I Macchiaioli: Telemaco Signorini

I.
"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stone, and good in every thing." 

 - William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene I

For the young peasant girl in Telemaco Signorini's painting, a stone wall is a hard yet welcome resting place, a good thing in the middle of a work day.   Her weariness is underlined by the position of  her arms,  one cradling her cheek, the other protectively curled around herself.  This subtle but impressive structural gesture is just one in a beautifully  plotted composition. The panoramic format,  familiar now from its use in films,  (its height to width ration of 05:1) was often used by Italian painters in the 19th century.  For them it was a way of connecting their work to their Renaissance predecessors whose expansive works often filled entire rooms.

Telemaco Signorini (1835-1901) was the son of a Tuscan court painter.  As a student in Florence he gathered with fellow artists  at the aptly named Caffé Michelangelo.  Together,  they soon attracted a name to themselves - the Macchiaioli - or painters of patches of light and dark.  As such, their work anticipated the experiments  of the Impressionists in France.  In 1887 the painter Giovanni Segantini wrote that the characteristic art of their time was all about light.

Italians in the  19th century were confronted by a different reality than their  counterparts in France; industrialization had not yet blemished the landscape and economic conditions were bleak.  For Italian artists, social and political concerns were just as important as new techniques or theories. Overpopulation and over-farming had exhausted the  soil; droughts and epidemics left the people undernourished and overworked by a depleted landscapes.  If the stones could speak, sermons  indeed.

The artists collectively known as the Macchiaioli began to meet at Caffe Michelangelo in the late 1850s.   A decade later the writer Vittorio Imbriani arrived in Florence and in 1868 he published a pamphlet about the group La quinta Promotrice.  According to Imbriani, the macchia was "the image of the first distant impression  of an object or a scene, the first and characteristic  effect, to imprint itself on the eye of the artist."    Further, "And this organization of light and dark, this macchia, is what really moves the spectator..." (quoted from Known and Strange Things by Tejo Cole, Random House, New York: 2016, p.186.)

II.
"Who knows if the sky has another sky above it?....Who knows if the light itself isn't  inside another light?  And what kind of a light is it, if it's a light you can't see?" 

 -   Antonio Moresco, Distant Light, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, Brooklyn, Archipelago Books : 2016.

Not enigmatic really, Antonio Moresco's Distant Light (La lucina: 2013)  is a story of two characters, a man living in an abandoned village and a small boy living in an abandoned house.  The man has chosen to live simply, in a house without electricity,  hoping to hear answers to his questions as he walks,  he talks with any living creature he encounters.   He talks to the trees, asking one that appears to be dying,  “How do you live like that?”   In the dark when he startles two badgers, one scurries across the road but the other is frozen in fear.  “Cross the road!” he urges the frightened animal.  “There’s someone waiting for you on the other side.  I’ll stay here, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.”   

As he lies in bed at night, he begins to notice strange lights twinkling from across a ravine, emanating from the spot where a deserted stone house stands.   When he consults an old man in the village, he learns  to his amazement that the farmer has plotted what he takes to be alien sightings on his computer.  Still  unsatisfied, the narrator traces the light from his bedroom window to the house where a little boy, shy but  preternaturally self-possessed, lives alone.  Their tentative, growing connection suggests answers to questions the narrator, and by extension the reader, deeply wish to learn the answers.

Antonio Moresco (b.1947) began publishing his work when he was forty-seven, he has written more than twenty books,  and  has been a finalist for the Strega Prize.  Among  his favorite writers he names  Dante, not the Divine Comedy but rather the Vita Nuova, Shakespeare,  Cervantes, and the Swift of Gulliver’s Travels.  Italian critics have reached for comparisons  to Canticle of the Creatures and De rerum natura.  Moresco describes his intentions as being "far away from the idea that it is just entertainment...I try to broaden its horizons, as the boys try adventure, risk, not the reconfirmation of myself. Scripture is the eye of the needle that allows me to pass by on the other side.”  As for Distant Light, “ The fairy tale is a revolutionary thing, everything becomes possible”

"Here and there, along the side of the lane, are stones jutting out that were once used as steps for climbing up to the small vegetable plots above, planks impregnated with lime and half-broken, abandoned flower pots, invaded by relentless lichwort or other plants and other forms carried by the wind.In one spot, over a low wall where there must once have been a vine, the large indefinable leaves of vegetables gone wild spread along the ground and then spill over  with tendrils searching for anchorage."

 -   Antonio Moresco, Distant Light, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, Brooklyn, Archipelago Books : 2016.

For relaxation the urban dwellers of ancient Rome liked to walk along their stone walls,  walls that were  built thickly to keep enemies and weeds alike at bay.    In a country where volcanic rock was plentiful, stone masons made  art out of necessity; it is said that a good mason can "see" the inside of a stone.  Artists responded to the strong aesthetic appeal in walls, even  crumbling ones, recognizing in them the organizing principle for a good story. As for the dog in Signorini's End of August at Pietramala,  working farm dog or household pet, he has a front row seat in the shade.

Revised 09/1//2016.
Images:

1. Telemaco Signorini -  Girl Resting on a Parapet, no date given, Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence.
2. Telemaco Signorini -  End of August in Pietramala, no date given, Galleria d"Arte Moderna, Florence.

Alma Thomas: A Most Painterly Brush

“One of the things we couldn't do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there.” - Alma Thomas, from an interview in the New YorkTimes, 1972.

Manuals of Japanese brush painting include rules for how to make strokes; if that seems restrictive or inhibiting, just look at the paintings of Alma Thomas (1891-1978).  Like an instrumentalist whose diligence sets her free, Alma Thomas was able make Abstract Expressionism speak the joy of painting itself.  Even when seen in person where the brush strokes are the more vivid than in reproductions, the sense of movement seems redolent of joy, in contrast perhaps to the anguish viewers often find in the paintings of her contemporary Mark Rothko. Thomas experimented  with techniques and styles but when she arrived at Abstract Expression she used its means to shape feelings in paint, the definition of aesthetics.

When the Thomas family, mother and father and four daughters, moved to Washington, D.C., the segregation of the nation's capitol was a giant step up from the constant threat of racist violence in their home state of Georgia.  The first student to graduate with a fine arts degree from Howard University, Thomas supported herself by teaching art in Washington, D.C. public while she painted on the side. "I Never lost this need to create something original, something all my own." Thomas was not able to devote her full time to painting until she retired from teaching at sixty-eight. Even then it would take another decade before she received broad recognition. 

About her late blooming career, Thomas had this to say: "I don't know how it happened, but it seems to me that I've conducted my life so that every time I came to a crossroads I took the right turn. I never married, for one thing.. That was a place where I know I made the right choice. The young men I knew cared nothing about art, nothing at all. And art was the only thing I enjoyed. So I remained free. I paint when I feel like it. I didn't have to come home. Or I could come home later and there was nobody to interfere with what I wanted, to stop and discuss what they wanted. It was what I wanted, and no argument. That is what allowed me to develop." Such clarity of purpose, expressed to an interviewer in 1977, still sounds revolutionary coming from a woman. 

Resurrection, (above)  is the first painting by Alma Thomas to be included in the official collection of the White House, in 2014.

Alma Thomas, the retrospective now on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem originated at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs this spring..  This path retraces an earlier one taken by Thomas's work,from the periphery to the center;  when the Whitney Museum opened Alma Thomas: A Retrospective in 1972 it was the first such exhibition at the Whitney devoted to the work of an African-American woman artist but it was the seventh solo exhibition for Thomas.

To read:
1. Phantasmagoria: Major Paintings from the 1970s by Alma Thomas, New York, Michael Rosenfeld gallery, New York: 2001.
2, Stroke!: Beauford Delaney, Norman Lewis & Alma Thomas, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York: 2005.

Images:
1. Alma Thomas (1891-1978)  - Resurrection, 1966, Collection of the White House Historical Association, Washington, D.C.

2. Alma Thomas - Irises, Tulips Jonquils, and Crocuses, 1968, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

From Baudelaire to Eric Rohmer

"What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives life dreams. life suffers.  

Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out.  Out of her face, her dress, her gestures, out of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman;s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and sleep.

If it had been an old man I could have made it up just as well.

And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in someone besides myself.

Perhaps you will say " are you sure that your story is the real one?"    But what does it matter what is really outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?"

    - excerpt from "Windows" by Charles Baudelaire

I am immersed in the new  book  Eric Rohmer: a biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe.  Although it is over six hundred pages long it will not last the month; it has me under its spell. When I looked at this still  frame from Rohmer's 1967 film La Collectioneuse I thought of the poem Windows" by the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire, the dyspeptic 19th century flaneur.  It strikes me that Baudelaire's words prefigure the cinematic imagination. The gorgeous cinematography of the late Nestor Almendros.(1930-1992)  captures the beauty of natural light; not simple to do but straightforward in its aim.

To read: Eric Rohmer: a biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe, translated from the French by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal, New York, Columbia University Press: 2016.

Image:Nestor Almendros

A Big Wave Knocked Her Over

I. Swimming as a pastime was an invention of the new urban middle class  during the second half of the 19^th century.  It was not that no one swam before that time of course; it was that swimming had  not been  a structured activity with lessons and styles and rules – and bathing suits.  Country people had enjoyed ‘natural swimming’ as it was dubbed in retrospect, an activity that could include any  and all members of a family and friends - in the nude.  

As the newly prosperous vacationers flocked to the shore to relax and escape the summer heat they brought with them a sense of bourgeois decorum that required a new, more structured regimen for what had been an informal pleasure.
A consensus was reached in polite circles that the sexes be segregated  on the shore as much as possible when not formally dressed and that swimming was reserved for males,  with females relegated  to such oddities as walking into the water while hanging onto anchored towlines or confined to little huts in the water (talk about confinement) known as “bathing machines.”  Boys were encouraged to learn to swim to avoid drowning but it would take the advent of urban WMCAs and WYCAs for girls to receive the same  life preserving instruction.

In  an article that appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in July of 1890 the aptly named Duffield Osborne enumerated the reasons that women should not swim: their hair might get wet or a wave might knock them over.  And this nonsense was not limited to men; writing that same year in Ladies’ Home Journal,  Felicia Holt titled her article on the problem  “Promiscuous Bathing.”

Warning of  the effect that bare toes on the beach would have on public morality, Holt wrote, “I fear the girl will soon begin to calculate the effect of what someone late called 'artistic bareness' on the mind of masculinity.  It would take an imagination of an entirely different order of magnitude to understand that the revolutionary potential of swimming for women lay not in self-display but in the experience of strength and self-assertion.

II.  “She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.” 

With that sentence Kate Chopin signaled her readers that for Edna Pontellier, protagonist of The Awakening (1899), learning to swim would become the means to her personal declaration of independence, an act that resulted in social ostracism, and finally, disaster.  Radical as her depiction of a woman's search for an authentic self was,   Chopin found it difficult to imagine a heroine escaping Divine wrath much less  the wrath of men.    Herself the daughter of a successful Irish businessman and a French mother, Katherine O'Flaherty  had grown up in a family of self-reliant women; her father died when she was just five years old.   At age twenty she married Oscar Chopin and the couple moved to New Orleans.  With the move from St. Louis to the deep south and the birth of six children in eight years, Chopin absorbed the shocks of a myriad of social expectations that diminished a woman's sense of autonomy.  In the novel Chopin drew pointed tableaux of Victorian social life that, to contemporary critics, only made Edna's increasingly desperate attempts  at self-assertion seem the more irrational as well as selfish.  Swedish writer Per Seyerstad, first to write a modern biography of Kate Chopin (Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography, 1969) was also to resurrect The Awakening for generations of grateful readers who have grown  up with it.  John R. Stilgoe, a Harvard historian who really ought to know better, cannot resist categorizing Chopin's revelation  of a woman's inner emancipation as a story that  “borders on the pornographic.”  It must be the combination of female self-assertion and feminine pulchritude that has male minds bollixed.

Image: Louis Valtat - Bicyclette, c.1895, Musee de la voiture, Compiegne.

Intertidal Life: Guzzle in Sight

I don't know what was uppermost in the mind of Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts  when she painted A Beach Afternoon, whether it was the tide going out on a summer day or the people breathing in the briny air.  But I know what I thought when I first discovered it: "Aha!   There's a guzzle."

The linguistic origins of the word guzzle are still in dispute but Massachusetts owns the word now.    In Cape Cod (1865), Henry David Thoreau described seeing a whale on the beach  "dragging in over the bars and guzzles."  Historian John R. Stilgoe includes guzzle in a category that he calls "topographical localisms," meaning a word that comes into being because it fills a need to name something that local people recognize.  Low spots on the beach, caused by the movement of wind and water,  sometimes capture enough  water that it too courses as large ocean waves do.  Sometimes a guzzle breaks through a sandbar at low tide to become a  tidal channel.

 "I can paint as well as any man." -  Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts

That confidence was hard won.   Although born into a prosperous family who could easily pay for her tuition at Academie Julian, Roberts's desire to become a p[painter was opposed by her mother.  Roberts persevered and one of her paintings  was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1892.  She became estranged from her father following his interference in her career.   Following a serious illness and an operation in1926,  Roberts was hospitalized for depression at Massachusetts General Hospital.  It was there that she hung herself on March 12, 1927.

I know I keep repeating this but -  little has been written about the work and life of Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts (1871-1927).   Some information is contained in the Archives of the Concord Art Association and in files of the Boston Public Library.  I only know this after reading "Elizabeth Roberts and the Concord Art Association" from the Massachusetts Painters Projects (Boston, Vose Archives: 1993.)

Image:
Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts  - A Beach Afternoon, c.1910, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Summertime, and the Living is Easy

"I loaf and invite my soul," Walt Whitman proclaimed in Leaves of Grass.  

As a picture of relaxed ratiocination Young Girl Stretched Out On A Bench is difficult to beat but I would not have given it a second look had I not read  "The Guardian Angel" written by Neil Philip at Adventures In The Print Trade. Carl Larsson was a purveyor of sentimentality I would have said.   Until recently,  the equal contribution in every way to the Larsson enterprise of the artist - and Carl's wife - Karin Bergoo Larsson barely registered on many of us either.

The deliciousness of the scene is the first thing that suggests summer to me. The utter relaxation of the little dachshund lying along her side as the young woman reads the paper and cradles the cat, seems so unguarded and comfortable that it appears unposed.   The suggestion of a tree frames  the image, leading the viewer's eye toward the red pillow that has been upended into its most comfortable position.

The feast of diagonals on display here is organized in a harmonious hierarchy and that, I think, was deliberate.  The green slatted  bench is multi-colored within its narrow range while, on the other side of the white swath of the blanket,  the irregularly striped cushion underneath her, complete with candy-striped fringe. The color red of the stripes near the top of the blanket join with the red printed cushion to outline the young woman in the green and white striped dress. To put all this into words makes it sound busy and stiff, which it is not. This may be Carl Larsson's masterpiece, I think.

Image:

Carl Olaf Larsson - Young Woman Stretched Out On A Bench, 1913, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Joy in Our Cause

"Women's rights are human rights; human rights are women's rights." - Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Like the fabulous globes created for King Louis XIV of France, moments in the history of the world cascade around us all the time; sometimes we mark them and sometimes they are lost on us as our attention is turned elsewhere.  From my mother I learned something about the date August 26, 1920 that her mother passed on to her: how, after women won the right to vote in the U.S., while some women formed the League of Women Voters, other women took oaths promising never to exercise the franchise.

I think of those women every time I cast a ballot, and I always do.   I think of them when I  remember the day my mother took me to a demonstration at the local newspaper plant where women were protesting employment ads that were segregated by sex and the press-men stood at the second floor windows and spat on us.  And I also remember a day when I was one of hundreds of women who returned to Seneca Falls in search of our history, only to find that the site of the convention of 1848 was  unmarked, a laundromat in fact!

This is a moment of paradox: as measurable levels of violence  are declining worldwide, violence against women is on the rise and, for the first time in my lifetime, there are more men in the world than women.
Frederick Douglas was right: "Power never concedes anything without a struggle.  It never has.  It never will."  

Today is also a moment of joy in our cause.  Savor it.

To read: Claiming An Identity They Taught Me To Despise by Michelle Cliff, Watertown, MA, Persephone Press: 1980.

Image Jean-Louis Aubert - photograph of Vincenzo Coronelli's Globes for the Sun King, Louis XIV, (c. 1681-83) 2005, Grand Palais, Paris.