Still Waters

"(A) mirror of the soul, and the depths that are divined below the surface join forces with the world above in a shared secret: neither the depths of the water nor those of the soul are ever to be plumbed." — Andrea Domesle

Fernand Khnopff's Still Water. Fosset   was shown at the First Vienna Secession in 1898. At the urging of Gustave Klimt, it was purchased by the Belvedere Museum  A panoramic view and an unusually large work for Khnopff, it depicts mostly unseen trees and a bright strip of sky visible only as mirrored in  water. Surely, it owes its brooding quality as much to Khnopff's eccentric cropping of the image as it does to its muted colors.   The sixteen year-old Khnopff had made his first sketches from nature in 1874, at his family’s summer home in Fosset, a hamlet in the Ardennes of eastern Belgium.  “Pas voir du ciel” he wrote on one, meaning roughly 'do not show the sky'.   In later years Khnopff always insisted that he had his reasons for the shapes of his image though, as mystification was one of his strategies, he offered no explanations.

The impression this painting made on its early viewers cannot be overestimated.  In short order Gustave Klimt painted Still Pond (1899 - Leopold Museum-Vienna) in tribute, though it is not one of his best works.   Twilight by the underrated Austrian painter Carl Moll is worthy of its inspiration; its invisible waterline draws the eye inward while it defies our expectations.  A fellow Belgian, Anna de Weert (1867-1950) came close in color and spirit with Canal In Ghent. 
To understand the impact of this one painting it helps to remember the ambivalences built into the use of symbols in 19th century art.  Water functions as a horizontal axis, positive in supporting life but when it acts as a mirror it takes on the vertical, with the implicit sense of drowning or at least absorbing what it reflects.  For  its original audiences, the still waters of Fosset were more than a static landscape.  They suggested the instability of nature and, by extension, of modern life.  Some of them doubtless had also  read Stephane Mallarme's Herodiade (1887),in which the French Symbolist poet had written:
"By the power of old silence and deepening gloom,/ Fated, monotonous, vanquished, undone,/ Like the sluggish waters of an ancient pond."

Images:
1. Fernand Khnopff - Still Water. Fosset, 1894, Osterreisches Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
2. Gustav Klimt - Still Pond, 1899, Loepold Museum, Vienna.

3. Carl Moll - Twilight, c.1900, Osterrreisches Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

4. Anna de Weert - Canal in Ghent, c.1900, Museum  voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.

Nightworld

“The Night is alone, like a beggar.
The streetlamps offer
Their yellow flame
As alms.

The Night is as quiet as a locked church.
The melancholy streetlamps
Open their rose flame,
Bright bouquets of light,
Bouquets under glass, the holy relics
That fill the Night with plenary Indulgence.

The Night endures pain!
The streetlamps in a a chorus,
Dart their red and sulphurous flame,
Like votive images,
And Sacred Hearts,
With cold knives.
The night grows inflamed!
The streetlamps in a row
Unfurl their blue flame.
Along the outskirts,
Like souls stopping to rest,
Souls of the day’s dead, treading the roadways,
Who dream of return to their locked houses,
As they linger, a long time, at the city gates.”

- exceprt from The Mirror Of The Native Sky, 1898, Georges Rodenbach.

Now that we are used to streetlights, it takes a deliberate act of imagination to see the world as it looked when they were new. The late 19th century streetlamps pictured here were lit by gas, not electricity, but the world they revealed cannot be dismissed simply as trading night for an artifical day.  By the light of the streetlamp a new world of night appeared. 

Judging by its frequent appearance in his works, the Belgian artist William Degouve de Nunques (1867-1935) found in this illuminated nocturnal world a correspondence to emotional states.  His Pink House (1892 - Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo) makes such a strong impression on viewers that it is often credited - in retrospect -  as the first surrealist painting.  The Parc Royale is part of that otherworld.  Like artifacts of some ancient culture, the geometric parterres seem alien without daytime pedestrians to make sense of them.  Equally strange is the air itself; something we rarely notice in daylight now floats like nocturnal spirits set free from captivity.  Pink House was an experiment of a different kind, where the atmosphere disappeared and, with it, our sense of space.  Like the night photography of Daniel Boudinet (1945-1990), the usual indicators of depth are mostly absent.  We see what we expect to see, at first.     

There is no obvious source of the light that illuminates the trees of Rippl-Ronai's park, no telltale shadows.  Here we are inside the park, looking out at an urban landscape reconfigured by artificial lights.  Which raises a question about Symbolist works like Parc Royale and Un Parc la nuit.  How much of what we see is real or how much of reality can we see?

Images:

1. William Degouve de Nuncques - Nocturne au Parc royale de Bruxelles, 1897, Mysee d'Orsay, Paris.
2.  Jozsef Rippl-Ronai  (1861-1927) - Un Parc la nuit, c.1892-1895, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. Daniel Boudinet - London -Streetlight-Nocturne, 1977, Mediatheque, Paris.

Heinrich Kuhn & Leon Dabo: Correspondences

His ambition was nothing less than to make  photography a medium of equal prestige to the paintings of great artists. We see this most clearly, without distractions, in his landscapes.  Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944)  became a respected photographer in turn of the century Pictorialism.   Kühn developed a  body of work that, although limited to the context of his personal life, was admired internationally.

Over time Kühn's style evolved away from an impressionistic rendering of  detail and toward abstraction, concentrated ever more on the quality of light and  a photographic version of tonalism, also a term borrowed from painting. 

Leon Dabo (1865-1960), a Parisian born painter, is usually considered an American because his best known works are Hudson Valley landscapes. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur and an Ami of the Societe des Arts, Versailles, among other honors, for his contributions to art, and his pictures were often shown in Paris at times when Kuhn might well have seen them.  There is, at least, at the same zeitgeist on view in their images. 

The monkier of  'man of the world' was made for Dabo.  Although his family moved to Detroit to escape the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to study art in Nancy and Munich.  It was Edmond-Aman Jean who first recognized and promoted Dabo's talent, assuring a successful career in Paris. During World War I, Dabo offered his services as a multi-lingual translator to the intelligence agencies  of of his native country.

Both Kuhn and Dabo were practitioers of what you could call the humanist landscape, a place where humans can exist and feel a part of the natural setting.  The late landscape geographer and founder of Landscape magazine J. Brinckerhoff Jackson (born in Dinard, France) was an apostle of this view.   Backlighting, especially as seen through trees, was a common motif and frequently used by early photographers. Landscapes dominated by variations on one note of color, a technique borrowed from tonalism.  For Kuhn, using the unstable medium of early photographic printing, the achievement was almost heroic.

Images:

1. Heinrich Kuhn - Isarauen, 1897, Albertina Museum, Vienna.

2. Heinrich Kuhn - Evening On the Schlesheimer Canal, 1899, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
3. Leon Dabo - Night Shore. Long Island, undated, private collection.
4. Leon Dabo - Midsummer Night, private collection.
5. Heinrich Kuhn -  Die Wiese, 1898, Folkwang Museum, Essen.
For further reading:
Heinrich Kuhn: The Perfect Photograph, edited by Monika Faber, Germany, Hatje Cantz, y: 2010
Leon Dabo: Poet Of Color by J. Spargo, in The Craftsman, volume 13, New York.
Discovering The Vernacular Landscape, J. B. Jackson, New Haven, Yale University Press: 1984

"The Maeterlinck Of Painting" At Versailles

To understand why Henri le Sidaner (1862-1939) painted the way he did, it helps to consider that the formative influence of his youth was Symbolism. Impressionism, pointillism, intimism...all other 'isms' were absorbed through that filter in his work. At first glance, his paintings charm, but look longer and they reveal themselves as symbolically charged, every bit as much as Giorgio Morandi's airless arrangements of pottery.

Because Le Sidaner died in July of 1939, it is easy to relegate his art to a golden age that never existed - at least not in isolation. He lived in Versailles, a suburb in 20th century Paris, but a country village when King Louis XIV moved his royal court there in the 17th century, thereby appropriating the name as a synonym for royal extravagance. 

Paintings of the French Pavilion in the snow, the Music Pavilion, and the roses of the Grand Trianon at the Chateau de Versailles remind us that here is a place where no one lives. Lighted windows, doors that are open for no apparent reason, and footprints in the snow are ghostly remnants.

One wonders if  Henri Le Sidaner and Lucien Levy-Dhurmer ever ran into each other while prowling the grounds of Versailles.  The symbolism of its immense grandeur left to gather dust, its fountains turned off except on special occasions, its lighted windows perhaps just an opitcal illusion like a mirage, must have exerted a magnetic attraction on them.  Photographer Deborah Turbeville's 1981 book Unseen Versailles pays an unacknowledged tribute to their works, although she portrayed the abandoned interiors.  (In the forward, Turbeville credits her editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis with giving her the idea for the book.)   Remember how the Russian emigre Alexandre Benois envisioned a decrepit Louis XIV being wheeled among the parterres by a servant. (The Sun King's Promenade - posted here March 30, 2010).

Images:

1. Le Pavilion sous la neige, Versailles, 1912, private collection, France.

2. French Pavilion In the Snow-Versailles, 1916, Christies-Ltd. 3. The Music Pavilion At Versailles, 1930, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

4. Roses At The Grand Trianon, undated, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

5. Evening at Versailles, 1925, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris.

6. Le Pavillon Francais-Versailles, 1917.

7. Snow - Versailles, undated, Sotheby's.

A Spray Of Pollen

What a difference a decade makes.  The  four elements of classical antiquity (earth, air, wind, and fire) that appear in benign decorative form on this vase made in 1889 become the pretext for dark dreams in 1900. 

In that millennial year Lucien Levy-Dhurmer won a bronze medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris.  Not-quite-human creatures cavort with black swans in an inflamed aura uniting fire and water. Black swans, representing deep mysteries, were a staple of symbolist imagery.    Gliding with no obvious effort through the water, they also suggested the permeability of everyday reality.

Often dismissed as an art form for amateurs, pastels became the favorite medium for the peripatetic Levy-Dhurmer, as for many of his contemporaries.  Easy to transport and easy to use, he found new ways to create spectacular effects with grains of chalk.  One that became a signature  created the appearance of a scrim between the viewer and the subject, a veil similar to the floral sprays of pollen that attract butterflies. 

In his interpretations, such real locations as Venice and Constantinople inhabit the same universe as the imaginary City of Ys, said to exist under the waves off the Breton coast.  My Mother - An Evening - To See The City Of Ys draws from a whole other world of archaic imagery from his portrait of the Breton people. 

 

Levy-Dhurmer applied a refined style to every new medium he tried.  In 1910,  he accepted his first commission as ensemblier, (see The Wisteria Dining Room - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, May 2008) designing not only architectural settings but everything  that went into them, so that no single element would offend the eye or be inconsistent with the whole. 

 

In his portrait of Georges Rodenbach we saw literature as a stimulant to Levy-Dhurmer's imagination. Music often moved him to translate his aural sensations into personal images of powerful yearning. The Beethoven triptych, a Tchaikovsky Swan Lake (1905), Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un faune after Debussy, and The Roses Of Isfahan After a melody by Gabriel Faure among them. 

Like swans, like butterflies, his female listeners seem to move through time and  space effortlessly, achieving an integration of the senses that teases and eludes us.  Do they float or levitate?  The artist offers no clues.

In his later years, Levy-Dhurmer continued to travel, to Savoie, Switzerland in 1924 and again in 1935, and he spent time frequently at Versailles from about 1922.   He outlived Symbolism and its other practitioners, turning  to landscapes, including the series La Calanque.  The goddess Diana, usually at home among wild nature, does in fact preside over a wisteria garden at Versailles. 

The seasons as reflected in La Calanque appear like ghostly  icebergs thanks to extreme cropping.  Brights pinks and reds are the visible tokens of warmth on a summer evening; the green outcroppings among the rocks appear more robust in their fierce light.  The Belgian Fernand Khnopff created a Symbolist vocabulary with his cropped images; refusing to explain their meanings but insisting on their necessity.   Possibly, Levy-Dhurmer through this device lets us know that he has not forsaken his earlier preoccupations but still finds inspiration in them.  Abstraction and verisimilitude coexist in works that deserve an audience.

Images:

1. Fantasmagorie, c. 1900-1905, private collection, NYC.

2. The Four Elements, c.1889, Jason Jacques Gallery, NYC.
3. The Grand Canal at Night - Venice, 1895, Keith Rennie Johnson Art, Brooklyn, NY.
4. Constantinople, August rateau Collection, Paris.
5. Ma Mere - Un Soir - A Vue la Ville d'Ys, 1898, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Brest.
6. Clair de lune, 1929, Louvre Museum, Paris.
7. Appasionata, from the Beethoven Triptych, 1906, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.
8. Les Glycines - Versailles, 1922, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.
9. La Calanque - the creek - 6 PM On A Summer Evening, c.1930, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
10. La Calanque, c. 1936, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

For further reading:
Autour de Lucien Levy-Dhurmer by Reynold Arnould, et al, editions des Musees Nationaux, Paris, 1973.

Love Minus Zero/ No Limit

"My love she speaks like silence
With no ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
And make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can't buy her.

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no succes at all."
 - excerpt from Love Minus Zero/ No Limit by Bob Dylan, January 14, 1965.

On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of its recording, lyrics exceprted from my favorite Bob Dylan song, released by CBS Records as part of Bringing It All Back Home in 1965.  Melodically unusual among Dylan's songs, it combines vaguely Latin diatonic chord sequences and notes of melancholy (it sounds as though I'm describing a perfume, and that's not farfetched).  Rather a commentary than a protest, the song deserves to be heard much more often.  Melody Gardot, Patricia Barber...?

Image:

Andy Warhol - unidentified woman, 1957, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

A Painter Of Souls

"As a portrait painter he has the gift of grasping the character of the person before him.  He is the painter of the mind as well as the flesh.  In this respect he reminds me of a passage in the Journal des Goncourt where Edmond de Goncourt tells of the impressions of M. de Montesquieu, after a séance with Whistler.  M. Levy-Dhurmer seems also to "pump out some of your individuality - to take the life out of you;  he sees through your body into your soul."  - Frances Keyzer, excerpt from The Studio, March 1906 Volume 37 Issue 156. 

Ever since I first saw this black and white reproduction La Paysanne Breton I have been searching for more about her.  Her quiet self-possession, her solemn, direct gaze fixed on the artist/viewer, are a testament to her specific individuality.  She stands by a weathered stone wall, a reminder of the endurance the Breton land requires of its inhabitants.

 Lucien Levy-Dhurmer seemed to function as a medium, translating the souls of his subjects to canvas.  The Symbolist mantra 'close your eyes and look within' often led to hermetic art, but Levy-Dhurmer's work harks back to an earlier version of the dictum by Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) :  “Close your physical eyes, so that you can see the painting with the eyes of the spirit.  Then bring into the light of day what you can see with your Night. "       

Like his contemporary Odilon Redon, Levy-Dhurmer's aims were not specifically religious, as those of Maurice Denis, but   exemplified a symbolism of emotion and evocation.  Like the more familiar Notre Dame de Penmarc'h, Nouveaus Epis or new growth of corn draws on the traditional faith and costumes of the Breton people translated to the imagery of Byzantine icons and Florentine frescoes.   Farmlands and fishing boats harbored at low tide ground their earthly lives.

After viewing Portrait Of Georges Rodenbach (c. 1895) , the poet Robert de Montesquiou dubbed its subject  "the minister of swans" (le pasteur des cynges). The swans of Bruges featured prominently in Rodenbach's novel Bruges-la-Morte, an immediate Symbolist classic on its publication on 1892.  Although he had lived in Paris since 1888, Rodenbach  (1855-1898) didn't discover the art of Levy-Dhurmer until seven years later.  The two became fast friends and the portrait soon followed.  This remarkable image performs the sleight of hand of dissolving the boundaries between the author  and his emblematic subject although, ironically,  he had never been to the city. Using  the technique of  sfumato (from Italian - to evaporate like smoke), Levy-Dhurmer suggests a symbolic fusion of author and subject.

Ah, the mischievous gaze of Mlle. Carlier!  Pastel
creates a diaphanous setting for her formidable charm; she seems to throw powdery dust as us, even as she lounges in its haze of enchantment.  It would interesting to know what  book she is reading!

The woman of/in the pond in this  tranquil portrait is Emmy Fournier (1856-1944), the woman Lucien Levy-Dhurmer married in 1914, when he was forty-nine.  Fournier had been the editor of a feisty feminist journal La Fronde until it ceased publication in 1905.  In her calm self-possession she could be the older sister, or perhaps the grown self, of the Breton girl.  She gazes into an inertior distance, absorbed by her thoughts, her head turned as gracefully as a swan.   A preliminary sketch of this work was dedicated to Perla, Levy-Dhurmer's affectionate nickname for his fiancee.  Fournier kept the sketch in her room until she died in 1944, at the age of 88. 
 He made another pastel of Mme. Levy-Dhurmer in 1917;  it shows her in profile as she sits reading by lamplight, head propped in her hand.  The title?   La Fronde.

Images:

1. La Paysanne Bretonne, undated, private collection, France, Reunion Musees Nationales.

2. Notre Dame de Penmarc'h, 1896, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Quimper.

3. Nouveuax Epis, early 1900s, L'Art Revure, Paris.

4. Portrait Of Georges Rodenbach, c.1896, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

5. Portrait of Mlle. Carlier, 1910, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

6. Portrait of Emmy Fournier - untitiled, 1910s, private collection, France.

7. Self-portrait of Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, undated 20th century, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

Sometimes Like Butterflies

  "Winged flowers of light” the French poet Andres Suares(1868-1948) called them.    Lucien      Levy-Dhurmer's lifelong fascination with butterflies is a  thread that runs through   a career of many decades and multiple media, from  dramatic experiments with ceramic glazes to strange and magical  pastels.

The  artist used chalks to create swathes of sparkling particles that mimicked the shimmering effects created by butterfly wings fluttering in the sunlight.   He  even decorated the entrance to his Paris apartment with  images of butterflies.  It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that we view some of his pastels through a spray of pollen. 

Born Lucien Levy (1865-1963) to French expatriates in Algiers, he changed his surname to Levy-Dhurner, a contraction of his mother's name, Goldhurmer, for his first solo exhibition  as a painter.  Hired in 1887 as artistic director of the Massier Pottery at Golfe-Juan  in southern France, Levy-Dhurmer introduced the metallic lustre glazes that won the firm a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889.    In 1895 he left the Massier firm to concentrate on painting, although he had already built up a portfolio of work that would appear in his first exposition at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1896.

Gustave Soulier found in Levy-Dhurmer's works a common subject:  "the enigmas of our modern souls."  And so the artist was included with a group of Symbolist artists denoted as 'painters of the soul.'   Like Levy-Dhurmer, Fernand Khnopff, Edmond Aman-Jean, Louis Welden Hawkins and Alphonse Osbert all trained in an academic tradition that left few traces in their later work.  

Early critics also detected a Renaissance influence in the sinuous forms of his Medusa and Circe that reminded them of Botticelli's Venus.  Indeed, Levy-Dhurmer’s first ceramic plaque exhibited in 1882 was a version of Venus.   His Medusa, strangely submerged in a watery world, has blood on her hands.

"Like severed

Hands

The leaves drift upon the pathways,

The Fields and the copse."

 - from The Illusory Villages by Emile Verhaeren, 1895.

La Bourrasque (The Gust of Wind), has been identified as the first of a series of ethereal images in which Levy-Dhurmer represented  a seemingly obscure personal vision. Similar images occur to me in reading some early verses by the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, also a part of the Symbolist circle.  Here the forces of nature made visible by the wind swirling through the woman's hair and the otherworldly pastel colors create a sense of vibrancy rather than menace.

          "Beyond, in the far reaches of hysteria and flame,

           And of livid froth and raucous frenzy,

           There we could ferociously rend and abolish the soul,

           Ferociously joyous, the soul and the heart."

                 - from Les Soirs by Emil Verhaeren, 1887

        I would add the early Head Of A Young Beauty and The Lost Explorer as examples of this personal mythology.  Although the artist renders the faces with the care you would expect  in a portrait, they are framed by settings that do not readily yield to interpretation.  The young woman's fresh face and dancing  hair ribbons emerge from a tulle-like fog, perhaps an allusion to a bridal veil.  The explorer seems more obviously old than lost, in this wintery stand of bamboo, recognizable but not necessarily realistic.
Look closely at the pitcher held by the nude woman at left and you'll see a butterfly hovering.
More of Lucien Levy-Dhurner soon.

Images:

1. La Mer, private collection, France.

2. Bowl with insects, 1890, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

3,  Head Of AYoung Beauty. Golfe-Juan, 1892, private collection.

4. The Lost Explorer, 1896, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

5. Medusa, 1897, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

6. Forest In Autumn, undated, private collection, France.

7. La Bourrasque, 1897, private collection, France.

8. Eve, 1897, Michel Perinet Collection, Paris.

9. La Cruche Casse, reprinted from Thoughts of An Amazon by Nathalie Clifford Barney, 1920,  in La Revue d'Art, Paris

The Winter's Spring

"The winter comes; I walk alone,
I want no bird to sing;
To those who keep their hearts their own
The winter is the spring.
No flowers to please—no bees to hum—
The coming spring's already come.

I never want the Christmas rose
To come before its time;
The seasons, each as God bestows,
Are simple and sublime.
I love to see the snowstorming;
'Tis but the winter garb of spring.

I never want the grass to bloom:
The snowstorm's best in white.
I love to see the tempest come
And love its piercing light.
The dazzled eyes that love to cling
O'er snow-white meadows sees the spring.

I love the snow, the crumpling snow
That hangs on everything,
It covers everything below
Like white dove's brooding wing,
A landscape to the aching sight,
A vast expanse of dazzling light.

It is the foliage of the woods
That winters bring—the dress,
White Easter of the year in bud,
That makes the winter Spring.
The frost and snow his posies bring,"
 - The Winter's Spring by John Clare (1793-1864)

Images:

1. Ma Bing - After  Snow-Drifting Serenely, 2009, Eli Klein Fine Arts Gallery, NYC.

2. Maurice Denis - Furrows In The Snow, c. 1895, Hopkins-Custot Galerie, Paris.



Winter Trees

"All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold."

 - Winter Trees by William Carlos Williams

You might think that identifying trees in winter is hard to do but, stripped of their leaves, deciduous trees can be grouped according to their skeletons, the arrangements of their branches.  When twigs and buds grow off a main branch one at a time, that's called alternate branching.  Opposite branching is when twigs and buds grow off a main branch in pairs.  Artists can be divided into two groups, as well, I think - those who understand this and those for whom verisimilitude is secondary.  Either way can work.

Images:

1. Elizabeth Colwell - Winter Landscape, 1911. Indianapolis Museum of Art.

2. Emil Orlik - Woman Carrying Wood In Winter - emil-orlik.com