Agnes Varda: The Last Straw

Following the harvest, comes the gleaning.  Clusters of grapes left on the vine,  apples that fall from the tree and are bruised,  potatoes with imperfect shapes, all  edible fruits of an earth that nourishes the gleaners who save them from rotting.   La pomme de terre,  apple of the earth, the French call the potato.

Gleaning is a term with biblical overtones to modern ears.  The practice followed in the wake of the beginnings of organized agriculture.  Both Christian and Jewish religious texts commend farmers to share a portion of the harvest with others and, in recent years, some have explicitly incorporated the practice into efforts to help the needy in prosperous countries.  But gleaning is a foreign practice to many modern urban dwellers, at least when it comes to food. We have replaced the concept with  ugly words: scrounging, scavenging, and at the extreme, stealing.

But in France gleaning is still a recognized part of the annual harvest.  When farmers gather their crops, the poor and the thrifty are allowed to take what has been rejected for commercial purposes. This practice is more than a custom; the right to glean (droit de glanage) was the way the poorest and weakest members of rural society, dating from the Middle Ages, were permitted to obtain food.  These images accurately portray the active role that women have played in gleaning.  What they do not show is that this activity has often been associated with controversy: the need of peasants for food versus the landowners' sense of ownership.
Filmmaker Agnes Varda, in her documentary Les Glaneur et la glanesue (2000) shows both the urban and rural practice is still a salient part of French life.  A debate among residents of the coastal town of  Nourmoutier is lively, humorous, and even confusiong, about the rules for how many buckets of oysters the locals may collect after a storm. Joining some local gypsies as they comb through mounds of potatoes dumped in the fields of Beauce, Varda finds a perfectly heart-shaped potato.  For her it becomes a symbol of food as an expression of the love between humans and earth.
The vineyards of Pommard appear again, as they did in Varda's fictional 1985 film La Vagabond.  In the earlier film, a female drifter is found frozen to death in a ditch, smeared with grape pulp.  The film, like other tales of travel and travail before it, the Odyssey and Aeneid, does not begin at the beginning but moves back and forth in time and among witnesses to the descent into invisibility of the young Mona Bergeron.

England used to, and France still does have laws that explicitly permit gleaning. How explicit?  Varda interviews the black-robed M. Dessaud, "our lawyer in the fields," a  magistrate standing in the cabbage rows who explains  the  French penal code (Article R-26.10) and the royal edict of Nov. 2, 1554, that establish the right to glean.  This bureaucratic side of the national temperament is  embodied today at the personal level by an apple farmer who explains the system he has developed for registering and licensing those who wish to gather his unharvested fruit.

For urban gleaners, the orderly system of trash collection makes it at once more challenging to recover food and easier to hunt for other items like cast-off clothing or appliances that can be mended.   Varda introduces us to a  biology teacher, a vegetarian,  who has lived in a shelter for eight years and teaches reading to immigrants in the evenings. He is eating stale bread plucked from a trash bin while he explains to Varda the nutritional challenges of scavenging for food. Again, two years later, Varda revisits the people of Le Glaneur et la Glaneuse.  No one has suffered the grisly fate of Varda's vagabond but the world is still cold, if not frozen.

Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners And I), 2000, and Sans toit ni loi (The Vagabond - a rough translation of the French title would With Neither Roof Nor Law) 1984, are available on DVD.

The image that started it all for Varda: The Gleaners of Chamboudouin  During her return to Musee Paul Dini she helps the staff bring the 19th century painting out of storage and, when they take it outdoors to be filmed in the light, a strong wind begins to blow as it does in Hedouin's painting. 

Mea Culpa:  How could I have neglected to point out this remarkable website (listed in my links column)?!  Hay In Art.

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Images:
1. Agnes Varda - from The Gleaners And I, 2000.
2. Jean-Francois Millet - Les Glaneuses, 1857, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. Robert Doisneau - The Coal Gleaners> Canal Saint-Marttin. Alberrvilliers. 1945, Pompidou Center, Paris.
4. Pierre-Edmond Hedouin - The Gleaners Of Chamboudouin, 1857, Musee Paul Din, Villefranche-sur-mer.

Rose Sauvage: Raoul Dufy

He was the indispensable man, the person who brought together the wild colors of Fauvism, the  plural viewpoints of cubism, interest in the arts of Africa and Asia, and an unapologetic talent for decoration.  In painting, tapestry, stage design, ceramics, and textiles,  Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) was creating Art Deco, a movement that only needed a name, starting in 1910.

We associate Dufy with perpetual summer and yet he grew up  in the northern French port city of Le Havre, a place of gunmetal seas and overcast skies.   His first encounter with something tropical came at the age of sixteen when he went to work in the office of of a Brazilian coffee importer, inspecting foreign produce on the aptly named  Quai du Commerce.

By the time Dufy arrived in Paris he was twenty-three and it was 1900, the year of the International Exposition, which he did not attend.  But the renewed interest in the decorative arts suited his style. Dufy did set himself up in a studio, shared with a friend from home, Othon Frieze who was also an aspiring artist.   They shared the building in the rue Cortot with  Suzanne Valadon and Max Jacob but  Dufy was not a typical Montmartrian.  In Portraits sans retouches (1952) Roland Dorgeles remembered him this way: “He was never seen untidily dressed, without a collar, slouching around in slippers like all his companions.  He loathed bohemianism.  His linen was always clean, his shoes well-polished, and he bore his poverty with a careless pride.”

In Terrace Overlooking The Beach (1907)   Dufy used stripes of color to create a sense of space in the absence of traditional perspective, much as he delineated space by adding hatching to otherwise blank spaces in his engravings.His woodcuts for Guillaume Apollinaire's Le Bestiare ou Cortege d’Orphee  in 1910 attracted the attention of Paul Poiret.

Of the two men, Dufy was the younger.  Poiret was already an established couturier, recognized as an innovator in fashion. He was an amateur  painter and collector of African art and the friend of  Derain,  Picabia, Vlaminck, and Dunoyer de Segonzac.     "We dreamed of sumptuous curtains and dresses decorated in the taste of Botticelli," Poiret said in explaining their partnership.  Poiret had recently returned from a tour of the Wiener Werkstatte, convinced that the French were ready and able to reassert their per-eminence in the arts.





The two set up a studio together on the Boulevard de Clichy where Dufy designed fabrics for furniture.  Dufy was also in charge of manufacturing at La petite usine or The Little Factory, as they nicknamed it.   Poiret later wrote “There were the two of us, Dufy and I, like Bouvard and Pecuchet,  a the forefront of a new profession that would bring us new joys and new excitements.”  Their standing screen (1912) of rambling roses (roses sauvages), falling leaves and  dewdrops is executed with the rigorous geometry that is characteristic of Art Deco.

Also in 1912, the Lyon textile firm of Bianchini-Ferier commissioned Dufy to design fabrics for them, an association that last for two decades.  The French government, too, recognized that something new, voting to sponsor an international exhibition of the decorative arts in 1915.  Surely one historical "what if" is the path the new movement would have taken if war had not intervened.

Paul Poiret, a canny publicist, came up with a novel idea to promote their work by parading his models dressed in Dufy's patterns at the races.  Dufy, in his turn, commemorated Poiret's feat in tapestry (Poiret's Models at the Races, 1925, private collection, Flammarion) and gouache (The Presentation of Models at Poiret's, 1941, private collection, Galerie Malingue, Paris) and paintings. 


In 1925, Dufy acknowledged his debt to Matisse for “all the new reasons for painting.”  Reflecting on what he had learned from the experience of his own  early attempts, Dufy wrote in his notebook, “Painting means creating an image which is not the image of the appearance of things, but which has the power of their reality.”  This was also the year the world finally discovered Art Deco at  the  International Exposition in Paris.   (The Societe des Arts Decoratifs had been founded in 1900.) In 1937, as another war was simmering, Dufy's La Fee Electricite became the centerpiece of yet another  World's Fair in Paris. 

For more:
Raoul Dufy: A Celebration of Beauty, posted at The Curated Object, May 2009.
Dufy by Dora Perez-Tibi, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside, New York, Harry N. Abrams: 1989.

Images by Raoul Dufy:

2.Red and blue flowers - textile; design for Bianchini- Ferier, Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach.
2. Seahorses and Sea shells, design for Bianchini-Ferier, 1925, Flammarion, Paris.
3. Havesters, ca. 1920, Bianchini-Ferier, Metropolitan Musuem of Art, NYC.

4.  La Terrasse sur la plage, 1907, Musee d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris.

5. Atelier Martine poster, ca. 1911, Fashion Institute of Design Museum, Los Angeles.

(with Paul Poiret) - Rose Paravent, for Atelier Martine, ca. 1912, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
6. Textile design in black, brown, gold and white for Bianchini-Fereier, 1925.
7. Poiret's Models At the Races, mural, 1925,  private collection, courtesy Flammarion, Paris.
8. A model wears Le Perse, evening cape by Paul Poiret, fabric by Raoul Dufy, courtesy of Flammarion, Paris.
9. Le Tennis, ca. 1920-25, Musee d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris.
10. Rose textile, three cersions, ca. 1930-33, produced by Onondaga of New York, courtesy of Flammarion, Paris.

Penthouse Serenade

"Just picture a penthouse way up in the sky  
With hinges on chimneys for stars to go by 
A sweet slice of Heaven for just you and I  
When we're alone
 
From all of society, we'll stay aloof 
And live in propriety there on the roof  
Two heavenly hermits we will be in truth  
When we're alone
 
We'll see life's mad pattern  
As we view old Manhattan 
Then we can thank our lucky stars 
 That we're living as we are
 
In our little penthouse, we'll always contrive  
To keep love and romance forever alive 
 In view of the Hudson just over the drive  
When we're alone"
 - Will Burton & Will Jason, music and lyrics,  1931, Famous Music, NYC.
Recorded by Ruth Etting, March 7, 1932, Columbia Music,  2630D (Matrix 152123),  NYC 

 

No other city brings to mind the glamour of the penthouse like New York City does.   Los Angeles was (and is) a sprawling town trying to maximize its suntan.  Paris is the city that has rules to prevent it from overshadowing its glorious self.     New York, like its people, stretches upward toward whatever is newer, brighter, higher.   A summer night somewhere near the corner of  East 42nd Street  and Lexington Avenue.  A woman stands  on the fire escape, wrapped in solitary  elegance, against a background of clotheslines in Martin Lewis's Glow of the Evening  (1929).  She gazes toward her architectural counterpart over a row of apartments: the Chanin Building, which opened just a few months before the stock market crash in 1929.

This is also a story of immigrants and people who were unafraid to leap about on tall buildings, even before the creation of Superman.   Ramon and Rosita,  a stunning dance team from Mexico City, dance a dance called the Southampton Hop on the roof of the Chanin Buidling, with the Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building as their backdrop.  You can almost hear the lyrics of Penthouse Serenade as you look at the duo.  They were in New York to appear in the revue Midnight Follies at the Hotel Metropole in 1929. 

Joseph Spah, who performed under the name Ben Dova,  immigrated from Strasbourg, France. Known for his stunts (that's him teetering on the edge of the Chanin Building's roof in top hat and tails).  His greatest feat may have been his unplanned jump from the burning Hindenberg blimp in 1937.  He survived but, to his chagrin, broke his ankle in the process. 

The artist Martin Lewis traveled the farthest to get to New York City, arriving  at the age of nineteen from his native  Australia.  After years of working as a commercial illustrator, Lewis had his first solo exhibition of etchings in 1929.  Drypoint  is a difficult technique to handle but, in Lewis's hands, it loses none of its sharpness as he layers it with virtuoso displays of shadings.  I am not alone in preferring his night scenes for this reason.   Even the young boy walking by the shuttered factory in 1939 lives in  an urban wonderland, awash  in angles of light and shadow.  

As you have noticed by now, this is an East Side story.   The poem  From Third Avenue On (below)  by Djuna Barnes is determinedly unromantic.  Barnes, a reporter for several New York dailies, likely knew that the street had been used for practice marches by a ragtag voluntary infantry during the Civil War.  Her taste and her talent was for the unusual combination, the sharp contrast as in stairs and stars or prayers and swearing.  City lights are not natural and that is one of their attraction.

"And now she walks on out turned feet

Beside the litter in the street

Or rolls beneath a dirty sheet

Within the town.

She does not stir to doff her dress,

She does not kneel low to confess,

A little conscience, no distress

And settled down.
Ah God! she settles down we say;

It means her powers slip away

It means she draws back. day by day

From good or bad.

And so she looks upon the floor

Or listens at an open door

Or lies her down, upturned to snore

Both loud and sad.
Or sits besides the chinaware,

Sits mouthing meekly in a chair,

With over-curled, hard waving hair

Above her eyes.

Or grins too vacant into space—

A vacant space is in her face—

Where nothing came to take the place

Of high hard cries.

Or yet we hear her on the stairs

With some few elements of prayers,

Until she breaks it off and swears

A loved bad word.

Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,

A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;

And friends and relatives disperse,

And are not stirred.

Those living dead up in their rooms

Must note how partial are the tombs,

That take men back into their wombs

While theirs must fast.

And those who have their blooms in jars

No longer stare into the stars."

  - From Third Avenue On by Djuna Barnes from The Book of Repulsive Women, New York, Guido Bruno: 1915.

By 1931, Americans were officially Depressed, none more so than New Yorkers, whose city, the mecca for aspiring moderns, bore the dubious distinction of being the home of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. Nearly half the theaters on Broadway had gone dark and the crash had accelerated a trend, already begun, of the exodus of the movie industry from New York and its environs, to Los Angeles.

In his book Celluloid Skyline (2001), James Sanders argues that absence only heightened the romance of Manhattan for filmmakers and film-goers alike. As for 1931, it was the year that Charlie Chaplin's City Lights was released and even the usually optimistic Frank Capra struck an unusually dark note in his comedy Platinum Blonde, whose plot - society dame is wooed and won by brash newspaper reporter - will be familiar to fans of Capra's 1934 classic, It Happened One Night.

Images:
1. Martin Lewis - Glow Of The Evening, 1929, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca. 
2. Martin Lewis - East Side Night, 1928, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca.
3. unidentified photographer - Ramon & Rosita Dance the Southampton Atop The Chanin Building, ca. 1929, Bettman Archive, NYC.
4. unidentified cinematographer, Ben Dova on the roof of the Chanin Building, 1933, British Pathe, London.
5. Martin Lewis - Little :Penthouse, 1931, British Museum, London. 
6, Martin Lewis - Shadow Magic, 1939, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca. 

You may also be interested in Djuna Barnes: Some Hard Captious Star, posted here August 23, 2011 and
The Book Of Repulsive Women, posted here March 17, 2010.