Distress

"Never put your subject in the center of the picture." One of the first lessons of composition is upended in this touching 18th century Indian miniature. A young woman sits, huddled, by the water. One hand wipes her tears as she cries while the other hand braces her against the ground, offering some contact. The foliage behind her mimics her conflicted emotions: on one side a willow weeps downward toward the river; on the other blossoming branches reach up toward the light. Even the little flowers beside her join in. She is the fulcrum of the picture and we sense the movement of the planets in the trees behind her. Distress is its title, but the painting suggests an alternative. At the moment, the woman faces toward sadness, yet the possibility of hope is present even as she cannot see it. The unknown artist offers us in this exquisitvely rendered moment, a world of wisdom distilled.

Image: Musee Guimet, Paris.

Anglada Camarasa: An Artist From Barcelona

Along with Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas whom we've looked at before, not to mention Pablo Picasso, another Catalan artist who lived in Paris in the 1890s-1900s, was Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa (1871-1959). He is the least known of the four outside his native country, which is a shame.
By the time Anglada Camarasa arrived in Paris in 1894, both Rusinol and Casas were established there. The drawing of the cafe interior is typical of the places that the expatriate Catalans frequented in the Montmartre district. The havoc of drug use, especially among women, and the novelty of electric lights (Seeing Lights) were common subjects to all three artists. And although Anglada Camarasa admired the works of his French contemporaries, Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and for a time his palette was subdued, but he gravitated to the bright palette favored by other Spanish artists. He stayed longer in Paris, too, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and became acquainted with the young Fauvist painters who shared his taste for vivid color (Downpour - Santona Bay).
What distinguishes Anglada Camarasa's pictures is a marked decorative element in their execution. His work has been compared to Gustav Klimt's, the first thought that came to me when I looked at Hope.

Seeing Light is an example of his exuberant use of color; the setting is dark yet the picture vibrates with flickering light. As with Klimt, his female subjects emerge from their settings like figures from a sculptor's block of stone. French and Viennese styles enriched Anglada Camarasa's work without confing it.
Especially during the winter months, the brightness of his southern sun is welcome.

Images:
1. Hope, 1904, private collection, Madrid.
2. Interior of the Cafe, c. 1895-1897, Private collection, Madrid.
3. Downpour-Santona Bay, 1900, National Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona.
4. Seeing Lights, 1904, Thielska Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.5. Portrait of Sonia Klamery, 1913, Reina Sofia, Madrid.
6. Granadan Woman, 1914, National Museum of Catalan Art, Madrid
7. Untitled (Cliffs of Majorca), 1936, Anglada Camarasa Musuem, Pollensa, Majorca.

Walking The Dog

Yesterday I mentioned photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986). This photo of a woman walking her dogs in the Bois de Boulogne was taken the year after the great flood of Paris, in 1911 when Lartigue was only seventeen. Already, his work displays a satirical bent that often goes unnoticed in Lartigue's work, for what we see here is a phenomenon - dogs as accessories.

From an article La Belle et La Bette from the 1 May 1914 issue of Femina there is this: “You know the old theory of the ‘revulsioinist’, according to which beautiful women choose ugly friends! Lacking ugly friends, certain coquettes are enlisting le bull, the most frightful of dogs as everyone knows, to play the role of revulsionist.” The magazine was well behind illustrators in noticing. Edward Penfield for Harper's and G. K. Benda for the music-hall artist Mistinguett date from 1907.

Dogs had become accessories for women, deployed for their visual qualities just as hats and parasols were. Greyhounds, borzois and collies were the aristocrats among dogs while terriers, bulldogs and spaniels were “ fur on legs”, especially convenient if you couldn't afford a fur coat. Satirists like SEM, Jacques Wely and Gus Bofa toyed with the the dogs’ unwitting tendency to reveal the pretensions of their owners.

Big dogs, little dogs...Robert Lloyd Wildhack's dog strikes a pose for Scribners' Magazine or Mehla Kohler's dachshunds, who look like they might bolt if given a chance, createdfor the Wiener Werkstaette's postcard series, take your pick.

Paris Underwater: The Seeberger Brothers

Seeberger Freres, founded in the early 20th century, was a press agency that supplied pictures to the fast growing illustrated press, along with its competition - Rol, Meurisse, and Maurice Branger. It made its reputation with fashion photographs for a new magazine - Vogue. Typical work was similar, though less interesting and subversive, than the pictures taken by Jacques-Henri Lartigue. The three Seeberger brothers were Jules (1872-1932) Louis (1874-1946) and Henri (1876-1956).

The well-dressed crowd looking at the Seine by the Pont d'Alma on January 28, 1910 had never seen the river like this. Neither had the animals at the zoo at Jardin des Plantes just upriver nor the rowboating subway workers in the Paris Metro tunnel on the North-South Line.
Rivers overflowing their banks and streets turned into de facto canals are staples of flood photography. Seeberger Freres rose to the occasion with their most memorable images. It appears that straw used to hold the water back didn't deter a curious giraffe from getting a closer look at the flooding. Perhaps, like their human counterparts, these creatures were awed.

For a related article, see Under Water, May 27, 2009.

Images: Mediatheque, Paris.

Seriously Winter: Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Look how realistic the winter art of Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) is. Lauri Silvennoninen's recent photograph of the artist's home Tarvaspaa in the city of Espoo, captures a mood similar to the painting (1906 - at right). Gallen-Kallela's name is usually associated with fanciful depictions of scenes from the Kalevala legend of his native Finland.
Winter in Finland is a serious business. Much of the country north of the main cities of Helsinki, Espoo, and Tampere, is in the sub-Artic climate zone. I once visited the International Center for Sub-Arctic Studies in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. In summer, I might add. It was a shiver-inducing experience in a place where summer seemed synonymous with borrowed time.

The paradox of winter is on view here. The crystallization of water is magical, visually and in the way that humans can skate and ski and slide over it. Yet the season is inhospitable to humans, furless and warm-blooded as we are.

Gallen-Kallela moved for a time to Berlin during the mid-1890s to oversee a joint exhibition with Edvard Munch. While there, he received word that his daughter Marjatta had died of diphtheria. Like other artists, Gallen-Kallela achieved an international reputation at the Paris Exposition of 1900. He also spent the better part of three years in the United States in the 1920s to promote exhibitions of his work.

These works from the second half of the artist's life balance affection and respect for this most difficult season, perhaps exemplified by the men and the wolves regarding each other for a quiet, yet charged moment, at sunset. That same tangerine shaft of color bands the evening sky at Rouvesi and is reflected in the mist above the water. Warm air meets lavender-blue water.

Image credits:

1. Lauri Silvennoninen - Tarvaspaa, Wikimedia Commons.

2. - 6. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, works from the collection of the Atheneum, Tampere, Finland.

Alternative Means Of Transportation

Ever since Pegasus, the winged horse, sprang from the pages of Hesiod's Theogeny (c. 700 BCE), humans have been looking for new ways of getting around. School children look at Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of imaginary flying machines with wonder.
Between bi-planes and a bevy of yellow parachutes, you might think that the skies over France were crowded a century ago, and so they were, even more in the imagination than in reality. The Montgolfier brothers had long since lofted their hot air balloons over the French countyside and during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, balloons had come to the aid of Paris under siege.
Dirigibles turned out to be quite useful for mapping the terrain, but usefulness can't keep the imagination in check. Pegasus reappears to promote the Paris Opera and our old friend, the caricaturist known as SEM, promotes tourism with a friendly sea serpent and a mermaid - at least I think that's why she's topless.






Image credits:
1. Anonymous - Parachutes, early 20th century, Wolfonsian Museum, Miami, Florida.
2. Andre Devambez - Bi-Planes Fly Over the Eiffel Tower, 1910, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.
3. Anonymous - Dirigibles Surveying an Italian River Plain, early 20th century, Alinari Archive, Florence.
4. Jean-Gabriel Domergue - A l'Opera, Chacoin Gallery, Paris.
5. Georges Goursat (SEM) - Paradise Found, Draeger Publishers, Paris.

The Mysterious Yellow House

Not the same house, not the same artist, but not dissimilar and perhaps not far apart.

The yellow house in winter or Winter Afternoon was painted around the year 1900 by the obscure (he evaded my research effort) Louis Villem van Soest (1867-1948). Van Soest was born in Purworejo, Indonesia or - as was in his lifetime - the Dutch East Indies. He died in The Hague. In between times he painted many winter scenes, evidently struck - whether by joy or horror - by the bracing experience of a North Sea winter.

By contrast, in The Canal Pathway at Gravelines the little yellow house is bathed in the yellow light of summer. We've looked before beneath the deceptively sunny surface of Henri Le Sidaner's canvases at the symbolism embedded in his work. Henri Le Sidaner (1862-1939) was also the child of colonial parents: he was born in Mauritius, off the east coast of Africa, but his family settled in Dunkirk, on the northwestern coast of France, not far from the port town of Gravelines.
Both paintings strike me as being offspring of photography, of the new ways we began to look at things when we became familiar with what a camera could do. They capture something about how a house relates to its surroundings by judicious cropping. As portraits of a beloved homestead they would be failures; as a fresh way of seeing they both caught my eye.

In This Room

In this refined neoclassical room, built a century ago by an American heiress, many of the great names in music and literature met and performed. Imagine Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, and Colette chatting here as they listen to new avant-garde music by Claude Debussy, Emannuel Chabrier, and others performed by the likes of Clara Haskil, Vladimir Horowitz and Nadia Boulanger. The woman glancing over her shoulder at us, painted by Antonio de la Gandara, was the one who made all this happen. One of the great patrons of early 20th century Paris was a transplanted American who was born in Yonkers, New York but raised in France and England.

Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943) was the daughter of a French mother, Isabelle Eugenie Boyer and an American father, Isaac Merritt Singer. He was the inventor of the Singer Sewing Machine and Winnaretta was the twentieth of his twenty-four children.

After a brief first marriage that ended amidst spectacular rumors in an annulment, Winnaretta married Prince Edmond de Polignac, an amateur composer who was 22 years her senior, in 1893. The two shared a love for music and a romantic preference for members of their own sex. Their marriage blanc endured until the Prince died in 1901.

In 1894 the couple established a salon in the music room of their Paris home. The Prince was an amateur composer and the Princess played both piano and organ. The Polignac salon became known for presenting avant-garde music.
The young Maurice Ravel dedicated his piano piece Pavane For A Dead Princess (1899) to Winaretta. Marcel Proust, who was in frequent attendance at the Salon Polignac, recreated its atmosphere in his monumental A la recherche du temps perdus.

In May 1904, the widowed Winnaretta decided that a new, more spacious residence would be better for hosting receptions. She hired Henri Grandpierre to design a new Hotel de Polignac, its architecture incorporating the creature comfort of the 20th century but animated by the spirit of the 18th century French royal courts. The circular salon on the first floor was decorated with tromp l’oeil walls that recall the Renaissance art of Giambattista Tiepolo.

Winnaretta commissioned works by such young composers as Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, and Darius Milhaud. Her interest in keyboard instruments inspired Francis Poulenc's Two-Piano and Organ Concertos, and Germaine Tailleferre’s First Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. She also supported the careers of pianists Clara Haskil and Vladimir Horowitz.

The portraits of Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc and the drawing of poet Paul Valery shown here were all made by Jacques Emile Blanche (1861 – 1942), about whom the eccentric Englishman Walter Sickert said, "he is liable to twist things he hears or doesn't into monstrous fibs." In any case, Blanche created many iconic images of his talented countrymen. It was a visiting photographer, Harry C. Ellis, who captured the Loie Fuller dance troupe leaping into air behind the Princesse's terrace in 1914. The salon, refurbished by Sylvie Negre, was photogrpahed by Pascale Chevalier for the magazine Maison et Jardin in October 1987. Perhaps they were visible through the windows of the salon.
The legacy lives on through the Fondation Singer-Polignac,. created in 1928. (see http://www.singer-polignac.org/)

The Fanciful Art Of Decorative Screens

According to her biographers, the French designer Coco Chanel was made uncomfortable by looking at doors so she used folding screens to conceal them from sight in her Paris apartment on the Rue Cambon. Concealment is one use for folding screens; another is their decorative use as movable art works.

The late 19th century craze for all things Japanese inspired numerous imitations by French artists. Pierre Bonnard was among the early ones, his Ducks and Herons of 1889 is a three-panel lacquer screen that owes everything to Asian art, but is gorgeous on its own.

Fantasy Animals by the Swiss Jean Dunand (1877-1942) is something entirely different. Dunand is considered to be the master of lacquer techniques from the Art Deco period. The inventiveness of his designs simply flows across the four panels as though there were no lines. The animals are charming and playful, companions for your living room who would never wear out their welcome.
Also working in the Art Deco style, Louis Midavaine's (1888-1978) single panel screen of exotic fish falls somewhere in between the other two. The golden carp is borrowed from images of Japanese Koi, but an element of exaggeration keeps it from being only an imitation. You can imagine this as the inspiration for the sinuous caroon fish to come in Walt Disney's movie Fantasia.

At The Piano

“The affinity between a pianist and a waiter, which Marx had foreseen, finds an unexpected confirmation in the epoch in which all wage labor has something in common with the ‘performing artist.’ - Paolo Virno, from A Grammar of the Multitude

I don't think that my father ever read Paolo Virno, but he shared with him an old world idea of the place of the musician in the social hierarchy. Musicians were people who came and went through the back door.

At the age of three, I discovered the piano - and pure joy - in the living room of the 18th century boarding house where we were staying on High Street in Newburyport, Massachusetts, while my parents waited for their house to be readied. Five long years passed before I was allowed to begin piano lessons. I hadn't read Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy then, but already understood his powerful message: "You can't teach people to be hungry."

One person's proletarian slog is another's leap for joy. Was it cruel parents who stood over him, making him practice incessantly, that inspired Salvador Dali's Hallucination: Six Images of Lenin on the Piano? The anonymous little girl teaching her doll to play the piano is sharing a wonderful secret. If words signify anything, then love and work are supoosed to mean different things. Or maybe not. Maybe this is what Freud meant about the connection between the two.

Images:

1. Salvador Dali - Hallucination: Six Images of Lenin at the Piano, 1931, Pompidou Center, Paris.
2. Egon Schiele - Woman at the Piano, 1909, private collection, Austria.
3. Fanny Zakuck Harlfinger - The Piano Lesson, 1904, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
4. Anonymous - Little Girl Teaching her Doll to play the Piano, early 20th century, Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt, France.
5. Ethel Reed - Miss Traumerei, c. 1896, from Les Maitres de l'Affiches, Paris.

Books And Their Covers

You can't judge a book by its cover, but the cover can certainly lure you to open the book. Here are some intriguing titles from the collection of the New York Public Library. My favorite is Wasn't the Depression Terrible? The cartoonist Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was known best for his illustrations that appeared for many years in the New Yorker magazine. Soglow debuted his character 'The Little King' in its pages in 1931. Soglow studied with painter John Sloan, but an irrepressible wit trumped the somber urbanism of the Ashcan School.

Images: from the collection of the New York Public Library.