Helene Schjerfbeck: Through My Travels, I Found Myself

Paring its elements down to near abstraction, this moody landscape shows its  Nordic origins. Helene Schjerfbeck has been called "Finland's Munch" for her status as an early modernist. Best known for searching self-portraits, Schjerfbeck inhabited her landscapes with her pensive personality. A woman of  contradictions, she was reclusive and at the same time a knowing follower of fashion. 

Helene's father gave her a pencil and Helene began to draw at  the age of four while she was recovering from a broken hip...at eleven she won a drawing scholarship to the Finnish Art Society, the youngest student to ever attend the school.

A grant from the Finnish government enabled her to visit Paris, launching her on  extended  travels around Europe, from Pont-Aven, Concarmeau in Brittany to Florence, limited only by her lameness and associated health problems. 

In 1902 she moved to the village of Hyvvinka, twenty-five miles north of Helsinki.  She died in a sanatorium in Helsinki in 1946.

Image:  Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) - Landscape at Hyvvinki, 1914, oil paint and charcoal on canvas board, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Shaken, Not Stirred: The Retro Cocktail Hour

A heady mixture of gum-shoe jazz, space age  pop, B-movie soundtracks, bossa nova, and all manner of musical exotica, Retro Cocktail Hour is hip, arch, and cool from a place that few would apply these adjectives to - Kansas! The program describes itself as being the home of "incredibly strange music." Hosted by Darrell Brogdon and a sultry-sounding woman with a tiki torch, this is two hours of Public Radio with a smile on its face.

Every program begins with the sound of a cocktail shaker in action. Said cocktail shaker is a fixture of the Underground Martini Bunker where the martinis are always dry. 

When stereo was introduced in the 1950s, it had to be sold to a  public happy with the sound equipment they already had. Companies that sold both equipment and the records to play on it moved aggressively to promote it with in store demonstrations of sound moving from left to right and back. Stereo required to customers to buy new record players. A new musical genre was created to show off the new technology: RCA called its version "Living Stereo."   This movement began in the 1950s so there had to be an underground bunker in there somewhere.

Jazz musicians moonlighting under such bizarre names as the Waitiki Orchestra and the Italian Secret Service punctured any stuffed shirts who might wander in and also protected the reputations of the pseudonymous players,  Latin percussion played a prominent role via such musicians as Perez Prado, Juan Esquival,  and Tito Puente; it punctuated the fun while providing an antidote to the all too serious Cold War. Easily the most recognizable tune is the 1959 hit Quite Village by Martin Denny. Denny used almost entirely percussion instruments to exotic effect.

Contemporary practitioners of the genre include Big Kahuna and the Copa Cat Pack and my personal favorites - Pink Martini.

Lately vinyl records are making an unexpected comeback, so everything retro is new again. Wonder where my Dual turntable is now.

You can listen to the Retro Cocktail Hour here.

Image: unidentified maker - Cocktail ensemble, Bamberger bequest, Newark Art Museum, Newark, NJ.

Seongmin Ahn : An Artist Of The Diaspora

“In my paintings, by symbolic action and opening a drawer, two seemingly separate dimensions become integrated. It is a matter of how to find connection and openness.” -Seongmin Ahn

Like alchemy, chopsticks pull noodles out of the waves against a background of Taoist indeterminancy.

An immigrant, Ahn portrays the natural world, using Baroque ornamentation on familiar Asian  subject matter like the waves and mountains here in Aphrodisiac. Joining the two cultures, Ahn combines her artistic training in Korean black ink wash and color painting with Western influences from abstract art and conceptual art. In bold compositions and  areas of saturated color, her painting style also reflects the influence of  minhwa  Korean folk art that reached its greatest popularity during the 19th  century of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910).

Ahn was born in South Korea where she studied art at Seoul National University. She now lives in New York City, .

Image: Seongmin Ahn - Aphrodisiac,2019, ink, pigment, and wash on mulberry paper, Courtesy of the artist's website.

Andre Devambez: Crepuscule

Procession at Dusk  is a pastel by  French artist Andre Devambez.  A twilight procession of monks is observed from afar as they move towards the lighted windows of the monastery. This scene is both solemn and poetic. Its composition emphasizes the glow of candles in the distance, looking like fireflies, while the setting sun is mirrored by the tree trunks in the foreground.  They contrast with the bluish tones of the evening landscape, rendered in sfumato. The summery cast of the landscape suggests a date  near the Feast of the Assumption.  It is possible that its conception dates from the time Devambez was  resident in Italy.

This work sheds a new light on Devambez's early career.  Known for his bird's-eye views and steep perspectives that earned him the nickname "painter of the 6th floor." However this pastel testifies to his predilection for gathering scenes that are observed in a detached mannerThis work is therefore unique in his oeuvre. 

André Devambez was born in Paris and grew up in the world of Maison Devambez, the family engraving and publishing business founded by his father. Andre showed an early interest in drawing and soon enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was awarded the Prix de Rome which allowed him to perfect hiscraft at the Villa Medici in Rome. On returning to Paris, Devambez his  bird's-eye views revealed his innovative framing. At the same time, he workedr as an illustrator for magazines such as Le Figaro illustré  and l'Illustration. In 1910, he was invited to create decorative panels for the new French Embassy in Vienna. A true jack-of-all-trades, painter, engraver and illustrator his work includes serious and light subjects.

Purchased last year from a private collector by the Musée d'Orsay, Procession at Dusk is a large pastel on canvas by  André Devambez (1867-1944). As one of the rare works from the beginning of the artist's career, this 1902 pastel  will be included in the exhibition 'Pastels. From Millet to Redon.'

Image: Andre Devambez - Procession at Twilight, 1902, pastel on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Ernest Chaplet: A Porcelain Life

"In  such a porcelain life, one like to be sure that all is well, lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken pottery." - Emily Dickinson

In this marvelous vase designed by Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909) I see so much detail integrated so harmoniously. The  choice of blue for the flowers is unexpected. The vase is molded and glazed with colored highlights.  At center is a hen with her chicks and a cockerel incised into the sandstone. The design was taken from a series of Japanese woodblock prints Kacho sansui zushiki or Drawings of flowers, birds, and landscapes by Katsushika Isai (1821-1880), a pupil of  Hokusai. 

Cite de la ceramique, French museum of ceramics was founded in 1824, eleven years before Ernest Chaplet was born in Sevres. His parents  owned a cabaret and, by all accounts, the boy had a happy childhood. At  age thirteen, Ernest became an apprentice at the porcelain factory. Later he was put to work decorating everyday earthenware while doing his compulsory military service.

Chaplet would become the supervisor of Haviland et Cie in 1882. The Haviland Brothers, David and Daniel, founded their eponymous company in France to produce porcelain for export to America. The company, and specifically Ernest Chaplet, was instrumental in the revival of the use of stoneware in the late 19th century. Felix Bracquemond discovered a set of Isai's drawings at a painter's studio in Paris in 1865.  Two years later, after seeing the Exposition  Universelle in Paris, Chaplet opened an experimental studio in  the suburb of Auteuil where he put his friend Bracquemond in charge. This particular piece was the product of their long anf fruitful collaboration.

Image: Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909) - vase with japonisme decorations, circa 1883-1885, gray sandstone molded and engraved with gold, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

August Morisot: Cathedral of the Pines

"I hear you call, pine tree, I hear you on the hill, by the silent pond

where the lotus flowers bloom, I hear you call, pine tree.

What is it you call, pine tree, when the rains fall, when the winds

blow and when the stars appear, what is it you call, pine tree?

I hear you call, pine tree, but I am blind and do not know how to

reach you, pine tree. Who will take me to you, pine tree?"

 - "I Hear You Call, Pine Tree" by Yoni Noguchi

Half a century after Japonisme took tout Paris by storm, the artist August Morisot interpreted the woods of southwest France using what he had learned from ukiyo-e, "art of the floating world,' its flatness and the high stylization of its constituent elements. 

This is Le Grand Bois, the Meyriat Forest near Bourg-sur-Bresse where August Morisot summered with his family from 1904 to 1913. Deploying black ink with the precision of a goldsmith, he used shades of red and orange to pattern the leaves and  their complementary colors of blue and  purple for the shadows and forest undergrowth. Morisot's style has also been compared to Maurice Denis in its oscillation between the style of the Nabis and Art Nouveau.

August Morisot (1857-1951) excelled in several media: painting, engraving, textile design,  and even glass-making. A native of Burgundy, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon from 1880 to 1885. He taught at his alma mater from 1895 until 1933 when he  retired in 1933 and moved with his wife Pauline and his daughter Marcelle to Brussels. He died there in 1951.

Morisot was sent to the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela as part of a scientific investigation in 1886 by France's Ministry of Public Information; his job was to document the local flora and fauna. The effect light filtering through the canopy of tropical vegetation made a profound impression on Morisot, reminding him of Gothic windows. The journey was perilous and Morisot risked his life for it. He suffered violent fevers, resulting in a religious conversion. When he returned to France he converted to Catholicism. Jules Verne would use this expedition as the basis for his book Le Superbe Orenoque (1898). After 1900, his taste for symbolist literature led him to populate his forest landscapes with fairies; he wrote The Voices of the Forest about it.

Note: Yoni Noguchi ( 1875-1947) was the first Japanese poet to write poems in English.

Image: August Morisot - Le Grand Bois - circa 1917, watercolor, pen, black ink, and gouache on beige cardboard, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Mood Indigo: Firelei Baez

 "I started early - Took my dog - 

And visited the sea -

The Mermaids in the Basement 

Came out to look at me -"

     - Emily Dickinson

We can intuit what Firelei Baez had in mind in this painting by reading its title (see below, it's quite long). Women were largely absent from epic narratives of the Caribbean basin;  Baez has a repertoire of  Caribbean and African folklore for inspiration. As Baez's title illustrates, conceptual art asks the viewer to connect the dots; it only takes imagination to find an underwater world within. Are there mermaids lurking near those white speckles (bubbles)? Are those green splotches  underwater shadows reflecting light from above? Whatever we read into the paint daubs, they are rendered as scumbling as viewed  under a microscope. Baez has declared that, for her, the imagery comes out of the application of the paint to the canvas.

Firelei Baez was born in 1981 in the Dominican Republic and her family moved to Miami when Firelei was eight. She studied art at Hunter College and Cooper Union in New York City where she now lives in the Bronx.

Baez traces descent from Haiti and Dominica, two countries that share the island of Hispaniola.  Haiti, on the western side was colonized by France while the Dominican Republic was controlled by Spain so there is no single narrative that encompasses these two very different variants of colonization.  (Think of the contrast between the neighboring states of Georgia and Florida, the one settled by the British and the other colonized by the Spanish). The cultivation of  indigo  was key to the economic development of Haiti; tobacco and sugar were also extremely significant  exports.  The process to turn the plant into a dye was developed in West Africa, a history that Baez knows by heart. For her, the underwater world is blue, indigo blue.

Image: Firelei Baez  - Haitian Mermaid - Describing the West Indian Navigation from Hudson's Bay to the Amazonas, 2023, oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas, 73 7/8 x 60 7/8 in., James Conan Gallery, NYC.

Adam Zagajewski: And That Is Why

 "And that is why I paced the corridors

Of those great museums

Gazing at paintings of a world

In which David is blameless as a boy scout

Goliath earned his shameful death

While eternal twilight dims Rembrandt's canvases,

The twilight of anxiety and attention

And I passed from hall to hall

Admiring portraits of cynical cardinal

In Roman crimson

Ecstatic peasant weddings

Avid players of cards or dice

Observing ships of war and momentary truces

And that is why we paced the corridors

Of those renowned museums those celestial palaces

Trying to grasps Isaac's sacrifice

Mary's sorrow and bright skies above the Seine

And I went back to a city street

Where madness pain and laughter persisted - 

Still unpainted."

 -"And That Is Why" by Adam Zagajewski, from True Life, New York, Farrar. Straus and Giroux: 2023.

For Adam Zagajewski, the past is always present in everyday life and, as this poem eloquently lays out, nowhere is this fact more visible than in museums. The past isn't dead; it may not even be past.

The poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was born in Poland and died in Poland; however he lived in Berlin, then  Germany, moved to France in 1982 and later taught at universities in the United States.

Image: Sophie Crespy - photograph of a gallery at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, courtesy of Grand Palais, Paris.

Chatelaine: The Stories of Hilma Wolitzer

"Some women marry houses."

   -  excerpt from "Housewife" by Anne Sexton

The housewife as chatelaine, as mistress of an establishment, was the 20th century successor to the  woman who produced the goods and services needed to sustain the 19th century family, the one who was lionized by Catharine Beecher in her influential book The American Woman's Home written with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1869. First published in 1883, Ladies' Home Journal would become one of the most successful magazines of 20th century America by appealing to newly affluent middle class wives who saw themselves as home managers and consumers.

These  are the women who populate the droll stories of Hilma Wolitzer, newly reissued as Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, published by Bloomsbury. But make no mistake, Wolitzer's gimlet eye misses none of the pitfalls and contradictions of the post-war housewife. About her own years as a domestic engineer, Wolitzer has said: "I made a lot of Jell-O."

Recurring characters Howard and Paulette "married in those dark ages before legalized abortion." When Paulette announces her pregnancy to Howard, "all I could really feel was the doombeat of his heart and the collapsing walls of his will." That's how it was then.  So, too, in "Photographs' Paulie, as Howard calls her, reflects, "The doctors in my life were of the old-fashioned tongue-depresser variety, who probably accepted kickbacks on unnecessary, but lawful, hysterectomies." That, too, is how it was.

The emotional complications and displacements of sex at mid-century even extend to retirement living. This from "The Sex Maniac: "Everybody said there was a sex maniac loose in the complex, and I thought - it's about time." There are many sightings but no actual encounters. "There had been an invasion of those widows lately as if old men were dying off in job lots."  The piercing gaze of Hilma Wolitzer remains as fresh as it was in 1970s and 1980s when most of these stories first appeared.

Susan Hall (b. 1943) is an American artist who was born in Port Reyes Station, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley.

Image; Susan Hall - New York Portrait, 1970, acrylic and graphite pencil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.

Yvonne Jacquette: Up/Down/Inside/Out

The artist Yvonne Jacquette died on April 23 at the age of eighty-eight. She had participated in planning a new exhibition that combines early and recent work and is now on view at the D.C. Moore Gallery in New York City.

Jacquette's aerial views earned her the sobriquet "Canaletto of the skies" after the Venetian painter famed for his topographical views. Like Canaletto, The line between what is real and what is imaginary is shifting. Typically, she built layer over layer of shifting perspectives. 

Film Cans is a rare still life, an unusual subject for Jacquette, rendered from an oblique angle that evokes for me the works of Chinese artists of the past two millennia. Of course, the humble film can is usually dark gray but the addition of many other colors hints at the varied marvels witin.

Jaquette  depicted Manhattan from a rented airplane, circling the island; sometimes she worked from a perch on the upper floors  in the Empire State Building. 

Jacquette was married for four decades to Swiss filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt until his suicide in 1999.

Image: Yvonne Jacquette - Film Cans, 2020, oil on linen, D.C. Moore Gallery, NYC.

Flowers Under a Tree: Paul Georges & Gustav Klimt

The American painter Paul Georges (1923-2002) studied with Fernand Leger in Paris from 1949 to 1952 While there he met his future wife Lisette Blumenfeld at the studio of Constantine Brancusi.

Before that, in 1947, he was one of a stellar class that studied with Hans Hoffmann at Provincetown. Jane Frielicher, Wolf Kahn, and Larry Rivers all became fast friends that summer.

Georges is better known for his allegories and self-portraits but I was taken with Calla Lilies by its echoes (deliberate or by chance) to a famous landscape by the Austrian Gustav Klimt. The composition is similar and so are the colors; here Georges has chosen more angular, spiky or, if you look aslant, abstract forms. 

Before that, in 1947, he was one of a stellar class that studied with Hans Hoffmann at Provincetown. That summer Jane Freilicher, Wolf Kahn, Larry Rivers, and Georges all became fast friends at the Cape Code summer school.

His paintings are in the collections of numerous major museums are color and sound the United States. Georges died at his home in Isigny-sur-Mer, Normandy. 

In Rose Bushes Under the Trees (1904-1905),  the focus is also on color and simplified forms, vibrant greens and flattened forms that mesmerize the viewer's eye with repeating decorative patterns. Klimt's brush work is fluid and circular, suggesting the invisible presence of a passing breeze. 

I like to think that Georges may have seen Klimt's painting, in reproduction if not in person.

Images:

1. Paul Georges - Calla Lilies, 1987-1989, oil on linen, Simon Lee Gallery, London.

2. Gustav Klimt - Rose Bushed Under the Trees, circa 1904-1905, oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Albert Gleizes: Lazy Afternoon

"It's a lazy afternoon

And the beetle bugs are zooming

And the tulip tress are blooming

And there's not  another human in view"

    - Jerome Moross & John La Touche, lyrics for "Lazy Afternoon," a song written for the 1954 musical The Golden Apple.

Everything in Man in a Hammock means something, so there's a lot to decipher. Like every Cubist worthy of the name, Albert Gleizes plays fast and loose with traditional linear perspective - and it works brilliantly. The mobile perspective mimics the back and forth of a swinging hammock. A strong series of diagonals anchor the man to the moving hammock while, at the same time, merging him with the landscape. His right foot rests on a typical Parisian park chair. The eye is drawn to a small still life near his right hand -  a table holds a spoon, some lemons, and a glass. As he holds a book in that hand by Gleizes's friend Alexandre Mercereau, this may be a portrait of his fellow artist; so, we can intuit the town in the  background as Cretail. .

Albert  Gleizes (1881-1953) always insisted that he was the founder of Cubism. Unlike Braques and Picasso who used subdued colors in their Cubist works, Gleizes preferred to work in bright colors. Gleizes was inspired by the paintings of Alexandre Mercereau who exhibited his paintings in Moscow and Prague. The two men would collaborate in founding a utopian community a Abbaye de Cretail, a suburb of Paris.

Image: Albert Gleizes - L'homme au hamac (Man in a Hammock) 1913, oil on canvas, 56 x 67.75 inches, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo.

Winslow Homer: Working Girls

"He has chosen of the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangiers; and to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded." - Henry James on Winslow Homer, from "Some Pictures Lately Exhibited." in Galaxy (July 1875)

I was taken with this farm girl's dress, its orderly rows of white dots dominating the center of the picture. The tools on the wall and the baskets and barrel form a pleasing diagonal line that opens the image out from the young girl at its center. And with what deftness the artist delineates the rooster in the lower right corner.  Fresh Eggs nicely illustrates the decorative quality that appeared in Homer's pictures in the 1870s.

Young girls, usually outdoors, working as shepherdesses or dreaming under sheltering trees. Young women, often school teachers, making their way in the post-Civil War world as it slowly opened its doors to female education and independence. Winslow Homer possessed an instinctive sympathy for them all, perhaps influenced by his close relationship with his mother, Henrietta Benson Homer, herself an amateur watercolorist and Homer's first teacher.

Image: Winslow Homer - Fresh Eggs, 1874, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on wove paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 

Overhead at Villa Medici: Jacopo Zucchi

 

"How does he know

that spring has come to the world?

From

         within the cage

where he wakes from sleep at daybreak -

the sound of a warbler's call."

 - Shotetsu (1381-1459), translated from the Japanese by Stephen D. Carter, from Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, New York, Columbia University Press: 2010

Look up. Overhead is a garland of intertwined circles where a parliament of birds convenes. The artist Jacopo Zucchi designed a garden room for his patron Ferdinando de' Medici, crowning it with a frescoe above.  The ceiling is a delicate and charming vision of harmonious nature, a green and pleasant place inhabited by green birds, no less. Jacopo Zucchi (c. 1541 - c.  1590) was a Florentine painter who received his training in the studio of Giorgio Vasari, a author of Lives of the Painters. 

Renovations to the ancient villa began in 1576, the year that Ferdinando de' Medici, a Cardinal in the Church, purchased the property which is adjacent to the Borghese Gardens.  The palaces were  known as the Collus Hortulorum (the hill of gardens). The Cardinal was a scholar of the sciences and a collector of antiquities and cultivated a garden of rare botanical specimens.

Informally known as the bird room, at some point in  subsequent years the exquisite fresco was white  washed, only to be revealed when Geraldine Albers, a student of the French Academy at Rome, became curious about the vast white space, knowing that two other studios on the grounds were adorned with frescoes. These rooms allowed Cardinal de' Medici to withdrawn from the everyday into a place devoted to quiet contemplation.

Emily Dickinson famously described Hope as the thing with feathers but the metaphor could apply as well to poetry.  From the time of the Bayeux Tapestries and medieval bestiaries, down to contemporary poetry, birds have been a continuing object of human wonder. Shotetsu was a Japanese poet of the Muromachi period.

Image; Jacopo Zucchi  - photo by Florizel, Painted ceiling  frescoe of the garden room at Villa Medici in Rome, c.1576  - 1577, in situ, Rome, Italy

Marjorie Hellman: Extinction Quartet

"(C)olor juxtapositions provide the illusion that shapes and forms appear transparent or translucent, creating ambiguous readings of space, structure, light and atmosphere." - Marjorie Hellman

Why Marjorie Hellman choose a short-lived ornamental tree as the material for Extinction Quartet is a curiosity. The birch tree thrives in cool, temperate climates and moist soils. It is not much of a stretch to think that the birch may become an endangered species. Before the 16th century, painting in Europe was typically executed on wooden panels or applied to frescoes; canvas was introduced in Venice and then was adopted in northern countries. 

Marjorie Hellman received an MFA from Syracuse University; she remained in Central New York for more than twenty-five years, teaching studio arts at the Munson-Williams- Proctor School of the Arts in nearby Utica.

Image: Marjorie Hellman, Extinction Quartet, oil on birch, 1989, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica.

Dennis Ashbaugh: A Moving Picture

"I live in seems interesting

as if I were on vacation here

and feeling indulgent

towards the human race; its way of

living in cities and

tearing us so the traffic has to be

re-routed around a  collapsing white mesh barrier

as on this intersection here."  

    -  excerpt from "Suddenly the City" by Linda Bamber in Metropolitan Tang, published by David R. Godine, Jaffrey, New Hampshire: 2008

Who knows where the mind goes when we look at paintings?

These are the colors of modernity, bright and unexpected. What I see in this painting is transportation mapping.  Like the internet, transportation analysis was born of military necessity. During WWII, it was vitally important for intelligence agencies to map the movements of vehicles by the other side.  Embodied in this image are new ways of envisioning information.

Dennis Ashbaugh is an American painter who is preoccupied with all things scientific. Computers, DNA,and even science fiction are like progrms running in the back of his mind.

Image - Dennis Ashbaugh - Grape Pumpkins,2002, acrylic on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.

Dorothea Tanning's Late Flowers

 

"smoke veil tissuing         in my thin

sugar, spread-veined and still

           so green-legged      for jumping through

Echo's silver glass to this

                                         temple of birdrush

                       crushed, edges smudged to blur

the violetly-loved body   There

           you would          hear me."

         - "Convolotus alchemelia (Quiet-willow window)" by Brenda Shaughnessy, 1998, from Interior with Sudden Joy , New York, Farrar Straus, and Giroux: 1999.

A few years after Dorothea Tanning had stopped  making art, she began a series of flower paintings. She was not the first artist to turn to flower art in old age.  The last flowers of the Frenchman Edouard Manet had recently been memorialized in an revelatory book by Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge.

While the bloom is rendered impressionistically, there is an air of malevolence to the sinuous stem, like something out of a surrealistic dream.  But then Tanning had been known previously for her forays into surrealism - from a distinctively feminine point of view in this aggressively male genre. Added to this, the size of the painting - 55 x 66 inches - is unexpectedly large and possibly intimidating.

If the poem by Brenda Shaughnessy strikes an apposite note, that's because  Tanning herself had invited the poet to name the flower (hence "Quiet-willow window" as well as contribute a verse.

When she died in 2012, Tanning was one hundred and one, twice the age of Manet.

Image: Dorothea Tanning -  Convolotus Alchemelia, 1998, oil on canvas + Whitney Museum of American rt,  NYC

Georgianna Houghton: Things of the Spirit

 

She called them "spirit drawings" but they were also abstract or else couched in a vocabulary to which she along held the secret decoder. It is tantalizing to wonder whether Houghton and Klint ever met on Klint's visits to London. Overlapping layers of swirls and circles in vibrant colors are dynamic features in the works of both artists. They are hardly the type of art expected from women at the time.

Born in Spain, Georgianna Houghton lived for most of her life in London.  Like Hilma af Klint after her, Houghton took part in séances and averred that she painted at the direction of the spirit world.  Male artists like Kandinsky and Malevich who were long credited as the creators of the non-objective style were also involved in exploring the things of the spirit.

Image: Georgianna Houghton (1814-1884) - The Eye of God, 09/25/182, watercolor and gouache on paper, laid on board, Courtauld Institute, London

Hilma af Klint: A Cartography of the Spirit

"Land lies in water; it is shaded green.

Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges

where weeds hang from the simple blue to green.

Or does the land lean down to lift from under.

drawing it unperturbed from itself?

Along the fine tan sandy shelf

is the land tugging at the sea from under?"

   - excerpt from "The Map" by Elizabeth Bishop, from North and South (1934)f

To me, Seven-Pointed Star looks like nothing so much as a map. Knowing that Hilma af Klint was born into a family of naval officers and cartographers, the comparison seems spot on. She spent her entire life pondering  in monumental paintings. the spiritual dimensions of science.

She was a member of the second generation  of women who were allowed to study at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm where she was able to sketch male nudes in life class. What were considered unseemly activities for a woman interested af Klint not at all. She traveled far and wide, visiting Norway, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and London. Not everyone was accepting of those female students.

"It takes a man to create a Parthenon  frieze or paint the Sistine Chapel." 

"Woman must go. Immediately. Has a single one of these weak women at the Academy become an artist? For me there is not one who has any value at all." - 1889

These misogynistic comments came from fellow Swede Carl Larsson, an artist known for idyllic scenes of family life. 

Klinr spent her entire life pondering the fundamental conditions of existence in monumental paintings. Her ideal building was a spiral; she would have been thrilled with the Guggenheim Museum's retrospective of her work and that the exhibition single-handedly changed the shape of art history. 

Image: Hilma af Klint - Group V, Series, Seven-Pointed Star, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Sylvia Sleigh: The Group

 

"A.I.R. does not sell art; it changes attitudes about art by women. A.I.R. offers women a space to show art as innovative, transitory and free of market trends as the artists' conceptions demand."

The group that called itself A.I.R. first met on Match 17, 1972 in a SoHo storefront. The  women founded a cooperative gallery to show art by women at a time when commercial galleries showed mostly work by men. There had been a demonstration at the Whitney Museum in 1970 brought attention to its paltry representation of women artists (five per cent). It was the painter Howardena Pindall who suggested the name A.I.R.

Who were they?  Susan Williams and Barbara Zucker were joined by Dottie Attie, Rachel bas-Cohain, Judith Bernstein, Blythe Bohnen, Maude Boltz, Agnes Denes, Daria Dorosh, Loretta Dunkelman, Harmony Hammond,  Ann Healy, Laurace James, Nancy Kitchell, Louise Kramer, Pat Lasch,, Rosemary Mayer, Patsy Norvell, and Howardena Pindell.

A.I.R. Gallery went on to curate groundbreaking exhibitions of art by women from Japan, Israel, Sweden, and the Third World in its first decade. 

Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) was a Welsh painter who lived and worked in New York City.

For more about A.I.R. go here.: A.I.R. Gallery.

Image: Sylvia Sleigh - A.I. R. Group Portrait, 1977-1978, oil on canvas, Whitney Museum, NYC

Winter Trees: Gandy Brody

 

"Suddenly, in every tree,

an unseen nest

where a mountain

would be."

 -  excerpt from "Choices" by Tess Gallagher

"Even Gandy's clothes seemed to have opinions." - Elaine de Kooning

"What sort of an age is this/ When to talk about trees/ Is almost a crime/" - Bertold Brecht, translated from the German by C. Salvesen

One of Brody's last paintings from 1975 bears the title I am a Tree. Trees bear an oblique symbolism in Brody's work, as does this tortuous looking specimen in The End of Winter; gnarled  branches caught on the diagonal, presented in unexpected shades of red and orange. Nature aslant, abstract but still evocative of nature. In  this typical Brody landscape there is no horizon, just a space that has no beginning and no end. Although working at the fringes of Abstratct Expressionism, Brody had a style of his own.

Here sooty remnants of snow show no trace of their former pristine whiteness, an in between moment when green struggles to reassert its presence in a dun-colored earth

Brody (1924-1975) knew he wanted to create something but what?  On his way to painting (he studied in New York with Hans Hoffmann,) he studied modern dance with Martha Graham and hung around New York clubs in the early days of  bebop. He had met and befriended the vocalist Billie Holiday in the early 1940s, rescuing her runaway dog Moochie He had already been painting for a decade when he realized he was an artist. 
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Brody divided his time between New York City and rural Vermont for much of his career and died too soon at age fifty-one.

Image: Gandy Brodie - End of Wi nter, 1956, oil on composition board, Whitney Museum, NYC.

Jane Piper: A Feeling For Color

"I didn't know such paintings existed. I had seen some things that were involved with color abstraction, some Picassos and Braques, but then when I saw the Matisses I didn't know what hit me. The experience threw me into a whole new emotional world of color and feeling." - Jane Piper on first seeing Matisse at the Barnes Collection.

Albert C. Barnes was Matisse's most ardent patron in America; the Barnes Collection eventually included about five dozen of his paintings. In 1930 when Barnes met the painter, he commissioned a three panel mural that would eventually span the Main Gallery at the Barnes. 

 

Jane Piper (1916-1991) grew up in Philadelphia and spent a year in France before studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.  She studied privately with Arthur B. Carles, another neglected modernists, whom she regarded as her most important teacher.  The influence of Matisse was noticed early on in her career; Piper, like Matisse, created a sense of space through her use of color. She said that she finally captured the sense of space that she wanted on the canvas through the liberal use of white, that this color corresponded to what she felt about the space.  She preferred still life painting above all because it fit easily into her way of life, allowing her to organize and control the placement of the objects.  That Piper was able to achieve this through white, turning  an absence into a presence, is comparable to Matisse's use of black but more subtle and mysterious.

Image: Jane Piper, Almost A Cross - 1988, oil on canvas, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica.

Orangerie: A Moveable Garden

  

"I peeled my orange

That was bright against

The gray of December

That, from some distance,

Someone might have thought

I was making a fire in my hands." 

                        -"Oranges" by Gary Soto

The most popular fruit in the world is the orange.  Its association with winter holidays makes perfect sense, a fruit that looks like the sun is fit  for purpose in the darkest time of year.

When Charles VIII invaded the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century he was smitten by a love for oranges. The orange trees were shipped in their root balls; on arrival the French gardeners bathed the roots in milk and honey. When Charles returned home to his chateau at Amboise he built France's first orangerie.  His wife, Anne of Bretagne, not to be outdone, built an orangerie for herself at Blois.

Henry II built one for his wife Catherine de Medici in 1533 and one for his mistress Diane de Poitiers. 

This competitive one-upmanship continued for centuries; each successive monarch felt the need to create a bigger, more elaborate hothouse for their precious citrus fruit.

Known as the Sun King, Louis XIV could just as well have been called the Orange King. He commanded a twelve hundred foot orangerie in the shape of a half moon to be built as a setting for masked balls and garden parties. His gardeners invented an ingenious method to make the trees  bloom year-round. This was also when the French began to pour hot orange juice over roasted chestnuts. C'est si bon!

The Musee de l'Orangerie was built in 1852 to shelter the orange trees from the Tuileries gardens. A typical orangerie, its glazed windows faced south to capture as much heat as possible. These hothouses evolved into the prototype for the modern greenhouse. At the turn of the century it was converted to a warehouse.  Claude Monet donated his panoramic water lily canvases to the nation; the paintings were installed in 1927 after the painter's death.

Image: Sergio-Gonzalez-Tornero - Orangerie, color intaglio print, 1966, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica,

Scarab-Like: Mark Innerst

"Seers can see, for instance, the light of the scarabs, emanations expanding to great size." - Carlos Castenada, from The Fire From Within

Mark Innerst is known for  paintings of luminous landscapes so it is possible to see in Scarab-Like a portal to another time and place. He has used the beetle  shape as a frame for a star-flecked night sky through a scrim of trees. The gem-like tints are true to history; blue was the most common color for glazes. A divine manifestation of the early morning sky.

In Egypt by about 2055 BCE an impression of a beetle, called a scarab was a sought-after amulet that was believed to bring good luck to its  owner. It was often worn in the form of a ring. The term scarab comes from Scarabaeus sacer, the family name for ding beetles. Rolling a ball of dung was likened to the heavenly cycle of regeneration.

Image: Mark Innerst - Scarab-Like, 1992, oil and acrylic on panel, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica.

A Predilection For Onions: Mary Ann Currier

"How easily happiness begins by

dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter

slithers and swirls across the floor

of the saute pan, especially if its

errant path crosses a tiny slick

of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions."

 - an excerpt from "Onions" by William Matthews which first appeared in Poetry in August 1989

Something about a still life painting turns its subjects into objects of desire. That is what happens in Mary Ann Currier's Onions and Tomato.  I want to chop them into small pieces and make soup. Three onions and a tomato, round, shiny, and luscious, guarded by a utility knife and a pot that functions as a mirror as well as a receptacle

Mary Ann Curries (1927-2017) had a predilection for onions. Currier chose onions as a favorite subject for their humble origins in fields of muck, the subtle variations in their color, and because they maintained their freshness while she finished painting them. She painted only from real fruit and vegetables, never from photographs although the realism of her paintings is breathtaking. 

Currier was born in Louisville.  Her parents emigrated to the United States from  Germany after World War II.  She studied art with many GIs, often being the only female in her classes.  She did advertising spreads, stationery, and then moved on to portraiture, finally finding her niche as a still life painter.  She had her first exhibition at the relatively late age of fifty.

Image : Mary Ann Currier - Onions and Tomato,1984, oil pastel on mat board, Metropolitan Museum, NYC