Waders

Growing up by the Atlantic coast, underneath the migratory path of the Atlantic Flyway, I took for granted the presence of shore birds, waders they are aptly called. They regarded my approaches warily but seemed willing to share the littoral space with me, as long as I obeyed their rules, which seemed to boil down to doing nothing to startle them. In my childish literal certainty, I never questioned that Crane Beach was named for the birds, but historians of Ipswich, Mass. may know differently. Just up the shore is Plum Island, officially designated the Parker National Wildlife Refuge. The birds, it seems, need a place of refuge from us.

"The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst."- The Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

You may also be interested in Plum Island, posted here 12 July 2007,
By Salt Marshes: Everett Hubbard & Arthur Wesley Dow, posted here 14 May 2008, and Alongshore with Martin Johnson Heade , posted here 23 April 2008.

Images:
1. Tsuruzawa Tansaki Morhiro - Cranes And Waves, late 18th century, Museumof Fine Arts, Boston.
2. Suzuki Harunobu - Herons In The Reeds, 18th century, Musee Guimet, Paris.
3. Zhangzhou - Chinese pot with swallows, 16th century, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
4. Maebyong - Vase With cranes, Koryo Dynasty, South Korea, 12th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

5. Hayashi Kodenji - Vase, Meiji period, Herbert Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY.

The Infinite Possibilities Of Summer

Image: Rene-Jacques, untitled, c. 1950, Mediatheque, Paris.

A Fountain In Istanbul

Not far from the Topkapi Palace stands this charming kiosk, the Fountain of Ahmed III, an Ottoman ruler of the early 18th century. From inside the building, four drinking fountains (one on each side of the building) are visible. The green bands that wrap the building above the fountains are inscribed with a poem on the wonders of water that can be read consecutively during a refreshing stroll around the kiosk. I wonder if the Italian painter Alberto Pasini stopped here on his travels.

Image: Anonymous - The Fountain of Ahmed III - Istanbul, c.1900, hand-tinted photograph, Alinari Archives, Florence, Italy.

The Green Mosque

At first glance, you might notice the cropping of this image, its similarity to a photograph. As you look closer, there are hints that this is not an ordinary house. Indeed. It is the mausoleum of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed I, who died on this day in 1421.

Mehmed I is considered to be the second founder or restorer of the Ottoman Empire. Although he moved the capital from Bursa to another city, he left behind a magnificent work - the Yesgi (Green) Mosque - completed the year before his death. Its design was influential enough to give rise to the name Bursa Style. Mehemd's affection for the project can be inferred from the inclusion of his personal mausoleum on its grounds.

How an Italian artist got from Parma to Turkey is a story that detours through Paris. To lose your father at the age of two is a misfortune. For Alberto Pasini (1826-1899), the event also contained the seeds of his future career. Raised in the home of an uncle, a major patron of the painter Giovanni Bodini, the boy was encouraged to draw. The novice painter had been in Paris for only a year when, in 1855, he had the good fortune to become an attache to a French diplomatic tour of the Middle East - with stops in Persia, Syria, Turkey, Arabia, and Egypt.

Drawing on his fund of travels, Pasini created dozens of paintings in the saleable Orientalist style. His contemporaries detected melancholy in these works and perhaps they were right. Pasini found the demand for these genre pictures incessant and wearing, and retreated to Venice for refreshment in contemplating the master Canaletto Perhaps this late work in the style was an opportunity to mediate on the creative work of another individual without fanfare, to find what was essential in his own work.

Image: Alberto Pasini - The Mausoleum of Mehmet I at Brousse (Bursa), 1873, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

In The Garden With Cuno Amiet

It was the summer of 1892 at the art colony of Pont-Aven. An impecunious Swiss artist Cuno Amiet (1868-1961) came to study with the Nabis, Emile Bernard, Armand Seguin, and Paul Serusier. What Amiet took from their innovative techniques was the conviction that color would the organizing principle in his painting, above all. And although Amiet would try on various styles and methods throughout his seventy year career, color was its unifying theme.

Gardens, with their controlled riots of color, were a frequent subject. Look how the colors seem to arrange the people, too. A little girl becomes part of a tableau with the flattened blooms, just as the woman sitting in a chair relaxes into the rhythm of the foliage. A woman appears to dig in the garden in time to the swaying shadows around her.

Images: courtesy of Swiss Art Research Institute, Zurich. 1. Girl With Flowers, 1896.
2. Woman Sitting in The Garden, 1910.
3. Woman Working in The garden, 1911.
4. Blooming Garden With Bench, 1933.
5. Rose Trees, 1946.
6. Garden With Figure, 1960.

Marie Braquemond, Impressionist

This humid greenhouse painting was made by Marie Braquemond (1841-1916), a genuine French Impressionist, circa 1880. The collection of potted plants was likely her own, perhaps painted at her home in Sevres. Her father was a Breton sea captain, but after her parents divorced and her mother remarried, Marie's childhood was spent in several places, including Switzerland.

Marie Braquemond showed her work at the Impressionist Salons in the late 1870s and the 1880s, and she participated in the Universal Exposition of 1878. Among her admirers were the influential critic Philippe Burty and Paul Gauguin. Unfortunately, as much cannot be said for her husband, Felix Braquemond. The two met while Marie was sketching at the Louvre and, after they married, the couple worked together on china designs for the Haviland firm. As often happened, the woman's contribution to their joint projects has been obscured. Felix Braquemond was jealous of his wife's superior talent and, after years of discouragement at home, Marie Braquemond gave up painting around 1890.

Abbott Handerson Thayer's Razzle Dazzle

As a painter of human figures, usually female, Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) was an idealizer, a painter of archetypes. The women and girls in his paintings are clothed in otherworldy garments, even appearing as winged angels.

Curious then, that this same artist experimented with inverted shading in his images of plants and theorized about protective coloration among animals in nature with scientific precision. Thayer turned this preoccupation to use, collaborating with fellow artist George de Forest Brush on a proposal for military camoflage for the U.S. Navy during the Spanish American War in 1898. Thayer's son Gerald continued the work and a book resulted, published under Gerald's name: Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). Abbott Thayer liked to describe the phenomemon as "razzle dazzle." What is also dazzling in Thayer's work is that close attention takes nothing away from the wonder of that one riotous multi-flora rhodoedndron bloom perched on the edge of the bowl, as if staring at its reflection in the water.

Thayer, who suffered from what is now called bi-polar disorder, also suffered the loss of two of his young daughters to sudden illnesses in the early 1890s. He was sustained in his artistic career by the patronage of industrialist Charles Lang Freer, whose name we've encountered in connection with Dwight William Tryon, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and the great Whistler.

To read more about countershading, go here.

Images:

1. Still Life with Rhododendron, 1886, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana.

2. Waterlily, 1881, Meredith Wilson Fine Art Gallery, NYC.

3. Study for Concealing Coloration, c. 1910-195, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

Two Men Looking At The Bay Of Naples

The expanse of the bay is shrouded in mist, the vengeful Mt. Vesuvius hovers in the background, and the dream-inducing Isle of Capri is out there somewhere. Son of a Norwegian fisherman, the thirty-two year old Johan Christian Dahl was lucky indeed to be young and an artist in Naples. He had as much to think about as to look at.
Image:

Johan Christian Dahl - Two Men Looking At The Bay Of Naples, 1820, New Carlsberg Glypotek, Denmark.

Stage Doom

"They promise to be faithful, but marry the first one who asks."

In his brief career, American artist Bob Thompson frequently adapted themes from mythology and the classics to his own preoccupations, to great effect. His interpretation of the second of Goya's Los Caprichos is less cynical than it first appears, or than Goya's intention in the original. The young woman's nakedness emphasizes her vulnerability in the marriage market, where Goya's image implied her complicity. Thompson's addition of a hovering bird-like wraith in the background suggests danger as does the title he chose. Thompson's blocks of flat, contrasting colors are far away from Goya's detailed graphics, but their impact is also strong.

Viewed in person, I found this image difficult to turn away from.

Stage Doom (1962), a watercolor by Bob Thompson (1937-1967) is in the collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, NY.

Los Caprichos (1799), a series of aquatints by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), on satirical themes, is in the Prado, Madrid.

Paper Boats

"Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running

stream.

In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of

the village where I live.

I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and

know who I am.

I load my little boats with shiuli flower from our garden, and

hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried safely to land

in the night.

I launch my paper boats and look up into the sky and see the

little clouds setting thee white bulging sails.

I know not what playmate of mine in the sky sends them down

the air to race with my boats!

When night comes I bury my face in my arms and dream that my

paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars.

The fairies of sleep are sailing in them, and the lading

in their baskets full of dreams. "
- Rabindranath Tagore

Image: Brassai - Children Playing In The Luxembourg Garden, 1930, French Ministry of Culture, Paris.

It's The Cannes Film Festival !

Director Jean Renoir debuted his La Regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) in 1939. The son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir created a film about the French haute bourgeoisie confronting the likelihood of war. It was intended to be shown at the first ever International Film Festival at Cannes. But war intervened and what we now know as the Cannes Film Festival didn't begin until 1946. If any film can safely be called a masterpiece, The Rules of the Game is it. It would be nice to think that the film would have won prizes, if prizes had been given, but the film was met initially with indignation by an audience that saw themselves in its characters and didn't like what they saw. A comedy of manners concealed an acid satire. Life is like that.

The 65th Cannes Film Festival opens today in France.

Image: Sam Levin - Still photo from The Rules of The Game, 1939, Mediatheque, Paris.

The Yearning Landscapes Of Leon Bonvin

Vaugirard was a humble village on the outskirts of Paris when Leon Bonvin was born there in 1834 and so it remained during his short life. Leon and his step-brother Francois both wanted to be artists. After the older Francois achieved a modest success in Paris, he encouraged Leon and gave him art supplies, but the boy had to practice mostly on his own, making charcoal and ink drawings of his bleak surroundings. Francois also encouraged Leon to study Eventually Bonvin turned to watercolors, images of gentle luminosity, as you can see here. He perfected the technique of outlining his forms in sepia ink, creating an effect similar to the then new medium of photography.
Bonvin worked as an innkeeper; he married in 1861. The young couple struggled; the inn lost money. In January 1866, Bonvin traveled to Paris to offer his watercolors to a dealer. Rejected, he hung himself the next day in the forest at Meudon. A sale, organized to aid his destitute family, raised some 8,000 francs.

What must it have felt like to have works of such delicacy and palpable feeling rejected?
The Plains at Vaugirard shows the road that ran by the inn where Bonvin lived. Within its narrow range of tones, the artist created such a variety of effects and gradations of light. There is the softness of the cloud-streaked sky close by the detailed surface of the wall. The dual sense of the nearby and the far away is like a voice whispering of the wonder that is in ordinary life. Bonvin heard it and, through his work, we hear it, too.

Images:
1. Landscape with Bare Trees and Plowman, 1864, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
2. Flowering Chrysanthemums with Worker, 1863, Walters Museum, Baltimore.
3. The Plains at Vaugirard, 1856, Galerie Talardon & Gautier, Paris.
4. Landscape near Paris, c. 1860, Cleveland Museum of Art.

L'Art Nouveau At Laduree

The macaron is in our future, trendsetters assure us. This delicacy made of two crisp cakes that enclose a smooth ganache filling is the creation of La Duree in Paris. Their macarons come in a variety of flavors and colors, and each new season sees a new addition (see rose-violet in a cocktail below).

Louis Ernest Laduree, a miller from the south of France, opened a bakery on the rue Royale in 1862, as the urban renovations of Baron Hausmann transformed the area into an elegant business district. Laduree hired Jules Cheret to decorate the shop and Cheret's cherub ceiling frescoes were inspired by the Sistine Chapel. It was Jeanne Souchard, daughter of a hotelier and Louis Ernest's wife, who invented the succesful combination of pastry shop and tea salon.
Arouund 1900, Pierre Desfontaines, a Laduree cousin, came up with the idea of the filled macaron. Still baked to his specifications today, the macarons are made up each morning and seasoned for two days to attain just the right balance of texture and flavor.

New, in 2008, is La Duree - Le Bar, is an art nouveau fantasy of pink metallic lace halo chairs and crackle glass walls embedded with butterfly designs, created in the spirit of the macaron.

Photos and more information here.

A Dwight William Tryon Springtime

You may also be interested in Signs Of Spring: Dwight William Tryon, posted here 25 March 2008.

Image: Springtime, 1895, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D/C.

Van Gogh And Millet In Boston

Jean-Francois Millet's painting The Sower (c. 1850, Museum of Fine Arts Boston) has been reproduced countless times. Vincent Van Gogh, who admired Millet, copied several of bis works, to teach himself to draw. Now, for the first time anywhere, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is showing Millet's masterpiece together with Van Gogh's The Sower, painted in 1888 while Van Gogh lived at Arles. Van Gogh first saw Millet's paintings while working in an art gallery in Paris, in 1875, the year that Millet died. Although he saw various sketches, Van Gogh never saw the finished masterpiece that the world knows. Van Gogh's Sower is something other than an homage, a work that reinterprets Millet through the techniques Van Gogh admired in Japanese ukiyo-e prints. His planter may be just a heroic as Millet's but Van Gogh's man grounded in a landscape whose elements are succinct. The tree, although it bisects the picture diagonally, functions as a frame, anchoring the man in the natural world. The blazing yellow sky is surely a Japonistic inspiration. This painting, shocking to its original viewers, expresses Van Gogh's spiritual convictions about the meaning of work. To look at this painting is to see why Van Gogh became a painter.

Image: Vincent Van Gogh - The Sower, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

You may also be interested in

Van Gogh's Invincible Summer, posted here 17 April 2010, and

Narcissus And Violets For Van Gogh, posted here 3 March 2010.

A Jugend Revival, Internet Style

I was happy to discover, while rummaging for information about the artists who contributed to Jugend, another series about the magazine on the internet, that I think you will enjoy if you've been reading recent posts here. It is at Atelier Coulthart. Rouchswalwe whose website is Funffingerplatze mentioned that she had enjoyed reading Jugend as a child, when she visited her grandparents. A partial collection from the magazine's forty-four year history is available online from the University of Heidelberg so, in the style of Wallace Stevens's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, there may be many more Jugends, each with something different to offer. I like to think that Walther Caspari's Night Writer from Issue Number 32 (1898), is using his torch to jot his impressions for the magazine.

Bruno Paul: Illustrator

Remembered today as an architect of Modernsim, Bruno Paul (1874-1968) came to Munich in 1894 to study painting. Although the Vienna Secession is the best-known Secession group outside of France, the first began in Munich in 1892. Paul was one of the original group of illustrators hired by Georg Hirth for his new magazine Jugend, a German journal of the Art Nouveau style.

Paul's style, as you see in these illustrations for Jugend, was far from the heated romanticism often portrayed in the Nouveau style. Paul left Jugend after one year to join Simplicissimus, a satirical magazine that won him an international audience. As architecture and design became the focus of his energy, Paul moved on to other movements, publishing his work in professional and technical journals. But there is nothing tentative in these early illustrations. The cover design of the falling bicyclist incorporates the title information in an architecturally clever way. As for the amateur artists captured working en plein air, Bruno Paul gives them to us with a nod and a wink.

Carl Larsson In Jugend Magazine

Carl Larsson is not an obvious choice for the pages of Jugend magazine. His images of domestic harmony inhabit a parallel universe to the edgy, erotic, and acidic images that were a staple of the magazine.

Family happiness was hard-won and never taken for granted by Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853-1919). An unusual and admirable working relationship with his wife, artist Karen Bergoo (1859-1928) is reflected in Larsson's work. The Scale and The Maypole Dance are among his illustrations published in Jugend between 1905-1906. Larsson used a characteristic color palette for his domestic works; The Scale is also similar to Young Woman Stretched Out on a Bench in its strong use of diagonals in its design. As the Larssons had eight children, I hesitate to attempt to name the models in there pictures.

You may also be interested in The Violet Complexion of Grez-sur-Loing, posted here 11 September 2009 about how the Larsson and Bergoo met,

and Young Woman Stretched Out on a Bench, posted here 5 May 2009.