Eveyln Hofer's Transcending Moments

Evelyn Hofer was a great collaborative photographer. Whether she worked with writers like Mary McCarthy on The Stones of Venice or V. S. Pritchett on Dublin: A Portrait, or intuited the presences of people long gone, Hofer was something very different from the photographer-as-voyeur.
From her birth in Marburg, Germany (1922) to the end in Mexico City (2 November 2009), Hofer seemed at home everywhere. For four decades she covered the art beat for the Conde Nast publications Vanity Fair, Vogue, House & Garden, and The New Yorker.

Often pictured, architectural gems like the much-imitated Villa Medici in Rome, Victor Horta's Art Nouveau Hotel Solvay, and Jean Lurcat's Maison de Verre in central Paris become, for Hofer's lens, an entrance into a further dimension. Of course, photography notoriously flattens three dimensions into two but, in Hofer's works, we seem to gain a dimension.
Think of some musicians and repairers of instruments who find something in the wood that holds past vibrations, comparable to insects frozen in amber. Fanciful, or possibly not yet understood, the phenomenon is easier to see in a poet's gloves laid in blue tissue.

In 1989, Hofer retraced the steps of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1832 tour of Italy, a time when the young minister doubted his vocation and mulled the ideas that he would propose to his fellow New Englanders as Transcentalism.

Of course the images here, in color, are only part of Hofer's work. She chose to photograph people usually in black and white.
NOTE: On view at the New York Public Library until May 23: In Passing - Evelyn Hofer, Helen Levitt & Lilo Raymond.

Images:

1. St. Stephen's Green - Dublin, 1967.

2. Mountjoy Square - Dublin, 1967.

3. Villa Medici - Rome, 1982.

4. Jean Lurcat Interior At Maison de Verre - Paris, 1982.

5. Two Chairs At Maison de Verre, 1982.

6. Marianne Moore's Gloves, 1983.

7. Foyer At Hotel Solvay - Brussels, 1985.

8. The Hills of Italy from Emerson In Italy, 1989.

The Sun King's Promenade

"It is time to be old, To take in sail:-- The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Comes to me in his fatal rounds, And says: "No more!" -Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Terminus

In 1897 a young man from St. Petersburg, Alexandre Benois (1870-1960), visited Versailles for the first time. Although he planned to become a lawyer, Versailles sidetracked him. His series of imaginary watercolor drawings, The Promenades of Louis XIV, won the attention of impresario Serge Diaghilev, who hired Benois to design sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. His greatest triumph would be Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.

What inspired the young Benois and why did he keep returning to Versailles for inspiration? Perhaps, in the first instance, homesickness for the vastness of St. Petersburg's Palace Square drew him the sweeping planes surrounding the empty chateau. Perhaps Haussmann's orderly boulevards made Paris feel claustrophobic to the young Russian. Perhaps growing up saturated in stories of Peter the Great prepared him to wonder what kind of life the Sun King led on the great stage he had made for him. Perhaps a stage was what Benois needed to unleash his imagination.

From Versailles to the modern ballet was not so far. The gods danced again, from Daphnis et Chloe to Apollon Musagete. And around seemingly every corner at Versailles, statuary surveyed visitors like some mythological deity - Terminus, the Roman boundary keeper. Boundary stones, called termini in his honor, were erected to guard Roman fields against trespassers. The philosopher Plato had written that an orderly landscape was the cornerstone of political stability. Roman law fixed the sacred boundary space at two and one half feet, wide enough for walking, worshipping, and patrolling. The punishment for violators (moving the stones) was to be burned alive. Today, the jack o'lantern is a secular descendant of the termini.

Benois, the Russian, was the product of a world both harsher and more wonderful than the bourgeois world we inhabit.

The Drawing And The Finished Work: Pierre Victor Galland

He has been compared to the Venetian Renaissance painter Tiepolo for his masterly decorative painting. Pierre Victor Galland (1822-1892) was born in Geneva, Switzerland but the French were perfectly happy to appropriate him as one of their own. Like Beneveneto Cellini, he studied goldsmithing and that apprenticeship with his father confirmed his joyous approach to art. We may not regard images of nymphs or cherubs with uncomplicated pleasure but we can enjoy an artist who could create them.

Here we have two works by Galland: the first is a pastel and pencil drawing from the Musee des Arts Decoratifs and the second an oil painting based on that study from the Musee D'Orsay. Without traveling across, Paris we can view both, admire their respective merits, and choose between them if we must. I can't. The painting is a veritable riot of botanical representation and a tour de force of composition. Clearly, Galland had an admiration for nature's ability to rival his best and most careful effects that he displays here. He leads the eye up from the redcaps via the curving vines to the background light and then brings us back to the beginning with shades of yellow in the foreground. Then look at the calming pastel, its minimal detailing fleshed out in translucent shades of red and brown, green and yellow.

Before Paris: Ethel Mars

Before Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire moved to Paris, the pair traveled to Europe in 1902, visiting Germany and Switzerland as well as France. The two women met while they were students at the Cincinnati Art Academy and then moved to New York City to work as illustrators.
They also showed their work together, as well as separately, with their first joint exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum of Art in 1903. From that show, the museum purchased a Mars print, The Japoniste Lamp. It's worth noting that Mars acknowledged the influence of Japanese art without being overly serious, just as she would later wear flamboyant outfits in Paris to 'epater les bourgeoises.'
Her subject matter changed in Paris, too. Perhaps she felt freer to portray women together in its more tolerant atmosphere, along with her new interest in the works of Kandinsky and the Nabis. Mars experimented with the effects of light on water, like her contemporary, Bertha Lum (1869-1954), but Mars used a grittier texture, a more naturalistic look.
You may also be interested in Another Part Of the Story: Maud Hunt Squire, posted here 19 December 2009.
Images:

1. Ducks, 1904, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.
2. Flamingos, 1903, Mary Ryan Gallery, NYC.

3. Black Forest, 1906, Mary Ryan Gallery, NYC.

4. River Boats-Lucerne,c. 1906, Mary Ryan Gallery, NYC.

5. Le Soir, 1904, Mary Ryan Gallery, NYC.

6. The Japoniste Lamp, c. 1903, Cincinnati Museum Of Art, Ohio.

Inspired By Kandinsky

When Ethel Mars first saw woodblock prints by Wassily Kandinsky at the Salon d'Automne in 1906, the 28 year old American was still younger than the Russian Kandinsky had been when he began studying art in Munich. Mars, already successful, found much to admire in the older artist's work. Later, when Mars and her companion Maud Hunt Squire waited out World War I on Cape Cod with the Provincetown Printers, she told Blanche Lazzell that Kandinsky was the "grandfather" of their group.

Mars began experimenting with a two block technique in her prints, after seeing the Kandinsky works here. Using fewer blocks to make a print simplified some aspects of print making while offering new challenges.

The bravura elaboration of detail in the depiction of clothing seems to be another happy inspiration for Mars, whose work was often more streamlined. For Kandinsky, Munich was the place where he fell in love with the operas and their mythical stories by Richard Wagner.

From knights and symbolic ladies to Mars's bourgeois woman admiring a Paris shop window both color and mood lightened. Paris was the center of the art world then, but shoppers not gods walked Haussmann's boulevards.

You may also be interested in Mademoiselle Mars, posted here 25 August 2009.

Images:
1. Wassily Kandinsky - Promenade Gracieuse, 1904, Nina Kandinsky Estate.
2. Ethel Mars - Woman At A Shop Window, c. 1906, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
3. Wassily Kandinsky - By The Sea, 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
4. Wassily Kandinsky - Promenade, 1902, Pompidou Center, Paris.
5. Wassily Kandinsky - L'Eventail (The Fan), 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
6. Wassily Kandinsky - The Farewell, 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
7. Wassily Kandinsky - Summer, 1904, Pompidou Center, Paris.
8. Wassily Kandinsky - Two Young Girls, undated, Pompidou Center, Paris.
9. Wassily Kandinsky - Twilight, 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
10. Wassily Kandinsky - Les Corbeaux, 1907, Pompidou Center, Paris.
11. Wassily Kandinsky - Moonrise, c. 1903, Lanbauchaus, Munich, Germany

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The Wanderlust Of Margaret Jordan Patterson

Usually, I avoid drawing personal parallels in writing here, but I have a soft spot for printmaker Margaret Jordan Patterson (1867-1950). Like my father, she was a scholarship student at Pratt Institute in New York City, a college known for its excellent school of art. Patterson's one year of study, 1895-1896, with Arthur Wesley Dow, stood her in good stead when her wanderlust peridoically drew her away from the sedentary life. Dow, who adapted the aesthetics of Japan to his art teaching, must have been a congenial instructor for the worldly young woman.

Margaret Jordan (from her mother Sarah Jordan) Patterson (from her father Alfred Patterson) came from a family of sea captains. Her parents were working their way around the world when Margaret was born in Soerabaija, Java. Voyages with her father and grandfather gave the little girl the taste for travel.

As an adult, Patteron's long tenure as assistant director of drawing for Boston Public Schools barely cramped her style. The summers were hers, for travel and study with Ethel Mars in Paris, the sponsor of Patterson's first exhibition at Galerie Levesque in 1913. It may have been the connection with Mars that brought Patterson to Cape Cod in the 1910s - or not. Patterson was perfectly capable of checking out new places on her own. From the river marshes and ocean dunes of eastern Massachusetts to the rocky coast of Monterey, Patterson documented her delight in the colors of land and sea. Curiously, she achieved greater subtlties in her printmaking than in her painting, coaxing a great variety of tones from the rigid medium of the woodblock.

Images:

1.Summer Clouds, c. 1918, Leepa-Ratner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg, Florida.

2. Coastal Cedars -Winter, c. 1915-1920, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

3. Fall Trees, 1913, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

4. Fall Trees - Belgium, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

5. The Swan-Belgium, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Addendum: You may also be interested in Jane Berry Judson and the Shadows of Fontainebleau, posted here 11 October 2008.

The Wisteria Dining Room

At last. It has been two years since the installation of the Wisteria Dining Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and almost as long (27 May 2008) since I wrote about visiting it, and now, thanks an article in their series Timeline of Art History here . The creator of the Wisteria Dining Room, Lucein Levy-Dhurmer (1865-1953) has appeared in these posts before. I find his work irresistible.

The ceramics visible on the sideboard are similar to the ones featured here: Roots, Grotto, and Harmony with their vegetal shapes and suggestive titles, shimmer with the mists that veil the artist's paintings and pastels. It was Levy-Dhurmer's work as a ceramicist that led him to interior design, a serendipitous path that kept going to two-dimensional works in pastel and oil. Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he's been compared, arrived at the same pinnacle of total design from a desire to control.

In 1896 Levy-Dhurmer’s first exhibition of about twenty works at the Galerie Georges Petit, created a sensation. From this occasion, his portrait of the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach, now in the Musée d'Orsay, is considered Lévy-Dhurmer's masterpiece.

Levy-Dhurmer's paintings have been described as the visual equivalent of the music being composed at the time by Debussy and Faure. Like his designed interiors, they create a separate world, away from the midday sun, a world suited to grottos and sinuous shapes.

Looking at his female nudes, it is easy to see the time spent absorbing Florentine painting of the Renaissance.

Danaë was the daughter of the King of Argos, a man disappointed by his lack of a male heir. After consulting an oracle who warned that he would be killed by his daughter's child, the King locked Danae in a tower, as a kind of stone chastity belt. Zeus, crazed by desire, entered the tower in the form of a golden shower, Danaë and made her pregnant. Soon after, their child, Perseus, was born and the prophecy was fulfilled.
For his version of the myth of Danae, Lévy-Dhurmer gives us Zeus descending upon Danaë in a shower of gold. Gold mist echoes the pattern of the leopard skin that she lies on. True to Symbolist imagery, Lévy-Dhurmer transmutes Danaë from a victim into a femme fatale. In contrast to Gustave Klimt's Danaë (1907) Lévy-Dhurmer's virgin temptress evokes his misty nudes such as Sonate au clair de lune. Danaë is one of Levy-Dhurmer's finest pastels, saturated the mists of fin-de-siecle Symbolism.
You may also be interested in Lucien Levy-Dhurmer At The Metropolitan, posted here 27 May 2008.
Images:

1.George P. Landow - The Wisteria Dining Room, 2008, Brown University, Rhode Island

2. Lucien Levy-Dhurmer - Roots, 1893, Jason Jaques Gallery, NYC

3. Lucien Levy-Dhurmer - Harmony, 1895, Jason Jaques Gallery, NYC

4. Lucien Levy-Dhurmer - Grotto, 1888, Jason JaqueS Gallery, NYC

5. Lucien Levy-Dhurmer - Feux de Bengale - Versailles, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris

6. Lucien Levy-Dhurmer - Danae, private collection via Christies Ltd.

7. Lucien Levy-Dhurmer - Seated Woman, private collection via Christies Ltd.
8. Lucien Levy-Dhrumer - Shores of The Mediterranean, 1919, private collection via Christies Ltd.

Our Spring Number Starts Here

Spring, a stained glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1899, Charles Hosmer Morse Museum, Winter Park, Florida

The Art Of Presentation: Fukusa

When I looked at Evelyn Hofer's photograph My Telephone In The Tarawaya Inn, Kyoto, Japan, I remembered one of my favorite books: How To Wrap Five Eggs by the graphic designer Hideyuki Oka (originally published in 1967 and now reprinted by Weatherhill Books of Berkeley, California).
Every society has its own aesthetic of gift giving, mixed with protocols and displays of wealth and status. The Japanese art of presentation combines simple things in elaborate ways.

One way of presentng a gift was to place the gift in a laquer box on a laquer tray, covered with a fukusa, a silk cloth decorated with a design appropriate to the occasion.
Although the gifts often consisted of food or tea, the gold thread Koi fish probably suggests the virtues of strength and endurance, rather than an iminent fish dinner. The fukusa decorated with lotus, for spiritual growth and purity combined with the white heron, suggesting delicacy and renewal, must have been reserved for something precious.
As for Hofer's telephone, perhaps the resemblance of its sikj cover to a pillow case is a wish for an uninterrupted sleep.

Images: Indianapolis Museum of Art.

By the way, this is one way to wrap five eggs! - - ->