Cubist Women

And not a Picasso in sight! 

The Bohemian artist Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957)  was inspired by Italian Futurism but the Salon des Independants hung him in their Cubist room. 

In his works, Kupka works explored the relationship between motion, color, and music, so you could call it Orphism, although these two paintings were made before Apollinaire coined that term.  Kupka's draftsmanship, his coloration, and his inventiveness are a delight.

A rather obscure artist, Rudolph Schwankovksy, seems to have encountered the wavy-glass effect, while German-born photographer Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) may have been commissioned by French Vogue or Harper's Bazaar.  It's a point I keep returning to, that it is the art of the work that matters and the terms we use to describe it are useful if they increase or understanding and, if not, then not. 

Images:
1. Frantisek Kupka -Woman Gathering Flowers, c.1907, Pompidou Center, Paris.
2. Frantisek Kupks - Woman in Triangles, 1909, Pompidou Center, Paris.
3. Rudolph Schwankovksy - Woman At A Piano, 1943, Orange County Museum of Art.
4. Erwin Blumenfeld - Lisette Behind Fluted Glass, 1943, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Art Deco Woman

“She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s.  She started all that.  She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht and you missed none of it with that wool  jersey.”

 “Oh, you always have someone in the trade,” Brett said.

              

  “This fellow raises the grapes.  He ‘s got thousands of acres of them.”

               

“What’s his name?” asked Brett.  “Veuve Cliquot.”

               

“No,” said the count.  “Mums.  He’s a baron.”

 The most fully realized female character in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway appeared in his first novel  The Sun Also Rises (1926). We only know (Lady) Brett Ashley through the words of Jake Barnes who, like his creator, can hardly be a reliable narrator in spite of his attraction to her.  When Jake calls Brett a "bitch" he renders Hemingway's verdict and we are meant to concur.  

Brett is a strong, independent woman who charms everyone she meets, a goddess with a bob who rejects a mythic role for herself.  I suspect Hemingway had a sneeking fondness for such boyish women.  His initial description of Brett (at top) is instantly recognizable as Hemingway-esque.  What may take a bit of reflection  to recognize in the dialogue is how the characters occasionally get away from their author.  We are intended to condemn Brett's garish ways but remain to be convinced that wandering from bar to bar, as Jake and his friends do, is superior to going from relationship to relationship. 

Although the novel takes place mostly in the Paris of 1925, it is the recent war that shaped their characters; Jake has become impotent and after her sweetheart dies, Brett is noncommittal with men, even her two husbands, whom she has divorced before the story begins.   This character who combines disparate qualities within herself, masculine/feminine, strength/vulnerability, morality/unreliability, is an Art Deco woman, like the style of the day that contained curves within geometric figures and speed within static images.

 Images:

1. unidentified artist - Blanco y Negro, 1934, Art Archive, UK.

2. unidentified artist - Vogue Summer Travel Issue, 15 May 1932, Kunstbibliotech, Berlin.

3. Jean Dunand - Leda, 1932, Galerie Felix Marcilhac, Paris.

4. Doccia & Agata - bowl, c.1920, National Ceramics Museum, Sevres.

5. Jean Lurcat - The Siren Rug, 1920s, Musee des Arts decoratifs, Paris.

Paris 1900: Les Americaines

Just think of the competition these paintings faced at the International Exposition of 1900.  People-moving escalators, films that talked, the world's largest telescope, and a globe that rivaled the Eiffel Tower  in size.  Not to mention the triumph of  the latest  style - Art Nouveau.  And yet two paintings by American artists,  both New Englanders, Ben Foster and Winslow Homer, were snapped up by the French state for the Luxembourg Museum and the lesser known of the two won a gold medal:  Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau . (Lulled by the murmur of a stream),was signed by the artist "Ben Foster, September, 1899".

 Today, the name of Ben Foster (1852-1926) is obscure, even for a Tonalist painter. The consensus is that Foster's lifelong bachelorhood was a bad career move, since it meant there were no offspring to keep his reputations alive.  :Foster  studied with Abbott Handerson Thayer in New York and visited Paris in the 1890s.  The late-blooming artist was forty-eight  when he won the medal in Paris.  The French saw something distinctively  American in the brooding melancholy of his picture of a small Connecticut town near the Housantonic River.  He was drawn to themes that drew from the Symbolist vocabulary., so that may have bees the connecting point.   His compositions often appear awkward or unbalanced at first, then  give way to a  sense of disquiet. that a puzzled contemporary described as "the aloofness of nature."

Winslow Homer's painting was something else.  As a young man Homer (1836-1910), Homer had painted idyllic scenes of verdant rural life, but by the time he painted Summer Night in 1890 he had lived for seven years at Prout's Neck, Maine, a fishing village on the rocky, inhospitable Atlantic coast.     Again, the French saw a peculiarly American lyricism in the scene of two young women dancing on the shore as the waves crash.   Homer, who was usually in need of funds, must have been especially gratified that the French nation moved so quickly to acquire these two paintings for the Musee de Luxembourg.

You may also be interested in Winslow Homer at Haughton Farm, posted here  1 August 2009.

Images:
1. Ben Foster - Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau, 1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Winslow Homer - Nuit d'Ete, 1890, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Paris 1900: Objets d'Art

Have you ever visited a museum with a friend, only to be unable to drag your companion beyond the gift shop?    Then you know what it feels like to research the Universal Exposition of 1900.   Yes the architecture, most of it temporary, was beguiling and well photographed.  It is a shame that the Georges de Feure's frescoes decorating the outside of the pavilion for l'Art Nouveau Bing have not been preserved.  But what about the art works that won all the medals?

One way to understand the variety of objects on display at Paris 1900 is to think how an ordinary street scene looks.  While some people look  a la mode, others are the image of last year, and some are backdated to previous eras - hippies, beatniks, etc.   

In Carlo Bugatti's two-fold screen we can see intimations of  Art Deco imposed on the curvilinear.  Even the large round sun/eye set in concentric circles looks geometric here.  Bugatti (1856-1940) was from a prominent Milanese family; his sister married the painter Giovanni Segantini and the composer Giacomo Puccini was a family friend.  Carlo trained as an architect, trying his ideas on ceramics, textiles, silverware, and even musical instruments before finding fame as a designer of furniture. 
His use of expensive materials (copper, mother of pearl, exotic woods) made for spectacular results, but also hinted at the limitations that the Deco movement would come up against during an economic Depression.  After winning a silver medal at Expo 1900, Bugatti was commissioned to design and furnish a Turkish salon for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Born Georges Joseph van Sluyters to a Dutch father and a Belgian mother, Georges de Feure (1868-1943) was canny enough to realize that Gallicizing his name would boost his career in Paris.  That said, the extremely independent young artist abandoned formal studies as soon as his parents allowed. 

Influenced, as he admitted, by the style of premier poster artist Jules Cheret, de Feure became the key designer at l'Art Nouveau Bing.   His exquisite, sensuous porcelains, like his iris  and tulip vases, convey the eros of flowers as strongly as the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe would.

The Swedish Rorstrand manufacturer and designer Nils Emil Lundstrom (1865-1960) produced beautiful porcelains on similar floral, vegetal, and animal themes, but in a cooler style.  Colors both delicate and subtle are used to create an effect that is part abstraction and part orientalism in this vase.

 

The fanciful ovoid coffee cup sits on a petal saucer that avoids overwhelming cuteness by being blue, rather than the expected green.  Nature, worshiped unnaturally, with the utmost artifice.

Images: 
1. Carl Thiel - Chateau of Water, Paris Universal Exposition, 1900, BPK, Berlin.
2.Carlo Bugatti - two-fold screen, c.1898, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
3. Clement Massier - vase, no date, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Georges de Feure - iris vase, c.1900, Limoges.
5 .Meisenthall Cristallerie - vase with arums, c. 1897-1903, Museum of Glass, Meisenthal.
6. Nils-Emil Lundstrom - for Rorstrand Pottery - vase, c.1897-1910,  Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
7. Rorstrand Pottery, ovoid coffee cup, no date, Musee Andre Dubouche, Limoges.
8. Alphons Mucha - fragment from a frieze from the Bosnia-Herzgovina Pavilion - Paris, 1900, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Recently, in writing about the painter Leon Bonvin I mentioned a work in charcoal by another short-lived  French artist, Georges Seurat (1859-1891).  And here it is - the little dog guarding the baby carriage. 

Image: Georges Seurat - untitled, c. 1882-1884, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Chaud Lapin

No, it's not incorrect adjectival placement.  Brush up your vocabulary with a bit of French slang with an idiom that will be very useful in the near future. 

Image: Georges de Feure - The Lady and the Rabbit, no date,  Victor Arwas Gallery, London.

Cezanne, You Painted The Wrong Rose !

"The rose is wrong.  I know what I'm doing." - Odilon Redon

"My flowers exist at the confluence of two riverbanks, that of representation and that of memory." 

"I refused to embark on the Impressionist boat because I found the ceiling too low.” -  from a letter to Paul Serusier.

 "As a child I sought out the shadows.  I remember taking a deep and unusual joy in hiding under the big curtains and in  the dark corners of the house."

"..the right .to dream, in indulge in the exuberant creativity of pure visual poetry, the right to depict forms never seen in nature, giving oneself over to the transports of fantastic mythology and symbolic story-telling."

Curious that an artist who created imaginary beings became famous thanks to a fictional character in an anti-realistic novel. Odilon Redon (1840-1916), the artist, did not share the revulsion toward the natural world of des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Husymans' novel Against Nature (1884).  But the book's sensational success magnified Redon's reputation, and it was Husymans introduced him to Symbolist  poet Stephane Mallarme.

After a misguided apprenticeship with the academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome, Odilon Redon studied with an eccentric, opium smoking lithographer named Rudolf Bresdin, who admonished the young man,  "The real artists ought not even to look at nature." 

At the same time Redon's new friend, botanist Amand Clavaud, introduced him to the underworld as seen through a microscope,  bacilii that Redon  later described as  "(the) terrifying world of the infinitely minute." - from A Soi-meme.  

Pairing the pastels of Redon with the writing of Ingeborg Bachmann is not so far-fetched as it may seem.  Bachmann the writer was provocative and so was Redon, who hoped to provoke in his viewers " a sort of diffuse but powerful attraction to the obscure world of the indeterminate and to set him thinking." - Redon to his publisher Andre Mellerio, 1898.

Images: by Odilon Redon
1.  Vase of Flowers - After Cezanne, 1898, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
2. decorative panel executed for a residence at Dommency, 1902, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. The Butterflies, 1910, Galerie Brame-lorenceau, Paris.
4. Old Man With Wings, c.1895, Louvre Museum, Paris.
5. Head of a woman, no date, Dallas Museum of Art.
6.Flowers in a vae, c. 1905, Carnegie Museum of art, Pittsburgh.
7. Le Printemps (Spring), no date, Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
8. The old tree in the field, no date, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

The Voyage Out

 

"Smoke is rising from the ground.

Keep an eye on the tiny fishing hut,

For the sun will set

Before you’ve put ten miles behind you.

The dark water, thousand-eyes,

Opens its white-foamed lashes

To peer at you, wide-eyed and long,

For thirty days,

 

Even when the ship pitches hard

And takes an uncertain step,

Stand steady on the deck.

They are seated at the tables now,

eating the smoked fish;

later, the men will kneel

and mend the nets;

nights, though, they will sleep,

an hour or two

and their hands will soften,

free from salt and oil,

soft as bread of the dream

they have broken.

 

The first wave of night hits the shore,

The second has already reached you.

But when you cast your gaze beyond,

You can still see the tree

Raising a defiant arm

-  The wind has already robbed it of another

-  and you wonder: how much longer

How much longer

Will the twisted timber weather these storms?

There is no land in sight;

You should have dug into the sandbank with your hand

Or tied yourself to the cliffs by a strand of hair.

Blowing into conches, sea monsters float

On the crests of waves, they ride and slice

The day to pieces with bare sabres, leaving a red trail

In the water, where sleep overcomes you

For the rest of your days

And your senses leave you.

Suddenly, something has happened to the ropes,

You are called, and you are happy

To be needed.  Best of all

Is to work on ships

That sail far away,

Tying knots in the ropes, bailing water

caulking walls and guarding the freight.

Best of all is to collapse in exhaustion,

When evening comes.  Best of all, at daybreak,

With the first light of dawn, to awaken,

To stand against an immovable sky,

Ignoring the impassable water,

And to lift the ship above the waves,

Sailing toward the ever recurring shore of the sun."

 - The Voyage Out by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Lilian M. Freidberg,  from Last Living Words, Green Integer Press, Copenhagen & Los Angeles: 2005.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was born in Carinthia and began editing and writing scripts for Austrian radio. She  studied extensively, earning her doctorate in philosophy for work on Marin Heidegger’s thought. She was close to other poets and writers including, Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, and Max Frisch.  Bachmann died from complications as a result of a fire in her apartment in Rome, when she lived from 1953 on.   These facts, combined with her complex vision of 20^th century historical events, lent an air of mystery to this feminist before her times.  Her poetry is infused with images from Art Nouveau and Surrealism.

Images: by Odilon Redon

1. The Path to the Sea, no date, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

2. Flower-Clouds, 1903, Art Institute of Chicago.

3. Underwater Vision, 1910, Museum of modern Art, NYC.

4. Nocturne, no date, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

5. Orpheus, c. 1903-1910, Cleveland Museum of Art.

6. Mysterious Boat, c. 1897, private collection.

7. La Coquille, 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
8..Visionary Head, 1907, private collection.
9. The Yellow Sail,  c. 1905, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
10.Decorative panel for residence at Dommency, 1902, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.  

Leon Bonvin

Since I posted an article  about the French artist Leon Bonvin (1834-1866) a year ago today, I have kept searching out his work and now have more to share.  Using watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink, Bonvin managed to create pristine lines and colors both delicate and buoyant, that are realistic while conveying something of his hunger to create, to get it all down on paper.  Bonvin felt keenly his inability to afford oil paints but we find no lack in the watercolors and charcoals he created.

Life was hard for the Bonvins,  a large family.   Francois (1817-1997) was  the first child, born in Paris to a policeman and a seamstress.  After his mother died when he was four years old, the father remarried another seamstress and there were nine more children   Leon, the family caboose, grew up at an inn the family ran in the village of Vaugirard (now a suburb of Paris).  

Both boys showed an early desire to draw, but Francois, who grew up in Paris, was able to spend time at the Louvre, even though apprenticed to a printer at age thirteen.  Not especially healthy and never well to do, Francois helped his younger brother as he could, encouraging Leon to keep at his art.

The work of an innkeeper is never-ending, no matter how modest the inn, and the time that Leon Bonvin could devote to his art was limited to  early morning and sunset.  The figure in the garden, immersed as he is his surroundings, is surely Bonvin himself.  Less certain is the identity of the woman sweeping, alos with her back to us.

Interior of a House with an Open Door strikes me as being   autobiographical , contrasting a claustrophobic  interior  with lighted shining path.  Compressed here is the frustration of confinement and a glimpse of a wider world ,obscured by blazing sunlight, or so it appears to the one inside.  And always the implied loneliness, always the spectator waiting by the roadside.

Without wishing to take anything away from Francois Bonvin's lustre, it is painful to think that Leon's pictures brought him so little recognition - and the money that he needed so desperately to support his wife. 

On January 29, 1866, Bonvin,  desperate to earn money to support himself and his wife, carried a portfolio of his work to Paris where a short-sighted art dealer refused to place his pictures, telling the artist that they are "too dark, not gay enough."   I recoil from the thought of despair that accompanied him on his trek toward home.  What he thought can only be guessed at, but his conclusions were grim.

The next day Bonvin hanged himself from a tree in the forest of Meudon, a place that overlooked the plains of Issy that the artist depicted with such affection in his watercolors.  The little family inn, Bonvin's wife, and the dog and the cat were all left waiting in Vaugirard for his return.

In the charcoal of his little dog, Bonvin's chiaroscuro approaches abstraction, foreshadowing works by Seurat, like the dog guarding the baby carriage.

 







Images:

1. Francois Bonvin - Portrait of Leon Bonvin at His Easel, 1860s, private collection, Cleveland Museum of Art.
2. Leon Bonvin - Still Life in a Kitchen, 1865, Walters Gallery,Bbaltimore.
3. Leon Bonvin - The Rabbit Hutch, undated, Louvre Museum, Paris.
4. Leon Bonvin - Figure in a Garden, Louvre Museum, Paris. 
5.  Leon Bonvin - Woman Sweeping, 1860s, Walters Gallery, Baltimore.
6 Leon Bonvin - The Open Door, Louvre Museum, Paris.
7. Leon Bonvin - Village Scene With a Female Figure, 1863, Walters Gallery, Baltimore.
8. Leon Bonvin - Rural Scene, 1865, Walters Gallery, Baltimore.
9. Moonlit Scene, 1864, Walters gallery, Baltimore.
9. Leon Bonvin - His Little Dog, undated, Louvre Museum, Paris.
10. A White Poodle, a Black Cat, and a Frying Pan,  no date, Louvre Museum, Paris.


Addendum:  During the original post of this article some text and images disappeared into the cloud, but have now reappeared.  My apologies for any confusion.

The Mice

"In our house
The fireflies make good companions
For the mice."
- Kobayashi  Issa

Image:
Utagawa Hiroshige - White Mice with Daikoku's Magic Mallet, 19th century, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston