Pop That Cork!

“I drink it when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it when I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.” - Madame Lilly Bollinger, on the uses and virtues of champagne.

Image: Klaus Richter, c.1915, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

Frozen Moments

The ancient Greeks gave a lot of thought to frozen moments. Their notion of philosophy was rooted in physics, especially the physics of moving things. When Aristotle wrote that Thales had named water as the first principle, the original state of everything we know, he elaborated that to mean any change in material state - like the change from water to ice.

As you can see in Dori's photograph of a jet fountain at the Milwaukee art Museum (2008), when water becomes ice it expands.
Irving Penn's 1977 image of frozen foods (blueberries, corn, carrots, aparagus, peas and raspberries) is a sculpture and also a demonstration of physics. The expansion of the foods as they froze was contained by cardboard boxes that have been removed, leaving behind a picture of frozen movement.

The unidentified Sea of Ice is an early color photograph, made by the Frenchman Leon Gimpel in 1911. Here is a vision of the power of water to evoke awe and fear, emotions the Greeks intuited so long ago.

Fosco Maraini: A Modern Renaissance Man

In a recent piece, Cathedral of the Pines, you can see a photograph taken in Japan by Fosco Maraini, an Italian anthropologist and much more than that. How apt then, to discover that the Florentine native, Maraini, photographed the art historian who re-introduced the modern world to the Renaissance: Bernard Berenson. Berenson is seen here in a picture taken near the end of Berenson's long life in 1954 at Villa Palognia in Bargheria, the home of Maraini'a Sicilian wife. Berenson stands before examples of statuary that he had reinterpreted for a new generation.
Standing in front of her house built into a mountain, the unnamed woman at left is also displaying a piece of her country's heritage in stone. The town of Matera, located in the 'arch' of the Italian boot, is known for Sassi di Matera (stones of Matera), one of the earliest settlements on the peninsula, dating back approximately 9,000 years.

I mentioned before that Fosco and Topazia fled the Facsist regime in 1938, moving to Japan. With the couple was their first daughter, Dacia, a writer whose recollections of her father have been my source of information on Maraini's life and work.

The other photographs here were taken in Japan. The photos of the girl holding a paint brush to her cheek during art class and the apprentice fisherman among his nets exhibit the open-hearted curiosity of the anthropolgist. But we find even more than that in Maraini's work. The telephone pole listing from the effects of a typhoon at Nara, the rope sandal left behind on a rainy dock, and the snow-capped memorial stones in a cemetery, all finely composed, testify to the relationship between humans and the natural world, as surely as antique stonework.

Images: Photographs by Fosco Maraini from the Alinari Archives, Florence Italy.

Merry Christmas

Nineteen seventy-three was an auspicious year for photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975). Evans began using the new Polaroid SX-70 camera and making color photographs, not his usual medium. Hanging Christmas Tree dates from late 1973, a sign and a symbol, vintage Evans made new.

To Ski Or Not To Ski...

...That is the question. Is it better to stand at the top of the hill fashionably attired in an outfit by Paul Poiret or better to risk falling and getting wet to cut a dashing figure on the slopes?

Pick your favorite answer from advertisements shown here designed by Leo Benigni, Georges Barbier, Peter Dohanos, Pinio Columbi, Burkhard Mangold, and Jean-Gabriel Domergue.

Having dared to invoke Shakespeare in fun, let's turn to a holiday tradition from the book of Goldilocks. 'Tis the season for new reports from the managers of ski resorts. Their annual laments on the lack of snow or, alternatively, the problem of constant grooming of too much snow are a routine event in newsrooms, second only to predictions about the habits of shoppers. It's always too hot or too cold in a material world.

Our Winter Number Begins Here

There's a bit of rococo in the illustrations of Charles Martin (1868-1934). The sky may be gray and wintry but there is a lot going on in this image of a sassy skater. Maybe the house is painted green to remind that although winter is here, spring is the upcoming attraction.

Image: Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Cathedral Of The Pines

Vallombroso: Cathedral Of The Pines (1928) was taken by the Italian photographer Fosco Maraini in his native Tuscany. Maraini (1912-2004) was a remarkable person, an anthropologist who wrote that "races don't exist, cultures exist" long before other scientists acknowledged this truth.

One of Maraini's many interests was the endangered Ainu culture of Japan. Two of Maraini's daughters were born while he and his wife, Princess Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, lived in Japan from 1938 to 1947. Ironically, though the family had fled Fascist Italy, they were imprisoned in Japan during World War II for Maraini's refusal to sign an allegiance to the Mussolini government.

As a child living in Massachusetts, my parents took me on a memorable visit to the Cathedral of the Pines in Rindge, New Hampshire, a place that has its own connection to events of World War II. When I found this photograph by Maraini, it stirred memories.

To learn about the American Cathedral of the Pines, visit here.

Another Part Of The Story

These two snowy urban views are wood block prints of an unlikely subject: the gritty Midwestern industrial city of Cincinnati, Ohio. The first major inland city in the United States, Cincinnati styled itself the 'Queen City'. And it was the hometown of artist Ethel Mars(1876-1953), whom we last looked at on August 25. During the time Mars was a student at the prestigious Art Academy of Cincinnati she met fellow artist Maud Hunt Squire (1873-1955).

Maud Hunt Squire was ambitious; she was already selling her artwork to New York publishers while still a student. The two women moved to France around 1905 but, like many other expatriates, they returned to the States when war broke out in 1914.
Maud Hunt Squire is pictured here during the war years at their home on outer Cape Cod. These were the beginnings of an art colony at the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, with theatrical people, many of them students of George Pierce Baker's Drama 47 workshop at Harvard University and, an attraction to Squire and Mars, several printers who had studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at Pratt Institute in New York. Among them were Ada Gilmore, Edna Boies Hopkins, Blanche Lazzell, and B. J. O. Nordfeldt.

Until recently, historians took note of Nordfeldt's work, giving the only man in the group what has turned out to be too much credit for tthe technique of single block, or white line, printing. In 2000, the Susan Sheehan Gallery in New York City helped set the record straight with their exhibition Tres Complementares, from which these image came.

Button Up Your Overcoat

"Button up your overcoat, When the wind is free,

Take good care of yourself, You belong to me! (refrain repeats after each verse)

Eat an apple every day, Get to bed by three.

Be careful crossing streets, Cut out sweets, Lay off meat.

Wear your flannel underwear, When you climb a tree.

When you sass a traffic cop, Use diplomacy.

Beware of frozen funds, Stocks and bonds, Dockside thugs, You'll get a pain and ruin your bankroll! !

Keep away from bootleg hooch When you're on a spree,

Take good care of yourself, You belong to me."

- Ray Henderson, Buddy De Siyva, & Lew Brown

I've mentioned the songwriting trio of Henderson-Brown-DeSylva before in connection with the song Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries (16 April 2009). Although Button Up Your Overcoat was very popular duruing the Great Depresion of the 1930s, it was published and first recorded in 1928. Maybe its sardonic take-it-on-the chin humor was a song suited to hard times. Other familiar songs from the H-B-DS catalogue include Bye bye Blackbird, Five Foot Two, Eyes Of Blue, I'm Sitting On Top Of The World and You're The Cream In My Coffee. They were masters of songs that create visual images in the listener.

Images:

1. Fernand Leger - The Skating Rink, c. 1921, fernand Leger Museum, Biot, France.

2. Henri Matisse - Mlle Matisse In A Scottish Plaid Coat, 1918, Mr. & Mrs. Albert Taubman Collection, Switzerland.

3. Charles Loupot - Fourrures Canton, c. 1924, R. Martsens Gallery, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Angels We Have Heard On High

At this time of year, remember the Parisi, the original settlers of Paris and environs, who were Celts. This heritage helps to explain the distinctive sound of French Chirtsmas carols. Il est né le divin enfant, Minuit Chrétien, Un Flambeau Jeannette Isabelle, and Les Anges dans nos campagnes or Angels We Have Heard On High are readily distinguishable from English and German carols for their sprightly rhythms and celebratory mood.

Although Stefan Lochner (c. 1405-c.1452) who painted Angels Adoring Baby Jesus was a German Gothic artist, I think his angels are the ones we imagine when we hear the angel carol. Lochner's curly-headed angel children are anything but saccharine. Notice the little hand reaching over the picture frame, the moving eyes. Each child an individual personality within the group. They are children, children who like to have fun, just the ones to invite to a celebration.

Note: Stefan Lochner's work is in the Bavarian State Museum, collection of Old Paintings, Munich, Germany.

A Symbolic Game

The tennis game in Fernand Khnopff's pastel Memories is an inference, or a symbol if you will. We cannot tell if the players are about to play or have already finished. Something about the insubstantial nature of rackets and nets whets a taste for ambiguity

From Jeux (1913) a production by the Ballets Russes to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow Up (1966), artists have discovered in tennis a game of symbols more than of sport.

In Jeux, tennis emerged as a metaphor for romance as a game, but maybe not the one that made it to the stage in 1913. The homosexual dancer Nijinksy conceived the work as a pas de trois of three men, an encounter that would have required dissimulation (symbolism) at that time. After as many alterations as a typical Hollywood rewrite, including a plane crash wisely jettisoned, Vasily Nijinsky produced the choreography laid out in the program:

"The scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek, they try to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace. But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden."

Moving fifty years into the future, a group of young people mime a tennis game in the early morning hours, watched by a protagonist whose sensibilities have been stretched beyond the ordinary three dimensions. Antonioni's Blow Up had much the same effect on moviegoers. Endless interpretation is possible, but what is certain is that tennis as a metaphor can bear the weight of conjecture.
It was the English who revived the ancient game of tennis in the 19th century and a game requiring skill and endurance more than brutal display readily attracted women. Also the illustrators who knew a good metaphor when they saw it.

Images:
1. Lucille Marsh Patterson - Play The Game, 1920.
2. Emile Razenhofer - Wiener Mode, 1900, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
3. J. E. Gluck - Tummer Brothers, undated, Library of Congress.
4. P. H. Lobel - Tennis - Salon des Cents, 1897, Art Institute of Chicago.
5. Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts,Paris - Gazette du Bon Ton, July-1922, Museum of fine Arts, Boston.

Premature Waterlilies

Sometimes the uncharacteristic work is the most interesting. Take Edme Gustave Frederic Brun (1817-1881) a minor French genre painter whose works can be found mostly in provincial museums. Brun used a palette of muddy tones to depict what looks like a visual correlative to Flaubert's descriptions of the crushing boredom of provincial life.

And then there is Waterlilies, a surprisingly modern piece of work, notable for its clarity and photographic cropping. Decades before Fernand Khnopff, Gustave Klimt, and Carl Moll, to name a few, produced their claustrophobic landscapes of surfaces reflecting an unseen light plus a myriad of symbolic implications, Brun made this. Compositionally satisfying, yet with an unforced naturalness in its array of flora, the painting draws the viewer into its quiet space.

Brun died before Claude Monet began his series of waterlily paintings. A puzzle without an obvious conclusion.

Luigi Ghirri

Earlier this year, the Aperture Gallery in Manhattan hosted the retrospective It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It?, devoted to the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992).

Ghirri was born near the town of Reggio Emilia (Vedute, 1977) and grew up in Emilia Romagna, an area roughly corresponding to a swath across the top of the Italian 'boot', a fertile, temperate area traversed by the Po River and settled since Roman days. The winter scene at right was Ghirri's last home at Roncosesi, not so far from where he was born.

Emilia-Romagna was home to two very different metaphysical painters of the 20th century – Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi, making it difficult to look at the landscape without thinking of the preternatural light of a de Chirico piazza or the vibrating tremulousness of a Morandi huddle of bottles.
And then there is Luigi Ghirri, photographer of Emilia-Romagna. Ghirri’early death at age 49 in 1992 cut short a career embraced the home grown metaphysics and the playful side of Surrealism. Ghirri made memorable images of clear moonlit nights and fog shrouded days, a correlative to de Chirico. He also created images like the rows of hats, seemingly suspended in air, in a storefront window ,about to spin off into space like so many felt flying saucers.

While living in Modena, he met the architect Aldo Rossi, whose studio he photographed frequently. The projects, in various states of disarray, scattered about the room recall the pleasures of childhood games of building and arranging, from doll houses to Legos.

Ghirri often spoke of how deeply affected he was by the view of the earth as photographed from Apollo 11 spacecraft. “My work as a surveyor taught me many things about space, the landscape, the stone-by –stone construction of a space, beginning with a plan. The plan is the given that allows you to stricture the work of an individual. It is necessary to have a plan, both for the construction of a house and, above all, for the creation of a work of art…It is only within this that the risk and freedom of the gesture is allowed.” - Luigi Ghirri

Also included in Ghirri's journal is this quotation from a letter written by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo that fits Ghirri's work as well.
“Everything has a blighted, faded quality about it now. Still, of you look at it for a long time, the old charm reemerges. And that is why I can see that I will lose absolutely nothing by staying where I am, even by contenting myself with watching things go by, like a spider in its web waiting for flies. You need to look at things for a long time…” – Vincent van Gogh

Note: It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It? by Germano Celant, William Eggleston & Paola Ghirri was published by Aperture Books, New York, 2008.

I'm A Little Teapot

How this clever little elephant found its way from 18th century Japan to 21st century Vienna I do not know. It was made in the city of Kaga in the prefecture of Ishikawa on the west coast of Japan, a location famed for its brightly colored porcelains. Now, it delights visitors to the Museum of Applied Culture in Vienna.

In the hands of a master potter, a grey elephant becomes an expression of joie de vivre, gaily decorated in red, green, and gold, trunk at the ready to pour, practically bouncing with steam. Elephants grow tall but this eight inch pup is already a fantastic creature.

First Snow

Speaking of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a German painter, whose work looms larger as time passes, here is an appropriate painting for this day, First Snow (1827, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Germany).

You can see how Friedrich makes the landscape itself the subject of his art, not the background for temporal, religious or mythological events it had been for earlier artists. Linger a bit and take in Friedrich's Romantic ambition to make this quiet scene the bearer of a philosophical mood that, after several more decades, will inspire the Symbolist Movement.

"(C)lose your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." - Caspar David Friedrich

Of the fates open to artists, Friedrich achieved early fame which he outlived, dying in obscurity. A deepening pessimism may be present in First Snow along with his hoped for sublimity.

Henri Riviere at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France

If you are in Paris now, and looking for something to see while many museums are closed, you might check out the recent gift of Henri Riviere's personal collection to Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

The Riviere collection includes, along with his lithographs, watercolors, the artist's notebooks and preparatory drawings, and illustrated calendars. His personal collection of Japanese ukiyo-e prints runs to more than 700, and BNF considers it an essential tool for the study of Japanese influence on French art, equal to that of l'Art Nouveau Bing.

Among the highlights of Riviere's own work are the series of fourteen drawings Light on the Copse at Longivy (1898), last displayed at the Musee D'Orsay in 1988 and another series, The Enchanted Hours (1901-1902).

Although Impressionism was the dominant movement of his time, Riviere's only brush with it seems to have been his friendship with fellow artists Paul Signac.

Henri Rivière (1864-1951) never visited Japan but created his own personal Japan in Brittany, finding in its landscape echoes of Japanese prints.

Archetypal Breton subjects – fishing and the ever present sea, rural agriculture and antique peasant burial rites become, in Riviere's works, if not universal, then trans-continental. The pared down, decorative style creates an extraodrinary effect. Rivière recreated the ukiyo-e style, down to his monogram, without compromising the Breton geography, its vegetation and topography. Like the Japanese masters, Rivière's work shows a sensitivity to the time of day and the weather as integral parts of his subjects.

Also, from Japanese print makers Rivere took the idea of series of works organized around a theme. If Hokusai composed Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, then Riviere made Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower, a magnificent series of lithographs in beige and peach tones. This may have inspired the comic strip Tin Tin. Did Hergé know Riviere's work?

Riviere’s watercolors are less well known than his lithographs. While watercolors are often full of washed-out tones and fuzzy forms, Riviere’s are more precise, a taste carried over.
Tree in the Snow strikes a seasonal note, reminiscent, oddly enough, of the work of the early 19th century German romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich.

Images: works by Henri Riviere and Katsushika Hokusai are from the Henri Riviere Collection at the Bibiliotheque Nationle de France in Paris. Visit http://bnf.fr/ for more information.

Addendum: There is much more of Henri Riviere's work here.