THE BLUE LANTERN

The Androgyne And The Magician

2012-02-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

Duality is an idea with a long history. Its most enduring symbol is an opposition between masculine and feminine, yin and yang. One way out of this unsteady binary state is through the figure of the androgyne, as in the hero/ine of Virigina Woolf's Orlando (1925).

When Fernand Khnopff met Sar Josephin Peladan in 1885 the circumstances were as dramatic as the Frenchman could have invented. Born Josephin Peladan, the magician of mysticism gave himself the honorary title of Sar, claiming it had been bestowed on his ancestors by a Babylonian king. The two men found in each other a rapport based on their fascination with androgyny.

Peladan invited the young artist to make an illustration for Le Vice Supreme, his 1884 novel of an artist who creates "an angel, without sex, the synthesis of a young man and a young woman." In the event, the result was not one of Khnopff's better works but it caused a sensation. Given that another Belgian artist Felicien Rops had illustrated the first edition it began an enduring enmity between the two artists. Eight years later, in 1893, Rops wrote in a letter to Armand Rassenfosse, "Knopff 9sic) no longer imitates the French; he has sunk up to his chin in the boots of the Englishman Burne-Jones."
Rose Caron, an opera singer who had sat for the artist, claimed that Khnopff' had appropriated her face for his nude woman. Khnopff was so upset at the charge that he confronted Caron, ripping the original sketch and throwing it at her feet. The press was thrilled to promote the scandal. Predictably, Peladan's sequel La Vertue Supreme, published in 1900, attracted little attention.

Khnopff went on to illustrate Peladan's Istar and Femmes Honnettes! (1888). For Istar he created a truly sensational image of a woman in the throes of passion, her eyes closed (and not in psiritual contemplation) her head thrown back, while a horrible phallic-looking plant writhes around her groin. Whether her bondage is literal (hands tied behind her head?) or figurative hardly matters.

Pallentes Radere Mores, roughly translated as "Immoral people turn pale under the lash of satire" was the frontispiece for Femmes Honnettes! (Honest Women!). The motto was taken from a satire by Persius (34-62 CE), a Roman poet who work became popular during the Middle Ages. The hands of the well-dressed woman reaching toward the toothsome nude suggest a world of dissimulation.

Years later, Khnopff told journalist Helene Laiilet, "Art is not a necessity." A sentiment that fits uneasily with Peladan's plan for a priestly class of artists whose work would promote spiritual evolution. Eventually the reticent Khnopff moved away from the garish Peladan. In the meantime, Peladan incorporated L'Asssociation de l'Ordre de la Rose Croix du Temple et du Graal in 1888 with its telltale reference to medieval times. Erik Satie became music director for the group and in the two years (1890-1892) before he broke with Peladan, Satie composed his most innovative music.

The Salon Rose-Croix, exhibited annually from 1892 to 1897 in Paris, to a large audience, lured by Peladan's notoriety, although the artists who participated were hardly a shabby group, including Edmond Aman-Jean, Eugene Grasset, Carlos Schwabe,, and Jan Toorop. At the first Salon in March, 1892, Khnopff's I Lock My Door Upon Myself captured public attention.

“My mind beats for no one; I live in myselffor myself. I feel with my mind. Ibreathe with my brain, I see with my mind, I die of impatience andlonging. No one here can sate my wishesor soften my lack and I have forgotten how to cry. I am alone, I rest and can wait.” – from Seraphitus Seraphita by Honore deBalzac, 1834.

Because Khnopff used titles for some of his pictures from poems by Christina Rossetti and because he used red-haired models, it is easy to see a pre-Raphaelite bent. But I Lock My Door Upon Myself and Who Shall Deliver Me are veritable catalogs of the artist's personal imagery. The locked room contains many possible exits. The window at right opens onto a scene of Bruges, the corridor behind the woman looks like the ones in early Flemish primitive paintings, and the table she leans on has been likened to a coffin. A circular mirror reflecting a vaporous scene, a bust of Hypnos that Khnopff had recently seen on his first visit to the British Museum, a faded poppy and arum lilies.

Khnopff's art is a demonstration of hise neo-Platonic belief that all natural things have a correspondence with a deeper truth behind the image. Khnopff used the arum lily as this emblem for androgyny. The flower belongs to the gynadnric class of plants, having both male and female characteristics which makes it an apt floral symbol for the ideal.
In Arum Lily, the model is Lily Maquet, one of three daughters of a Glasgow architect living in Brussels. who posed for the artist. She wears the armor-like white dress, and seems trapped between the lily and the curtain that separates her from past, represented by an antique column.

"Khnopff has created a type of ideal woman. Are they really women? Are they not rather imaginary feminites? They partake at the same time of the Idol,of the Chimera, and of the Sphinx and of the Saint. They are rather plastic androgynes, subtle symbols, conceived according to an abstract idea and rendered visible." - Jean Delvillle

Something else that Khnopff told Helen Laillet in their interview which appeared in Studio International for December, 1912: "The expression of the mouth is the truest, there it is impossible to dissimulate." You can peel this statement like an onion. It goes against the common wisdom that the eyes are the window of the spirit, through which we most fully experience another person. with Khnopff's opaque or averted glances. Its suggests dissatisfaction with what he saw there and, as a corollary, the goal of dissimulation and concealment. And the mouth can be greedy or cruel. When I look By The Seaside or many of Khnopff's pcitures, I'm reminded again of Norma Winstone's lyric A Timeless Place.

"The summer sky I saw reflected in the colour of your eyes,
but somehow I could never peel away the layers of disguise.
I'm drowning now, I'm slowly sinking in a sea of blue and green
Where what you are is never seen. How can anybody know you?"

Note: Thank you to Neil Philip for his help with the Latin and with Roman literature.
Images:
1. Alexander Seon - Portrait Of Josephin Peladan, 1891, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.
2. Fernand Khnopff - Le Vice Supreme, frontispiece 1885.
3. Fernand Khnopff - With Josephin Peladan, Istar, 1888, Wolf Uecker Collection, Lausanne.
4. Fernand Khnopff - With Josephin Peladan. Pallentes Radere Mores, 1888, Cheramy et cie, Paris.
5. Fernand Khnopff - Le reflet bleu (Blue Reflection), 1911, private collection, Brussels.
6. Carlos Schwabe - poster for the Salon Rose+Croix, March 1892, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
7. Fernand Khnopff - I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
8. Fernand Khnopff - Arum Lily, modeled by Lily Maquet, 1895
9. Fernand Khnopff - At the Seaside, 1890, Mme Paul Philipsson, Brussels.

"My Dream Will Become Your Reality"

2012-02-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

" ..there can be no doubt that the guardians of the sun gate were put there in answer to the question, 'Why do the dead return not?' The beasts fawn on all who enter, but rend all who would pass thence again." - William Lethaby, from Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, London, Percival & Co.: 1892

After more than a century Caresses still startles, even without the frisson of knowing that the face of the woman/leopard is modeled after the artist's sister. The androgyne has been an ideal at least since Plato's Symposium where the brother-sister relationship seemed to offer a way out of the conflicts of sexuality. Closer to Khnopff's time, the theme reappeared in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg as a morality that might encompass perverse urges. And in French literature the place of honor that Shakespeare's Hamlet holds in English belongs to Racine's Phaedre, a play about incest.

When Khnopff was questioned about his intentions for the picture he replied that the image is a lot less mystical than people think; that it is a completely contemporary allegory. It may be an allegory on the choice between power and pleasure embodied in a sphinx and an androgyne but its imagery draws on the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, a popular subject with 19th century painters, notably Gustave Moreau. The leopard symbolized exquisite delight in the Middle Ages, but Khnopff intended a cheetah, the animal closest to the snake. He used the body of a leopard for plastic reasons, he explained. The red desert and the two ruined columns suggest that the two sexes are exiled in some stark burning infinity.

Like Moreau, who created hybrid forms not found in nature, Fernand Khnopff's forms were emblematic, but he used readily available symbols such as circles, mirrors, flowers, animals. The blue wings and the closed eyes of Khnopff's Icarus are the stuff of sleep and dreams. His sleeping Medusa is also an intensely personal revision of a well known mythological character. When Khnopff told the Italian journalist Marghareta Sarfatti that Hypnos "is the only deity I recognize" he acknowledged the centrality of dreams in his imagery. And always, although not acknowledged, that gorgeous Memling blue that he knew from childhood in Bruges.

"Behind appearance is a reality which appearance expresses but can never fully disclose. Beauty is a sort of symbolic disclosure. It is the invisible made visible through expressions, the revealing 'garment' of the invisible and kin to our natures." - Theodore Jouffrey, from a lecture to the Royal Acaemdy of Art, 1842.

What strangeness lies behind this voluntary solitude, immobile yet attentive - to what thoughts? The Symbolist belief that silence is necessary for spiritual revelation has links to many religious and occult practices.

"In the most remote antiquity, ornamentswere emblems. The jewels which adorned the men and women bore the imprintof a profound sentiment, or better, contained an illusion to some religiousidea...were less real representations than the forms of writing, thought madesensible." - Charles Blanc, from Grammaire des Arts decoratifsin Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris, H. Laurens: 1876

"...to distinguish between the invisible and the hidden. For example, a letter in an envelope is visibly hidden, but not invisible." - Fernand Khnopff

Encadrement, or framing, was very important to Khnopff. From the French, the word carries the dual meaning of both framing and encircling. In the novel Against Nature (1884), J.-K.Huysmanns asserted that the artist is one who remains outside time. The multiple framing devices in Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff distance the viewer, so does Margeurite's averted glance. The white dress and the long gloves are a kind of armor. One arm is locked by the other in a hidden gesture. The door behind her is closed, an emblem of the space that separates the viewer (and the artist) from her. There are markings that suggest hieroglyphics on the hanging that drapes the door, but we cannot decipher them.

The golden circle was Khnopff's mandala. The circle is usually positive, symbolizing unity, perfection, and sacred form in geometry. The Latin word for gold - aurum - is similar to the Hebrew word for light - aor.

Khnopff often used the tondo, a round form from the Italian Renaissance. I suspect that his interest was specific enough that he would have known that its earliest instance was Burgundian and, thus, associated with Bruges, once seat of the Burgundian court. But there are more ambiguous interpretations of the circle and the erudite Khnopff was likely aware of them as they were common currency in his time. In his play The Birds (c. 414 BCE), Aristophanes claimed that each of us begins as a circle, without arms or legs. Medeival alchemists contended that the first sphere was a skull.

A mirror image has commonly symbolized art because both are mimetic, representing the sensible world. In light of Khnopff's neo-Platonic belief that human passions are elevated through their abstract expression, it may be that in With Gregoire Leroy. My Heart Cries For Other Times the artist intends us to question whether the reflection is an illusion or an emblem of the soul. There is more to this image than narcissism just as there is more to contemplating the past than nostalgia.

“We are merely the stars’tennysballs, struck and bandied which way please them.” – from The Duchess ofMalfi by John Webster, c. 1613.

By the time he completed Memories at the age of thirty-one, Fernand Khnopff was the most famous artist in Belgium and had an international reputation. He used photographs of Marguerite in making the picture. Through the powdery medium of pastels he created a timeless place, without shadows. I think of this picture as une ronde des femmes. The three women at left, with the youthful Marguerite-of-the-white-dress in front are like an exercise in time-lapse photography. The woman in the center, the only one with her back to the viewer, is turned toward this tableau. Like the Portrait of Marguerite, she clasps her tennis racket behind her back in a locked gesture. The knowledge that Marguerite married the next year and moved away to Liege seems a palpable presense.

The chimera, a character with specific attributes in Greek mythology, is also simply an imaginary creatre composed of incongruous parts, or even an unrecognizable creature from a dream. Here Khnopff's version, part animal and part human, stands in front of a woman who holds in her hands a veil that separates reality and dreams.

"My dream will become your reality." - (Sar) Josephin Peladan

What Peladan said, Khnopff, whose works Peladon adored, achieved. The painter of introspective portraits and Barbizon landscapes would never have cast the spell on viewers that this enigmatic purveyor of dreams has. But in retrospect, even Fosset in the forest of Arden appears to be a place "where what you are is never seen."

Images:
Caresses, 1896, Musee Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussles.
A Mask, 1897, Hambourg Kunsthalle.
Icarus, undated, Maitre Poirier Collection, Brussels.
Medusa, 1896, private collection, Belgium.
The Golden Tiara, 1909, private collection, London
Portrait of Margeurite Khnopff, 1887, Musee Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
Brown Eyes And Blue Flower, 1905, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.
With Gregoire Leroy. My Heart Cries for Another Time, 1889, private collection, Belgium.
Memories, 1889, Musee Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
Chimera, c. 1910, Marcel Mabile Collection, Brussels.
In Fosset. An Evening, 1886, Hearn Family Trust, New York.

For further reading:
1.The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff by Jeffrey Howe, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press: 1892.
2. Catalogue Raisonne by Robert Delevoy, Catherine Croes, Gisele Ollinger-Zinque, Editions Hossmanns, Brussels: 1979, 1987. Attributions, courtesy of.
www.expo-khnopff.be

Bruges & Fernand Khnopff

2012-02-06T09:03:00.000-08:00

"What is the effect of an early education and of peculiar surroundings upon a disposition abnormally sensitive and precocious?...Like birthmarks, these reflections and impressions grow with us - sometimes hidden, often shown in disfigurements, always there...Bruges has much to do with the art of Fernand Khnopff." - Walter Shaw Sparrow, Magazine of Art, London, 1890.

Idealized memories of childhood are common enough, and probably explain the persistence of the myth of a golden age. D'Autrefois, or other times, often give the subtext to Khnopff's art. We interpret at our own risk.

"Where life was concentrated in two or three rooms and where the salons were only used once a year for official receptions, only after ward to be closed once again for the length of the long silent winter but also in the desolation of the summers. grandiose dwellings, places of oblivion and solemnity, where a child's spirit is almost forced into melancholy meditations and solitary pondering...." - Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert on the Khnopff family in Bruges.

According to Pol de Mont, director of the Museum of Fine Arts-Antwerp, Fernand Khnopff told him in 1901 of the countless hours spent playing with his younger brother Georges in the cellar of the family home in Bruges. Khnopff's vivid memories of staring out the windows just above the waterline of the canal may have been the source of his later idiosyncratic image cropping.

"I have often been reproached for cutting the heads off my personages with the frame which surrounds them, but in doing that I have had each time a precise goal. Thus, in L'Offrande, I had wanted to give the impressions of a very large figure seen on high from below," (Fernand Khnopff quoted by Edmond-Louis de Taeye in Fernand Khnopff, in the sereis Les artistes Belges contemporains, Brussels, Castaiagne, 1894).

Edmond Khnopff (1826-1900), the artist's father, was a royal magistrate in Bruges. where Khnopffs had lived since 1726. Originally from Austria, the family had been elevated to the nobility by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1621 and several generations had served as lawyers and judges in the Austrian Netherlands. The independent Belgian nation was twenty-eight years old when Fernand Khnopff was born on September 12, 1858 at his grandparents' home, a castle in Dendermonde, east of Ghent His younger brother Georges was born at Bruges in 1860 at Bruges and a sister Marguerite was born in 1864 at Liege. The Khnopffs lived at Langestraat 1, a location with a view of the famous Quai Vert.

Khnopff's methods for keeping the curious at arm's length were themselves an artwork, the aristocratic skill of revealing only so much as he chose. He cooperated with interviewers throughout his career, but on his terms. His descriptions of his only known return to Bruges in 1904 never varied from what he told his friend Leon Tombu: that he had put on dark glasses before leaving the train and never removed them while outdoors. This story, true or not, has an antecedent in Dendermonde. After his grandfather's death in 1868, Khnopff never visited there again.

Khnopff obscured the extent of his use of photography but we still wonder about those dark glasses. In Bruges. A Church (above) shows the interior of the Church of Notre Dame and the altar by Michelangelo. The Khnopff family coat of arms was displayed one of the church walls; by no means was this just one among the many churches of Bruges for Fernand Khnopff

A country with two principal languages is a country in need of interpreters. The polymath Henry Van de Velde (1863-1957) said that he saw in Flemish and wrote in French. Flemish cities - the beads on the rosary of Flanders in Fierens-Gevaert's resonant phrase - existed as a living reminder of.another time So the works of the Belgian symbolists were rooted in reality as much as in dreams.. The repetitious images of stagnant pools and crumbling churches in Symbolist art, attributed to the stories of Edgar Poe Allen, had real-life counterparts in cities like Bruges.

The place that religion had occupied in everyday life hollowed out in the 19th century, leaving a vacancy that the Symbolists filled with a psychological mysticism. In L'Art Romantique (1869) Baudelaire asserted that an affinity exists between spiritual states and the natural world and, furthermore, "art is of value only in so far as it is capable of expressing these mysterious relationships."

What coded messages does this dual image hold? The upper panel is a tondo,a round painting of Marguerite. Enclosed in a circle, symbolizing perfection, she touches the lips of a mask of Hermes. Behind her is a wall hanging white a white crane embroidered on it. The lower panel shows St. Jan's Hospital in Bruges, home to a large collection of paintings by Hans Memling. At the bottom of the frame he engraved words from Aesop's Fables: "Light winged the crane fled." In an interview with Maria Bierme, Khnopff added: "clear is the light of noble thoughts which rise toward the heavens."

The year of Khnopff's Secrets/ Refkections, the Chapel House at St. Jan's hosted the first modern exhibition of Memling's work. It attracted 35,000 visitors but Khnopff was careful to state that he had not seen the Bruges Memlings, which may explain his painting - An Abandoned City - which shows the base of the Memling monument without the Memling statue on top!

Images:

1. Memories of Flanders. A Canal In Bruges, 1904, Hearn family Trust, New York.
2. A Canal In Bruges, 1905, left panel for the triptych D'Autrefois (Of Other Times), current whereabouts unknown, Catalogue raisonne, Croes et al, Brussels: 1979.

3. L'Offrande (the Offering), 1891, pastel, graphite and chalk on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
4. In Bruges. A Church, 1904, Musee Communale, Verviers.
5. Secret. Reflection, 1902, Groeningen Museum, Bruges.
6. Margeurite Khnopff photographed by Fernand Khnopff- c. 1901, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
7. unidentified photographer - D'Autrefois, 1908, Venice Biennial, Venice, Cartlgoe rainsonne, Croes et al, Brussels: 1979.

Fernand Khnopff & Le Regard Hautain

2012-02-03T07:11:00.000-08:00

“Two small, very sharp, metalliceyes, a slightly receding chin, a disdainful mouth, and a head of hair, Oh!Beautiful red hair of a barbarian, describing comma-like curls on his foreheadand giving him a kind of widl crown; upright posture, neatly dressed, a simpleperson who had a horror of appearing disheveled; a Clergyman in the process ofbecoming a Dandy.” – Emile Verhaeren, in L’Art Moderne, 1886.

So the poet Emile Verhaeren took the measure of his friend Fernand Khnopff. Both men were in their twenties at the time and in the process of becoming: Verhaeren, the Belgian poet who narrowly lost out to his friend Maurice Maeterlinck for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911 and Khnopff, the great Belgian artist. Both had also studied law to please their families before turning to art.

Immediately attracted to the avant-garde group Les Vingts in 1883, Verhaeren became the voice of their new art in the magazines La Jeuen Belgique and L'Art Moderne and in his book Quelques Notes sur l’oeuvrede Khnopff (1887). Verhaeren expressed doubts thatvisual art was suited to the expression of ideas. Khnopff had no such qualms and his best works bear him out. The counter argument was made by Theodore Joufrrey in 1842: “Behind appearance is a reality whichappearance expresses but can never fully disclose. Beauty is a sort of symbolicdisclosure. It is the Invisible madevisible through expression, the revealing “garment” of the Invisible, and kinto our own natures…”

But back to the visible world and what Verhaeren had in mind when he used the word Dandy about his friend. A haughty expression doesn't quite convey the weight of the French term le regard hautain that came to be the public face of the Dandy . Charles Baudelaire had written: "Dandyism is not, as many seem to think, an exaggerated love of fine clothes and material comfort. These things, to be perfectly dandy, are mere symbols of his own spiritual aristocracy. Dandyism is primarily a desire to be individually original, but always within the limits of polite social convention. It is the love of startling others and never being startled oneself." Dandyism, so defined, has something to do with art of Fernand Khnopff.

Khnopff began by sketching from nature ar age sixteen to pass the time during the long summer at his family's second home at Fosset. A village in the Haut-Fanges, or High Fens of eastern Belgium., Fosset is in the Ardennes, the Forest of Arden that Shakespeare immortalized in As You Like It. There, where the local people still cherished old beliefs in the occult and druidic tree worship, Catholicism was more a matter of formality than devotion. The dame blanche or white goddess was still venerated. She, too, would have much to do with the art of Fernand Khnopff.

The forests and fields of Arden not so much. Among his several landscapes, done in the style of another storied wood - the Barbizon - Une Crise (A Crisis) painted in 1881 when Khnopff was only twenty- three suggests that landscape by itself was not the subject. Whether he intended a general comment on the searching of youth or something specifically personal is left up in the air. In middle age, Khnopff made sketches of winter scenes at Fosset but the finished painting, La vielle en hiver, again suggests his favorite motto, a variation on an 18th century axiom of Nicolas Chamfort - "One has only oneself".

Images:

1. Fernand Khnopff - Self-portrait, 1879, Jean Willems Collection, Brussels.
2. Fernand Khnopff - Une Crise (A Crisis), pastel, 1881, private collection, Brussels.
3. Unidentified photographer - Fernand Khnopff, probably at Fosst, no date, Editions Lebeer-Hossmans, Brussels: 1979.
4. Fernand Khnopff - Mist in The Ardennes, 1882, private collection, Belgium.
5. Fernand Khnopff - La vielle en hiver (The Old Woman in Winter), c. 1916, Galerie Horta, Brussels.

February by Franz Melchers

2012-02-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Djuna Barnes: A Daring Young Woman

2012-01-29T12:28:00.000-08:00

As a young journalist during the 1910s, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) proved herself fearless. For a woman to break into the profession - and in New York City - she had to be. Within the space of two months in 1914, she persuaded a doctor to force feed her like jailed women's suffragists were, spent time in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with a young gorilla named Dinah, and offered herself as a volunteer damsel-in-distress to firefighters in training at the Sixty-Seventh Street Recruit Center.

Barnes knew how to turn her phrases to a radical deviation from the normal and she executed her aphorisms like leaps from a trapeze with no safety net beneath her. What saved her articles from superficiality was something that now sounds old-fashioned. Barnes had a tragic sense and although she applied wit to her chosen subjects, they also constitute a catalog of potential misfortunes.

Images: from the exhibition Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913-1919, on view until August 19, 2012 at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art.

How it Feels to be Forcibly Fed from New York World Magazine, September 6, 1914.

The Girl and the Gorilla from New York World Magazine, October 18, 1914.
My Adventures Being Rescued from New York World magazine, November 15, 1914.

You may also be interested in Some Hard Captious Star: Djuna Barnes posted here August 26, 2011.

Le Rouet des Brumes

2012-01-27T07:43:00.000-08:00

"Phantom city, mummified city, vaguely preserved. It smells of death, of the middle Ages, Venice, in black, the customary ghosts and the graves." - excerpted from A Walk In Bruges by Charles Baudelaire from Pauvre Belgique, 1864 - reprinted by Editions L. Conard, Paris. .

"In Bruges a miracle of the climate has produced so mysterious chemistry of the atmosphere, an interpenetration which neutralises too-bright colours, reduces them to a uniform tone of reverie, to an amalgam of greyish drowsiness." - excerpted from Bruge-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, Paris: 1892

When the subject is Bruges, metaphor is everything. In the paintings of William Degouve de Nuncques and the novels of Georges Rodenbach atmosphere becomes a force of nature. But what is a force of nature and where is the line that separates it from human endeavor? These are not questions that metaphor can answer. According to Arthur Rimbaud, the French would have been second rates Symbolists without the Belgians.

Bruges became a port city by accident in 1134 when a tidal wave swept inward some eleven miles from the North Sea down the River Zwijn . The diligent citizens of Bruges built a web of canals to take advantage of their good fortune and their continued dredging eventually caused the Zwijn to silt in, leaving the city marooned at permanent low tide. In Psychologie d'une ville: Essai sur Bruges (1901), a book dedicated to the memory of Georges Rodenbach, Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert referred to the dawn of the 15th century as "The Twilight of Bruges"

"The Middle Ages...knew that everythingon earth is a sign, a figure, that the visible is only worth what it extractsfrom the invisible; in the Middle Ages...which were not gullible, as we are, toappearances, closely studied this science and made it the caretaker and theservant of mysticism." - excerpted from TheCathedral (1898) by J.-K. Huysmans, translated from the French by ClaraKing (1981).

The waning of religion left avacuum for nostalgia to fill. A more complicated response was a kind of psychological mysticism in the works of 19th century Symbolists. In the fate of Bruges they found confirmation of their sense of irrelevance to the industrialized present in its glorious art and architecture. What better image could there be than Fernand Khnopff's surrealistic rendering of the Memling Plaatz, named for the great artist Hans Memling (c.1430-1494) . Marooned by a rising tide, the plaza and the base of the statue are rendered recognizably but where is the Memling statue. When queried, Khnopff's reply was that he had never seen the statue.

Belgium has been called 'a country that does not exist", an allusion to its duality: Flemish (Dutch) in the north and Wallon (French) in the south. When it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, it was called the Austrian Netherlands and when it was de-accessioned, as they say in the museum business, the French considered annexing it but didn't.

Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) was born in the French speaking Flemish town of Tournai, poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) came from Saint-Amands in eastern Flanders, and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was from Ghent (Gand) in western Flanders. Maeterlinck,who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911, edging out Verhaeren for the honor, was hailed in his lifetime as 'the northern Shakespeare.' All three wrote in French.

Bruges-la-Morte, the novel and the metaphor, made Rodenbach's name. Equally claustrophobic is a story published posthumously - Le Rouet des Brumes or The Spinning Wheel of the Mists (1901). A refashioning of the myth of Narcissus, it is one of many late 19th century distortions of the myth to extremes never hinted at in its ancient origins. The protagonist of Le Rouet des Brumes is a nightmarish variation on Joris-Karl Huysman's exasperated aesthete, des Esseintes, in the novel Against Nature.(A Rebours, 1884).

Although the narrator identifies himself as a friend of the man who has died in a sanitarium, he recounts the tale with the detachment of a psychiatrist offering a case study. The nameless recluse gradually retreats from the world to a house full of mirrors. Happy at first, he descends into paranoia, only to be found bloody and bruised after attempting to smash through a mirror to "the other side."

"I was not surprised, knowing my friend to be sensitive, knowing besides what impressions can be created....within closed rooms, amidst the dust, the musty odor, the confusion, the melancholy one feels for things that seem to have died a bit during one's absence. Oh, the sadness of evenings of jubilation! Evenings of return, after the forgetfulness one experiences while away. It seems as if all one's sorrows that had remained at home come out to greet us..."

If we are tempted to share the detachment of Rodenbach's narrator, keep in mind that Rodenbach began another work, L'Ami des Miroirs (The Lover Of Mirrors), with these words: "Madness is frequently nothing other than the paroxysm of a sensation that originally appeared to be purely artistic and subtle.' This puts Rodenbach at odds with the artist whose name is most often linked with his, creator of the frontispiece for the first edition of Bruges-la-Morte: the purely artistic and subtle Fernand Khnopff. The circumstances of Khnopff's return to the place he considered his home town were obscured by the artist, whereas Rodenbach, who never returned to his birthplace in Ghent, spoke of it constantly, according to his children.

Note: Artworks by Khnopff were made during the year of his one acknowledged return visit to Bruges in 1904.

Images:
1. Fernand Khnopff - In Bruges. The Minnewater, 1904, Belgian Royal Musuem of Fine Arts, Brussels.
2. Fernand Khnopff - Souvenir Of Bruges. Entrance To the Beguinage, 1904, Hearn Family Trust, New York.
3. Fernand Khnopff - Abandoned City (Memling Plaatz - Bruges), 1904, Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
4. Fernand Khnopff - In Bruges. A Portal, 1904, Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany.
5. Fernand Khnopff - In Burges. St. Jan's Hospital, 1904, private collection, Belgium.
Fernand Khnoff - frontispiece - Bruges-la-Morte, Paris, Flammarion, 1892.
7. Henri Berssenbrugge (1873.1959) - photograph of an artist painting in Bruges, early 20th century, Fotomuseum, Antwerp.

The Year Of The Dragon

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

The year of the dragon begins today. It is an auspicious year. Dragons partake of the five elements: water, earth, metal, fire, and wood. Like poet Walt Whitman, they are vast, they contain multitudes. After a Green Dragon or two, you too will be able to breathe fire.

The Green Dragon Cocktail is a simple, sweet drink whose most unusual ingredient is kummel liquor (a blend of caraway and other spices). While its origins are unclear, the classic version appeared in The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock in 1930. The following recipe makes one Green Dragon cocktail.

Ingredients:

1/2 oz. kummel, 1/2 oz. green creme de menthe, 1 & 1/2 oz. gin, juice of half a lemon, 4 dashes of orange bitters.

Method:
Fill a cocktail shaker half full with shaved ice.
Add the other ingredients and shake gently for 10-15 seconds, being careful not the bruise the gin (!)
Strain the liquid into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon. Drink!

Images:
1. Bertha Lum - Green Dragon Cocktail, 1937, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.
2. Bertha Lum - The Woman In The Chinese hat, 1924, San Francisco Musuem of Fine Arts.

Also: May I direct readers to the excellent Bertha Lum website by Laurent.

Painter Of Mystery

2012-01-20T10:50:00.000-08:00

In the midwinter here is another reason to look forward to spring. A collaboration between two museums is preparing an exhibition on the under-celebrated Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935). Portions of several of the artist's notebooks will be included in the exhibition catalog, revealing his thoughts about his work and his sources of inspiration.

Degouve de Nuncques defies attempts at pigeonholing, even among Symbolists His Pink House (1892) is often suggested as the progenitor of surrealism and, close to home, of Rene Magritte's inverted twilight world. A melancholy disposition and a deep pessimism underlined by personal tragedies - the death of his wife, a paralysis of his hand - appear in his paintings as a scrim that separates us from his images. We look at them and wonder what the artist inscribed there.

It is not obvious what makes the painting Mysterious Garden fit its title but it suggests the artist's puzzlement, perhaps something like this: " A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, .The Great Gatsby, chapter 8 - 1925)

Two years spent on the Balearic Islands off the Mediterranean coast of Spain from 1900-1902, seemed to intensify the artist's attraction to scenes of winter. What remained consistent was the usual lack of figures, the odd black swan or fair wagon, aside.

In recent decades, Degouve de Nuncque's paintings have been included in group exhibitions such as Autour de Levy-Dhurmer at the Grand Palaid in Paris (1973), Mystery and Glitter at the Musee d'Orsay (2008) and The Kiss of the Sphinx at Vienna Kunstforum (also 2008). Only now is a catalogue raisonne of the artist's work in preparation.

Images:
1. Birds In Winter, no date, Frank Welkenhuysen Galerie, Utrecht.
2. The Black Swan, 1895, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.
3. Mysterious Garden, 1891, private collection, Belgium.
3.untitled winter scene, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.
4. The Fair Wagon, 1910, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
5. Apple Trees in Bloom, 1908, private collection, Belgium.
6.. Snowy Landscape With Barge, 1911, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.

For further reading: Nocturnal World - William Degouve de Nuncques, posted here 16 November 2009
William Degouve de Nuncques: Maitre de mystere at Musee Felicien Rops in Namur, Belgium from 28 January 2012 to 6 May 2012 and at Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands from 27 May to 2 September.

His Lyric Pessimism: Albert Baertsoen

2012-01-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

In the heart of Ghent, Albert Baertsoen painted his favorite hour: twilight. At left is the Maison de Bateliers, the boatmen's hiring hall. In the background are the Church of Saint-Michael and an old hotel left over from the First Empire. We look down the canal at a red boat, possibly similar to one where the artist had sat himself down to work.

It may be that the affinity of Albert Baertsoen (1866-1922) for winter scenes had something to do with being born on January 9. What is certain is that neither his travels to Paris and London nor his artistic successes altered his love for Ghent, the city where he was born and where he died.

Belgium was the most industrialized nations in 19th century Europe, and Ghent was a city known for its textile mills. Baertsoen's father was a successful miller, so the family's prosperity made art and music lessons for a talented child possible. Albert became an accomplished musician before he turned to painting.

As a child Albert walked the streets of Ghent with the artist Gustave Den Duyts. The River Lys, seen in Thaw In Ghent was his daily companion. Den Duyts recommended him to Jean Delvin, who became Baertsoen's artistic mentor.. Baertsoen had his first exhibition in Paris at twenty-two.

Baertsoen's work is difficult to categorize, yet it is similar in appearance to the American Luminism A meticulous artist who made many sketches before he began each painting, Baertsoen also excelled at etching. This meditative characteristic of his work connects it to luminism.

His contemporaries saw in his work presentiments of the hidden lives of buildings, akin to the art of Fernand Khnopff, who was born at nearby Dendermonde. Although Baertsoen created no obvious personal mythology in his art, he did share Khnopff's inclination to crop his images in unexpected ways. Whether this owes much to photography or is evidence of the walker's perspective is a curiosity.

What keeps Baertsoen's lyricism from being too pretty is his pessimism. Ghent was the place by which he measured the rest of Flanders. Although he visited Bruges, Baertsoen's interpretation of the medieval city sees beyond the picturesque - abandoned beguinages, convents turned into shops - to its long tradition of devotion. He understood - in the memorable phrase of Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert - that "the targedy of Bruges is that it has failed to detach itself from the rosary of old Flemish towns" (translation mine). Industrialization brought new hardships along with new wealth, something the privileged Baertsoen observed in his work.

Although his artistic output was small, several works take their vantage point from the canals of Flanders, that is from a boat. As one example, in 1898, Baertsoen embarked on a trip down the Ghent-Ternuezen Canal from his hometown to the Dutch port city of Ternuezen. The houseboat was both home and floating studio where Baertsoen painted tranquil scenes of the small Flemish towns along the canal, that gradually were replaced by gritty views of working barges in the industrial north. The Little Watercourse In Flanders At Twilight is a well-known souvenir of the Baertsoen's houseboat days.

The Germans invaded neutral Belgium in the early months of World War I. Flanders became the ground on which some of the war's most horrific fighting took place. Baertsoen moved to London to be with his grown son. The artist was also reunited with his friend Emile Claus as the two worked in the studio of American painter John Singer Sargent. Widespread destruction notwithstanding, Baertsoen returned home to Ghent when the war ended.

Images:

1. A Ghent Evening, 1903, Musee d'Art moderne, Brussels.

2. Thaw In Ghent, 1902, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. The Little Quai, 1902, Emporium Magazine, Volume XVI, no. 96, page 418.
4. A Square In Flanders, Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
5. Voortman House And Park In The Snow, 1900, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Ghent.
6. A Quai In Bruges, etching, 1900, Musee d'Art moderne.

7. Petite cour en Flandre au crepuscule, 1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

8. Lighters in The Snow - London , National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
9. unidentified photographer - Albert Baertsoen, c. 1910, National Library of Art & History, Brussels.
10. The Rope Layers At Nieuwpoort in The Snow, 1895, Museum of Fine Art, Ghent.

For further reading: Albert Baertsoen by Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert, Brussels, G. Van-Orst: 1910. (in French)

The Free Aesthetic In Belgium

2012-01-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

“As if art had aformula!” – Gustave Marissiaux, 1898.

Beginnings and endings are arbitrary but necessary devices for shaping a story. Ten years after the founding of Les Vingt in 1883, a new artistic society - La Libre Esthetqiue or Free Aesthetics - was formed to promote new art in Brussels. Blegium being a small country, there was overlap between the two groups and many of its members shared multiple friendships and influences.

Armand Rassenfosse (1862-1934) and the photographer Gustave Marissiaux (1875-1929) and were longtime friends of the painter Auguste Donnay (1862-1921). Marissiaux traveled widely, making frequent visits to Brittany, Umbria and Venice. TheBelgians were admired for the luminosity of their photographs, but there were doubters.

The recession of 1885-1886 caused a collapse in wages. The Belgian Workers Party pressed for social reforms,including universal suffrage. Protestsin the industrial cities of Liege and Charleroi were brutally suppressed by the authorities. Within this context, Belgian artphotography was seen as a bourgeois retreat from that reality. Edouard Hannon (1853-1931) was a founding member of the Association of Belgian photographers in 1874.

Perhaps the finest Belgian pictorial photographer, Leonard Misonne (1870-1943) was born intomaterial comfort at Gilly, near Charleroi. Missonne studied to be a mining engineer but his frail constitution necessitated a less strenuous occupation. He admired the French painters Millet andCorot, whose influence shows in his subject matter and and perspectives. "Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing; light is everything."

Rassenfosse and Donnay met when they were the principal poster artists for the publisher Auguste Bernard in Liege in the 1890s. Marissiaux photographed his friends, immersed in their collections. As we have noticed before, the aesthetic of ukiyo-e prints translated easily from hand-crafted woodblock printing to new techniques in printing.

Born EdouardAlbert Drains in Paris (1855-1925), the photographer known professionally as Alexandre moved to Brussels in 1875. His technical bravura, hiswillingness to try anything and his use of “instantaneous” flash photography attracted the attention of Khnopff He was in close contact with Les XX,especially Jena Delville, Xavier Mellery and Mellery’s former pupil Khnopff. In 1896 Alexandre executed platinum platesof works by Khnopff, which Khnopff then enhanced with color, creating a series of uniquenew images. This work earned Alexandre aninvitation to join the British Linked Ring Brotherhood (1893-1908), eventually becoming official photographer to theroyal family. He died atNice.

In the work of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) painting and photography were combined in images of the artist's arbitrary, individual symbolism. D'Autrefois (In The Past),. was modeled by the artist's sister Marguerite Freson-Khnopff, although you would have to be familiar with her from his previous works to recognize her likeness here. Khnopff's psychological attitude toward his sister remains an enigma, and a story for another day. But something he wrote in Fashion In Art (1896) suggests the impulses that behind La Libre Esthetique, the idea, and the group he helped to found. (Note: D'Autrefois is the only known existing image that Khnopff planned as the central panel of a triptych intended to be a portrait of the city of Bruges. It was to be flanked on the left by a view of canals and on the right by the tomb of Mary of Burgundy.)

"Can it be true, as skeptics say, that in any work of art there is no thing but what we ourselves find in it, that we admire it, bot for its intrinsic merit, but because it answers to certain feelings of our own, and that we seek in it only a reflection of our own soul? After all, it is quite possible.: - Fernand Khnopff.

Images:

1. Gustave Marissiaux - Auguste Donnay, c. 1911-1914, Museum of Wallon Photography, Brussels.
2. Auguste Donnay - The Imaginary Theater of Maurice Materlinck, Musee Felicien Rops, Namur.
3. Edouard Hannon - Sunbeams, 1897, Museum of Photography, Antwerp.
4. Leonard Misonne - untitled landscape, 1890s, published by Heering-Verlag, Harzburg, 1976.
5. Gustave Marissiaux - Armand Rassenfosse In his Studio, c. 1911-1914, Museum of Wallon Photography, Brussels.
6. Henri Carriere - Red Star Line.Anvers-New York, 1898, University of Liege.
7. Armand Rassenfosse - Genievre la Croix Rouge, Musee d"Ixelles.
8. Alexandre - Morning After The Rain, c.1903, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
9. Fernand Khnopff - D'Autrefois (In The Past), pastel and watercolor over photograph of original work, 1905, Belgian Royal Museum of Art, Brussels.
10. Fernand Khnopff - dream Flowers, 1895, private collection, Belgium.

For further reading:
The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso by Dorothy M. Kosinsk, New Haven, Yale University Press: 1999.

Franz Melchers & Japonisme In Belgium

2012-01-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

This is a story that ends in New York City and began in Belgium. I've written before about the two decades it took from the time I bought a calendar of prints by Franz Melchers at the Metropolitan Museum until the day I held in my hands a copy of L'An, the book that the prints were created for, from the collection of New York University Library.

The date is February 2, 1889. Two exhibitions opened in Brussels on that day, one at the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Art and the other at a private home on la rue Royale. Both the public and the critics eagerly anticipated the sixth exhibition of the avant garde group Les Vingt (The Twenty), knowing it would provide delicious gossip. With new works by Fernard Khnopff and his rival James Ensor, as well as Georges Lemmen and Theo Van Rysselberghe, and the French contingent of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Georges Seurat, lively conversations were guaranteed.

The other event was a gathering at the home of musician Edmond Michotte (1831-1914), a man of many friends, notably artist Fernand Khnopff. Michotte was a japanophile and the owner of a remarkable collection of art, some purchased from his friend, the Parisian dealer Siegfried Bing. Michotte, also a convinced Wagneriite, often hosted salons to show off his latest acquisitions to his friends, the cream of literary and artistic Brussels.

On view were prints by the likes of Houksai, Hiroshige, Harbunobu, and Tokoyuni. The press, sensing the moment, took enthusiastic notice. "Le tout Bruxelles est japonisant. Le japonisme a conquis droit de cité chez nous ; il est à la mode et c'est tout dire." The death of the 'Anglomania' fad was declared; whether Michotte' friend and Anglophile Fernard Khnopff saw it that way is doubtful. A critic for La Jeune Belgique rhapsodized with all the cool detachment of a bee reeling from flower to flower of "radiant art that blossoms spontaneously, as naturally as a flower" (translations mine). Japan, according to M. Destree who had never been there, was "a wonderful and charming country."

If japonisme in Belgium was born that day, it had gestated in Michotte's salon for some time. At his urging, the Belgian government purchased several works for the Royal Museum of History and Art. (The collection is considered to be of the finest quality, its preservation from fading that has altered many ukiyo-e prints a rarity.) Other exhibitions followed at the Association for Art in Antwerp in 1892 and 1893. Along with works from Michotte and Bing, more recent collectors Georges Lemmen and Theo Van Rysselberghe loaned works.

The diagonal, a staple of linear perspective since the Renaissance, appeared as a new invention in the hands of Japanese artists. Rather than lines that converge at a single point, their images balanced and divided by vertical lines and created a sense of depth with multiple but not directly connected planes.
Soon there was even a new magazine La Libre Esthetique (The Free Aesthetic). The Japanese influence is obvious in these images, especially that of Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa (c. 1832). Typically, the influence appears stronger in the graphic arts., where two dimensions are the given. Where the wave cuts across Lemmen's poster for Les Vingts like a caesura through a line of verse, it organizes Auguste Donnay's Jardin sous la neige by a series of meandering diagonals. Decades Later Tin Tin and his fox terrier Milou ride the great wave to adventure.

Back to L'An (The Year) is a book of sixteen poems by Thomas Braun, one for each season and each month of the year, a common organizing principle for books. Lesglaces de Janvier, Les jardins de Fevrier, Les barques du printemp, Lestempetes de Mars, Les chansons d'Avril, les vergers de Mai, Les Fontains deJuin, Les fenetres de l' Ete, Les Papillons de Juillet, Les roses d'Aout, Lesmeules de Septempbre, Les feuilles de l'Automne, Les labours d'Octobre, Lesbrumes de Novembre, andLes sapins du Decembre.

The illustrations are color lithographs, a printing process that had been invented in 1796 by a Bavarian printer Aloys Senefelder, but only became used widely in the 1890s thanks to the popularity of Toulouse-Lautrec's works in the medium. The book takes its shape from Melchers's illustrations; it is large and square. Melchers achieved the effects of color separations seen in Japanese woodblock prints through a laborious process of hand-tinting.

Franz Melchers (1868-1944) was born in Munster innorthwestern Germany. He studied art in Brussels and later at The Hague with JanTooroop. He exhibited at the the International Exposition at Paris in 1889.Melchers died at Anvers (Antwerp) in occupied Belgium in 1944.
Continuing for the rest of this year, The Blue Lantern will begin each month with a Franz Melchers lithograph from L'An.

Images:
1. Herge - Nous sommes perdis, Milou, 1934, from Les Cigares du Pharoun, castmern, Brussels.
2. Georges Lemmen - Les Vingts, 1891, Bibliotheque Royale Albert 1er, Brussels.
3. Auguste Donnay - Le jardin sous la neige, Musee de l'Art Wallon, Liege.
4. Georges Lemmen - The Beach At Heist, 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
5.Theo Van Rysselberghe - La Libre Esthetique, 1894, Bibiliotheque Royale Albert 1er, Brussels.
6.Gisbert Combaz - Interpretation de paysage, 1902, City Hall Museum, Brussels.
7.,8.,9.,10. Franz Melchers - Frontispiece, Spring, Summer, Autumn, from L'An, 1897, Brussels.

A Year With Franz Melchers Begins Here

2012-01-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

Image: Franz Melchers - January, from L'An by Thomas Braun, 1897, Brussels.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Image: Takahashi Haruka - New Year's card, 1928, Leonard lauder collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Colors Dance: Jean Lasne

2011-12-29T11:27:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

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 !

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-22T10:43:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-22T00:30:00.000-08:00

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

Crossing The Bridge To Abtsraction And Back: Janet Fish

2011-12-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

"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

2011-12-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-06T11:14:00.000-08:00

"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

2011-12-03T11:05:00.000-08:00

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.

Bacchus In Autumn

2011-11-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

What a melancholy sight Bacchus and and his four little satyrs make on a cold November day. You can see ice crystals on the grapes so it must be early morning. Imagine the temperature of the lead underneath the gilded plomb dore. Until March, when the women will gather in secret to celebrate the rituals of wine and liberation, the party's over.

The Marsy brothers, Balthazar (c. 1624-1681) and Gaspard (1628-1674) were sculptors employed by King Louis XIV. They created the Fountain of Bacchus for the King's gardens at Versailles, along with the Fountain of Latone, mother of Apollo and Artemis, and the Fountain of Enceladus, the grand trumpeter. If Bacchus was a god of excess, Louis XIV was his fervent acolyte. Fully a third of the cost of the renovations to Versailles was spent on the waterworks to supply its 50 fountains. Thanks to Louis XIV, water is a problem at Versailles to this day.

For furthers reading: Thomas Hedin, The Sculpture of Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1983.
Image: Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le bassin de Bacchus en automne -Chateau de Versailles, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

Carriere, Rodin. Steichen

2011-11-28T07:13:00.000-08:00

One missing link between painting and photography.

Two artists and one unlikely friendship.

Three strands of art: the realistic landscape of the Barbizon woods, the Impressionist landscapes of visual perception, and the Symbolist landscape of spirit and emotion.

Even people who had doubts about his painting admired Eugene Carriere (1849-1906). He came to Paris from his native Strassbourg, after apprenticing as a lithographer, to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Unable to return home when the Germans occupied Strasbourg in 1870, he joined the army. After being taken prisoner, he found refuge in thoughts of art. In search of commercial work, Carriere spent six cold months in England designing greeting cards. With a wife and child to support, Carriere returned to Paris.

It was at the Sevres Manufactures around 1880 that he met the sculptor Auguste Rodin. They were an unlikely pair but the two became fast friends. Rodin was a womanizer and Carriere was a family man but the two artists inspired each other and often exhibited together. Carriere continued to struggle to make a living while Rodin was lionized, a state of affairs he did everything to promote, unlike the quiet homebody who lived (improbably) in that den of iniquity - Montmartre. Today the Musee Rodin owns several works by Carriere that Rodin bought, both out of admiration and from a desire to help his struggling friend. Carriere made a lithograph of his friend at work that was used as the poster for the Rodin pavillon at the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle.

In hindsight it is easy to see a connection between Rodin's revolutionary technique, the partial figures emerging from the marble block, and Carriere's subjects emerging through his monochromatic palette. But inspiration and influence are not necessarily simple.

With successes at Galerie L'Art Nouveau Bing in 1896 and at the first Viennea Secession in 1898, Carriere was able to open Academie Carriere in Paris. Among his students were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain . Their radically different styles were linked to their teacher by a common disregard for realistic appearances.

Meanwhile Rodin became the most famous artist in the Western world We should not let his reputation blind us to the influence that Carriere had on pictorial photographers.

Edward Steichen, a photographer in transit from his home in Luxembourg to the United States, studied Carriere's work and wrote about its influence on his pictures. Steichen also met Rodin and photographed him in his studio Like Carriere, the Austrian photographer Heinrich Kuhn also made his family the subject of his work. And an unlikely but documented homage came from Pablo Picasso, who dedicated a drawing of a mother and child to Carriere.

The pictorial way of landscape or its arrnagement of still life can be explained in many ways. From darkness to light, through the quiet vision of Eugene Carriere, is one worth memorializing.

Images:
1. Eugene Carriere - Nelly C.arriere, daughter of the Artist, Musee d"orsay, Paris.
2. Eugene Carriere - Pot de terre, undated, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. Eugene Carriere - Child with a Soupiere, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Eugene Carriere - Auguste Rodin,. lithograph, 1897, Art Institute of Chicago.
5. Edward Steichen - Rdoin and his Thinker, 1902, Metropolitan Museum of art, NYC.
6. Eugene Carriere - The Writer, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
7. Edward Steichen - La Cigale, 1901, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
8. Edward Steichen - Monnlight. Winter, 1902, Metropolitan Museum of art, NYC.
9. Eugene Carriere - Breton Cemetery, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Where Light Goes

2011-11-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

Again, a painting by the underrated French Symbolist Henri le Sidaner (1862-1939). In L'Eveche you can almost see the last light of a late autumn afternoon moving indoors. The colors coalesce around the door, like guests gathering.

Image: Henri Le Sidaner - L'Eveche, Chartres, 1913, private collection, France.

A Garden For The Laughing Monks

2011-11-20T10:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I walked through the new Tiger Glen in Ithaca, a garden inspired by three ancient Chinese wise men. Designed by Marc Peter Kane for his Alma mater, Cornell University, the new Japanese garden is a tribute to Tao Yuanming, a Confucian poet, Lu Xiujing, a Daoist priest, and Hui Yuan, a Buddhist monk. Why a Japanese garden, you wonder? Because the story of the three Chinese wise men was equally beloved in Japan.

The 3rd-century parable of the Three Laughers of Tiger Brook celebrates the virtues of open-mindedness, curiosity, and tolerance. When the poet and the priest visit their friend at his home in the mountains, their discussion becomes so animated that they cross the ravine that surrounds the temple. Realizing that he has broken his vow never to leave his monastery, the monk and his friends break into laughter at the absurdity of artificial boundaries.

In Doun Masanobu's 17th-century silk painting the three friends are pictured n their moment of recognition. In the garden, the raging torrent is mimicked by carefully fitted elongated blue-gray rocks. The garden is new this year, its pines and mosses come to grow in a sheltered spot on a promontory one thousand feet above Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes. It, too, is ancient, being about two hundred million years old.

Image:
Kano Doun Masanobu (1625-1694) - Three Laughers of the Tiger Glen, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY.

Wanda Wulz And Trieste

2011-11-17T07:18:00.000-08:00

Surrealism is a male domain, or so men have told us, and the outright misogyny of many of its well known images obscures the surrealist woman. Hidden in plain sight you could say, with a nod to the rapidly unfolding science of the mind. Even so, one image and one untethered name keeps popping up: a catwoman and Wanda Wulz. This is the tale of my search for the woman behind Cat Woman and where it has taken me.

For more than a century the Wulz family ran the preeminent photography studio in Trieste. Founded in 1860 by Giuseppe Wulz who specialized in documentary images, Fotografia Wulz became known for its portraiture under his son Carlo (1874-1928). Carlo had two daughters, Marion and Wanda (1903-1984), both free spirits with a camera.

If strange convergences and surprises from the subconscious are elements of surrealism then the Wulz family, Wanda especially, were early and exuberant practitioners. Even father Carlo must have found some playful sense lacking in his portraits of the bourgeoisie; just look at the infant Wanda in a green-grocer's basket.

Close in age, Marion and Wanda remained close into adulthood, part of the family business that supported their creative autonomy. They would have been hard pressed to find another setting so congenial. Although individuals took these pictures it must surely be more accurate to call them collaborations. From Marion we have images of Wanda as aviator and as a one-woman jazz band.

The Wulz studio became a meeting place for the artists and writers of Trieste in the 1920s, drawn no doubt by the two fiercely talented and attractive Wulz sisters. The writer Italo Svevo was one, along with young painters including Giuseppe Garzolini, Alfredo Tominz, Umberto Verduta, and their wealthy neighbor Piero Fragiacomo.

There was another member of the Wulz family: Pippo-the-cat. He was often Marion's subject but he was Wanda's cat. Looking at Wanda's self-portrait and The Cat Without Me and then Cat-woman we find no familiar sentimental mimicking of personalities between pet and person, but a simpatico of claws.

"The last breath of civilization expires on this coast where barbarism starts," wrote the French diplomat Chateaubriand, not very diplomatically, in 1806. He was not pleased to be posted so far from Paris.

Exactly one hundred years later when the Irish writer James Joyce came to teach at the Berlitz School of Languages there, he eked out time to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nevertheless, Joyce considered his fourteen years in Trieste a time of misery, averring that its isolation ate his liver. While there he also tutored a talented local writer, Italo Svevo. There are those who believe this was the best thing Joyce ever did for literature.

But there were others who came to stay. Dante wrote parts of The Divine Comedy there and six centuries later the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke composed his Duino Elegies (1922) during visits to Castle Duino. located Originally a Roman watchtower, then expanded in medieval times, the castle belonged to Rilke’s friend Princess Marie von Thurm-und-Taxis Hohenlohe. Local lore claims that Rilke was inspired by disembodied voices he heard calling to him as he walked the windy cliffs overlooking the city.. And no less tortured a soul than the painter Egon Schiele made frequent stays in Trieste to escape the claustrophobia he felt in Vienna..

Trieste first appears in the pages when of history when the Romans annexed it. During the heyday of their empire, the nearby Venetians raided Trieste regularly, too, causing the beleaguered city to seek protection from the Hapsburgs. Yet when Garibaldi's newly united Italy stopped a few miles short of the city, its citizens were seized with a melancholy strain of nationalism, known as irredentism. United by a secret deal among the Allies following World War I, the people of Trieste provided a safe haven to Jewish refugees from throughout Europe during the 1930s. And Trieste has long been a favorite place of exile for deposed royalty.

Connected to the rest of Italy by a narrow strip land along the Adriatic coast, Trieste is closer in spirit to its Balkan neighbors than to the Mediterranean world. Further isolated by the Alps hemming it in on the north and subjected ti dry winds sweeping down off the escarpment, Trieste is often covered with a layer of dust, like furniture left in an untended room. With its mixture of Italian, Slavic, and Germanic influences, Trieste could be both cosmopolitan and backward.

Multiple personalities are grist for psychiatry and Trieste adopted psychoanalysis with the zeal of a convert, notwithstanding Sigmund Freud's professional failure there as a young man. In Silvia Bonucci's novel A Voice In Time (2005) the emotional claustrophobia of the period 1900-1940 is dramatized through the decline of the Levi family. Closer in spirit and in time to Fotografia Wulz is Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno (1923), the diary of the repetitive compulsions of an old man, written down at the urging of his psychiatrist. Like Zeno Cosini, with his mistresses and his inabaility to quit smoking, Trieste may appear outwardly unappealing but it is also lovable.

For further reading: La Trieste dei Wulz: 1860-1980 by P. Costantini, et al, Fratelli Alinari, Firenze.

Images: unless otherwise noted, all images are from the collection of the Alinari Archives, Museum of Photography, Florence.

1. Wanda Wulz - Cat Woman, 1932.
2. Wanda Wulz - Self-Portrait, c.1932.
3. Wanda Wulz - The Cat Without Me, 1932.
4. Carlo Wulz - title attributed: Baby Wanda In A Basket, c. 1904.
5. Marion Wulz - Jass-band, 1920.
6. Carlo Wulz - Portrait of Marion, 1927.
7. Daniel Boudinet - Villa Fragiacomo In Trieste, Mediatehque, Paris.
8. Piero Fragiacomo - Marina con barcho, Galleria Tommaso Marcato, Milan.
9. Egon Schiele - The Harbor at Trieste, 1907, Neue Galerie Am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz.
10. Ugi Fiumani - The Golden Hour, c. 1900-1930, Museo Revoltella, Trieste.
11.. Wanda Wulz - Three Hats, 1935.

The Voices

2011-11-13T11:08:00.000-08:00

"It's OK for the rich and the lucky to keep still,
no one want to know about them anyway,
But those in need have to step forward,
have to say: I am blind,
or: I'm about to go blind,
or: nothing is going well with me,
or: I have a child who is sick,
or: right there I'm sort of glued together...

And probably that doesn't do anything either.

"They have to sing; if they didn't sing, everyone
would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.

That's where you can hear good singing.

People really are strange: thye prefer
to hear castratos in boychoirs.

But God himself comes and stays a long time
when the world of half-people start to bore him."
- title poem from The Voices by Rainer Maia Rilke, translated from the German by Robert Bly, Denver, The Alley Press: 1977.

Image: Paula Modersohn Becker - Blind Woman in the Woods, courtesy Temple University Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia.

Let There Be Light

2011-11-12T13:23:00.000-08:00

The days get short and we renew our appreciation for artificial light. Old advertisements have their charms, not least the game of spotting their borrowings from their fine art "betters." The woman in her Viennese reform dress gazes skyward as if seeking the source of the wondrous new tungsten lamps. Maybe her next job will be posing for Gustav Klimt, and why not?

Images:
1. Anonymous - Metal-threaded lamps with tungsten, 1900, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
2. Emil Preetorius - Licht und Schatten, 1910, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
3. Heinrich Lefler - Auerlicht, 1898, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
4. unidentified artists - first prize poster for Festival of Electricity & Transportation, 1928, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
5. Joe Loe - Motard Kerzen 1910, Albertina Museum, Vienna.

Paradise Without People

2011-11-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

If nothing else united them, Spanish explorers from the 16th century, 19th century gold prospectors, and modern real estate speculators all shared the dream of California as a paradise without people. No matter that the state took its name from the myth of a land peopled by black Amazons ruled by Queen Califa.

Recently, in Landscapeland we looked at California through an art historical lens. Another way to view the California landscape is through the eyes of its inhabitants, absent from these sublime images, and their conflicting aims.

Carmel-by-the-Sea, for example, was founded by real estate developers in 1903 and promoted as a colony for artists and writers. After the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 Carmel and the entire Monterey Peninsula became the relocation destination for photographers, musicians, and theater people, too.

Industrialization in general scarcely interested California artists and the Southern Pacific Railroad in particular was anathema to them, dramatically expressed in Frank Norris's best-selling novel The Octopus (1901) in a scene where a steam locomotive plows mercilessly through a flock of grazing sheep. Businessmen promoted the state as agricultural cornucopia, which it was, through commercial art. And "serious" artists like Granville Redmond chafed at demands to produce fields of flowers. You can see what Redmond was getting at if you compare his majestic California Poppy Fields with the recently auctioned Marsh Under Golden Skies

In Our Italy (1891) essayist Charles Dudley Warner was early to name some obvious similarities between the Golden State and the Mediterranean. One can see his point in the work of local artists, including Arthur and Lucia Kleinhans Mathews. Gottardo Piazzoni 's The Land (at top) evokes beginnings both Biblical and of the classical Greek and Roman varieties.

When Leopold Hugo photographed the rock formation called the 'Gates of Night', cinematic was not yet an adjective and Hollywood was a sleepy village with a single trolley line. Something about the swooping, jagged Pacific coastline was just waiting for the motion picture industry to arrive from the east coast. California was ready for its close-up.

Landscapeland was posted here 0ctober 18, 2011.

Images:

1. Gottardo Piazzoni - The Land, 1915, Berkeley Art Collection, CA.
2.Armin Hansen - Carmel Countryside at Night, undated, private collection, California.
3. Guy Rose - Carmel Dunes, 1918, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
4, Granville Redmond - California Poppy Field, 1926, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
5. Granville Redmond - Marsh Under Golden Skies, no date, Bonham's & Butterfield's, Los Angeles/
6. Lucia Kleinhans Mathews - Landscape with Tree, 1908, Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
7. Leopold Hugo - Gates of Night, before 1906, San Diego Historical Society, La Jolla.
8. Anne M. Bremer (1868-1923) - The Highlands - early 20th century, Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.

Face To Face

2011-11-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

"...viewing a human face sets off a unique reaction in the human brain. This chemical reaction, not unlike addiction, occurs when we see a face or expression that pleases us, giving us a feeling of well-being. From infancy through old age, we are responsive to human features, sometimes with ambivalence, but always with meaning. " - anonymous collector

A.C., as I think of him (and his wife) are the anonymous benefactors who made possible a jewel-like exhibition of portraits of all sorts at the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University. A small gallery suited the fifteen works, lending an intimacy to the experience even when, as is probably the case with a first century bust of Ptolemy of Mauretania, the intention was ceremonial. Works of human revelation and contemplation, rather than formality and each one intended for the attentive viewer.

Four paintings by the German artist Max Beckmann (1884-1950) are the centerpiece of the exhibition and suggest the qualities the collectors look for . A contemplative image of the artist's second wife Quappi, one of his friend the Alsatian engraver Sabine Hackenscmidt, and the two reproduced here. A fiercely thoughtful gaze aimed straight at the viewer belies the height of his successful career, and hints at the middle-aged Beckmann's attempt to understand the mystical aspects of life. The Oyster-Eaters provides a challenge of another sort. Quappi Beckmann lifts the oyster to her lips as Sabine Hackenschmidt looks on, eyebrow arched enigmatically. A white-jacketed waiter stands behind. What is last-noticed is an ominous gray face looming in the background that seems to represent all that came after the pinnacle of 1926 for these people. The Nazis removed Beckmann from teaching and his works from museums, only to abuse them in displays of "Degenerate Art." Years of living in poverty in Amsterdam efr the Beckmanns ended only when World War II ended.

This version of Incense by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) was made ss a present for his niece Gilberte Freson on the occasion of her marriage in 1917. The better known version from 1898, which is at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris . A more intimate and personal vision, a close-up rendered against a neutral background, the priestess seems younger and more approachable - fitting for a wedding gift.

Balthus (1908-2001) often created images of young girls that are erotically charged. Not so his Portrait of Rosabianca Skira, daughter of the renowned art published Albert Skira. Balthus, the son of a Russian Jew, fled the Nazi occupation of France during World War II for neutral Switzerland. There Skira gave him employment on his new magazine Labyrinth. The border painted around the picture suggests a window sill, the girl's arm resting there. She looks toward her future, which neither of us can see, with apparent calm, or perhaps the privacy of adolescence.

As with Balthus, so with Egon Schiele (1890-1918), it is the expressive faces that have joined this collection: Schiele's patron Karl Otten, Chief Inspector Benesh, and his frequent model Poldi, absorbed in thought. Only in his clenched Self-Portrait does Schiele express the torment that we think of when we think of his work. The arms, held tightly to his sides, are as expressive of emotion as the sound we imagine we hear coming from his mouth.

Face to Face, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY. , August 6 - October 30, 2011.

Images:
1. Max Beckmann - Self-portrait, 1926
2. Max Beckmann - The Oyster Eaters, 1943.
3. Fernand Khnopff - Incense, 1917.
4. Balthus - Portrait of Rosabianca Skira, 1949.
5. Egon Schiele - Poldi, 1914
6. Egon Schiele - Self-portrait, 1910.

The War Of Nerves: From Peter Altenberg To Emily Holmes Coleman

2011-11-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

"I will break all their heads
and lay them in neat rows
and we shall wave high the keys

and all of us shall dance in the snow."

- Emily Holmes Coleman, published in The Liberator

An abundance of trained psychologists in late 19^th century Vienna coincided neatly with the discovery of nerves. Psychoanalysis became its classification system. Nervous disorders were diagnosed as the response of the refined and affluent to modern life and doctors profited handsomely by treating them. For this, Josef Hoffmann was commissioned to design the Purkersdorf Sanitorium in 1905. If that name is not familiar, Koloman Moser’s black and white checkered chairs are.

Mental illness, on the other hand, had a long history, exemplified architecturally by the Vienna Narrenturn, or Fools’ Tower, the oldest asylum in Europe. A stone fortress built in 1784, it was a step up from the basic dank dungeon where people who were ‘difficult’ to deal with had long been confined. Distinctions between sanatorium and asylum were largely based on class differences.

Our old friend Peter Altenberg, social critic of fin-de-siecle Vienna, was of the class of brain-workers who suffered from a vexing assortment of melancholy symptoms that was labeled as neurasthenia: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, fatigue, mood swings, migraines, phobias, and sexual dysfunction. In his Confessions of a Neurasthenic (1908), William Taylor Marrs wrote "the best thing about neurasthenia is that it allows one to move in neurasthenic circles" A sure sign of an exclusive club.. A steady diet of coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol kept Altenberg going.

.One of Altenberg's personal hells was the Steinhof Sanitorium where his brother Georg Egblander had him committed in April, 1913. Being a writer, Altenberg told his side of the story in Das Alternberg Buch:

“You rotten sod! Despite my spending the last five months explaining to you that the Superintendant has it in for me and wants to ensure my physical, spiritual, and intellectual ruin, you have nevertheless collaborated with him…although he had declared to me of his own free will: “You are of course released by us doctors as fully cured. It requires only the simple formality that the person who brought you here contacts us and fetches you. ‘…Since this message of redemption you have allowed days to pass, brother-murderer!”

In Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders (1913) Altenberg skewered doctors who turn a medical consultation into a battle of wits with their shallow ‘depth’ psychology. He understood that it is difficult to live with mental problems in a society whose duplicities are only fortified by the uncooperative individual.

It was Peter Altenberg whose review for Simplicissmus in 1911 launched the career of painter Oskar Kokoschka as the "mad modernist." Altenberg's skeptical attitude toward the linking of madness and talent was eminently reasonable, yet still unconventional.

“Van Gogh was a famous painter who was nevertheless interned in an asylum seven times. But those who run around free are by no means ‘van Goghs’ for that reason…Madness is a chance additional extra, like a pimple or a bad cold. My dear sirs, whether normal or abnormal, it is all a question of ‘original genius.’ Just because you think you are the ‘Emperor of China’ is of limited importance for humanity and, is significant only for the one sanatorium in which the worthless idiot, thanks to money paid by his relatives, terminates his days, that is to say years. Nowadays people have a colossal concern for madmen who are nothing but madmen. Just because there have been some who besides the remarkable performance of the brain, are also able to show evidence of other, more important achievements.” – 1911, translated from the German by Edward Neather.

“Alone in her room at night she stood and pressed her face against the window. It was the end of March and turned cold again. And all the thumbs of ice began to whirl in shaking circles, keeping with the wind. I shall have snow on my glassy fingers, and a shutter of snow on my grave tonight.” - excerpted from The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman, 1930.

Call it a sanitorium or an asylum, the individual is there because of an inability to function in the larger world. The Shutter of Snow is a remarkable novel in both subject and technique, its author Emily Holmes Coleman unjustly forgotten. Its title comes from Coleman’s intuitive connection of "heat with destruction and cold with freedom”. The novel draws on Coleman's experience after the birth of her son John in 1924.

The novel's protagonist Marthe Gail is a young mother unable to care for her baby, confined to a mental hospital when she begins to hear voices. Marthe's suffering is now understood as postpartum depression. Coleman brings us inside Marthe's struggle to regain a stable identity and her desperate attempts to make herself heard. Her character is a direct descendant of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

Visits from Marthe's widowed father are occasions of emotional turmoil, his aggressive neediness is suffocating Marthe. Making. her frantic to escape their shared past, she retreats into silence. At the same she needs to speak her mind to important people in her life, her husband Christopher and her psychiatrist Dr. Brainerd, to explain herself to the world. In her struggle to regain a sense of self and her desperate attempts to make herself heard, Marthe Gail is the direct descendant of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

The Shutter Of Snow got a negative reception when it was published in 1930. Coleman's use of shifting viewpoints and her subject matter made critics uneasy. They expressed annoyance at the lack of quotation marks to set off conversations, forgetting that these same techniques had been used by Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert. When it came to the war of nerves the gift of a double vision was not enough; Alternberg's irony was more acceptable than Coleman's seriousness.

For an obscure author, Emily Holmes Coleman had an illustrious career. Born in Oakland, California in 1899, she lost her mother while a young girl, first by mental illness and then to death. Lonely years at boarding school were followed by four demanding years at Wellesley College. After graduation Emily Holmes married Lloyd Rig (Deke) Coleman, a psychologist. In 1925 they moved to France where Emily was the society editor for the Chicago Tribune and Lloyd worked in advertising. Coleman published stories and poems in transition, a magazine that styled itself the purveyor of "the revolution of the word."

Coleman's time in Europe was eventful. She spent a year in St. Tropez working as secretary to Emma Goldman, editing the anarchist's autobiography Living My Life (1931). While on the Riviera, Coleman became friends with the eccentric art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Back in Paris, Coleman read the manuscript version of Nightwood by fellow. Djuna Barnes. Few people remember that it was Coleman who engineered the publication of Nightwood in 1936. Her skills at suggestion and persuasion worked so well that editor T.S. Eliot and the general public believed it had been Eliot's idea. His enthusiasm for the book led him to call Nightwood "the best book written by a woman in the 20th century." The Shutter Of Snow should have been so lucky.

The Shutter of Snow is published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive.

Images:

1 & 3.. Richard Lutsch - Figures for entrance to Purkersdorf Sanitorium, 1905, Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.,

2. Koloman Moser - chairs for Purkersdorf Sanitorium, c. 1904, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

4.Oskar Kokoschka - The Tempest, 1914, Kunstmuseum, Basel.

5.. Erika Giovanna Klein - Eyes, 1922, Kovacek-Spiegelgasse Gemaldegalerie, Vienna.

6. Lucy Schwob a/k/a Claude Cahun Self-portrait with Masks, c. 1919, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

7. Lucy Schwob a/k/a/ Claude Cahun - title attributed: Behind Bars, private collection, France.

8. unidentified photographer - Emma Goldman and Emily Holmes Coleman, Virago Books, London.

Halloween

2011-10-31T01:01:00.000-07:00

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

Angles And Light

2011-10-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

"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

2011-10-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

"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

2011-10-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

“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

2011-10-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

“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.

Smudge

2011-10-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

A smudge is a mass of burning organic matter, placed on the windward side of vegetation, that protects crops from frost on cold nights. A smudge is also a technique used in pastel and watercolor. The two come together in The Light of the Smudge (above) by Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921). Thayer was a student at the Brooklyn Academy of Design when he created this image recalled from his childhood in southern New Hampshire from memory.

Thayer's near contemporary, Arthur Bowen Davies (1863-1928), grew up in Utica, New York, a city on the Mohawk River, just on the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. Bowen left off dating or identifying his pastels, another form of smudging. I have looked at dozens of these pastels and some of them, seen here, seem like memories of his native landscape. Traveling east and west along the Mohawk and the Erie Canal, I have seen these palces - real or imagined - many times. Davies lived in France and Florence, Italy (where he died) as well as in upstate New York.

Images:
1. Abbott Handerson Thayer - The Light of the Smudge, 1874, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA.
2. Arthur Bowen Davies - Across the Valley, undated, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
3. Arthur Bowen Davies - Mountains in Moonlight, undated, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
4. Arthur Bowen Davies - Autumn Landscape, undated, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Jules Bastien-Lepage

2011-10-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

“And when other painters saw Bastien-Lepage´s pictures and discovered he had simply set up his easel outdoors, posed his models, and painted right there through to the finish, they sought to do likewise with an unprecedented fervor. All this activity resulted in a fresher, more vivid concept of outdoor color and by the year 1880 the plein-air movement was in full swing.” - Anthony Watkins

Equally so, the invention of the foldable paint tube in the 1840s was a technological breakthrough that made paintings outdoors easy. Before he set up his easel in the open air, few painters had ventured outside as Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) did. A realist, like the much better known Jean-Francois Millet, Bastien-Lepage distinguished himself by the particularity he brought out in his subjects.

They stand before us, near the frame of his paintings, almost ready to walk out of the background where they stand. Bastien-Lepage painted from a standing position to maintain the integrity of the relationship of the figures to their surroundings. His grasp of aerial perspective was much criticized but he defended it vehemently.

In many of his paintings the figure fills the canvas; the landscape around the figure is defined by the size of the brushstrokes the artist used to depict it. He used detailed marks for the grasses or stones in the foreground; broader, boxy strokes for the middle distance; and a series of softer, less definite strokes suggest the far distance. Perspective is merely indicated, but notice the care Bastien-Lepage took in selecting titles for his paintings. The location and date of Roadside Flowers in Damvillers is inscribed in the lower left corner, even as the care-weary child dominates the picture.

Bastien-Lepage grew up on a farm in rural eastern France, far from Paris. Although his parents encouraged him to draw, they could not imagine a career in art for their son. So Jules went to work as a postal clerk and studied art at night. This context helps in looking at Going To School (at left), a work that might strike us as sentimental unless we remember that for rural children in the 19th century to attend school was often a financial sacrifice for the family that depended on the labors of all its members..

While serving as a sharpshooter in the franco-Prussian War of 1870, Bastien-Lepage received a severe chest wound which may have contributed to his early death. Having got himself to Paris, Jules tried ,with little success, to get work as an illustrator. That came in 1874 when he showed Portrait of My Grandfather and again in 1877, when his Hayfield captivated the annual Salon.

In the few short, productive years that were given to him, the artist traveled to Italy, Switzerland, and England. Several paintings commemorate his empathy for the working children of London's streets

The day after his death in his Paris studio on December 10, 1884, Jules Bastien-Lepage was buried in the family's cemetery in Damvillers. The memorial exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay in 1885 sold out and his work was kept alive by the discerning critic Roger Marx, who arranged a show of Bastien-Lepage's work at the Paris International Exposition of 1900.

The man, the artist, believed that everyone has a place in nature. This is the connection between a figure like the woodcutter from Damvillers, whom he knew, and his Joan of Arc, a vividly imagined woman of the woods . Both belong to a world that is encompassed by the phrase, coined by M.H. Abrams: 'natural supernaturalism.'

Images:

1.Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1877, Musee des Beaux-arts, Nice.

2. Portrait of My Grandfather, 1869, Musee des Beax-Arts, Nice.

3.October Season - Picking Potatoes, 1879, National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne.

4. The Woodcutter - Pere Jacques, 1881, Milwaukee Art Museum.

5. Going to School, 1884, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland.

6. Marchande des fleurs a Londre (Flower Seller in London), 1882, via Artmagick.
7. Pas de mache (Nothing Going), 1882, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
8. Joan of Arc, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
9. Roadside Flowers in Damvillers a/k/a The Little Shepherdess , 1882, private collection, France.

Art Criticism Of The Poets

2011-10-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

If there is a criticism more piercing than the sharpest arrow, it must be to have your picture drubbed by an armed poet. I shied away from even imagining the images that gave rise to these barbed blasts by Kay Ryan and Elizabeth Bishop. I like the poems and also the painting by Earl Horter, which I chose because cherry red is its most prominent color.

"Most of it's too dreary or too cherry red.
If it's a chair, it's
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said -
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it's a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people.
Their purpose warps
around the backs of things
and under arms;
they gouge and hatch
and glue on charms
till likeable materials -
apple crates and canning funnels -
lose their rural ease. We are not
pleased the way we thought
we would be pleased."
- Outsider Art by Kay Ryan from Elephant Rocks, New York, Grove/Atlnatic: 1997.

"Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
some northerly harbor of Labrador,
before he became a schoolteacher
a great-uncle painted a big picture.
Receding for miles on either side
into a flushed, still sky
are overhanging pale blue cliffs
hundreds of feet high,
their bases fretted by little arches,
the entrances to caves
running in along the level of a bay
masked by perfect waves.
On the middle of that quiet floor
sits a fleet of small black ships,
square-rigged, sails furled, motionless,
their spars like burnt match-sticks.
And high above them, over the tall cliffs’
semi-translucent ranks,
are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds
hanging n‘s in the banks.
One can hear their crying, crying,
the only sound there is
except for occasional sighing
as a large aquatic animal breathes.
In the pink light
the small red sun goes rolling, rolling,
round and round and round at the same height
in perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling,
while the ships consider it.
Apparently they have reached their destination.
It would be hard to say what brought them here,
commerce or contemplation."
- Large Bad Picture by Elizabeth Bishop from North & South, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 1946.

Image:
Earl Horter, Still Life, 1939, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

"Scream When You Leave"

2011-09-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

"Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar!
Oh don't ask why,
Oh don't ask why!
For we must find the next whiskey bar
For if we don't find the next whiskey bar,
I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have whiskey
Oh, you know why.

Oh show us the way to the next pretty boy!
Oh don't ask why
Oh, don't ask why!
For we must find the next pretty boy
For if we don't find the next pretty boy

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have boys
Oh, you know why.

Oh show us the way to the next little dollar!
Oh don't ask why,
oh don't ask why!
For we must find the next little dollar
For if we don't find the next little dollar
I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama
We now must say goodbye
We've lost our good old mama
And must have dollars
Oh, you know why."
- lyrics by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill, 1927, 1930, from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,

Germany in the 1920s. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht had never been to Alabama, but no matter. Weill had aspired to write classical symphonies before he turned to satirizing opera, but no matter. Playing at decadence in the face of privation was like waving a red flag at a bull, but no matter.

"All of us here are hookers and hustlers.
We drink too much, and don’t care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
That have never seen sunshine or air.

You smoke too much. There’s always a cloud
Of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt? I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg.

The windows here have been covered forever.
Is it snowing out? … Maybe it’s rain.
You’ve got that look in your eyes again,
Like a cat in a crouch for a kill."

- The Stray Dog Cabaret by Anna Akhmatova, from

The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt, New York Review Press: 2007.

For the Russians, life was revolutionary and the stakes were life or death (well, not always - just read The Twelve Chairs by Ilf & Petrof). Artist Natalaia Goncharova (1898-1962) was described by a friend as "entirely serious." The Stray Dog Cabaret opened on New Year's Eve of 1911 in St. Petersburg and the next year Goncharova participated in an exhibition named The Donkey's Tail. Playfully named perhaps, but always an edge to the words and images.

Images:

1. Ewald Muller - Hanson Cigarettes, undated, useum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

2. Geza Farago - Torley, 1924, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna

3. Maria Schwamberger - Abadie, 1929, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

4. Josepf Fenneker - Blond Poison, 1920, courtesy Alain Weill & G.K. Hall, Boston.

5. Natalia Goncharova - Behind the Red Curtain, 1916, Pompidou Center, Paris.

6. Natalia Goncharova - Peacock, 1911, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Francophile Manhattan

2011-09-26T07:17:00.000-07:00

I never knew my mother's mother; she died years before I was born and so I have never been comfortable referring to Florence Williams as my grandmother. My mother adored her mother, whose nickname was Billie, and often told stories about her and one of them was the genesis of this piece.
During the Depression, when work for my grandfather the builder was nonexistent, Billie took off her wedding ring, took the train into Manhattan from New Jersey, and got herself a job as a receptionist at the Helena Rubinstein Salon on Fifth Avenue. Rubinstein had made her fortune with face creams, being the first to realize that if creams were marketed for day, night, and anti-wrinkle, the customer would buy three times as many jars of her cream. For years I have searched for pictures of that Salon, and here is one of the reception area by the esteemed architectural photographer Samuel Gottscho (1875-1971).

To design the salon, Rubinstein chose the Hungarian Ladislas Medgyes who had outiftted her New York apartment, with its sensational clear dining suite made out of a new wonder material called lucite. The cosmetics mogul brought her love of all things French with her to New York. The oak and leather stools were designed by Jean-Michel Frank, the rug was inspired by Fernand Leger, who also painted the mural for Nelson Rockefeller’s east side townhouse, and there was the flattering portrait of Madame Rubinstein in a yellow shawl by Marie Laurencin. Also like Rockefeller, Rubinstein dotted her apartment with African sculptures and surrealist paintings. The rococo settee seen above in the Salon were a frequent Rubinstein accent.

The Rockefellers, father John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his son Nelson , were prominent Francophiles who had the means leave a mark on the city. Nelson's Fifth Avenue duplex, designed by Jean-Michel Frank, in 1937, was the setting for many events during his long career in the arts and in politics. (Frank, who was made a refugee by the Nazi occupation of his native France, jumped to his death from a tall New York building in 1941.) Meanwhile, John D.'s eponymous Rockefeller Center, under construction throughout the 1930s, was an extravagant love letter to all things French that has become, with time, an icon of American architecture. At its center is Paul Manship's golden Prometheus: "Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends." Rockefeller's kindred spirit, you could say.

As is often the case with love affairs, one party was more enthusiastic than the other. The French, their patented mixture of admiration laced with disdain, looked askance at the American skyscraper, finding something savage in this obelisk of modern architecture. They tried out a variety of metaphors to contain the heady experience of the vertical building, from mountains to cathedrals. The journalist, Jules Heret, sneered at them as “maisons geantes,” redeemed only by the magical aura cast by electricity. One critic even dismissed Cass Gilbert’s stately Woolworth Building as “banal and ineffective.” When the magazine Je sais tout published its first article about the construction of Rockefeller Center in December, 1931, the tone began to shift toward admiration for America’s “composition urbaniste,”

In 1935, Le Corbusier, a man who considered himself the master of le composition urbaniste, visited New York City with its bouillabaisse of Beaux-Arts and streamlined architecture. Later he committed his reaction to print in When The Cathedrals Were White (1947): “In New York, then, I learn to appreciate the Italian Renaissance.”

Images:
1. Samuel Gottscho - Helena Rubinstein salon in Manhattan, 1936, Museum of the City of New York.
2. unidentified photographer for Life Magazine - Helena Rubinstin in bed designed to her dimensions by Ladislas Medgyes, 1941, Museum of the City of New York.
3. Fernand Leger - design for fireplace mural for Nelson Rockefeller's New York townhouse, c. 1938, Davidson gallery, NYC.
4. unidentified photographer - Prometheus, designed by Paul Manship at Rockefeller Center Plaza, 1930s, New York Public Library.
5. Le Corbusier - Metamorphosis of a violin, 1922, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Our Fall Number Starts Here

2011-09-23T00:49:00.000-07:00

Image: Koloman Moser - September, 1900, from a calendar for Garlach & Schenck, Vienna.

Lord & Taylor Does Deco

2011-09-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

In 1928 when the Fifth Avenue department store Lord & Taylor mounted an in-store art exhibition, the name of the style Art Deco was still decades in the future. An Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art was organized by the store’s canny Fashion Director, Dorothy Shaver. and constructed by architectural designer Eli Jacques Khan. Two months later rival R.H. Macy’s debuted its own exhibition of the latest decorative arts from France.

In the triumphalist version of history, Paris introduced Art Deco to the world in 1925 at its Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. No matter that style in the decorative arts had been evolving quickly with new scientific and industrial developments. No mention of simmering French pique at the success of Jugendstil design in the pre-war years. In the wake of the "war to end all wars", it would seemed blasphemous to dwell on the years the French had put into planning their reassertion of dominance in the design world.

Dorothy Shaver (1893-1959) knew something the captains of American industry had missed, which may be why she went on to be the first woman to preside over a multi-million dollar corporation. The United States had declined to participate in the 1925 World's fair in Paris because, according to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, American manufacturers were not interested in a fair devoted to modern design. Official indifference meant nothing to the thousands of Americans tourists who attended, even in those days before commercial air travel. American journalists sent back glowing reports from the Fair, full of exciting words like sleek, elegant, and streamlined.

What Shaver did was to connect the dots in an imaginative way. Parisian department stores had pioneered studio boutiques for artists, like Atelier Primavera for the Prentemps department store. The Au Bom Marche store's pavillon at the Paris World's Fair, designed by Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, showed the new style's exciting applications for architecture. Edgar Brandt's ironwork soon showed up on New York City buildings such as the Madison-Belmont and Rockefeller Center, constructed from 1931. The Metropolitan Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts mounted exhibitions in response to Paris in 1926, it's true. But the Met had been encouraging modern American design with periodic exhibitions, to modest public attention. Shaver had an eye for artists, too. Her exhibition featured paintings by Braque, Picasso, Derain, and Utrillo. Two years after Shaver's exhibition, the Chrysler Building opened in midtown Manhattan, and a year after that ground was broken for Rockefeller Center.

Images:

1. Fernand Legeer - poster for Lord & Taylor, 1928, Museum fo the City of New Ork.

2. Sigurd Fischer - a room for Lord & Taylor designed by Eli Jacques Khan, Museum of the City of New York.

3. Horace Taylor - poster for the Royal Mail Line, c.1928-1930, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

4. unidentified photographer - Exposition Pavillon for Au Bon Marche department store, designed by Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, 1925, Museum of the City of New York.

5. Edgar Brandt - Les Cigognes d'Alsace - for Selfrdiges department store - London, 1928, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
6. Georges Braque - Still life with compote and tobacco pouch, 1920, Pompidou Cneter, Paris.

7.unidentified photographer - Dorothy Shaver (front) with her sister Elsa Shaver, University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

Mela Koehler's Reform Dresses

2011-09-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

Her given name was Melanie Leopoldina Koehler (1885-1960). Born in Vienna, Koehler studied art with Betrhold Loffler and also Koloman Moser, one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstatte. She became a member of the group around 1909. Her specialty was fashion illustration, possibly because she had an affinity for the reform dress movement and women's emancipation. I was intrigued to read that Koehler worked for a Viennese Journal in 1915 named Die Blau Laterne (The Blue Lantern). Yes!

In 1931, as the political situation in Austria continued to deteriorate, Koehler emigrated to Stockholm. There she designed theatrical costumes for, among others, the Swedish Royal Academy. She married in 1932 and continued to work as Mela Koehler-Broman.

The backgrounds in her fashion illustrations were full of colorful abstractions, in contrast to works by, say, Maria Likarz. I think Koehler was tweaking the nose of Gustav Klimt, a man who acted as though reform dress for women had been his idea. Whatever Klimt's feelings for the designer Emile Floge may have been, he was egotistical enough to horn in on her artistic territory.

Images:
Mela Koehler - for the Wiener Werkstatte - postcards # 606, 523, 518, 522, and 520 - c.1910-1914, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.