Self-Portrait Of A Nabi

He looks rather solemn against the riotously colorful background with its energetic swathes of flat paint. He looks like what he was, a man of learning , as well as an artist. Self-Portrait Against A Japanese Background is the name that Jacob Meyer de Haan (1852-1895) gave this picture. Of the group of artists that called themselves the Nabis, taking the Hebrew word for prophet, de Haan actually was an Orthodox Jew, from a family whose wealth came from their bread and matzoh business in Amsterdam. Things you can't see in this picture: de Haan was short - only four feet eleven inches and suffered from a slight hunch bank, attributed to his tuberculosis, disabilities that exempted him from military service and left him free to pursue his art in Paris.

There he stayed with fellow Dutchman Theo van Gogh., who introduced him to Paul Gauguin. Under Gauguin's influence, de Haan became a modernist. In return for painting lessons, de Haan helped to support Gauguin. The two went first to Brittany, where de Haan suffered from the damp weather. It was his decision to try another place in the spring of April, 1889 - Le Pouldu where the two men took rooms there at L'Hotel de la Plage.
Received wisdom has Gauguin the dominant partner in this relationship, but not necesarily. The two men were rivals for the innkeeper, Mademoiselle Marie Henry, competing artistically by decorating the walls and ceiling of her dining room with their works, but de Haan won her heart. He also Marie with her baby, Marie-Lea and, a year and half later, little Mimi sitting at table, entranced, by the shapes and colors of fruit.
Gauguin tried to persuade de Haan to join on his Tahitian adventure but he refused. When de Haan did leave Le Pouldu in October, 1890, he left all his belongings, including his paintings, at the inn but he never returned. His deep sadness at Theo van Gogh's death in January, 1891, hastened his declining health.

In a last letter to Theo, de Haan wrote movingly, ""When I look back, when I think of that sombre, stifling environment where I hung about in my youth – of that niggardly and narrow-minded artistic circle, I feel overjoyed today thanks to my liberal ideas, to a young and vigorous present and great confidence in the future".
His admiration for Gauguin was implicit in words and made explicit in the careful modeling de Haan brought to still life painting.

What Gauguin thought of his friend de Haan is enigmatic, revealing more of Gauguin's relentless self-interest than anything else. His portraits of de Haan show a man as animal, a symbol more than an individual, with the narrow eyes and pointed ears of a fox.

Note: You can read more about de Haan, Mme Henry, and Gauguin here.

Images:
1. Self-Portrait Against A Japanese Background, c. 1889-1891, Triton Foundation, Pays-Bas, France.
2. Onions, c. 1890, Museum of Fine Arts, Quimper, France.
3. Maternity, 1889, courtesy of the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Still Life With Mimi, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
5. The Inn At Le Pouldu, 1890, Kroller-MullerMuseum, Otterloo, Netherlands.
6. Lilacs In A Glass With Apples And Lemons, c. 1889, courtesy of the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Emile Zola And Japan

Before Emile Zola (1840-1902) became known as a scandalous novelist and a crusading journalist, he wrote art reviews for Parisian newspapers. As a child, his father's work as an engineer took the family to Aix-en-Provence where Emile got to know his mother's childhood friend - Paul Cezanne. Proximity influenced his interest in art, as did exposure to Japanese prints and their influence on his generation of young artists. That influence is present in Zola's novel A Page Of Love (1878), punctuated by verbal landscapes that attempt to recreate the atmospherics of ukiyo-e prints. Edouard Manet's portrait of Zola at his desk shows the writer surrounded by Japanese prints and a decorated screen.

Oddly, it was only after I chose the paragraphs below as examples that I remembered that Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning - a victim of a clogged chimney.

“There were hollows, as could be divined by the lines of roofs; the Butte des Moulins surged upward, with waves of old slates, while the line of the principal boulevards dipped downward like a gutter, ending in a jumble of houses whose tiles even could no longer be seen. At this early hour the oblique sun did not light up the house-fronts looking toward the Trocadero; not a window-pane of these threw back its rays. The skylights on the roofs alone sparkled with the glittering reflex of mica amid the red of the adjacent chimney-pots.”

“The night-lamp with a bluish shade was burning on the chimney-piece, behind a book, whose shadows plunged more than half the chamber into darkness. There was a quiet gleam of light cutting across the round table and the couch, streaming over the heavy folds of the velvet curtains, and imparting an azure hue to the mirror of the rosewood wardrobe placed between the two windows. The quiet tints of the room, the blue tints of the hangings, furniture, and carpet, served at this hour of night to invest everything with the delightful vagueness of cloudland.”

You may also be interested in Felix Regamey Goes To Japan posted here 24 May 2009 and Merchants Of Desire: Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, poster here 29 November 2008.

Image Credits:

1. Bernard Boutet de Monvel - View of Nemours, undated, Museum of Chateau de Nemours, France.
2. Edouard Manet - Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Text: excerpts from A Love Episode , chapters V and I, by Emile Zola, translator uncredited, published by Societe des Beaux-Arts, Paris, London, New York: 1910.

Henri Chouanard: "Unknown To The Public"

Just in time for the exhibition's closing tomorrow, we have A Grand Tour Of Morocco: Henri Chouanard at the Museum of Photography in Marrakech, described by the museum as a photographer "unknown to the public." After considerable digging, I'm forced to agree. Henri Chouanard was French, he lived from 1888 to 1936, and he traveled a lot, camera equipment in tow.

Whether he was an amateur (more likely) or a professional, Chouanard was engaged in a project requiring considerably more deliberation than a contemporary tourist armed with a dispoable camera.

It's been awhile since I've featured autochromes here but regular readers know that my interest in early color photography was sparked by visits to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York ( a repository of autochromes, even though the process was invented in France by the Lumiere Brothers). Because the grains that contained the colors on the negatives "migrated" over time, these is great variability in the quality of the images, although they were taken during a period that extended roughly from 1910 to 1925.

If I can't give much information about the photographer, I can offer some notes on his subjects. The pictures of the Entrance to the Palace of Bahia (in Marrakesh) and that of the interior courtyard look very differently. It would be easy to believe that the entrance had been photographed recently, the colors have remained stable. Not an antique, the Bahia Place was built in the late 19th century and was a modern building when Chouanard visited.

The camel resting on the pontoon bridge (at top) was photographed at Azemmour, or The Olives, an inland river city southwest of Casablanca. Biskra is an oasis in the Algerian Sahara and a popular vacation spot. Look closely and you can see two men climbing the palm tree near the center of the image.

Images: Autochromes by Henri Chouanard are from the collection of the Alinari Archives, Florence, Italy.

Adrift On What-If River

"In a crystalline radiance of day's last light,
I frolic along the river shallows, paddle light,
then enchanted by water creatures, drift
all effortless ease across their clear depths.

A white-haired man trailing a fish hook,
a girl rinsing gauze clean, makeup fresh:
we gaze and gaze, a recognition swelling,
a pulsing blush, then can't find the words."
- Meng Hao-jan (689-740) , translated from the Chinese by David Hinton, Brooklyn, Archipelago Books: 2004.

Meng Hao-jan was the first Chinese poet of imagist landscapes. He lived during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907), one of the great periods in Chinese literature, at a time when its capital was the largest city in the world. Despite the importance of his work, Hinton's is the first translation into English.

Image: Hiroshi Yoshida - Sailboats, 1926, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.

The Polar Bears Who Live At The Musee d'Orsay

What is it about bears, I wondered? Pandas and polar bears are our fellow mammals, magnificent creatures, and endangered species both, thanks to human heedlessness. Their native habitat is the fraying edges of the Arctic Ocean, but the polar bear has been commemorated by artworks at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.
Emile Galle's vase made of patte
de verre attempts to recreate the native frosty atmosphere, with a bear standing on an ice flow. A pretty piece of work but the positioning of the back legs is inexplicably awkward and uninformed, when you realize that there were polar bears at the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes at the turn of the century.
Not surprisingly, Francois Pompon's white marble bear secured its creator's reputation when it was first shown at the Salon d'Automne of 1922. Pompon, who had apprenticed with Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin by preparing their marble blocks, spent hours studying the live polar bears at the zoo. In his animal figures, Pompon dispensed with details in the efffort to understand the essential animal. In his attentiveness, he got right what Galle missed: the asymmetrical relationship of the front and back legs. In the process, he created an Art Deco masterpiece. No matter that the bear is anchored to an arbitrary marble slab, she is caught forever in motion. I like to imagine magine Pompon's bear strolling the museum at night, on sure footing.

Image credit : photograph by Patrice Schmidt, Musee d"Orsay, Paris.

Our Summer Number Begins Here

"Would you like summer? Taste of ours.
Spices? Buy here!
Ill! We have berries for the parching!
Weary! Forloughs of down!
Perplexed! Estates of violet trouble ne'er looked on!
Captive! We bring reprieve of roses!
Fainting! Flasks of air!
Even for Death, a fairy medicine.
But, which is it, sir?"
- Would you like summer? by Emily Dickinson, Modern Library edition.

Emile Guimet's Promenades Japonaises

In 1880, Emile Guimet (1838-1918) published Promenades Japonaises, a book in which he described the arts of Japan as hieroglyphs, (a term he borrowed from poet Stephane Mallarme) so unfamiliar were Japanese methods to European eyes. Fifteen years before Siegfried Bing opened his revelatory Maison de l'art Nouveau in Paris, the wealthy and widely traveled industrialist from Lyon was urging his fellow Frenchman to consider the beauties of Japanese art. The message was timely; artists more and more found the conventions of European academic art stifling and worn out.

Guimet and his friend, illustrator Felix Regamey were well-suited to their mission. Guimet was a tireless note taker, eager to explore all artifacts from pottery to to the school books of Japanese children - and always willing to listen. Regamey recorded his impressions through books full of sketches. Both shared traits of curiosity, appreciation, and a willingness to be surprised by what they found. The exoticism of Pierre Loti, whose novel Madame Chrysantheme also caused a sensation when it was published in Paris in 1887, and inspired Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly was a flight of imagination compared to their studious labors.

The popularity of Guimet's book contributed to his deteremination to build a permanent home for his collection that would be open to the public, a collection that included numerous Buddhist religious items and 1300+ wood block prints, (one of the largest collections outside Japan). First opened in his hometown of Lyon in 1879 and then donated to the nation in 1885, the Musee Guimet moved to its current home in Paris.

Suzuki Harunobu (1725-1770) was the first Japanese artist to produce full color prints. He was also known for choosing ordinary people for his subjects. This may be the reason why in Young Woman and Her Maid with Bush Clover (above left) the kimonos of the two women, though finely rendered, are part of the total effect rather than the focal point of the image as they are in the works of many other ukiyo-e artists.

Guimet wrote admiringly in Promenades Japonaises about Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889), particularly of the artist's impressive technical abilities. The two pieces here are from the folio Drawings for Pleasure; the work is exuberant but not graceful in the way that Japanese prints often are.

Guimet's splendid collection included the works of well known artists such as Shotei and Kuniyoshi, to name only the two whose boating scenes shown here. Now, thanks to the internet, Guimet's collection is available online.

To learn mote, visit the Musee Guimet. Image credits: Musee Guimet, Paris
1. Suzuki Harunobo - Young Woman and her Maid With Clover, 1760s.

2. Eisohai Chokai - Chasing Firepflies, 1795.
3. Kyosai Kawanabe - Three Rabbits- from Drawings for Pleasure, 1881.
4. Kyosai Kawanabe - Fruit - from Drawings for Pleasure, 1881.
5. Hokuju Shotei - View of Matsusada From The Sumida River, c.1811.
6. Kuniyoshi Utagawa - Parked Among the Seaweeds, 19th century.
7. Katsuma Ryusi - Dragonfly, 1765.

An Uncommon Poster Artist: Stephanie Glax

Here is a riddle. Why would an Austrian artist design posters advertising a Croatian seaside resort, using the Italian name for the town? Abbazia, or Opatija to use its Croatian name, is perched on an inlet by the Adriatic Sea. It became a popular winter vacation place for the Austrian royal family in the 19th century after a railroad crossed the mountains from inland to the coast.
Here is a second riddle. Who was Stephanie Glax? With no biographical information, it is possible to say that she was an unusually fine illustrator of the early 20th century. A cursory glance shows how well these works integrate design and color. Look closely and be impressed by the fineness of the backgrounds, executed with as much panache the main subjects.

Image credits:

Posters by Stephanie Glax are from the collection of the Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

A Friend Of Degas

An artist who falls between two stools, so to speak, may be overlooked by critics. Guiseppe de Nittis (1846-1884) seems to be one of those. His work was never entirely Impressionist and he was not completely comfortable with academic styles in painting, so it hardly surprises to learn that the young de Nittis was expelled from his first term at art school.

At age twenty-one the Italian de Nittis, newly arrived in Paris, was taken up by the influential dealer Alphonse Goupil, but soon chafed at working to order. In 1874, his friend Edgar Degas invited de Nittis to be part of the first Impressionist exhibition at Nadar's, a much better fit.
Although de Nittis died at the tragically early age of thirty-seven from the effects of a stroke, his short life was packed with travel: from Italy to Paris to England and back to Italy and then the round began again. Perhaps The Train Passes, painted in Italy, is a memento of wanderlust.
Luncheon On The Lawn, possibly the artist's most famous work, resides in the museum that bears the de Nittis name in his hometown. Like most of his best work, whatever the mixture of styles, the work displays the artist's fondness for his home, from the homely scene of ducks on the lawn hoping for tidbits from the table to the majestic sweep of the Arno River, put into perspective by wandering sheep.


Image credits:

1. Luncheon on the Lawn, 1884, de Nittis Museum, Barletta, Italy.

2. Figure Of A Woman, 1880, de Nittis Museum.

3. The Train Passes, c. 1878, de Nittis Museum.

4. Winter Landscape, 1880, National Gallery, London, U.K.

5. The Violet Perfume Shop, 1880, Musee Carnavalet, Paris.

6. The Bank Of The Arno Near Barletta, undated - 1880s, Museum of Modern Art, Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy.

The works of Giuseppe de Nittis return to Paris one more time from 20 October 2010 to 16January 2011 in an exhibition at the Musee du Petit Palais.

Visit the de Nittis Museum website in Barletta, Italy here.

Watercolor

"Surges of clouds pelted the waves, drenching the daylight

into submission. In an expanse of anguish,

its own inclemency, he reached into the rain

searching to define one watery line, his hand

in the deluge. He stood and withstood those torrents

streaking his vision, flooding his eyes, outpourings

upon an ocean, where pain salted wet paint and

passion, that classical suffering, joined

summer to squall. All in an hour, it was his:

pluvial, dark, intense, even desirable."

- Watercolor by Susan Kinsolving, from Dailies & Rushes, New York, Grove Press: 1999.

Is this how it was for Whistler, I wondered, reading this verse by Susan Kinsolving?

Image: James Aboot McNeill Whistler - Hastings, c. 1880, Adelson Gallery, NYC.

Lill Tschudi

In all the times that I have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I've never seen the prints of Swiss artist Lill Tschudi (1911-2004) on display. But after reading the aptly titled (for me, anyway) The Unknown Art of Lill Tschudi by Neil Philip
last summer I was delighted to find this group of Tschudi linocuts. Though they are typical of the Grosvenor School in London where Tschudi studied, they share with their contemporaries, the Japanese Sosaka Hanga printers, a desire to make art from the rhythms of modern life.

At her best, Tschudi captures the magic that viewers found in the kinetic energy of 20th century technology the kinetic energy. In London Buses, the dynamic red vehicles appear to reshape the street as they nose through. While the linemen are anchored to the electric pole, we can feel the energy shooting outward through the wires.

You may also be interested in One Hundred Views of New Tokyo posted here 15 August 2008.
Image Credits: linocuts by Lill Tschudi from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1. London Buses, 1949
2. Putting Up Posters, 1933
3. Cleaning A Sail, 1934
4. Fixing Wires, 1936

Promenades In The Jardin de Luxembourg

Sunlight caresses the wooden benches
And statues with their names effaced.
Backlit by the trees.
Meanwhile a little girl holding a cello
Will not go down the walk
Where, for a century, a green lion
Has been devouring an ostrich. In the corner
For storing wheelbarrows, it seems Flaubert
Is about to burst with rage against
The foolishness of his own portrait bust. ….

- excerpt from Promenade en Ville

Verlaine? He stands there erect on the grass,
Lyre and palm tree behind him, a bronze bust
Of Verlaine atop three good yards
Of cement prick around which writhe three
Unlikely Muses, panic stricken to be
Discovered in such dubious company
By strollers so much less interested
In amorous combat. ….

- excerpt from Verlaine

After the death of his son, the professor
Of philosophy continued asking
Himself if the end of illusion could
Be achieved without anger, and he worked
So that every hour did not seem identical
To every other. When spring
Lingered in the Luxembourg Gardens
Between boys and girls, he used to pass
Beneath the shadows of the Queens of France
Gathering up the day’s volunteers
And a joyous band would then
Ascend the rue Soufflot, around the one
Who pardoned youth its vigor
And died shortly after he retired.

- The Little Band

In his second poetry collection Promenade en Ville, Hedi Kaddour stretches the classical sonnet form to create dramatic moments that occur, sometimes without notice, in public places. A walker and a watcher himself, Kaddour imagines the garden's statuary in the persons of Gustave Flaubert and Paul Verlaine as fellow commentators. And in The Little Band he evokes, for me, the painting Les Saltimbanques (The Parade Of The Humble) by Fernand Pelez, another artist who found the extraordinary moments in ordinary life, that is housed at the nearby Musee du Petit Palais.

Hedi Kaddour, born in Tunisia in 1945, has taught at L'Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris since 1984. He has published three collection of poetry and a novel Waltenburg (2005).

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet (b.1942, Bronx, New York) now living in Paris. Hacker won the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Etienne, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Text Credit:

TREASON: poems by Hedi Kaddour, translated by Marilyn Hacker, New Haven, Yale University Press: 2010

Image Credit:

1. Brassai - The Professor reading His Journal in The Luxembourg Gardens, c. 1937, Reunion Musee Nationale de France.

2. Bruno Requillart - Statue of Verlaine In The Luxembourg Gardens from the series: Parks & Gardens, 1977, Mediatheque, Paris.

3. Fernand Pelez - Les Saltambanques, 1888, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

9 June 1896

A painting carefully dated but not signed is a curiosity. We know that this watercolor of the railroad station at Charance was made on 9 June 1896 but the artist is cloaked in the anonymous designation "Ecole francaise." So, Charance is a village about 3 kilometers from the city of Gap, located in the French Alps in the far southeast corner of the country. Here, as elsewhere, the arrival of the railroad connected Charance (Gap) more closely with the rest of France. But kings and conquerors had found their way here before. Emperor Augustus in 14 BCE annexed the pretty little Alpine place to the Roman Empire and in March, 1815, Napoleon rallied his troops for an assault on Paris here at the crossroads of two ancient Roman routes. Freshly escaped from the island of Elba where his fellow heads of state had consigned this "obstacle to the restoration of peace in Europe", Napoleon would have his Hundred Days in Paris before being definitively exiled to the colder island of St. Helena.

Nothing could be farther from this image of a late spring day. The leaves on the trees are still freshly green and, with no train in sight, quiet reigns: no one seems to be in a hurry to go anywhere and there is no trace of the pollution or noise that comes with modern travel. Indeed, you have to look closely to see the iron tracks.

Image: Musee de Quai Branly, Paris.

A Bridge To The Post-Impressionist Future

"For purposes of convenience, it was necessary to give these artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most non-committal, the name of Post-Impressionism."

With these words, Roger Fry (1866-1934) introduced the British public to a new generation of French painters in 1910, including the likes of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Redon, and Serusier. Even that old Impressionist Claude Monet looked new when represented by his Harmonie Verte (1899).

Fry's nomenclature has also served to keep critics and historians of art busy arguing over what the term means and to whom it applies. There is considerable overlap with the Nabis but they, at least, denominated themselves as a group. After reading What Happened To Art Criticism? by James Elkins (Prickly Paradigm Press), it would be easy to throw up one's hands. But still, it's worth the effort.

The Walled City Of Paris

Walls may deter advancing armies but they are of little use in fighting disease. When the Black Plague arrived in 1348, Paris was home to approximately 200,000 people and you can see from this map that the population had overflowed outside the ancient walled fortifications. Like other European cities that suffered through the plague, Paris did not recover from its loss of population until the early 16th century. The only European cities of comparable size were in the Mediterranean region: Milan (100,000), Florence (50,000), Naples and Venice (100,000) and Constantinople (500,000).

Image: Abbaye Saint-Victor - Paris Between The Time of Charles V & Charles IX, catalogued in 1838, Babbidge Map Library, University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Fanciful Cities: Franco Fortunato

The Found City hangs on a wall in my living room, an imaginary token of the small medieval commune (founded c. 1100) in Italy whose name my father's family adopted.

Situated on a hill above the Tyrrhenian Sea, not in a bottle, the old city lies about 60 km from Messina and 170 km from Palermo on the island of Siciliy. Four communes, San Piero, Montalbano Helicon, and Librizzi, meet in a point called Quattrofinaiti. Each August, the commune celebrates a festival of macaroni.
Looking at the imaginary cities in the paintings and prints of Franco Fortunato (b.1946, Rome) recalls the Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a book of prose poems about invented cities. Like Calvino, Fortunato is too humane to disparage urban settlements though his images include solitude, loneliness, isolation, and ambiguity. Reflection and interaction with their surroundings are mixed up. The artist as time traveller borrows the Quatrrocento blues and golds and the architecture of the Florentine Renaissance to create his contemporary version of trompe l'oeil.

Images:
1. La Citta Ritrovata 2. The Poet's House
3. The Leaves Of Time
4. La Citta Isola
5. Isola di Cartiglia
6. La Citta Che Amala Notte

There is more by and about Franco Fortunato at Himmelberger Gallery.

Parma: Walled City Of The Etruscans

When this fanciful map was made in the 15 th century, Parma was an old city, dating back to the Bronze Age, c. 3000 BCE. The University of Parma, founded in the 10th century, was already a venerable institution and is now one of the oldest universities in the world. By 1528, the culture of the Etruscans had been absorbed by Rome and its heirs. The romance of old maps and the mysterious Etrusci are ghosts behind this image.