"Ma Racine au Fond de Bois"

"My roots are in the forest." - Emile Galle

 I was struck by the similarity of this photograph of Emile Galle (1846-1904)  to the well-known portrait painted by his friend Victor Prouve.  Here is Galle at his work table, sketching busily with colored pencils, one of his tall presentation vases silhouetted at his right as the sun streams in from the left. 

At the World's Fair of 1889 in Paris, Galle was awarded both first place for his glass and a gold medal in ceramics.  His ability to capture  the depth and movement of nature on the surfaces of his pieces was already obvious.  Nothing was wasted on Galle: his  studies in botany, geology, and philosophy at Weimar were all brought to bear in his art.  He took over the family glass-making business in Nancy. He became the first Secretary of   Horticultural Society of Nancy in 1880.. He traveled far and wide but the experiences that shaped his art  were the hours spent in explorations in the woods of Lorraine

At this time of year you can see the sturdy little Alpine Soldanella poking its fringed purple flutes out of the melting snow.  Then the massed green rosettes of leaves appear. On the lavender-blue glass, Galle etched his designs in silver and platinum, an instance of his technical innovations.

Africana is another of Galle's presentation pieces.  He often named his works for the occasion or person who inspired him.  Impressed by the work of  Louis Pasteur (his germ theory of disease and use of the microscope) that he created a coupe de verre for the scientist's seventieth birthday in 1892, inscribed on its bottom: "May this cooled crystal thus preserve the reflection of your flame."

 Also a native of Nancy and a keen collector and supportive critic of the avant-garde in art, Roger Marx called Galle "a homo-triplex" for his achievements in glass, ceramics, and wood.  Marx's motto was "rien sans art", meaning 'nothing without art.'  Galle named his furniture as he did his glassware; this side chair is 'quiet meadows.'


Undersea explorations revealed a wealth of flora and fauna that lived beneath the surface of the ocean.  Jules Michelet's The Sea (1861), itself a rich mixture of prose, poetry and travelogue was widely read by Galle's contemporaries.  So, too, the poet Charles Baudelaire who wrote "the sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul..."  In this untitled work, Galle seems to have returned from an underwater voyage with a chunk of marine life.
The tall vase (and as we have seen with Galle, they could be so tall as to be unsuitable as containers for anything less than long grasses) was created by the artist in 1900  "for my window at the International Exposition."

Images:
1. unidentified photographer - Emile Galle in His Studio, c. 1898, Musee d'Orsay.
2. Emile Galle - The Carp, 1878, Musee des Arts decoratifs, Paris.
3. Emile Galle - La Soldanelle des Alpes, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Emile Galle - Africana, 1900, Musee des Arts decoratifs, Paris.
5. Emile Galle - Salon Chair, 1902, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
6. Emile Galle -  sculpted and encrusted glass of underwater rock, 1903, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
7. Emile Galle - vase inscribed on its base:  "For my window at l"exposition de 1900", Musee d'Orsay.
 8. Emile Galle - vase with frog and dragonfly, 1891, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Daffodils

"Long yellow sunlight fills

The cool secluded room

Sweet and set in order –

And again

The insistent sweet perfume

And the impressions it preserves

Irritate the imagination

Or the nerves."

- Daffodils by T. S. Eliot from Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917  edited by Christopher Ricks, New York, Harcourt  Brace & Company: 1996.

Image: Frantisek Kupka - Verticals In Yellow, 1913, Pompidou Center, Paris.

The Visits

These quiet mauves and pinks look peculiarly modern fs the colors for a Renaissance fresco. Mary is a suitably pale and humble virgin in contrast to the archangel Gabriel' whose wings are a cascade of joyous color as befits the announcement he is to deliver.  Fra Angelico created this particular Annunciation  at the Convent of Saint Mark, Florence for a place of prayer and contemplation.  In fact, the room in the image is the cell that it was intended to adorn.

 A more secular age draws on  the fund of powerful religious imagery, even as belief in the sources of the imagery weakens.  An Italian painter of the Risorgimento, Silvestro Lega also lived in Florence when he painted The Visit in 1868.  He intended the viewer to recognize the formality of the human figures, their placement on the canvas arranged like a church trpitych, as the template informing the artist's personal vision.  His models  were young sisters, Maria, Issolina, and Anna Snipers, who took piano lessons with Virginia Batelli (the onlooker - at right).  For Lega  the young Batelli was his artistic muse, and when she died an early death from tuberculosis in 1870, he fled Florence for Romagna. After ten years of hardship and loneliness, he returned to Florence and his circle of painter friends. 

A devout Roman Catholic, the Frenchman Maurice Denis uses the muted palette of Fra Angelico's cell fresco for Encounter.  Like Lega's women, his figures maintain a chaste individual space even as they embrace.  This time the human onlooker is joined by two white birds, perhaps doves of peace. 

 Images:
1. Fra Angelico (1395-1455) - Annunciation, c.1437-1444, Convent of San Marco, Florence.
2. Silvestro Lega (1826-1895) - The Visit, 1868, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome.
3. Maurice Denis (1870-1943) - Encounter, 1892, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
4. Maurice Denis - The Visitation,  1894, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Atelier Simultane

"Colors excited me.  I didn't attempt to analyze what I was doing.   These were things that came from inside me.   Thirty-one years ago this month, my mother took me to see Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo.  The exhibition had been planned with Delaunay's cooperation, but she died on December 5, 1979  in Paris, two months before the opening.    

- Sonia Delaunay quoted in Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective, Buffalo, Albright-Knox Gallery: 1980.

It was in March of 1980 that my mother took me to see the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at the Albright-Knox Gallery. The museum owned a work by Sonia's husband, Robert Delaunay, though none by her.  His work seemed to me inferior to hers in a way that illustrates neatly the difference between. the two of them.  Where her work brims with energy and ideas, his sticks too closely to isms, whether Orphism, Simultanisme, or Cubism.

Like other artists we've looked at here,  Sonia Delaunay  read Michel-Eugene Chevreuil's influential treatise On the Laws of Simultaneous Color Contrasts.  The book became  a cross between a dictionary and a bible for avant-garde artists.   Delaunay's  ability to convey  movement and rhythm through color  contrasts owes something to Chevruel.  Her own  Compositions, Couleurs, Idees published in 1930 by Editions Charles Moreau, Paris is a embodiment of Cherveul's theories.

This originality is apparent even in her very early work, like the unexpected Portrait de Charles de Rochefort from 1908. The flattened facial contours set against a background of brightly colored and unstable patterns  manages to convey her subject's  strong personality through its embrace.

I wish I had an image of the large wool rug designed by  Delaunay that was displayed at the Albright-Knox on a raised platform in the main exhibition hall.  Built of marble and stone, the museum was intended for the Pan American International Exposition of 1901, but the Beaux-Arts building was  wasn't completed until four years later.  I saw Rodin's monumental Gates of Hell in the same space and it is a tribute to Delaunay that her works, though modest in size, filled that grand, cold space with  the expansive  dance-like rhythms  of simultanisme.

Atelier Simultane, Sonia Delaunay's studio/gallery/store,  opened in Paris  circa 1923, financed by the commission she  received from a manufacturer in Lyon for fifty textiles.   The clothes that she designed for herself served well as advertisements for her art.
Her  friends wanted them too, and  soon Atelier Simultane attracted  glamorous customers:  Nancy Cunard and Gloria Swanson, to name just two.   As a model of her own designs, Delaunay's  presence stood out even in a Parisian art scene that offered strong competition.  Delaunay’s textile and fashion designs prefigured a  trend that art critic Rosalind Krauss named “black deco”. 

The collaborative spirit of the moment resulted in projects, notably Tristan Tzara’s “poem dresses” fashioned from Blaise  Cendrar’s sensuous poem “On her dress she wears a body”, dedicated to Delaunay/

Her theatrical sense and  friendships with the Dada and Surrealist circles led her to design the 1923 production of Tristan Tzara's The Gas-Operated Heart.  The play, a parody of classical drama, was called by one critic called  "the greatest three-act hoax of the century."  The figure illustrated at left seems to resemble the American dancer Josephine Baker, but Baker wouldn't arrive in Paris for another two years but, apparently, the cake-walk preceded her.

At the same time, Delaunay turned her attention to cinema, designing sets and costumes for the 1926 serial Le Petit Parigot, directed by Rene Le Somptier, among others.   Her Boutique Simultane was a hit at the 1925 Exposition Internarionale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne.  Delaunay was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne. on fashion's influence on painting, at a time when the material arts were regarded as poor cousins.  With the advent of the Great Depression, Delaunay's business shrank and she was forced to close Atelier Simultane, a move that she later described as "liberating" her from business.

Sonia Terk was born in 1885 in the Ukraine into a privileged childhood of travel. art and museums.  She arrived in Paris in 1905 to study art but became dissatisfied with her teachers, finding more to interest her in the new Post-Impressionist painters, so wild they were dubbed 'Les Fauves' by their critics. Robert Delaunay, whom she married in 1910,  was her second husband.  A depression and two world wars brought dislocations and upheavals; Robert Delaunay died of cancer  in 1941. 

Atelier Simultane is the subject of a new  and overdue exhibition, now open   at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City: Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay.   The Atelier was only a small part of Sonia Delaunay's career, but it would be enough to secure the reputation of a lesser artist.

As her work is shown more, her influence on other artists becomes apparent, ranging from her contemporaries like Stanton Macdonald Wright (1890-1973)  and Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) to such younger  painters as Frank Stella (b. 1936) and Bridget Riley. (b. 1931) who  has said "The music of colour, that's what I want."   Kupka's Floral is so dynamic that if you look long enough you can feel its petals opening.

Images:

1. Sonia Delaunay - Joker from Playing Cards, revised 1979, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo.
2. Sonia Delaunay - Femme, 1913, Samuel & Luella Mason Collection.
3. Sonia Delaunay - from Ses Peintures et ses Objets,ses Tussyes Silumtanes ses Modes, c.1922-1925, Librairie des Arts decoratifs, Paris.
4.  Sonia Delaunay - Portrait of Charles de Rochefort, 1908, estate of Sonia Delaunay.
5. Sonia Delaunay - Danseuse Espagnle, 1917, Estate of Sonia Delaunay, Paris. 
6.  Sonia Delainay - silk fabric samples, courtesy Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC.
7. Sonia Delaunay -sketch for The Gas-Operated Heart, 1923, Leonard Fox, Ltd., NYC.
8. Sonia Delaunay - Sailboats,  1930, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.
Unidentified photographer - Sonia Delaunay modeling her costumes and sets for Le Petit Parigot, 1926, Antoinette Blanchette Collection, courtesy Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC> 9. Sonia Delaunay - Robe Poeme, undated, Museum of Modern art, NYC.
10. Stanton Macdonald Wright - The Prophet,  1955, Pompidou Center, Paris.
11. Sonia Delaunay - Composition Number 16 from Compositions, Coulerus, Idees, 1930, New York Public Library.
12. Frantisek Kupka - Floral, 1919, Pompidou Center, Paris.
13. Bridget Riley - Arrest, 1965, The British Council for the Arts.


You may also be interested in Sonia Delaunay at the Italian Institute of Graphic Arts, posted here July 9, 2009.

Our Spring Number Begins Here

Image: Franklin Edward Bittner, for Book of Home Building and Decoration by Henry Collins Borwin, New York, Doubleday Page & Company: 1912.

Features include:

Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary and American Movie Critics: from the Silents Until Now.

Artists include:

Edmond Aman-Jean, Fra Angelico, Ingeborg Bachmann & Odilon Redon, Leon Bonvin, Sonia Delaunay, Raoul Dufy, Helen Hyde, Emile Galle, Suzuki Harunobu, Kobayahsi Kaichi, Walter Leistikow, etc.

Hedi Kaddour: The Dogs

"He loved us, with our muzzles and our fangs,
How we'd surge at the slightest footsteps, creak
Of a door: truncheon and trough, enough
To gather your strength, but never a foretaste
Of dog paradise, sugar for pleasure,
An instant for itself.  Fine food was all
For him: partied, snag his heart out,
Round as spade handle in the moonlight, doubled
His fat by the bellyful, gobbled up meat
And potatoes in sauce, gobbled up all
The cheeses between two shots of Calvados,
And then the caramel-crisp masterpiece,
Kirsch-flavored meringue, cream like eternal
Sea foam: one night, when he came home, we wolfed him down."
 - The Dogs (Les Chiens) by Hedi Kaddour, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
   from Treason published by Yale University Press, New Haven: 2010.

In sonnet-shaped poems of smiling bitterness, Hedi Kaddour introduces himself to English-speaking readers.  With the fluent assistance of an American living in Paris, poet Marilyn Hacker, who relates in her preface her first encounter with Kaddour's poems in Passage au Luxembourg (2000).  As a poet, Kaddour is a flanuer, a walker of the streets who loses himself in the spectacles of daily life and finds a combination of wisdom and lightness.  We may recall the haiku-influenced vignettes of  another flaneur, Felix Feneon, but Kaddour's favorite poets are Anna Ahkmatova, Joseph Brodsky , and other non-French influences.  What he shares with them is life lived in tumultuous circumstances.  A self-contained public vignette or a small bit of dialogue often serves as a memory device for Kaddour.  It is difficult to describe briefly but I think the juxtaposition of Kaddour's Dogs poem with these dog images by Pierre Bonnard suggests his dis-associative process of association.

Hedi Kaddour was born in Tunis (1945) to a Tunisian father and a French-Algerian mother.  The family moved to France when Kaddour was eight years old.  Although French was his native language, Kaddour studied German at school and has earned a doctorate in Arabic.  After many travels abroad, Kaddour now teaches literature at L'Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon.

Images: Pierre Bonnard -project for a decorative panel for the Central Union of Decorative Arts - Paris, 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Melancholy Twilight

Little known outside Italy is the Divisionist painter G. B. Colina (1870-1965.)  In Melancholy Twilight the hoarfrost thickens as a woman bends wearily under the weight of her basket at the end of the day.
The Divisionist painters of late 19th century Italy pursued the same goal as American Luminist painters, but used different methods.  Rather than blending their pigments to achieve a luminous finish on canvas, the Italians applied colors in separate daubs, relying on the human eye to synthesize them.  The short-lived French painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891) is considered to be the inventor of 'chromoluminarism.'   The link with France caused some critics to label the Italians Neo-Impressionists, a name that does the Italians scant justice.  Intrigued by the new in science and technology, their human sympathies were with the rural poor and the urban refugees. Looked at through this lens,  Melancholy Twilight is a moment in the long march to industrialization.

Image: Giovanni Battista Colina - Melancholy Twilight, 1899, Gallery Of Modern Art, Novara.

Inventions Of The March Hare

"He said: the universe is very clever
 The scientists have laid it out on paper

Each atom goes on working out its law, and never
 Can cut an unintentional caper.

He said: it is a geometric net
 And in the middle, like a syphilitic spider

The Absolute was waiting, till we get
 All tangled up and end ourselves inside her."

 - untitled poem from Inventions Of The March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks, New York, Harcourt  Brace & Company: 1996.

Images:
1. Eugene Gabritschevsky - Vision of Insurmountable Desire, 1937, Musee d'Art moderne et contemporain, Toulouse.
2. Odilon Redon - Germination, 1879, Art Institute of Chicago.
3. Odilon Redon - The Smiling Spider, c.1886, Louvre Museum, Paris.
4. Odilon Redon  - The Head Tree, undated, private collection.
5.  Odilon Redon - Le Regard, before 1900, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.
6. Odilon Redon - The Prisoner, undated, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Julius Klinger: Poster Artist

The young artist was proud of his posters, as the arresting image at left proclaims.   Julius Klinger  (1876-1942), who grew up in Vienna and studied art there, moved to Berlin at twenty-one in search of work.  Previously he had worked for a fashion magazine in Vienna, Wiener Mode. 

There is some confusion as to whether Klinger studied with Koloman Moser, as several biographies of Klinger assert.  Some sources on Moser claim that the polymathic artist had no time for students.  In any case, the two men were acquainted. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, pattern books and magazines offered their equivalent of clip art and Klinger contributed to several. including La Femme dans la Decoration Moderne, published by Libraire de l'Art Ancien et Moderne in Paris.  Repeating patterns were very popular, but Klinger contributed a characteristically humorous twist by repeating human patterns. 

These stylized images evoke ancient friezes, and I;ve compared them before to caryatids.  Why this is, when the subject matter was contemporary is rather subtle. The curly locks on the bathing beauties do look like Greek carvings seen on the Acropolis.  And the dancing maidens exist in a netherworld somewhere between ancient greece and fin-de-siecle Vienna.

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



Lunar Baedeker

"A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls

of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon

"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes----"

 - from Lunar Baedeker  by Mina Loy, Contact Editions, Paris: 1923.

No excerpt, not even the whole poem, could ever encompass the loopy wonderousness (the wonderous loopiness ?) that is Lunar Baedeker, much less the life story of its creator Mina Loy (1882-1966).  Like Anabasis by St. John Persse, it can be an epic of whatever you imagine.

To read the complete poem go here.  For more about Loy go here.

Images:

1. Edvard Munch - Summer Night, 1907, National Gallery, Berlin.

2. Odilon Redon - The Sleeper , undated, Louvre Museum, Paris.

In And Out Of Moser's Shadow: Otto Prutscher

The checkered plant stand produced in 1903, the inaugural year of the Wiener Werkstatte, is a familiar image but its creator, Otto Prutscher (1880-1949) has been overshadowed by Koloman Moser, the man Josef Hoffmann called the man of a thousand ideas.  But it was left to Hoffmann and others to follow the ideas to various conclusions, enriching the vocabulary for decorative arts even today, in artists too numerous to mention, but one (or two) is Mackenzie-Childs of New York.

Blue and gold on white was a popular color scheme at the fin-de-siecle; Fernand Khnopff used it often, most notably in the design of his Brussels home Villa Khnopff.  Prutscher's designs, reproduced in Julius Hoffman's journal Der Moderne Stil (published monthly in Stuttgart  from 1899-1905), show the tug of war that took place even in individual artists as they reconciled the curvilinear lines of Art Nouveau with geometric designs and formats (think the Viennese journal Ver Sacrum).

Thanks to two friends - and collectors -  Serge Sabarksy and Ronald S. Lauder, Viennese arts of the early 20th century are now exhibited in an elegant and appropriate setting, a Beaux-Arts townhouse on Manhattan's upper east side, within sight of the Metropolitan Museum, making the Neue Galerie easy to find.   A note to bookworms, the library of the townhouse has been turned into a dual-language English/German bookstore where every aspect of fin-de-siecle Vienna is covered, including Otto Prutscher.

Like other members of the Wiener Werkstatte (Viennese Workshops), Prutscher worked in a variety of media but I am drawn to his glass work.  Here he applies geometric designs to curving surfaces in most convincing fashion.  Here the yin and yang become one, in a style as unforced as it is sophisticated.
Who knows, this could be the first of a series of posts, what with so many accomplished artits in the Wiener Wekstatte.

Images:1. Plant Stand for the Wiener Werkstatte, 1903, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.   2. Ornamental designs for Dekorative Vorbilder in Der Modern Stil, c.1900, New York Public Library.   3. Wine Glass, c. 1908, Neue Galerie, NYC.   4. Demitasse cup for the Wiener Werkstatte, 1907, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.   5. Goblet for the Wiener Werkstatte, 1905, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Suggested reading : Wiener Werkstatte by Gabriel Fahr-Becker, London, Tashcen: 2008.