Colors Dance: Jean Lasne

For the history-minded, the dates tell.  Jean Lasne (10/07/1911-05/16/1940) was born at Bolbec near Le Havre and he died  when the Germans broke through the French lines at Ardennes, one of the thousands of soldiers killed during the Battle of France.  

Twenty-eight years is not much time for a life or for painting but for Lasne nothing was wasted.  He admired the solidity of Cezanne's shapes, translating them into his own vibrant primary palette.    The emotional impact of Picasso's Guernica was important too;  Lasne wanted to establish a dialogue between the viewer and the interior life of the painter.    In his canvases, the colors seem to talk to each other: the reds and the blues are chattering, the whites and greys murmur to each other. 

"If  feeling animates the canvas, if the canvas has humanity, the feeling will live only in a perfect form – the work  moves  indirectly but it is necessary that it moves".  (translation mine)

Images:
1. Jean Lasne - The Flautist, undated, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Orleans.
2. Jean Lasne - The Hat Box, 1938, Musee des Annees 30, Boulogne-Billancourt.
3. Jean Lasne - La Mappemonde, 1939, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Darkness Spoken

Like Orpheus I play
death on the strings of life,
and to the beauty of the Earth
and your eyes, which administer heaven,
I can only speak of darkness.

Don't forget that you also, suddenly,
on that morning when your camp
was still deep with dew, and a carnation
slept on your heart,
you saw the dark stream
race past you.

The string of silence,
taut on the pulse of blood,
I grasped your beating heart.
Your curls were transformed
into the shadow hair of night,
black flakes of darkness
buried your face.

And I don't belong to you.
Both of us mourn now.

But like the Orpheus I know
life on the side of death,
and the deepening blue
of your forever closed eye."

 - Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, from Darkness Spoken: Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Brookline, MA, Zephyr Press: 2006.
Image: Gustave Dore - detail from Maenads In The Woods, 1879, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

At a time of year when new books are recommended to your attention, I want to suggest something not quite new but extraordinary: the poems of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)   Yes, her writing is often dense with layered  images and has often been described as  hermetic, but the poems offer their special pleasures to those who meet the author in them for the first time. 

Seasons Greetings To One And All !

Merry Christmas
Joyeux Noel
Feliz Navidad
Buon Natale
Zalig Kerstmis
God Jul
Frohe Weihnachten
Prettige Kertsdagen
Mele Kelikamaka
Boas Festas
Gelukkig Kerstfeest

Image: Koloman Moser - December, 1903, for Ver Sacrum calendar, University of Heidelberg Digital Library.

The Feast Of The Seven Fishes

From southern Italy comes a Christmas Eve custom: the feast of the seven fishes.  I like to imagine seven fish feasting, something a little different.  Seven is said to be a lucky number but not if you are number seven on a dinner plate.  As a small child in coastal Massachusetts, I would walk beside my parents along the slatted wooden piers  past the lobster troughs where diners at ocean-front restaurants could select their personal dinner.  They admonished me not to touch  because they lobsters snapped.  I remember thinking that I would, too, if  I were about to be boiled alive like some unfortunate creature in a Grimm fairy tale .   But I'm not.  I'm a vegetarian.  "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly..."

P.S.  The Dedham Pottery is still in operation just south of Boston, not far inland from the Atlantic.

Image:
1.Marthe Picaret - Manger Moins de Viande, Australian War Memorial website.
2. Dedham Pottery - crackle-glaze lobster plate, c. 1869-1929, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Evanescence

When I first saw Michale Schuyt's photograph of the Jantar Mantar, a celestial observatory built at Jaipur, India in the 18th century, I was reminded of Georgia O'Keefe's Ladder To The Moon.  With its seemingly random placement of stone stairways  the observatory looked like a collection of movable gateways waiting for the planes to land.  It looked surreal, rather than what it was, the embodiment of scientifically calculated star-watching posts.   In fact, stairways to the stars

When Karl Marx wrote "everything that is solid melts into air"  he wasn't thinking  about stairs but he could have been.  A stairway is a structure built to solve the problem of ascending and descending in space, something the human body is not well equipped to do.  I think of Marcel Duchamp's scandalous 1913 painting Nude Descending A Staircase and then its 1952 recreation by the photographer Eliot Elisofon.  Once you get past the initial recognition of the joke, you notice how awkward the real moving person appears.


In terms of physics, a staircase is a lever or a treadmill. that multiplies energy.   While Superman can leap tall buildings in a single leap, the rest of us can only reach such heights with a sustained expenditure of energy.  The aunt of Frenchman Jacques-Henri Lartigue seems to have mastered the "leap" decades before Superman.

Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Stairway  displays the co-ordinate geometry of Descartes in action.  Just as the mathematics of multiple variables is encapsulated in Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's design  of a stairway with a curvilinear sluice way running down its center. at Villa Lante in Bagnaia.  The effortless cascading water is a contrast with the energy required to walk up the stairs. 

When the gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler wanted to measure the intelligence of chimpanzees during World War I, he built a staircase.  Then he placed a bunch of bananas at the top and waited to see what the chimps would do.  

According to Aristotle, the stairway represented the divine order of the universe.  In their metaphysical ambition to link heaven and earth, the early Mesopotamians melded the stairway and the spiral when they created their legendary ziggurat. The  double helix staircase at Chateau de Chambord,  its design attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, is a puzzle ( how can you see another person on the stairs but not meet them face to face?).

Clerics and all manner of royal personages have deployed stairways in  grandiose ceremonies and  buildings.  The same impulse appears in modern popular songs with such titles as Stairway To The Stars, Stairway To Paradise, and Stairway To Heaven.   Aspects of worship or pilgrimage are often associated with climbing, as in a Jacob's Ladder.


A stairway implies the magic and mystery of the transitory,  the idea of ascending toward the invisible with all its attendant symbolism.  A spiral or helix stairway could be energy frozen in time and space, like freezing water.  The seven white stairs and the seven millstones of Sevres combine layers of symbolism in marmoreal tranquility.

A neglected stairway is a melancholy sight, its disrepair suggesting better times have gone by.  Moss sets into the cracks as ivy curls around the trees in Valenciennes's  watercolor.  Even the light seems to be in retreat.

A century after Valenicennes, a grand staircase at Parc de Sceaux near Paris, as photographed by the recent immigrant Andre Kertesz, is the image of desertion.  No footsteps have disturbed the wind-blown leaves from their resting places, no broom or rake has tidied them.  A stairway, and a grand one at that, it commands respect for human ingenuity as it reminds us of the flux at the heart of existence.

Images:
1. Georgia O'Keeffe - Ladder To The Moon, 1958, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.
2. Eliot Elisofon - time-lapse photograph of Marcel Duchamp descending a staircase - NYC, 1952, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
3. Jacques-Henri Lartigue - My Aunt, 1906, Association des Amis de J.-H. Lartigue, Paris.
4. Oskar Schlemmer - Bauhaus Stiarway, 1932,  Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
5.  Carlo Ponti -  Palazzo Contarini della Scala, c. 1850s, National Galleries of Scotland.
6. Kokkei Shinbun Sha, publisher - Worshipers Going To the Oku No In From Ehagati Sekai, 1907, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
7. Bernard de Jongghe - The Seven White Stairs And The Seven Millstones, 1990, Cite de la ceramique, Sevres.
8. Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819) -   A Cobblestone Stairway Covered With Moss, undated, Louvre Museum, Paris.
9. Andre Kertesz -  Le parc de  Sceaux in Autumn, 1926, Mediatheque, Paris.

Our Winter Number Begins Here

Image: Helen Dryden - Fashion Fete, November 1914, Museum of the City of New York.

Crossing The Bridge To Abtsraction And Back: Janet Fish

"There are no such things as still lives." - Erica Jong, from Fruits & Vegetables, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1970

Definitely not in the paintings of Janet Fish.    For almost half a century, Fish (b. 1933) has executed compositions of extreme complexity while at the same time using even the brightest colors to create illusions of transparency.  Equally dazzling displays of glass and shrink wrap suggest the comfort of an artist who encountered Pop Art early on.  The works in her first solo exhibition in 1971 sold out before the show opened.  Even people who don't recognize the artist's name have seen her iconic images of canned fruits and massed bottles of Smirnoff vodka or Kraft dressing.

 Fish has said that she turned to the painting of still life as a bridge between representation and abstraction.   When she was a student at the Yale School of Art in the early 1960s, abstract expressionism was a weighty orthodoxy, enforced by New York critics and difficult for young artists to ignore.  Representation was considered old-fashioned, abstraction equaled progress, and the arts post-war were about progress just as  much as business was.  "Progress is our most important product" was the official motto of General Electric, after all.  Fish recalls that "I told a cold look at the product - all hot air and mirrors - it didn't mean anything to me.  It was a set of rules."

Luckily for Fish, one of her first mentors was Alex Katz,  who painted the way he wanted to and encouraged Fish to find her own way, too.  Unable to get an academic position after graduation because of her gender,  moved to New York City where she existed on odd jobs and kept painting.  "My mother had as much influence on my career as any of my instructors did - probably more," Fish told a reporter in 1982.

  "To alter the color is to change the feeling," according to Fish, so her turn to more delicate, abstemious use of color suggests  new interests.  For an artist whose work is described as distinctly American, her use of objects from Japan is notable.   In Dragon Kite the plate, the bag and the tablecloth are covered with scripts that are part of the composition while maintaining their discrete existences   Like Orange Pink Green  and other  recent works, color is still important although it is used sparingly.
For Fish, whose early training was dominated by academic arguments, it may be perverse to suggest that her newer paintings bring to mind an argument from the 19th century academies of Europe, but here it is.  Is drawing primary or does a painting need color to be successful?  The best answer is that there is no answer, a Zen koan.   Maybe this is the message of the Dragon Kite.

Quotes are from the essay Janet Fish by Judith Stein, D. C. Moore Gallery: 1998.

Images by Janet Fish, from the D.C. Moore Gallery in NYC unless otherwise noted.
1. Dragon Kite, 2007.
2. herb Tea, Smith College Museum of Art,  Northampton, MA.
3. Dishes from Japan, 2003. 
4. Orange Pink Green, 2003.
5. Turkish Delight, 2003.
6. White Tulips, 1999.

In Praise Of Folly

Ever since the advent of photography, its  promise of absolute realism in representation has been qualified by acts of human ingenuity, before, during, and after the picture is taken.  Our vexation at the complexities of a seemingly straightforward medium is encapsulated in the quip: "Who are you going to believe - me or your lying eyes?"

As if on cue, a white swan glides past a small stone house.  An idyllic winter day in the country, with snow on the roof, but not too much,  no obvious signs of travail and no hint of ice on the water to trap the stately waterfowl. 

We could be looking at a village in Normandy but it turns out to be Le Hameau de la Reine, the queen's hamlet, built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette by her favorite architect Richard Mique on the grounds at Versailles.  Loyal to the end, Mique  ( "un artist savant, habile, et digne de plus de gloire" - par Anne Higonnet) and his son were executed by a tribunal of the revolution for trying to save the life of his queen.  

Model farms were among the favorite playthings of the French aristocracy in the 18th century, providing the excuse for adults to indulge in dress-up, costuming themselves as milkmaids  and shepherdesses.  The painter Fragonard duly recorded such happy moments, but to an enraged citizenry they may have looked like evidence of folly.  Today, Le Hameau is classified as a folly by architects, meaning that it was designed for pleasure or that is was  a  fake, like a Potemkin village designed for another 18th century monarch, Catherine the Great of Russia. 

But there is a difference between the artificial and the fake, and Marie Antoinette intended her model farm as more than a plaything.  It provided food for the royal family, a home and a livelihood for poor local peasants and an example of  virtuous self-reliance to the nobility.  Orchards and gardens were cultivated, cows provided milk, chickens laid eggs, and fish from the ponds were caught and cooked.  It even offered a  respite from the cavernous spaces of the thousand rooms of the chateau, a  more human sense of scale. 

Where this photograph fits in the story, the viewer decides.

For further reading:

Versailles and the Trianon by Pierre de Nolhac New York, Dood, Mead & Company: 1906.

Marie Antoinette, the Life of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig, translated form the German by Eden and Cedar Paul, New York, Viking Press: 1933.

Image: Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le colombier du Hameau de la Reine sous la neige. Versailles, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris, RMN.

Luminance

As the days get shorter in the Northern Hemisphere my contrarian thoughts turn to light.  Luminance is the term for perceived lightness, defined by scientists as the amount of light that comes from or is reflected off a flat surface (like a painting).  Color and light are processed by different parts of the eye/brain, and only in primates apparently. 

In Places des Lices. Saint-Tropez, Paul Signac gives a bravura demonstration of how luminance works and also why painting with dots - pointillism - does as well, even though the science behind that theory has been superceded by photometry.  Each area of light within the picture is composed of dabs of several different colors but, because each dab has equivalent luminance, the colors blend in a pleasing manner.

There are other things  in Signac's painting that are not immediately visible.  The man sitting on the bench has  the perfect day to himself.  Being human ourselves, we notice him first but although he has the scene to himself he is not the subject.  The trees have been (de)formed by the winds that blow off the Mediterranean, something that Signac, an amateur sailor, was particularly attuned.to. As he sailed around the Mediterranean, he might possibly have read Afloat, a lyrical travelogue written by Guy de Maupassant and published in 1888.  In any case, both artist and writer made a point of visiting as many ports as possible.

Afloat has recently been translated from the French by Douglas Parmee and published in the U.S. by New York Review Books.

Image: Paul Signac - Place des Lices. Saint-Tropez, 1893, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Black Birds

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free."
 - Blackbird by John Lennon & Paul McCartney, 1968.

One is called the common blackbird and the other is the rare Himalayan blue magpie but they are related.  Both have bright red bills, both are talkative, and intelligent. Indeed the pie bleu is considered by biologists to be one of the most intelligent of all animals.
As to the artists, one is Simon Albert Bussy (c.1869-1954), the son of a shoemaker who married Dorothy Strachey, sister of Lytton, and the other is porcelain painter Henri Lucien Lambert (1836-1909).   Both were French and both used birds often as occasions for decorative bravura in their work.
Although we often think of decorative elements in connection with abstraction,  for these two artists decoration was anchored in reality.  It is true that Bussy's blue magpie has lilting tail-feathers not seen in nature but it is this touch that redeems the stiff  background composition.  The French were already in the grip  of japonisme in 1873 when Lambert designed a set of dinnerware for the firm F.-E. Rousseau. Lambert's designs were an advance in verisimilitude over their previous Japanese-style dinnerware, designed by Felix Bracquemond.  Lambert's birds and animals, although stylized, appear in their natural surroundings, and draw on his familiarity with a variety of Japanese artists beyond Hokusai and Hiroshige.  So fully  realized is each plate that viewing them individually is even more satisfying than looking at the complete set.  Nothing common about that.

Images:
1. Heni Lambert - Plate with blackbird, c.1873-1875, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Simon Albert Bussy - Himalayan Blue Magpie, 1925, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Roubaix.

A Philosopher In Paint: Augustus Vincent Tack

What got me thinking about Augustus Vincent Tack again was that I recently saw Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life.  Malick once wrote an introduction to a book of translations of the philosopher Martin Heidegger and it is possible that he is also familiar with a little known artist.  The sequences in The Tree of Life that give imaginative form to the creation of the cosmos would like at home with Tack's paintings.  What Malick wrote about Heidegger could also be the introduction to Tack:
"If we cannot educate ourselves to his purposes, then clearly his work will look like nonsense."














It is easy to imagine the paintings of Augustus Vincent Tack  (1870-1949) hanging in a gallery along with the Abstract Expressionists, even though they rejected the ideas that inspired Tack's art.  For Tack, the artist and the viewer  share a synesthetic experience, with colors evoking movement and emotion.   Synesthesia had become popular through  the colored vowels of Arthur Rimabud's poem Les Voyelles to the paintings of Kandinsky.  For post-war painters, the very idea was anathema.

In recent decades, Tack's work has suffered unfairly from a  form of guilt by association.  His images were associated with unfashionable ideas and so his work has been neglected.    During his lifetime, Tack was fortunate to have a sympathetic patron in the critic Duncan Phillips, who bought dozens of Tack's paintings.   When Phillips opened his eponymous museum, the Phillips Collection, in 1921, he commissioned murals from Tack for the museum.   But having most of your work located in one place can limit your visibility, as the posthumous fate of Dwight William Tryon at the Freer Gallery (also in Washington, D.C.) suggests.

Augustus Vincent Tack belongs to a stream in American art that has recently been called a third way, for its blending of European and Asian influence. Tack admired the japoniste John La Farge (1835-1910) above all other American artists, and extended the older artist’s use of the abstract and decorative properties of Japanese art in his own work.  Phillips saw it that way, too, writing that Tack’s work carried “forward the La Farge tradition in American painting."

Where Asian art is seen as  static, Tack's is restlessness expressed in two dimensions.  His frequent use of a conceit borrowed from architecture - the lunette, or half-moon arch -  as a framing device, disguises the absence of any perspective point.  The artist puts the restlessness of our eyes to work to achieve his ends.  Some critics who disliked this, criticized  Tack's "distortions."

“Who has not watched the rhythmical serrations of sand, or snow -drifts blown by the wind, or wind blown clouds, or the reflections of leaves in the water, or patches of sweet fern growing on a hillside, or rain-stained walls or the the foliage of thick growing crops?” 
( Augustus Vincent Tack, c. 1944. )

Even in his more conventional early works, like Windswept, Tack's landscapes  are decorative in the way he uses  patches of rocky soil as counterpoint to the surrounding snow.

Phillips often displayed Tack's paintings with photographs by the contributors to Camera Work.     And, in fact, Alfred Stieglitz had done something similar is his photographic series Equivalents.

In 1928, Duncan  Phillips realized his dream of having a gallery  decorated with murals by Tack.   The space, a music room which had irregular proportions, was challenging.    Tack used all his favorite resources, including Catholic mysticism and Platonic philosophy.  During several trips to Italy in the early 1920s, Tack studied the Renaissance paintings of Giotto.  He also  responded strongly to encounters with old Roman mosaics.  Phillips was exultant at the result, calling it a "Hall of Cosmic Conceptions" , a place where the unity of life and art  became visible.  

You may also be interested in The Extraordinary John La Farge posted here April, 10, 2009.

Images:
1. Augustus Vincent Tack - Aspiration, 1931, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
2. Augustus Vincent Tack - Liberation, a lunette for the music room, 1929, Phillips Collection.
3. Augutus Vincetn Tack, Rhythm, 1929, music room, Phillips Collection.
4. Augustus Vincent Tack - Time and Timelessness, c.1943, Phillips Collection.
5. Augustus Vicent Tack, Allegro, 1929, music room, Phillips Collection.
6. Augustus Vincent Tack -  Windswept, c.1900-1905, Phillips Collection.
7. Alfred Stieglitz - Equivalent, 1929, George Eastman House, Rochester.
8. Augustus Vincent Tack - Far Reaches,  1930, Phillips Collection.
Augustus Vincent Tacck - Night.Amargosa Desert, 1935, Phillips Collection.