outstanding collections based on based on personal mnemonic devices.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that The Pink House, also known as The House of Mystery, was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's tale The Fall Of The House Of Usher.

William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935) came from an ancient French family, long associated with the arts. He was born at Montherme, in the Ardennes, but the family moved to Spa and then to Brussels after the War of 1870, so he is usually considered to be an artist of his adopted homeland. William admired his father and shared his interest in music, literature, science and philosophy. Also his dreamy outlook, as William’s friend Henri de Groux wrote about William’s father, that he "detests anything that represents authority, loves animals even more than mankind, and walks about with a loaded shotgun to shoot at neighbors bent on harming his cats."


William taught himself to draw and, as an aspiring artist, shared a studio in Brussels with Dutch painter Jan Toorop in 1883. His work was introduced at the Salon de Paris in1890, on the recommendation of the sculptor Rodin.In 1894, Degouve de Nuncques married Juliette Massin, an artist and  sister-in-law of poet Emile Verhaeren,. Juliet introduced him to other Symbolist writers. Verhaeren called Degouve de Nuncques “he who reveals the souls of things.” “His intellectual art soars beyond reach, into the disquieting realms of unreality and dreams. He is more of a poet than a painter.” (L’Art moderme, 14 March 1895).

The artist designed stage sets for plays by poet, Maurice Maeterlinck. Financial independence enabled the artist to travel in search of inspiration and, perhaps also as a respite from periods of intense depression. Park In Milan is a strongly horizontal version of a scene similar to Parc Royale, minus the street lamps and comforting gridded sidewalks.

Far away places suggested fairy tale landscapes, also as in Reve de Voyage (1899), which may be totally imaginary, but Mallorca and the Balearic Islands really were exotic by northern European standards. His nocturnal landscapes were permeated by mystery, yet recognizable and civilized.
The Beneluxe countries were the incubators for the Symbolist movement. The scientific investigations were largely Germanic and French but the artistic explorations of mind, memory, and myth found, paradoxically, their greatest exponents in the most industrialized countries on the continent.

Night In Venice (1895), which recalls Whistler’s Venetian works, and also Walter Sickert’s Palazzo Eleanora Duse, Venice, was originally owned by the Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye
Evening, for Degouve de Nuncques, was a time of solitude, tinged with melancholy, but not sinister. These are landscapes of dreams, not nightmares. Look closely at Nocturnal Impression (1896): among the blue shadows, a nocturnal landscape full of lights. Indeed, those fairy lights that punctuate Night Scene at the Park Royale are modern street lamps.

De Nuncques painted his fantastic forest scenes, with gnarled tree roots and assemblies of trees in daylight. The Forest at Leprous (1898), with its dark hues and cropped perspective suggests the elongated figures common to fin-de-siecle art, just as the lemon trees, in muted hues appear wraith-like.

Lemon Trees (1901) was painted while the couple lived in the Balearic Islands, off the coast of Spain, from 1900-1902. as was The Grotto at Manacor, Mallorca. "Coming from a line of aristocrats, sensitive to all the arts, but self-taught, familiar to Brussels and to Paris of the painters and major writers of his era, in love with the nature and life in the country, curious and attentive traveler, William Degouve de Nuncques realized pictorial works of an immense quality, at once anchored in the 19th century and foreshadow surrealism." Surrealists were the heirs to the preoccupations of the Symbolists, and Degouve de Nuncques' The Pink House (1893) was a favorite work, especially of Rene Magritte.

Around 1904, while staying in the village of Laethem Saint-Martin, Degouve de Nuncques began to attract a crowd, or put more elegantly, a school of painters that kept working in his spirit for decades (Gustave van de Woestyne, Jacob Schmits, Valerie Saedeler, Georges Lebrun, and Albert Servaes, included).

A crisis of faith, followed by several years of living as a refugee in the Netherlands during World War I took a heavy toll on the artist’s spirit. After Juliette died in 1919, Degouve de Nuncques suffered a mysterious paralysis of the hand that left him unable to paint for eleven years. In 1930, he remarried and the new couple settled in Stavelot, in eastern Belgium, where the artist was able to resume painting for his remaining five years.

Unlike other Symbolist painters, Degouve de Nuncques seldom included human figures in his work and, when he did, they were usually unpersuasive. The natural world was the repository of meaning for him, clothing its supernatural aspect in atmospherics. The exception is Boy And Owl (no date), where the figures are rendered realistically, convey a sense mood of complicity between them.

Since his death, the paintings of Degouve de Nuncques have been displayed mostly in group exhibitions, such as Mystery and Glitter last year at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris and The Kiss of The Sphinx: Symbolism in Belgium at the Kunstforum Vienna in 2007. A solo exhibition was held in 1977 at the Hotel de Ville in Brussels. Surely it is time for another one.
The Iceburg, 1930 (at right).

Note: A previous abbreviated and - I hope - inferior version of this article has been removed.

Chocolate On The Brain

What do chocolate and advertising share in common?

It seems that neuro-biologists have recently discovered that there are similarities in the ways that both act on the human brain.

The impetus for this research was the quest to understand addiction. Some over-eager marketers have speculated that neuroscience could enable them to create chocolate that is irresistible. Apparently, they are unaware that chocolatiers have long since beaten them to it.

A good chocolate can make a person giddy or supply a warm glow. And, in case your French is rusty or non-existent, Suchard chocolate cocoa was the official sweet of the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.

Mary Chase Perry Stratton

A man who knew art, knew what he liked, and was not at all reticent about putting the two together, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919) believed that the best way to display the revolutionary paintings of James McNeill Whistler was to juxtapose them with the extraordinary iridescent glazed pottery of Mary Chase Perry Stratton.

Mary Chase Perry Stratton (1867-1961) was a potter who founded Pewabic Pottery in Detroit in 1903. Her early interest was channeled by her teachers toward china painting, the acceptable medium for ‘artistic’ women at the time, but Perry wanted to be a designer, so she gravitated to the ceramic tile business. Finding the decorative arts confining, her next ambition was “to out-grow the emotional phase of admiration and interest in decoration and to acquire a more intelligent understanding and appreciation of its finer requirements.”
Charles Lang Freer, a wealthy railroad car manufacturer who also lived in Detroit, became Perry’s friend and patron, opening his art collection to her for study. In 1909, at her Pewabic Pottery, Perry perfected an iridescent glaze that captivated all who saw it. Freer commented that “Critics who saw it declared it priceless.”
Freer, who never married, had a lot of energy as well as money to devote to his hobbies. He set out to find art pleasing to his personal tastes, by artists whose careers he could make a significant contribution to. An early supporter of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Freer assembled the most impressive collection of Whistler’s work. He was also a major patron of American artists Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Dwight William Tryon. It was at Whistler’s suggestion, that Freer concentrated on collecting Asian art but it was Freer’s idea to endow – and shape - a museum to display his collection. The Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. opened in 1923. Freer died in 1919.

Images of works by Mary Chase Perry Stratton and James McNeill Whistler from the Freer Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. ( http://www.asia.si.edu/)