Halloween

Image: Rookwood Pottery - Something Wicked,  1901, Jason Jacques Gallery, NYC.

Angles And Light

Although he achieved his first successes with unconventional portraits, the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916)  brought an equally fresh perspective to landscape.  What is, in fact, a barn built into the ground becomes through the artist's vision an abstraction of angles andf light.

Three remarkable images, all executed during the summer of 1883,  form a suite that makes a vivid impression of an austere rural aesthetic discovered in situ.  Bright light becomes compatible with mystery when buildings and even entire vistas are cropped.  Thanks to the introduction of photography eccentric cropping became a popular tool for painters at the turn of the last century and Hammerstein seems to be an early experimenter.

Our view of the farmhouse is what one might see from close up.  Then again, looking at The Farm we need time to orient ourselves to the angle of vision Hammershoi sets before us.  We know that we have seen something that looks like this before but what?   With these paintings Hammershoi refutes the idea that landscapes are conventional or unthinking entertainment.  They do not easily let the viewer go.

Images:
1. Landscape with a Barn, 1883, private collection, Denmark.
2. Farmhouse, 1833, Nordisk Galerie, Paris.
3. The Farm, 1883, private collection, Denmark.

Clarence White: Circle Games

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere." - Hermes Trismegistus. second century BCE, Egypt.

Iconography, symbolism, genre.  All are subjects taken with extreme seriousness in the world of art criticism.   But artists intend to evoke a variety of responses other than hushed awe.  The clothespin figures of Atilio Salemme (1911-1955) or the stilt-walking characters of early Lyonel Feininger are meant to bring smiles.  

As a change of pace from the febrile intensity of fin-de-siecle Vienna in recent posts, these photographs by Clarence H. White.  (1871-1925) offer a straightforward delight.  White was an accountant who gradually realized that his photography was more than a hobby.  Encouraging by Arthur Wesley Dow to take up the teaching of photography in 1907 at Columbia University, White went on to found his own influential Pictorialist school.

Something about these low-tech pastimes, watching  raindrops bead on a transparent surface, blowing soap bubbles, or playing a game of quoits suggests the pleasure of thinking  and feeling shapes in motion.    I can't resist mentioning Max Wertheimer's Gestalt  principles of our perceptions of form (proximity, symmetry, etc.) but don't let them take away from the pleasure of looking.

Images:

1. Drops of Rain, 1908, Camera Work, Number 23.

2. Blowing Bubbles, c. 1903, Herbert Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

3. The Ring Toss, 1899, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

In Vienna. The Glasgow School

How  the group of artists known as the Glasgow School became the talk of the Eighth Secession is also a story of Josef Hoffmann.   The Viennese architect produced  the exhibitions of the Vienna Secession in its early years and, although we may not realize it, he invented the "designed" exhibition. What better way to show the work of a group of artists than through a multi-media installation?

The Glasgow School had designed several  stylish tearooms, spaces where women could socialize in public.  Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald,  Charles Rennie Mackintosh,  and Herbert McNair , two sisters and their  husbands, were known collectively as 'The Four.'   The Mackintoshs were the leaders, Margaret specialized in painting and glass art; Charles was an architect.

 Several times Josef Hoffmann had visited England to study the Arts & Crafts  design and it was his invitation that brought the Glasgow group to Vienna.  The tearoom installation at the Eighth Secession used furniture designs from their Argyle Street Tearoom, including the Mackintosh 'rose' high-backed chair.  Critics and the public agreed in their praise of its airy charms  and, as happened with Fernand Khnopff's work  in 1898, local museums and collectors bought.  Interestingly, The Seven Princesses - after Maurice Maeterlinck now in the Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna predates Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh's masterly  Mysterious Garden (Scottish National Gallery).

Critics are still debating how much the visiting Scots influenced Viennese modernism but by 1900 the curvilinear style had become  like the child who doesn't realize how tired she is and keeps on running around until she drops.  The salutary effects of applied geometry were ready to make things new again.  This time to be mixed with elements of  medieval revival and recently discovered  Japanese arts of the floating world.

Images:

1.Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh - frieze for Argyle Street tearoom, c.1898, Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow.

2. unidentified photographer - tearoom installation, 1900, Vienna, Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow.

3. Charles Rennie Mackintosh - chair, c.1898, Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow.

4. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh - Junirose, 1898, Osterreisches Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
5. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh - The Seven Princesses - after Maurice Maerterlinck, 1906, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

6. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh - The White Rose and the Red Rose, 1902, Waerendorfer Collection, Vienna.

7. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh -    Deustche Kunst und Dekoration - cover, May 1902, Heidelberg University Digital Library.

In Vienna. Fernand Khnopff

 

The last time we looked at Fernand Khnopff's In Fosset. Still Waters, (January 31, 2011) I mentioned the impact the painting made when it was shown at the Vienna Secession in 1898.    Another Khnopff landscape, In Fosset. Under The Trees has had an even longer half-life.  Gustav Klimt made several under the influence of its stylized vertical tree trunks, notably Birch Forest. Buchenwald I (1901, Dresden Gemmaldegalerie) and the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch was obsessed by them.   Philippe Roberts-Jones, like Khnopff a Belgian, was the first to point out  the similarity between Khnopff's forest and Rene Magritte's Leader of the Pack (1955),  dominated by an impossibly large, nut-collecting squirrel.  

Comparing Magritte's work with another Symbolist, William Degouve de Nuncques (March 2008), illustrates that the Surrealists shared the Symbolist knack for making pictures out of ideas.  The ideas in Fernand Khnopff's paintings were often presented like Zen Koans, in a form inaccessible to the rational mind. Paradoxically, this held true even when, as he often did, Khnopff created and named his images for the works of writers he admired.

Khnopff's work was the star of the first Viennese Secession in March, 1898, and included mixed-media sculptures like the Head of a Young Englishwoman which was bought by Adolphe Stoclet,  a Belgian engineer  in Vienna to supervise some railroad construction.  Stoclet, who came from an artistic family, (he was a nephew of painter Alfred Stevens) met architect Josef Hoffmann on the trip.   Today Stoclet is remembered for  commissioning Hoffmann to design his new home in Brussels - the Palais Stoclet.

Another Khnopff sculpture, Vivien, stayed in Vienna, bought by the Belvedere Galerie.  It depicts a character who is a thief of hearts,  embodying  two of the artist's preoccupations - Anglophilia and femmes fatales.  Lilie Mauqet, who modeled for Diffidence, was one of three sisters from Glasgow whose Pre-Raphaelite looks appealed strongly to Khnopff.   He  rearranged the branches on his family tree to give greater prominence to the English in his background.

 

 Listening to Flowers was already familiar to German-speaking audiences; it had been published in the journal Pan in 1895.  Inspired by a  Stephane Mallarme poem, the picture was an early example of another type of mixed-media work by Khnopff -  a combination of pastel and photography.  Khnopff was certainly a pioneer in this type of mixing, taking  a keen interest in the new medium and purchasing photographic paraphernalia for various experiments. at home  Some of the artist's friends were surprised after his death, when these items were found in his studio; the artist was accustomed to keeping his own counsel. 

Public attacks on his work at the beginning of his career probably only reinforced Khnopff's reticence.  In 1885, he illustrated the cover of a novel The Supreme Vice.  Khnopff knew its author, Sar Josephin Pelaldon, through their shared interest in Rosicrucianism.  Peladon was a controversial character who  dabbled in occultism and alchemy, and claimed to be the reincarnation of an ancient Babylonian king.  Unfortunately for Khnopff, his cover outraged Rose Caron, an opera singer whose portrait he had recently painted.  She claimed, whether sincerely or for publicity's sake,  that Khnopff had used her image in making it.  The young artist was so upset that he ripped the original pastel up and threw it at her feet.  The Belgian press was thrilled to promote the scandal.

Three years later, another Peladon work Istar was the occasion for one of Khnopff's most disturbing works.  The image shows a woman with her arms raised (possibly bound?) above her head.  Meanwhile, serpent-like vegetation binds her legs and claws at her genitals.   Khnopff's portrayals of women, particularly those of his sister Marguerite, would continue to make viewers uneasy throughout his career.  .  The Viennese magazine Ver Sacrum devoted its issue of December 1898 to honor Khnopff's work. All the works illustrated here were included among the twenty-one that Khnopff chose for the Vienna exhibition.

“we who seem to desire one another, my sister, we recognize each other. 

Yes, you are my sister since you recite softly the hymns of the unreal that I chant at the top of my voice.  Yes, you are my sister, because you have not hearkened to the mortal stammerers of love and the gross jolts of women…

Sisterhood, incest, virtue or sin, assumption or fall, whatever shall be the fate of our love, new born that it may raise over us a mystical aurora…

Be my sister…If incest one day comes to join our mouths, we will have at least made the efoort of a grand fate, and we will have fought, before our downfall, against the earth and instinctive force…”

Attempts to understand Khnopff's intentions are always incomplete.  Charles Baudelaire, another poet admired by Khnopff wrote lines that serve as well as any to get at the fascination Khnopff's work continues to exert.

" We cannot but arrive at this truth that everything is hieroglyphic...Well, what is a poet - I take this word in its widest sense - if not a translator, a decipherer?"

In Fernand Khnopff, the Viennese found much to admire.  His quixotic mixing of sacred  imagery,  symbolic decadence, and uneasy attraction to modernity was just what their new movement in art was looking for.  For Khnopff the triumph must have been especially sweet:  his family had been raised to the aristocracy by the Emperor in 1621.

Images:
1. In Fosset. Still Water, 1894, Osterreisches Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
2. In Fosset. Under the Trees, 1894, Belgian Royal Museum of Art, Brussels.
3. cover of Ver Sacrum, December 1898, Heidelberg University Digital Archive.
4. Head of a Young Woman, 1898, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
5. Vivien, 1896, Osterreisches Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
6. Diffidence, 1893, private collection, Belgium.
7. Listening to Flowers,  1892, private collection, Belgium.
8. After Josephin Peladon. The Supreme Vice, 1885, private collection, Belgium.
9. Istar, 1888, private collection, Belgium.
10. Soltiude, 18981, Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Art, Brussels.
11. With Verhaeren. An Angel, c.1898, Belgian Royal Museum of Art, Brussels.

Landscapeland

Landscape,  the aesthetic version of the natural world, has a long history in art, dating back to the Renaissance, when it began to emerge from the background of  religious subjects.  It fell out of favor with early 20th century  Modernists.  Only recently, exhibitions devoted to the landscapes of Gustav Klimt, who died in 1918, have come as a revelation.  It was left to photographers and the makers of prints, flying under the radar.  They knew what Virgil had written in The Golden Age Returns from the fourth Eclogue:

"...faint traces of our former wickedness will linger on, to make us venture on the seas in ships, build walls around our cities, and plow the soil."

California, growing exponentially at the same time, was a veritable landscapeland, with Sequoia forests and barren depths of the aptly named Death Valley.   Pedro de Lemos, (1882-1954)  director of the Stanford Museum, and William Rice, (1873 – 1963) s an early  teacher of woodcut techniques, created  atmospheric landscapes in  color woodcuts

Unhampered by the limelight, woodblock printers tried on borrowed styles from Japan and Mexico in their works. The diverse imagery of extremes of topography was united by a shared technique which, in turn,

 inspired several distinctive art movements.   Women gained a powerful and early voice in this medium, as did the labor movement and Latino artists. 

Several  artists went directly to the source and traveled to Japan to study printmaking techniques and aesthetics.  Bertha Lum (1869 – 1954) went so far as to spend her honeymoon studying in Japan.  Helen Hyde (1868 – 1919) grew up in San Francisco but was introduced to Japanese printmaking when she studied in Paris with the collector Felix Regamey.(You'll find both Hyde and Regamey elsewhere on this site.)  Hyde moved to Japan in 1899, later returning to live in Pasadena.

Anders Aldrin (1889-1970) immigrated from Sweden to the American midwest as a young man but found his vocation and his subject in southern California.  Attracted to subjects with romantic names - Echo Park, Silver Lake - he probably appreciated the symbolism that attaches to Zabriskie Point.

 

 

Other immigrant artists are more obscure, like Carl Langheim (1872-1941) whose work suggests the influence of by Symbolism and the Nabis.  The Wood could easily be paired something by Charles Lacoste, for instance.

Another transplanted artist, Elizabeth Norton (1887-1985)  moved to San Francisco from Chicago.  An example of a recognizable California urban landscape is her Berkeley stadium (1926). An autumn football game becomes a landscape by virtue of human absence.

The California Labor School in  San Francisco became a center of woodblock printing and, today, the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts has a large collection of color woodcuts.

Images:

1. William S. Rice - Twilight - East Oakland, 1920s, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.
2. William S. Rice - The Adobe House, c. 1920-1935, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.
3. Pedro de Lemos - Fishing Day, undated, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.
4. Pedro de Lemos - Sun-dappled, private collection, California.
5. Bessie Ella Hazen (1881-1946) - Carmel Cypresses, undated, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.
6. Bertha Lum - Point Lobos, 1929< Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
7. Helen Hyde - Church in Cuernavaca, 1912, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
8. Anders Aldrin - Zabriskie Point - Death Valley, undated, San Francisco Museum of Fine Ary.
9. Carl Langheim - The Wood, 1896, San Francisco museum of Fine Art.
10. Elizabeth Norton - U.C. Stadium, 1926,  San Francisco museum of Fine Arts.

Clean New World

"To get the whole world out of bed
And washed, and dressed, and warmed, and fed,
To work, and back to bed again,

 Believe me, Saul, costs worlds of pain."

 - excerpted from The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield 

But some are oblivious to such eternal truths, according to the advertisement (above) for United Laundry of Vienna: "The Viennese are pampered."

In her book Clean New World (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press: 2001), historian Maud Lavin finds connections between the people who do the cleaning (still women, mostly) and the graphic designers of advertising and packaging for cleaning products.  Both groups are relatively less powerful, the value of their work is underrated and, one of the coping skills they use to make their situation less stressful is humor.

Images:

1. Bal Clay - Der Winer ist verwohnt, 1954, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

2. Ernst Ludwig Frank - Olso, c. 1925, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

3. Cecil Charles Aldin - Colman Starch, 1900, Bemrose & Sons, London.
4.  hans Nuemann - King's Soap, 1924, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

Look Again: Robert Demachy

“Do not say that Nature being beautiful and photography being able to reproduce its beauty; therefore photography is Art.  This is unsound.  Nature is often beautiful, of course, but never artistic ‘per se’, for there can be not art without the intervention of the artist in the making of the picture.  Nature is but a theme for the artist to play upon.   Straight photography registers the theme, that is all – and between ourselves, registers it indifferently.”   - Robert Demachy in Camera Work 17 (April 1907):

He detested amateur photography and wrote tirelessly to explicate the artistic dimensions of professional photography at a time when the new medium was  yet undefined.

 

                           A pioneer of French pictorialism, Robert Demachy  (1859-1936)  created unusual effects using  the gum bichromate process invented by his countryman  Alphonse Poitevin in 1855.   In his photographs, Demachy achieved things that  had previously been  seen only  in etching sor watercolors. And he did it before the invention of sophisticated lenses and  other accouterments we now take for granted.  By scratchings and erasures on his plate negatives, Demachy's manipulated backgrounds  enhanced the the grace and stature of his subjects, creating  a satisfying compositional whole. 

Among many Demachy photographs, In Brittany appeared Camera Work (Issue 5 - 1904).  Although the young woman's face is visible only in profile and she is obviously posed carefully, the photographer captures a strong sense of individuality, something he did well.    

        

I think that Speed, often reproduced, was an especially heartfelt image.  Demachy was one of the first Frenchmen to  own an automobile, circa 1890, at a time when they were still experiments in motion, being both expensive and dangerous.  Severity, on the other hand,  is an homage to a new style in painting - Symbolism.    

Demachy's nudes (see Struggle, again from Camera Work 5, for instance) have become known as much for their subject matter as for their place in his work.  I was especially interested to find the portfolio of  sixteen rare prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  Madeleine and Miss S. deserve to be much better known.  Robert Demachy had much to say and his photographs still do, a century after he first made points that are still being debated today. 

Images:

1. En Bretagne, 1904, camera Work 5.

2. Miss S., undated, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

3. Madeleine,  undated, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

4. Speed, July 1904, Camera Work.          

5. Severity,   January 1904, Camera Work.  

6. Woman in a Boater Hat, 1899, Mediatheque, Paris.

7. Hedgerow Under the Snow, 1907, Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Veduta: The Bay Of Naples

“The most beautiful country in the universe inhabited by the most idiotic species.” – Marquis de Sade from Voyage d’Italie, 1775-76.`

Judgied by pictures, the Bay of Naples is the Italian peninsula's most beautiful vista  The French writer Stendhal (1783-1824), who lived for awhile in Milan and served as the French consul to Trieste before the Risorgimento,  wrote that only Naples had "the true makings of a capital."  As for the other cities of the peninsula, .they were merely "glorified provincial towns like Lyon."
In the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the confederation, Naples was the largest and most prosperous city in Italy. Its merchants conducted a robust international trade, its governors enacted a n admirable legal system, and its citizens enjoyed a cosmopolitan culture .

I have never been to Naples, although my father's parents were both born there.  Each moved to the United States in adolescence with their respective families.  Although Naples is one of the oldest cities in the world, when the Greeks arrived to establish a beachhead on the Italian peninsula, they gave it the name Neapolis (its Greek meaning is 'new city') and the name stuck.

Despite evidence to the contrary,  legends persist that Horace and Virgil wrote there.  Beauty does that to people, inspiring poetry and bending mere evidence.  An old Neapolitan rumor has it  that  when moonlight strikes the Possuoli Bay it is so beautiful that even the fish fall under its spell.  The usually rigorous W.H.Auden insisted that evidence proved that the German poet Goethe finally lost his virginity there, at the age of thirty-seven.

Veduta, an Italian word meaning view, has come to be associated with paintings of grand urban vistas, which include large expanses of water.  And mountains are helpful, too.  Naples has both, including one of the most mythologized and ill-tempered mountains, the volcanic Mt. Vesuvius.  The Bay of Possuoli Off the Coast of Naples by the German artists August Wilhelm Julius Ahlborn (1796-1857) is unusually charming, capturing the intense lavender blue of the water, and also curiously typical in its origins.  The veduta appears to have sprung from the paintbrushes of northern Europeans dazzled by the warmth,  light, and  sublimity of beauty and terror in close proximity. Even the starkly modern images created by the visiting Welshman, Thomas Jones (1742-1803), with their cropped views of Neapolitan vernacular buildings, suggest thrilling views just beyond our sight.

  Images:

 1. August Wilhlem Julius Ahlborn - The Bay of Possuoili Off the Coast of Naples, 1832, National Gallery, Berlin.

2. Henry Brokman  - Terrace of the Hotel Cocumella, 1913, Musee du Petit-Palais, Paris.
3. Henry Brokman -  Terrace of the Hotel Cocumella with Mt. Vesuvius in the Background, Musee du Petit-Palais, Paris.
4. Thomas Jones - Rooftops in Naples, Aprile (sic) 1782, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.