Francoise Gilot's Recent Montoypes

"Cigarette papers datebook and tobacco pouch
Life
Ought to be like painting
still
And literature
A hatless head
Eyes straight
Comma
A flat nose a plane
On the forehead
My portrait
My heart beats
It's an alarm clock
In the mirror I'm full length
My head smokes"

-"Still Life - Portrait" by Pierre Reverdy, translated from the French by Kenneth Koch, New York, New Directions: 1969.


I can imagine Pierre Reverdy's poem as a dual portrait of two artists, the ingenue Francoise Gilot and the satyr Pablo Picasso.

A mixture of figuration and abstraction has always been characteristic of Francoise Gilot's work. Squares and stripes provide a geometric frame of reference, anchoring her subjects in an otherwise indeterminate space. Flecks on the wings of a bluebird or on the torso of a nude person suggest layers of time and space in the lives of living creatures, and the artist's interests in myth and the nature of the cosmos. 

Gilot began making monotypes in 1985 after more than four decades painting with oils on canvas.  The new medium offered ways to incorporate texture into the meaning of the work.   She worked first at Solo Press in New York City where she created several series of  monoprints, so-called for their singular nature.  Painting directly onto plexiglass rather than using the customary stone or metal plates, Gilot was free to affix exotic papers to the base sheet.   From this plate a single print was made by transfer to paper.  The first exhibition of her monoprints took place in Paris at Berggruen & Cie in 1990.  Today, at ninety-seven, Gilot still practices her discipline of painting every day in her apartment on New York's Upper West Side or in her Parisian studio

When Francoise Gilot met Pablo Picasso in 1943 it happened shortly after her first exhibition opened.  Attracted to the artist as much as the man, Gilot anticipated a creative partnership as well as a romantic one but, during the decade they were together, her interests were subject to his domineering personality and irrational outbursts. With strength and clarity of mind, qualities Picasso was not accustomed to in his relationships with women, she spoke the truth to him: "As an artist you maybe extraordinary, but morally speaking you're worthless."  Could Gilot have been thinking of that moment when she created Law And Freedom?

The year that Gilot moved in with him, Picasso made a drawing,  titled Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple. The game of their courtship had turned to erogenous combat. In retrospect, Gilot had been wise to hesitate for the better part of three years before moving in with him. They had two children, Claude and Paloma, before their acrimonious split.  Picasso was so incensed that he cursed her, telling her that for the rest of er life she would live in his shadow, that if anyone was nice to her it would only be because of her connection to him.   She later described the source of her determination, "in a way I thought, I don't know how long we will all remain alive, so I'm going to do what I want."

Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) was the contemporary of Cubist and Surrealist artists but he was much closer to the Cubists, especially Joan Gris who illustrated some of Reverdy's books.  In Reverdy's later years, both Picasso and Braque  contributed illustrations to his books but Picasso was so jealous and competitive with Braque by that time that it must have been a relief to deal with Gris. Reverdy's  translator Kenneth Koch goes so far as to label Reverdy a "Cubist poet."   Reverdy was the least mystical of poets; his approach was  to transform life into an aesthetic experience.  Gilot writes about meeting Reverdy in her autobiography Life with Picasso, reprinted this year by New York Review Books, with a forward by Gilot's American friend author Lisa Alther on the anniversary of its initial publication in 1964.  Controversial when it was originally published in 1964, it caused friends of Picasso to vengeful denunciations; thanks to its publication, Picasso never again would conssent to see his children.

Fore more about Francoise Gilot, read Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Woman.

Images:
1. Francoise Gilot - Nude on a Sofa, 2011, Mac-Grder Gallery, New Orleans.
2. Francoise Gilot - Bluebird, 2011, Mac-Gryder Galler, New Orleans.
3. Francoise Gilot - Billard Game, 2011,  Mac-Gryder Gallery, New Orleans.
4. Francoise Giilot - Law and Freedom, 2009, Mac-Gryder Gallery, New Orleans.

Two Norwegians: Olav Hauge & Harald Sohlberg

"You build a house for your soul,
and wander proudly
in starlight
with the house on your back,
like a snail.
When danger is near
you crawl inside
and are safe
behind your hard

And when you are no more,
the house will
live on,
a testament
to your soul's beauty.
And the sea of your loneliness
will sing deep
inside."
  - "Conch" translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin

"This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors will open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.
  - "This is the Dream" translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly

"Not by car,
not by plane -
by neither haysled
nor rickety cart
- or even Elijah's fiery chariot!

You' never get farther than Basho.
He got there by foot."
 - " Not by Car, But by Plane" translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin

Olav Hauge (1908-1994) was a poet, a translator, and a horticulturalist, whose writing made a mark on the literary and geographical landscape of his country.  Widely read in European literature, Hauge was also a prolific translator of works from German (Heym, Trakl, Brecht, and Paul Celan, from the French (Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Michaux, and Rene Char) and English (Blake, Browning, Tennyson,Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence).  The German romantic Friedrich Holderlin whose blend Greek  mythology and pantheistic mysticism beguiled Hauge, permeated his inner life, so deeply so that Hauge sometimes lost his footing in ordinary life.  When that happened Hauge suffered psychotic episodes, spending several years in a mental hospital during his twenties. 

For most of his life Hauge lived alone in a small house filled with books; only in 1978 did he finally marry Bodil Cappele, an artist. he loved books so much so that he wanted to share them with his neighbors, mostly farmers and laborers who had little time for reading.  Often when one would drop in he would pull a book off the shelf, saying "No doubt you've read this..." 

Trained in horticulture at university, Hauge tended a small orchard.  Although the Hauge family owned a large farm, Norwegian custom dictated that the bulk of it go to Olav's older brother so the younger one received just three acres on which he grew apples.  And though he loved apples, he loved literature more.  Hauge's first poems were published when he was thirty-eight years old. Something in the grandeur of the green mountain landscape of western Norway found a correlative for Hauge in the poems of the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po.  Hauge's  Journals, kept from 1924-1994 and published after his death, reveal a man of extraordinarily broad culture.

When Hauge died his body was carried uphill by a horse drawn carriage for burial in the Ulvik cemetery.  Those who attended the funeral reported that the carriage was accompanied by a colt and its mother who trotted gaily alongside the casket all the way up the mountain.  I like to think that Li Po was with them in spirit..

Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935) is the other great Norwegian artist, the one who did not paint The Scream. Although reasonably contemporary (Edvard Munch lived from 1863-1944), Sohlberg painted the Norwegian landscape in a somewhat romantic style; contra that his use of color is clear and neat, reminding my of the contemporary American Alex Katz.  Munch has been judged the more modern of the two for his expressionist style and febrile temperament.  Both artists disdained comparisons of their works with those of other  artists.  Hauge is  a modernist, his poetry spare and concrete in style - and yet Sohlberg's landscapes strike me as  a visual equivalent in their rendering of the unique character of northern light.

For further reading: The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems by Olav H. Hauge, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly & Robert Hedin, Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press: 2008

Images:
1. Harald Sohlberg - Fisherman's Cottage. circa 1907, Art Institute of Chicago.
2, Harald Sohlberg - Flower Meadow in the North, 1905, National Museum of Art, Oslo.
3. Harald Sohlberg -  A Country Road, 1905, National Museum of Art, Oslo.

May Stevens's Big Daddy: A Man For Our Time

Against an improbably blue sky Big Daddy sits, with a pug(nacious) dog on his lap; draped in an 'Uncle Sam' outfit, his visage resembles an  unhealthy reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt.  His transparent military helmet and thick neck inevitably suggest a phallic reference.  Pax Americana painted in 1973 looks, if not contemporary, then eerily prescient.

May Stevens created the Big Daddy series between 1967 and 1976.  She says she got the idea from a painting she had made of her father, in a typical pose, sitting in front of the television in his undershirt. Ralph Stevens worked as a pipe fitter at the Bethlehem steelyards.  She has described her father as being an ordinary working class man who never questioned the government, supported the Vietnam War unconditionally, and held openly racist and ant-Semitic views.

Stevens did not merely caricature her father.  Bald and stocky, Big Daddy represents the toll  manual labor takes on workers.  She has spoken perceptively about his life and aspirations.

"He wanted to be proud.  He worked hard (sloughed off only to the extant that it was, permitted,  in fact required, by his co-workers) and used his wages for his own comforts and for ours, and to enhance his standing in the community and ours.  His sending me to college was the kind of decision that rising in class was worth spending money on.  He didn't expect, of course, that college would make me dress badly (long hair and shirts and jeans) even years after I graduated.   Nor behave badly either (radical politics, peace marches, signing petitions and other intemperate behavior).  he never imagined that lifting me out of his class would produce in me an allegiance to his class that he did not feel.  He had swallowed the dream,  but it's more than a dream because the books and the art that raise you from one class to another, to bourgeois life, are indeed capable of providing a better life - and also the means of critiquing that life."

With a style akin to Pop Art, Stevens created a  symbol that connected  patriarchal attitudes to American imperialism (the red, white, and blue color scheme borrowed from the flag). Big Daddy  became a vehicle for protest at the hypocrisy and injustice embedded  in personal life as well as in politics. Deliciously, in Big Daddy Paper Doll (1970) the figure is surrounded by cut-outs of outfits as though he were a Barbie doll, except that his outfits are soldier, police officer, and a butcher in a bloody apron, all latent with  potential violence.  As the images were first shown that became the Big Daddy series, they were derided by mainstream art critics as heavy-handed, even a perversion of Pop Art (!), and they also detected resemblances to the dreaded psychedelia.  Time has clarified Stevens' wide-ranging intentions, keeping her works fresh while other works by her male counterparts now seem dated.

May Stevens (b. 1924) was born in Boston, grew up in Quincy, and now lives in New Mexico.  An earlier series Freedom Riders (1963) was inspired by Daumier's Third Class Railway Carriage (1864).  In 1971 Stevens contributed a memorial volume for the victims of the Attica prison uprising.
To read more about May Stevens...

Addendum: Mat Stevens died on December 9, 2019.  She was ninety-five.

Image: May Stevens - Pax Americana, 1973, acrylic on canvas, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY.

Sassetta by the Sea

  "O my country, I can see the walls
and arches and the columns and the statues
and lonely towers of our ancestors,
but I don't see the glory;
 - from Canto I

  "Human things last only a short time,
and what the sage of Chios claimed
is very sure:
that leaves and human beings
are similar by nature.
Yet few are comfortable with this idea.
We all give room
to restless hope,
the young heart's creature.
  from Canto XLI

(Excerpts from The Canti,  poems by Giocamo Leopardi, translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2010.)

All appears tranquil on this summer day in central Italy in the 15th century.  The castle-fortress, Rocca Aldobrandesca (at the upper left corner),  built for Aldobrandeshci family, glows importantly in the sun, the buildings of the little walled city are the colors of Jordan almonds, the waters of the Tyrreanean Sea live up to their nickname 'the silver coast', and  ships sail merrily along,  the wind at their backs.  In the lower right corner a woman bathes in a stream, undisturbed. The scene remains much the same today as when Sassetta painted it,  a small fishing village except for the cars and kite surfers.

Stefano di Giovanni, known as Sassetta (ca.1392-ca.1450), is considered by many to be the greatest Sienese painter of the 15th century. His life is obscure in some aspects; no one is certain where he was born nor the origin of his nickname, although there have been plenty of guesses.  Siena is not far from Talamone: in any case, the artist never traveled very far from home, nor did he need to.  He worked in a milieu that included Duccio di Buoninsegna, called the father of Sienese painting, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers, Pietro and Ambrogio. His style was one of utmost refinement and technical virtuosity. His first works appeared in the 1420s.  There is a quality in Sassetta's style of  "just enough but no more" that has caused many artists of this past century to find in him a precursor.

Who were the Aldobrandeschi, then? There was  a pope in the family tree, Gregory VII from the 11th century.  Famously, Guiglielmo Aldobrandeschi was a character in Dante's  Divine Comedy, as was his son, cited as an example of the sin of pride. A family of wealthy aristocrats, the Aldobrandeschi owned large tracts of lands in southern Tuscany, necessitating an imposing watch tower in the fortress at Talamone.  By 1300, all but abandoned, it became the home of a garrison for Siena.  Talamone had attractions for those with ambitions and the wealth to bring them to fruition; settlements protected  by hillside enclosures surrounded by lands that had been irrigated since the time of Etruscans, settlers of   central Italy who predated the Romans.  It also had an advantage in being a Republic for some four hundred years from the 12th through the 16th centuries; unlike the Papal States which surrounded them, in Siena artists were accorded greater freedoms.

This miniaturized picture of a medieval commune has another remarkable quality: confidence.  Central Italy was an economic, political, and cultural hub and would remain so throughout the Renaissance. Sassetta was an extremely pious man but when he came to the sea, he had to own that life was indeed good.

Giacomo Leopardi (1797-1837) was Italy's first modern poet,  whose work pensiero poetante, thinking in poetry, introduced a new type of lyric as a possible poetry.

Image: Sassetta - City by the Sea - View of Talamone,  c. 1430, Pinaoteca di Siena 

Vittorio Bolaffio: A Lyric of Swallows in Spring

"Even when it seems that the day
has passed like a swallow's wing,
like a handful of tossed
dust that can never be
regathered and no description
no  story is needed
or heard, there is always a word
a small word one can say
if only to say
there's nothing to say."
 - Patrizia Cavalli, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock, from The Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry edited by Geoffrey Brock, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2012.

I. On a sunny spring day a young woman pauses on her way to look up at birds in flight overhead. A lyrical moment full of graceful curves, her arms, birds on the wing, and a slightly mysterious wall, not sinister but where does that brown gate lead?  Are we near the sea or up on the escarpment, pretty much the only choices in Trieste, wedged as it is between the mountains and the water.

It could be my imagination or it could be that the wall behind her, there for no obvious reason, is a symbol of the irredentism that is the defining characteristic of Trieste, longtime home of the artist Vittorio Bolaffio.  In Bolaffio's day Trieste was a port city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a fact that rankled the Italian patriots of the Risorgimento.  When World War I broke out Bolaffio was conscripted into the Austrian Army. After the war ended he moved permanently to Trieste, rented a studio, and made lasting friendships while absorbing the atmosphere of the Garibaldi cafe.

After studying art in the Florentine atelier of Giavonni Fattori he had headed to Paris, then the center of the art world, where he sensed to  the significance of Cezanne before most French artists caught on. The impact was so vivid that later when critics evaluated Bolaffio's work they found it to be unusual in its broadly European interests and influences.

An anecdote from the book Trieste nei miei ricordi (Trieste in my memories) written by Bolaffio's friend Giani Stuparich ...the charm of Bolaffio's personality that is visible in Spring with Swallows.

"... one morning I saw Bolaffio arrive in a taxi, and he came down with a very long frame under his arm and I led him into the garden sun where the children were playing.  He called them to see the painting and watched their reactions. I never saw him as happy as when he discovered that they were very interested in the figures and the colors.  Later he told me  about the picture, "I painted iit by oil light while dreaming of the sun. I see that in the sun it does not get damaged: children are the sharpest critics." "

Bolaffio is not so well known outside Italy as his teachers Giovanni Fattori and Giovanni Segantini or his friend Amedeo Modigliani, perhaps because most of his paintings are in Italian collections.  Several of them, including Spring with Swallows, are in the provincial museum of Gorizia. Born in 1893 into a family of well-to-do Jewish wine merchants in the border city of  Gorizia, Baloffio who was described by those who knew him as being gentle, generous, and quiet, seems a natural outsider.  His portraits of members of the local Jewish community are especially admired.

Vittorio Bolaffio died in Trieste the day after Christmas in 1931.  "He was a great artist - he dreamed of universal brotherhood" is the epitaph dictated by his friend the poet Umberto Saba for his tomb.

II. Born in Perugia (1949), Patrizia Cavalli lives in Rome. She has published three collections of poems, the first,  My Poems Will Not Change the World was published in 1974, followed by My Own Singular I (1992) and Always-Open Theater (1999).  "Even when it seems that the day" is  a representative poem, written in a fresh colloquial voice with Cavalli's use of enjambment intensifies her sense of the conditional  nature of  our perception of events.  In origin, enjambment is a French word meaning to step over and in poetry it occurs where most line endings are not punctuated and whose sense of movement steps over to the next line. Her lyricism have inspired some Italian critics to call her  "a modern-day Sappho."  Cavalli's translations of Shakespeare include Othello, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Image: Vittorio Bolaffio - Spring with Swallows, no date given, Museo Provinciale di Borgo

Howardena Pindell: The Force in the Pattern

In Astronomy: Saturn and Neptune Howardena Pindell portrays the two planets in series of concentric circles moving through a space dotted with numbers and arrows, visitors from a secret graph.  In this ether figurative elements float in a sea of abstract brushwork. It is as though the structure of the universe was right before our eyes in a language whose key we are have yet to find.  As for the large round object at bottom, it could be Jupiter the next innermost planet to Saturn or it could be Earth representing human subjectivity The ragged edges of the image are typical of Pindell's paintings, the canvases usually unstretched and hung directly onto walls with ordinary nails.  

Like Emily Dicksinon's learn'd astronomer who saw figures in columns and charts that measured them, Howardena Pindell has explained her desire to "atomize" art down to its irreducibly smallest  parts, similar to a mathematical exercise.  Pindell recalls how, as a child, she often saw her mathematician father write numbers down in a journal divided into grids. "I saw writing and numbers as drawing."  Another, darker,  memory,  is of a  car trip with her parents through the Midwest.  While drinking from a mug of root beer in Ohio, she noticed that the bottom of the mug had a red circle drawn around its edge.  In answer to her question "why", her parents explained that in the South black people were served separately from whites with cutlery and glassware marked with red circles. 

Although we usually see pattern as decoration, Piindell explores its ideational force, using pattern to express  ideas.  She has worked mostly in an abstract style with figurative elements cleverly encoded; her preference is for details over generalities.  This has also allowed her to upend the cliched expectations of black artists to create earthbound art.

Howardena Pindell was born in Philadelphia and, in 1967, the year she earned her MFA from Yale University,  she was hired by the Museum of Modern Art.  While working at MoMA  Pindell became one of the original members of Artists in Residence, a women's gallery founded in New York in 1972 in response to the dearth of opportunities for women to show their work in museums and galleries, something she had direct experience with at work.  Pindell would return to this theme, elaborating with statistics gathered through seven years of research, with the results published in 1989 in New Art Examiner. She shook up the art world by showing how arts institutions were still deliberately  exclusionary, based on racism. 

At the age of seventy-four Pindell finally had her first career retrospective in 2017, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen, at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago.  And in 2019 she received the Artists' Legacy Foundation award.

Image: Howardena Pindell - Astronomy: Saturn & Neptune, 2008, ink, acrylic, and gouache on paper, courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Francisco de Zurbaran: Perfectly Still

If only Francisco de Zurbaran had had a century of his own to shine in. Instead Zurbaran's life (1598-1664) overlapped that of Diego Velasquez (1599-1660), arguably the greatest painter of Spain's Golden Age.  Whether Zurbaran would have been flattered to be called the "Spanish Caravaggio" is open to question.  There is no evidence that he ever saw any of  the Italian's work, not to mention that the comparison  grounded in their similar intense use of chiaroscuro, went in the wrong direction for an unalloyed compliment.  And Zurbaran might well have taken offence; he was an ambitious man, the son of a notions seller,  who married three times to wealthy women.

Still life in the 17th century was just becoming a separate genre rather than a merely decorative addition to portraiture.  Looked down on, seen as requiring less skill and ambition than figure painting, it was the poor stepchild of painting.  Zurbaran was a typical artist of his time, painting mostly religious subjects, long  used  to educate the faithful and a fruitful source of commissions for Zurbaran.  Portraits were intended to flatter the vanity of their subjects; a clever artists could combine the two as Zurbaran did with Bishop Gonzallo de Illescas.   Of the few still life paintings that are thought to be from his hand, only this one is signed 'Zurbaran and  dated 1633.   

One painter, Francisco Pachecco, threw shade on still life  in The Art of Painting (El arte de la pintura) in 1649):  "These days there is no lack of those who enjoy this kind of painting because it is easy to do and causes delight by its variety."  "...although it does require more skill...if it is to be used in serious history painting."

Looked at in one way Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose  is a triptych. This has led some critics to guess at religious symbolism in the objects themselves. The unearthly light  does not reach  the  preternaturally dark background, sometimes referred to as Spanish-black. The objects are set on a narrow ledge which imparts a horizontal solemnity to their arrangement.   A  basket of oranges with a sprig of blossoms looks freshly plucked from the tree, an orangerie being a sure sign of luxury in the days before refrigeration. So was the pewter plate that holds four lemons, their pedicels all projecting an erotic tactility.  The cup of water with a rose on a pewter saucer may be included as a bravura display of chiaroscuro.  If we cannot know for certain what prompted Zurbaran to paint this enigmatic masterpiece we sense his pride in its perfection.
Image:
Francisco de Zurbaran - Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, 1633, oil on canvas, 23.62 x 41.12" The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

Sonia Delaunay: A Wind Rose

"Did the same
Car carry me away
                             I see where you came from
                             You turn your head
Midnight
On the moon
Just struck
                            At the street corner
                            Everything is turned around
I saw her face
Even her hands
                            The last star
                            Is in the garden
Just like the first
Think of tomorrow
                            Where will they be
                             The thoughtless dead
When the wall vanishes
                             The sky will fall."
"Perspective" by Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), translated from the French by Kenneth Rexroth, New York, New Directions: 1969.

A wind rose is a graphic chart that shows the direction and speed of wind and employs colors to differentiate wind speeds.  The subject was irresistible to Sonia Delaunay, an artist who thought in graphic terms no matter what the medium at hand. When her friend the poet Tristan Tzara invited her to illustrate a series of poems he had written about La rose des vents Delaunay was delighted.    Both had a long-standing interest in illustrated books and had worked with others on similar projects, most famously Delaunay's  1913 collaboration with Blaise Cendrars on Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France a long title for a long work printed on one continuous sheet of paper two meters long.   The resulting book, titled Juste present (La rose des vents) was published in 1961. For the covers Delaunay created a color etching that appeared right-side-up on the front and upside-down on the back just present, indeed.

"I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd: in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd."
 - excerpted from "The World" by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), Maidstone, Crescent Moon: 2012.

It was jazz that came to mind when I saw the Sonia Delaunay retrospective at the Albright-Knox Gallery in early 1980. It was still winter and those brilliant colors seduced me;  fanciful rugs woven  rugs on the gallery floor seemed to bring the sun inside even on a gray day.



Along with  elation  I felt  the unfairness of being too late to an exhibition that opened less than two months after the artist died in December 1979.  If there was any incongruity between the brilliant rhythms in Delaunay's work and the unmovable gray marble columns holding up the Beaux Arts galleries it barely registered on me.  Originally built  to house the Fine Arts Pavilion for the 1901 World's Fair, the Albright-Knox Gallery only opened in 1905; it was celebrating its 75th anniversary in 1980.

Simultanisme, or the representation of movement through pure color, was Sonia Delaunay's contribution to the dynamic experiments that ushered in 20th century art. It has proved to be just as important as Dada and Surrealism, two better-known European movements.  Delaunay's experiments went beyond the emphatically colored landscapes by the Fauvist painters (derogatorily christened  as " Les Fauves" or " the wild beasts" by contemporary critics) just as people were getting comfortable with the beautiful daubs of the Impressionists. 

Delaunay and Tzara had known each since their early days in Paris, meeting in 1921.  Sonia Terk (1885-1979)  was born in Odessa and emigrated from Ukraine in 1905 to study art. When  she met Robert Delaunay, a French artist and became pregnant with their son,  she divorced her husband and married Delaunay.  Their marriage was also an artistic partnership that lasted until Robert Delaunay's death in 1941.   The Delaunay apartment became a meeting place for avant-garde artists and poets Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Jean Cocteau.  While Sonia was busy decorating a Surrealist bookstore Robert painted two portraits of their friend Tzara.  Delaunay not only painted, designed clothing, furniture, and other household items but also collaborated on books with several French poets.  "I have done everything. I have lived my Art," she said.

Tzara came from Hungary by way of Zurich which is where he began to practice something he called Dada, art that expressed hostility to reason and aesthetics, two things that had proved woefully inadequate in the face of trench warfare. A performance artist at the Zurich's Cafe Voltaire, he began to produce manifestos before he wrote poetry.   By the time he met Sonia Delaunay-Terek, Tzara was already known as the "president of Dada."


Images: Sonia Delaunay-Terk, illustrations for Juste present (La rose des vents) by Tristan Tzara, Paris: 1961.  Images from the collection of the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco.
1. illustration for page 39.
2. illustration for page 13.
3. illustration for page 21.
4. frontispiece.

At Sea In A Red Desert

"In the desert you see, there is everything and nothing."
 - Honore de Balzac, from A Passion In The Desert, (1830) translated from the French by Ernest Dowson.

What is it that makes Red Desert seem so of-this-moment when many of the finest films of the 1960s are time capsules, you could say, impressive historically, but delimited by time.  We can see now that a general level of self-awareness, reflected in mass entertainment, was a byproduct of postwar prosperity.  For Italy, a country that had known poverty for long, the boom when it came in the 1960s was  like leaping an entire century in one bound. The present was disorienting and the future unknowable. "There is something terrible about reality, but I don't know what it is. No one will tell me,"  a character named Giuliana  admits plaintively near the film's end. Sound familiar?

In 1964 when Michelangelo Antonioni filmed Red Desert he may have made the first feature film starring the environment.   In the U.S. Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in September 1962 and the controversy sparked by its claims of chemical poisoning of the natural world were something new in the giddy world of post-war expansion.  An unspoken character in the film is the Po River, the longest river in Italy that rises in the Alps and windes its way across several provinces to empty in the Adriatic Sea.  One of the most complex rivers in Europe,  its sprawling delta makes the Po a barometer of the increasing sedimentation and rising waters that pollution has brought.

And why call it Red Desert?  For the chemical-swollen air that collapsed all distinctions between there and nowhere and, specifically, for the red sulfur particles that fell like rain, coating everything.

Antonioni, the son of a prosperous northern  family was nevertheless keenly aware of the region's poverty and the seemingly miracle of prosperity brought by the booming petrochemical industry in the decades following World War II.   The scale and futuristic look of the structures erected, conical furnaces and rows of red radio towers raised like the beaks of giant birds to the sky, inspired awe and uneasiness in those who watched the Po landscape altered almost beyond recognition.  All this would be included in the mis-en-scene for Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso).

By 1964, Antonioni and his partner the actor Monica Vitti had  completed a trio of much admired films titled retroactively "Alienation Trilogy." L'aventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962) had been filmed in black and white.  Red Desert, their first color film would be awarded the coveted Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1964. When asked why he had turned to color film after such great successes with black and white, Antonioni pointed out that black and white photography is not pure; it too alters reality. 

What he realized was that he needed color to show the deadening effect of pollution on this historic landscape, one that had survived millennia of human settlement yet now seemed imperiled with mere years of industrialization.  Although Antonioni denied being influenced by particular painters, he employed painterly images and techniques throughout Red Desert.  To get the effects he had in mind, Antonioni had buildings, trees, and even grass painted.  The crew spent a long night spraying trees with gray paint to mimic the effects of air pollution.  Even the clouds of sulfur that give the film its title are muted by the thick air. Whenever a bright blue stripe appears on the screen, viewers are alerted that the scene will shift and to pay close attention.  The character Giuliana (played by Vitti) plans to opena gallery where she will sell ceramics, paints the  interior walls with blocks of soft, luminous color that looks like the work of a cheerful Mark Rothko.

In the opening shot factories are obscured by mist rising from the Po River or, so we assume, until the camera pulls back to reveal the steam clouds are belching from smokestacks.  Nearby, striking workers listen to a man shouting through a megaphone that conditions at the factory are so bad that the owner's wife would be ashamed to show her face.  Again the camera pulls back and we see the owner's wife Giuliana walking through this hellish landscape with her little boy Valerio. Prosperity has not brought an end to exploitation.

Giuliana is damaged like her surroundings, recovering from a near miss automobile accident but unable to connect with her old life, she wanders aimlessly.  For a time it seems that Zeller, a sensitive colleague of her husband may be able to help her but, in a manner reminiscent of Lawrence Selden in Edith Wharton's novel  The House of Mirth his offer of rescue is a mirage.

Red Desert ends with a mere whisper of hope when Valerio asks his mother if the birds know the poison spewing from the factory, she assures him that they must know by now.  An admission of puzzlement tinged with dread from Antonioni, a man enthralled by modern technologies.

Images:
1. Osvaldo Babieri Bot (1895-1958)  -  Construction, no date given, Galeria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi, Plaisance, Italy.
2. Red Desert film still - trees seen through a fog of pollution.
3. Red Desert film still - Giuliana and Zoller walk near radio towers.
4. Red Desert film still - Giuliana and Valerio watch the strikers.

Georges Braque: Eole, or a Lesser God

"The poem's tempo

failed to keep up,

despite a following wind:

with the young storks

flying across the sky

pure and effortless.

and could only attempt

to mimic their beat

But the sluggish pace

of the poem

stalled and stopped:

the lagging engine,

fingers beneath the wing - 

the underside

tearing, with tearing,

the supple air

of the leaf - "

  - "Fleeting thought" by Ana Luisa Amaral,  from What's In A Name translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, New York, New Directions: 2019.

"I have always been very much engaged and preoccupied by the material, because there is as much sensibility in the technique as in the rest of the picture." - Georges Braque

"Their flight is knowledge, space is their alienation." - St. John Perse, from "Birds"

Aeolus (Eole in French) was such a minor god in the Greek pantheon that it is unclear whether he had one guise or three.  The four winds were the children of Aeolus, keeper of the winds and Eos, the goddess of the dawn, daughter of Hyperion and Theia so, combined, they may have formed Aeolus.  In Greek the word denotes one who is nimble.  Aeolus, who guarded the four winds, lived on a rocky island off the coast of Sicily where he the four winds imprisoned in a cave.  He only loosed them when ordered to by a greater god. 

Braque created his Eole as a sequence of forms: a triangular form is the neck, topped by a spherical head with a crescent (moon) for the god's face in profile at the end of an elongated neck. Hair flows out to the right, as though wind-blown.  Stars in the lower left hand corner also suggest that Aeolus is airborne.  Enclosed forms (triangle, crescent,etc.) surge to the left, creating streams of air in their wake.

Portuguese poet Ana Luisa Amaral is known for reinventing familiar stories in mythology and religion.  Lot's Wife wonders about her namelessness in a bible abounding in names; Amaral's  Ariadne would rather sit in a cafe on the island of Crete chatting with a dinosaur than spinning the thread that will allow Theseus to return to safety after slaying the Minotaur.

Ana Luisa Amaral was born in Lisbon in 1956.  Her first book of poetry  Minha Senhora de Que (Mistress of What) was published in 1990. She has published ten more volumes since and has been included in several anthologies of international poetry and translated into Spanish, Castilian, French, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Croatian.  What's In A Name translated by Margaret Jull Costa is her second collection to appear in English.  Amaral is herself a translator, having translated Emily Dickinson into Portuguese: she received her PhD. in literature on Dickinson's poems.

For further reading: What's In A Name by Ana Luisa Amaral, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, New York, New Directions: 2019.

Image: Georges Braque - Eole, 1939, bronze relief, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica.

The Double-Goers: Zachary Schomburg

"I would become, say, Lake Michigan and she, Ontario.  Huron was scoffed at.  Any lake but Huron, she said.  As we threw it around a bit, I changed my answer.  Lake Michigan was clearly the wrong choice for me.  It's a bit too urban, I said, perhaps too likely a choice.

A little later she described our dialogue about Great Lakes as futile and a bit nauseating.  She became upset, knowing we'd probably never become Great Lakes.  She was right, but weeks later I did become a forest somewhere near Saginaw and she became a lovely washer-dryer combination."

  "If Great Lakes" by Zachary Schomburg, from The Man Suit,  Boston, Black Ocean: 2007

A bad aura sometimes attaches to Surrealism: there are those who assert that the writers are incapable of making sense and the artists can't draw.  In general, surrealism works best when it suggests previously un-imagined connections.  Nonsense has a short shelf life for humans; we are designed to search for meaning.   Schomburg has been called  "a sincere surrealist" and praised by James Tate (1943-2015) who was himself a comic absurdist in verse with serious intent.

A doppelganger is the double of a living person, maybe a ghost, and in Zachary Schomberg's poems there are doubles in the most unlikely guises.  A girl dressed as a wedding cake meets her match in a man dressed as an avocado.

Just as Dante had his Beatrice and Petrarch had his Laura so Schomburg's man has Marlene - muse, sometime companion, and always oddly evasive, evasion being part of the charm of a muse for the sort of man who writes poetry.  There is even a poem "Far From Marlene" including with a character with a bird's nest in his hair that seems to have wandered in from a neighboring fairy tale.

From the first poem  "The Monster House" death is present, often as a non sequitur or an absurd joke.   The monster  tells jokes but wants to kill the audience - literally. When he refuses to reform he is replaced by a gorilla dressed as a man who plays a Wurlitzer organ. Schomburg hints subversively that strange things happen whenever one puts on a man suit.

"Black Telephone, White Telephone" is a sequence of poems charting the parallel adventures of two telephones; they may be commenting on each other's exploits or maybe not, but their juxtapositions are suggestive in unexpected ways.  Maybe ordinary life is mysterious after all.

In two poems, both titled "What I Found In The Forest," there are mythic surprises, hollowed trees and handsome woodsmen.

"I found a group
of inappropriately dressed
women inside

a hollowed-out tree.
They all had hidden agendas"

and again from the second poem:

"I found a group
of sharply dressed lumberjacks
hollowing-out

a large section of trees.
They were all singing Italian opera."

There is something new in Schomburg's surrealism, an acknowledgement of loneliness and a sense of history that looks back to "Abraham Lincoln's Death SCene" and forward to an emerging ecological consciousness.

Image:
Arthur Dove - Lake Afternoon, 1935, oil on canvas, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Eva Besnyo: Photojournalism as Art

What is it about Budapest and photographers?  For most of his life, the Budapest native Andre Kertesz (1894-1981), now lauded as the father of photojournalism, was known as "the unknown soldier" of modern photography even though he was the first to receive  a solo exhibition of his work (at Galerie au Sacre du Printemps, Paris) in 1927.  And then there is Eva Besnyo (1910-2003).  It was not until 2012 that her work was the subject of a retrospective in Paris at Jeu de Paume (L'image sensible).  One of the few times Besnyo's work has been shown in the United States was when a single picture was included in the hugely successful exhibition (and accompanying book) The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in  1955.  Curated by Edward Steichen, it was sentimental mishmash and brought little attention to the Hungarian/Dutch Besnyo which was a missed opportunity for American viewers.

For her work as a pioneer of photojournalism recognition was long in coming.  In the Depression days of the 1930s when Besnyo was starting her career, her nearest American counterpart, Dorothea Lange, was up to something entirely different.  Besnyo's objectivity and lack of romanticism in images do not manipulate the viewer's emotions as Lange intended hers to do.  Taken on vacation in the summer of 1931, Besnyo's little gypsy boy, an outcast in Hungarian society, carries the battered cello that earns his subsistence across his back (note the diagonals, a ptominent feature in Besnyo's work).  We may interpret his carrying a burden larger than he is as a commentary on his prospects in life but that is our interpretation.  Besnyo observes.

The Besnyos of Budapest changed their name from Blumengrund to make it easier for the father, a lawyer, to succeed professionally in the anti-Semitic climate of Hungary.  Her father gave Eva her first camera, a Kodak Brownie, when the girl was fifteen.  It was Eva who encouraged the boy next store to try photography; he did and went on to become famous under his new name - Robert Capa.  Both would raise photojournalism to an art form: neither were attracted to the pictorialism  popularized through Alfred Stieglitz's journal Camera Work.

Rather than attend university like her sisters as their father wished, Eva apprenticed herself to photographer Josef Pecsi.   At his studio from 1928 to 1930 she learned about micro-photography (see the work of French photographer Laure-Albin Guillot). But it was the gift of a book from her friend Gyorgy Kepes that changed her life, she later said.  The book was The World is Beautiful (Die Welt ist Schon) by a German avant-garde photographer Albert Renger-Patszch and it introduced her to the movement New Objectivity that influenced her future course.

Bela Besnyo would have preferred his daughter move to Paris than to the Sodom-and-Gomorrah that was Weimar Berlin.  "Paris is romantic," Eva admitted, "but you can learn so much in Berlin."  So Berlin it would be and when Besnyo arrived there in 1930 with her new Rolliflex she found work at Rene Ahrle's advertising agency and then a job as a photojournalist with Neofot, a picture agency similar to the Bonney Agency in Paris..   In a further bid for independence Besnyo opened her own studio the next year, becoming part of a generation of women who achieved economic and personal freedom through photojournalism.  Making street life their subject they legitimized their presence in public life.

When Hitler came to power in 1932 life in Germany became stressful for Jews.  Nazi brown-shirts roamed the streets, attacking people with impunity.  Besnyo was early to recognize the need to plan for a way out. She eventually married John Fernhout, a Dutch cameraman who was the son of a well known artist Charley Toorop.  Even when the relationship ended Besnyo remained close to her mother-in-law who helped her find her way professionally in her adopted country.  After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940 Besnyo was forbidden to work openly so she subsisted on the few private commissions she was able to scrape.  Eventually she went underground, using forged identity papers.  Her beloved father was killed at Auschwitz in 1944 while the rest of her family survived.  Her photographic archives were destroyed by aerial bombing.

Giving birth to a son in 1945 and a daughter in 1948, Besnyo had experienced the difficulties of working and being a parent and so was immediately sympathetic to the Dutch feminist movement, Dolle Mina in the 1970s.   Her work at this time became more socially engaged and her wit and humor,  previously in the background of her work came to the forefront. You get an inkling of it from her photograph of a garage sale in 1950s Amsterdam; a jumble sale does resemble the layers of an onion opening to the viewer/buyer.
Besnyo's great strength as a photographer may work against her visibility, it is that she has no signature style. From Budapest to Berlin to the Netherlands where her works have been memorialized in a series of stamps there is always another revelation around the corner. 

Images: Eva Besnyo, photographs courtesy of Maria Arthuria Instituut, Amsterdam.
1. Eva with Rene Ahrle, Berlin, 1931.
2, Roma boy with cello at Lake Balaton, summer of 1931.
3. Interior of Dutch Haka consumer cooperative at Jutphaas, 1934.
4. Yard sale at Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, 1950s.

At Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Peter Altenberg's Front Row Seat

"There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that's already three things and there are a lot more."

While the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) averred that he needed to walk in order to think, the first identified "urban flaneur" was Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), stalking life through the streets of Paris. Baudelaire, the inveterate walker, and Peter Altenberg who preferred to watch the world go by from a table in a Viennese cafe were compatriots of the pen.

Long prone to melancholy, Altenberg became dependent on alcohol and a variety of other drugs. He also suffered from insomnia, having no reason to keep regular hours.  After being committed to mental institutions four times  during the period 1909-13, his pessimism only increased with the outbreak of World War I. At a time when many regarded Austria as a charming asylum, Altenberg actually ended his days in one, dying there of pneumonia in 1919.

"Do you recognize that stack of empty slivovitz bottles?!?  Indeed I know, they're mine - " Ebullient punctuation and succinctness,  Altenberg is our contemporary.  As is his gimlet eye for social cruelties and his unseemly relishing of pretty young girls.

 Altenberg revealed himself to be conflicted in ways familiar to us.  A man who praised the pastoral life, yet  never deserted cafes  and their creature comforts, a Nietschean believer in the primacy of the aesthetic, yet a  champion of the rights of  working people who found beauty in humble things disdained by his peers. Unusually for a man of his time and place, Altenberg displayed empathy for  women, children and servants.  In The People Don't Always Feel Altogether Social Democratic we find him arguing for equality as the carriage with driver he is riding in buttresses class distinctions. He brushed aside the extreme social stratification of his time  like a annoying cobweb.  If this contradicts what I just wrote in the previous paragraph, well, that's Peter Altenberg for you.

In writing as in life, Altenberg elided the contradictions between bourgeois respectability and sexual expression, frequently consorting with prostitutes and demimondaines while maintaining a Romantic's attitude to women.  When a young woman he was wooing protested that his interest in her was only sexual, he replied "What's so only?" Persecution Complex is Altenberg's argument with Sigmund Freud and the radical new  psychoanalysis.  Altenberg  himself had been diagnosed with "over-excitation of the nervous system," resulting in an "incapacity for gainful employment," a diagnosis  that left him free to pursue the bohemian life he preferred. This did not prevent him from portraying his psychiatrist as a humorless stuffed shirt in Sanitorium for the Mentally Imbalanced. 

He may  not  be well known to non-German readers, but Altenberg has always been a favorite of other writers. Thomas Mann  recalled reading of Altenberg as "love at first sound." His friend, the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, dubbed Altenberg a "professional neurotic" but was eager to steal his ideas. Franz Kafka described Altenberg's talent for  "finding the splendours of the world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffee houses."   Altenberg and Schnitzler were nominated to be co-recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1914 but no prize was awarded that year.

Who was Peter Altenberg?  Born in 1859 to a prosperous Jewish family that supported him throughout his life, Altenberg's finances were also supplemented through the patronage of admiring friends.  He showed no inclination to pursue a career, motivation was never a strong point with him. He failed his high school composition examinations even though he was a talented writer. Nevertheless, Altenberg published eleven books while never making a living from them.  Camping out in a series of cheap hotel rooms, Altenberg's real life was lived in the cafes where he spent most of his time, absorbing atmosphere, intuiting the psychic states of those around him, and writing everything down. He was a self-described "little pocket mirror" that reflected the world as he found it  "(I) loathe and revile people yet can't live without them." 

Altenberg also wrote poetry on the backs of the postcards he collected, postcards having been a  recent Austrian invention (1869).  This habit inspired his friend Alban Berg to compose Five Songs On Postcards to  lyrics by Altenberg.  Berg was a composer of the Second Viennese School, meaning he combined romantic lyricism with the arbitrary rigor of the twelve-tone row. When the piece premiered in 1913, the audience rioted and the piece was withdrawn, not to be performed again until 1952. At the time, people said that within a week, half the audience had taken themselves to the couch of Dr. Freud.

Altenberg's "telegrams" written on the fly and published in newspapers. They belong to a genre called the feuilleton,  a term  from French suggesting at once sheets of paper and the flutter of little leaves.  They appeared in such popular publications of the day as Ver Sacrum, Simplississmus, Pan, Jugend, Wendingen  and Die Bombe (The Bomb). He also wrote poetry on the backs of the postcards he collected, postcards being a recent Austian invention (1869).  This habit inspired his friend Alban Berg to compose Five Songs On Postcards with lyrics by Altenberg. When the music premiered in 1913, the audience rioted and the piece was withdrawn, not to be performed again until 1952. At the time, people said that within a week, half the audience had taken themselves to the couch of Dr. Freud!



As the  Habsburg Empire slid ever closer to political instability, Vienna remained a charming place to escape the exigencies of daily life. The educated class had come to regard political activity as futile, so narcissism was a ready escape. The writer Theodore Herzl, only nineteen  in 1879, identified the neurotic personality of his time as one "falling in love with his own spirit, and thus of losing any standard of judgment." If this sounds to our own preoccupations, then reason enough to pay attention to Altenberg now

Oskar Koksochka (1886-1980) wrote poetry and plays but his portraits and landscapes,  the embodiment of expressionist, are his lasting legacy.  Kokoschka said that when he painted portraits he painted the soul of his sitter and not their likeness or, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the distillation of a human being that would survive in my memory."  Kokoschka's Altenberg, balding and mustachioed,  reveals angst in every fiber of his face and hands.  However, one sitter, Adolf Loos, was so taken with the artist's version of himself that he said "This picture is more like me than I am."

In Telegrams of the Soul Peter Altenberg is well-served by his translator Peter Wortsman (Brooklyn, Archipelago Books: 2005).

Images:
1. Oskar Kokoschka - Portrait of Peter Altenberg, 1909, oil on canvas,  private collection, New York.
2. Ludwig von Zumbach  - cover art for Jugend magazine, 1896, Albertina Museum, Vienna.

Equinox Bracelets

It's a spring tradition in Utica, New York.  Every class of  sculpture students at the Munson-Williams-Proctor  Institute Art School gets to participate in the making of the Equinox Bracelets, following a style of work laid down at the Bauhaus in 1920s Germany.  The students begin work on the project while they are freshmen and complete the fabrication during their sophomore year. The project is a joyful yet serious meditation on the recurring cycle of the seasons  and the symbiotic relationship between darkness and light.  The Equinox Bracelets will be on exhibit on the grounds of the Munson-Williams- Proctor Art Museum for two months following the vernal equinox.

The circles are constructed out of bent plywood left over from another project and stand ten feet high.  The colored lights are set inside  holes drilled into the wood.  The geodesic dome which holds the sculpture together was also built by the students.  Part of the frisson of working on the project comes from students working on discrete parts and then watching the work take shape as they put them together.

I have more about the city of Utica and the Munson-Williams Proctor Art Institute and some of their artworks by Arthur Carles, Norman Lewis, Henry Lee McFee,  and Bob Thompson

Participating artists: Colette Bernard, Carolina de Pontes,Claus Dicovskiy, Diana Kichuk, Rebecca Johnson, Natalie van Oyen, and MWP Sculpture Technician Erik Nilson.

Image: unidentified photographer - Equinox Bracelets, 2019, mixed media,  courtesy of Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institue, Utica, NY.