Leonid Andreyev, Photographer

"Everyone talks about their love of nature.  Any dacha-dweller in white trousers will maintain that there is nothing in the world to compete with nature.  I remember seeing someone like that sitting on the sea-shore reading a book.  It was sunset, one of the most beautiful sunsets that you could get on the shores of the Gulf of Finland - and he was reading,  In the sky the clouds were engaged in a monumental battle, crashing into one another, changing their shapes and colors every minute, dying and coming back to life again, lit by a sunray which would unexpectedly break through them - and he carried on reading." - Leonid Andreyev

There is nothing idyllic in the writings of the Russian Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919). Censorship and the absence of civil liberties that we take for granted were pervasive under the Czars. By default the arts provided the only conduit for moral and intellectual impulses, political activity being foreclosed by a repressive regime. Andreyev's work is characterized by an oscillation between exuberance and depression, the corrosive wit and sense of the superiority of his vision was not only applied to himself.  "He wished to be enormous - not for his own sake: he wished to reflect in his transitory tread as a writer - the march of the Century.." - Andrei Bielyi.  To that end, Andreyev wrote not only the stories and plays he is remembered for, but painted and sketched and photographed.

Andreyev's temperament led him to predict the disasters of world war, revolution, and even something akin to nuclear weapons.  Born in the country, Andreyev moved to Moscow to study law, but becoming instead a court reporter for a Moscow newspaper.  His first collection of stories was published to great effect in 1901, attracting the attention of Maxim Gorki.  He careened through women and vodka until his marriage to Aleksandra provided him with as much stability as he could tolerate

Two sons were born, Vadim and Daniil, before Aleksandra died of puerperal fever in 1906.  Andreyev then married Anna Denisevich in 1908, and made the quixotic decision to separate his two little boys, keeping Vadim with him and sending Daniil to live with Aleksandra's sister.  Vadim has written about the boys'  alienation from their father, visible in photographs.

The picture of Daniil with his father and step-father,  taken  on a rare visit to his father's home in Vammasluu, is far removed from the idyllic images of his contemporary Heinrich Kuhn.

Andreyev, whose connections with the revolutionaries of 1905, led to his exile after he published The Seven Who Were Hanged (1909).  He built a large wooden house on the Gulf of Finland at Vammasluu.  The house was impractical from the start, in need of constant repair, and after Andreyev's death Anna sold it for demolition.  But its saving grace was that it was only forty miles from St. Petersburg. 

The Seven That Were Hanged was Andreyev's protest against the executions the Russian government used to destroy  the 1905 revolution.   Through harrowing interior monologues we  follow five revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals as they come to terms with their fates.  He turned away from the expansiveness of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in depictions of confusion, distortion and hallucination for something we recognize as distinctly modern.

Exiled from Russia, Andreyev turned his prodigious energies to photography.  Never inclined to hold back the intensity on any project, he brought his fierce energy to bear documenting his new life and surroundings.








"It was as if he himself were a whole factory, working ceaselessly in shifts, preparing all those masses of large and small photographs which were stacked up in his study, contained in special boxes and chests, overflwoing on every table, mounted on the window panes.  There was no chroner in his house which he had not photographed several times over.  Some photographs were extremely successful, for instance spring landscapes.  It was hard to believe that they were photographs at all, they were suffused with success elegiac musicality, reminding one of  Levitan." - Kornei Chukovsky, scholar and children's author, was a frequent visitor to Vammasluu.  He refers here to the painter Isaac Levitan. 

Leonid and Anna made the first of many trips  to the Mediterranean in 1910, attracted by the  sun and warmth of the south.  
Andreyev died in 1919 as he was preparing for a speaking tour of the United States, to warn Americans about the dangers of the Bolshevism.  At age forty-eight. he was dead of a brain hemorrhage. Andreyev's American connection came in 1924 when MGM's first feature film was He Who Gets Slapped based one of his plays.  The film starred Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer and was produced by Lous B. Mayer himself.

  
For further reading:
Stories And Photographs by Leonid Andreyev, translated from the Russian by Olga Andreyev Carlisle, San Diego, Harcourt Brace & Jovanoich: 1987.
Photographs of a Russian Writer by Richard Davies, London, Thames & Hudson: 1989.

Images: Autochreme photographs by Leonid Andreyev are in the collection of the Leeds Russian Archive, UK.
1. Sunset at Vammasluu - Finland.
2. Leonid and the Devils - Andreyev in front of copies he made of Goya sketches in his study at Vammasluu.
3. Vadim Andreyev, c. 1909.
4. Daniil Andreyev, c. 1912.
5  Anna Andreyeva - Leonid Andreyev, Filip Dobrov & Daniil Andreyev at Vammasluu, c. 1912.
6. A Road near Vammasluu. 
7. Anna Andreyeva in Marseilles, 1910.

Vittorio Zecchin & Stile Liberty

Looking at Vittorio Zecchin'a work, the obvious reference point is Gustav Klimt.  We've been prepared to see an affinity between the two artists by legions of art historians who present a linear narrative that tells us that Zecchin was a lesser artist influenced by the famous Viennese Secessionist.  But is that all there is to the story?

Looking more intently at Zecchin,  we see a Venetian artist using  the art history of Venice as it was all around him for his textbook.  The arrangement of human figures in procession would have been familiar from Venetian churches and  the elaboration of abstract designs was characteristic of the Byzantine architecture of the Doge's Palace.  Zecchin combined design elements typical of Murano glass, corollas, stars, and flowers  with geometrical forms. 

What makes Zecchin different from Klimt is what makes Venice different from Vienna.  Klimt's patterns also drew on historical sources but what scandalized his contemporaries was the sex in the mosaics as much as in the naked human figures.  Ovoid shapes intermingled with spermatozoa circulating on a sea of avid  eyes could hardly go unnoticed by a public that greeted each new monograph from Sigmund Freud with shocked fascination.  Everything seemed to be reducible to the sexual impulse in Freud's worldview and in Klimt's art sexuality had even penetrated  the shell of abstraction.

Vittorio Zecchin (1878-1947) was  sixteen years younger  than Klimt and his career got a late start due to to the conservative teachers he encountered at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia.  The son of a glass maker on Murano, Zecchin grew up surrounded by the stylized use of color in  design.  The gold-leaf mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco  earned it the nickname Chiesa d'Oro (Church of Gold) soon after it was consecrated in 1094.  Klimt, who didn't travel much, visited Venice specifically to see the mosaics.

As we saw in Giacomo Balla's The Madwoman, the Divisionist style of painting, popular during Zecchin's youth,  employed discrete dabs of color,  a move that created a painted surface similar to a mosaic or a glass bijoux.   He attended the Venice Bienniales each year, including the large Klimt show in 1910, but exhibited his own work with  the  rejected artists  in a tent city on the beach in 1914.

Reviewers for  the daily papers were not always kind to Zecchin, but that changed in 1913 when he was commissioned to execute a series of panels based on The Thousand and One Nights for the Hotel Terminus.  The finished work is a masterpiece of  Italian art nouuveau  or Stile Liberty as they called it and, although the panels have since been dispersed to various collections, the Ca' Peraso where Zecchin himself exhibited is presenting a reunion of the eleven panels during an exhibition in 2012 dedicated to the art of Zecchin - under the guise of the "Klimtiano"  150th anniversary year.

Images:
1. Ca' Pesaro exhibition poster - Panel from The Thousand and One Nights, 1914, Musei Civici, Venice.
2. Le Stelle (The Stars), undated Wolfonsian Museum, Miami.
 3...Perle, undated, Wolfonian Museum, Miami.
4. title attributed -  and overlapping hills, Musei Civici, Venice.
5.  Deer The Three Wise Man, 1913, Musei Civici, Ve
nice.

Alda Merini: There But For Fortune

"Hours wasted in vain
in the asylum gardens,
Back and forth along the walls
made fierce with flowers,
All of us lost in a fleeting
dream of reality,
Which some cleric
tossed behind our backs.
And after meeting
some patients smile
at the fake friendliness.
Time wasted in whirling thoughts,
hedged in behind the bars,
liked naked swallows.
Then we listened to the sermons,
we multiplied the fishes,
Down near the Jordan,
but Christ was not there:
He had uprooted us from the world,
Like dreadful weeds."
 - Near the Jordan by Alda Merini, tranlsated from the Italian by Stephanie H. Jed & Pasquale Verdicchio.

If you don't read Italian your chances of stumbling on the poems of Alda Merini are slight.  Merini (1931-2009) lived most of her life in her native Milan.  She showed a talent for poetry at an early age and, in spite of enormous internal turmoil, she eventually published more than one hundred volumes.  In photographs we see her wavy brown hair and a cigarette always in hand .  She had the additional misfortune - if you want to call it that - to be nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1996, the same year as the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, who went on to win the prize. 

Merini's thoughts never skated over the surface of life like a water beetle.    Near the Jordan is an exemplary poem of Merini's,  holding opposing ideas in balance - or at bay -  in a state of disequilibrium. Between incarceration and freedom she lived with a double consciousness,  experienced at times as a gift, at other times as a burden.  If this seems dark, Merini's poetry also conveys a light touch.  I like to think of Merini's aphorisms when I think of the ponderousness of church fathers who condemned her.

"I am completely
Asexual
Not counting
Errors and omissions."
 - from Six Aphorisms, 1999,  Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Douglas Basford.

Images:
 Giacomo Balla - La Folle 1905, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome.

For further reading:

The Holy Land by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Stepahnie H. Jed & Pasquale Verdicchio, Buffalo, Guernica Books: 2002.

I Am A Furious Little Bee by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Carla Billitteri, Oaklamd, Hooke Press: 2008.

Love Lessons by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Susan Stewart, Princeton, Princeton University Press: 2009.
 You may also be interested in:
 The War of Nerves: Peter Altenberg & Emily Holmes Coleman, posted here November 3, 2011

All the Planets in Heaven, All the Stars: Gaspara Stampa, posted here August 28, 2010.

Visit the Alda Merini website (in Italian)

Factory Of Tears: Valzhyna Mort

"And once again according to the annual report
the highest productivity results were achieved
by the Factory of Tears.

While the Department of Transportation was breaking heels
while the Department of Heart Affairs
was beating hysterically
the Factory of Tears was working night shifts
setting new records
even on holidays.

While the Food Refinery Station
was trying to digest another catastrophe
the Factory of Tears adopted a new economically advantageous
technology of rycyling wastes from the past -
memories mostly.

The pictures of the employees of the year
were placed on the Wall of Tears.

I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the Heroic Factory of Tears.
I have acllouses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I'm happy with what I have."

 -  Factory Of Tears from the book of the same name by Valzhnya Mort, translated from the Belarusian by Elizabeth Oehlkers & Franz Wright, Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press: 2008.

How fitting that Factory of Tears has been published in a bilingual edition as its author Valzhyna Mort is passionately engaged in elevating the position of her native language in world literature.  Unlike many contemporary poets, Mort does not translate "write what you know" to mean "write about yourself."   From the particulars of her native country she has made an entire world.  Her poems are models of compression.  After reading them you can peel your reactions like layers from an onion.

"In my probably unpopular-with-beginning-poets view, the only outlet that a beginning poet needs is a good library," Mort told a CBS interviewer in Baltimore where she lives currently. 

Valzhyna Mort (b. 1981) is a native of the city of Minsk in Belarus, a former Soviet Socialist Republic that is east of Poland.

Image:
Jan Toorop - Desire and Satisfaction, 1893, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

From Here You Can See The Quattrocento

The first time I saw Aristide Maillol’s Femme a l’ombrelle was on a poster announcing her presence at an exhibition of Post-Impressionism at the Palais de Tokyo on avenue Woodrow Wilson in Paris.  Having grown up near the Atlantic Ocean, I was pretty sure I knew what she was gazing at; now I’m not so sure. Maiillol painted the picture at Fecamp, a town on the Atlantic coast of Normandy, so I got  at least the ocean right. 

The woman in the pink dress appears to be standing before a photographer's backdrop of a seascape, rather than the sea itself.  This may be the key to Maillol's intentions.  Where a line separates the sky from the sand, there her right hand grasps the parasol; where sky and sea meet, there her hair springs up from her forehead.   Her left hand touches the brim of her hat, a gesture mimicked in reverse by the swirl of decorative ribbons trailing behind her.  Anchoring her in place is a band of gray across the bottom of the canvas that our eye registers as shade.  This gesture of masterful design registers on reflection when we realize there is no evident source of the shade.   What a marvel of classical composition this painting is.   In the words of Maurice Denis , written in 1943, Maillol has subordinated "all the graces of detail to the beauty of the whole.."

 "During a stay in Fecamp, where I was giving drawing lessons to a group of American women, I commenced a five meter wide canvas of them, entitled Far from the City.  These young women were beautiful, bursting with life and health; they wore large hats, following the style of that year; I made a considerable effort."  It seems Maillol originally intended Femme a l'ombrelle to be part of a mural that was never completed.  Nevertheless, the resulting work is his finest painting.

 

 

Maillol often expressed his admiration for the frescoes of Renaissance artist Domenico Ghirlandaio in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.   We can see echoes of Ghirlandaio's  women in Maiilol's L'enfant couronne (1892), Le souer de l'artiste (1888) and even the very late Portrait of Dina Verney (1940).

During the medieval period an important distinction  was made between the left and right sides of the human body: the right side was superior morally, because guided by God, while the left side could be exposed to view, so brooches were customarily pinned on the left shoulder.

That preference for the left profile is repeated frequently in paintings of the early Renaissance, as is another stylistic gesture that Maillol often used - the half-portrait.  Together these devicesestablish a continuity between centuries, a grace and solemnity that  remained unaffected by Maillol's introduction to the avant-garde Nabis in the mid 1890s and his friendships with two of its members, Joseph Rippl-Ronai and Maurice Denis.  Indeed, Maiilol's portraits retained continuity throughout his long career, in contrast to the sensuous modernism of the sculptures Maillol is best known for.

Painted at about the same time or slightly before Maillol created the woman in pink, Madaemoiselle Faraill au chapeau displays a similarly deceptive background that is as an element of the portrait, not  a realistic landscape.  From this we recognize the link with the art of the early Renaissance, before landscape became an independent object of interest to painters.  Here, the bands and circles of yellow and green echo the tilt of the girl's hat and the pom-pom flowers that decorate it it.

The little girl crowned with a laurel wreath by the hands of an unseen woman is not only classical in its allusions, but classical in its economy of  means.  Her eyes are momentarily closed to the world she is about to discover, her  blue dress stands in for all the fresh colors of spring, and the yellow background is the brightening sun.   She looks like a younger version of Dina Vierny, Maillol's last model, a fifteen year old girl  the artist met when he was seventy-three.  It was Vierny (1919-2009) who assembled the extensive collection of Maillol's paintings and tapestries and founded the Musee Maillol, opened in 2005.

Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) died as the result of a car accident that happened while he was enroute from Banyuls-sur-mer to visit another artist friend, Raoul Dufy.

Images:
1. Aristide Maillol - Femme a l'ombrelle,  c.1891-1895, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Aristide Maillol - Young woman in profile,  1893, Musee Hyacinth Rigaud, Perpignan.
3. Aristide Maillol - Le soued de l'artiste, 1888, private collection, France.
4. Aristide Maillol - Jeune fille pensive au feuillage, 1893, Musee Maillol, Paris.
5. Aristide Maillol -  Mademoiselle Fariall au chapeau, 1890, Musee Maillol, Paris.
6. Aristide Maillol - L'enfant couronne, 1890, Musee Maillol, Paris.
7. Aristide Maillol - Dina Vierney a la robe rouge, 1940, Musee Maillol, Paris.
8. Pisanello - Portrait of Ginevra d'Estre or Margherita Gonzaga, c.1438-1440, Louvre Museum, Paris.

For further reading:
Wendy Slater, Aristide Maillol in the 1890s, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press: 1982.
David Alan Brown et al, Virtue And Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra d' Benci and Renaissance Portraits if Women, Princeton University Press: 2001.

Visit the Maillol Museum online.

Below is the poster that started my love affair with Maillol.

Geometric/Floreale: The Fortunys

Geometric flowers  are typical of Fortuny designs, a union Arabic and Western ideas.  Geometry in Arabic science began as a series of symbolic forms, while Western artists used Euclidean principles to invent pictorial perspective.  The difference can be represented by a flower.  The Arabic flower was a visual image, an abstraction that could be known  by studying refracted light. Whereas, the Western flower was an object in front of the eye, to be known through the gaze.

Mention the Fortuny name and what comes first to mind is a diaphanous pleated dress, known as  the Delphos: it was named after an ancient Greek tunic and made from silk plissé  fabric, using a technique for pleating fabric that teh Fortunys  patented.   The Delphos dress and the Knossos scarf really did begin a revolution in fashion and, as we have remarked about Viennese reform attire, women were very much involved in changing the norms ot their dress.  Fortuny and Negrin's ideas were shaped by the modern rethinking of Greek civilization that began after Heinrich Schliemann's archaeological discoveries of the 1870s.  Theorists turned from Athens to Crete, one result being heightened awareness of women's role in ancient Greece.   In this context, it is ironic that Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose theory of 'mother right' has been largely discredited   is more often cited than the more subtle semi-pagan speculations of the first British female academic,  Jane Ellen Harrison, whose  Prolegoma To The Study Of Greek Religion (1902) was a favorite college text of mine.  We know now that Knossos, on the island of Crete is the oldest known European city, dating back to the Bronze Age.  

"She was enveloped in one of those long, Oriental gauze scarves that the alchemist dyer Mariano Fortuny submerges in the mysterious potions of his caldrons, stirring them with a wooden stick, first like a sylph, then like a gnome, where he obtains colours from strange dreams and later prints them with his thousands of new generations of stars, plants, animals."

 - Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote in Forse che si, forse che no (1910) on seeing Henriette wearing an early version of the dress.

"She" was Henriette Nigrin, an artist who supported herself as an artist's model in Paris, where she met Mariano Fortuny in 1897.  Henriette eventually moved to Venice in 1902, becoming  his business partner and designer.   The Fortuny family disapproved of their relationship, so they did not marry for several years.  Together, they designed textiles and, after World War I ended, opened their own production company on the Giudecca, still in operation today. 

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo,  son, grandson, and nephew of respected Catalan painters, was born  in 1871 in Granada.  After his father's untimely death in 1874, the family moved to Paris, living with their uncle, the painter Raimundo Madrazo.  Mariano's Parisian friends included Marcel Proust and the composer Reynaldo Hahn.

The family moved again, to Venice in 1892, to the Palazzo Orfei, now the home of Museo Fortuny.  Among Mariano 's Venetian friends were  Marchesa Casati anf the writers Gabriel d'Annunzio and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The young Fortuny expected to follow his father's vocation as a painter, but a visit to the annual Wagner Festival Bayreuth  in 1893 convinced him that theatrical design offered a better scope for his talents.   Eight years later, Fortuny  designed the sets for the Italian premiere of Tristan and Isolde at La Scala  (1901).  

 “The Fortuny dress Albertine wore that night seemed like the tantalizing shadow of invisible Venice. It was covered in Arab ornamentation just like Venice, just like Venetian palaces, disguised as sultans behind a veil pierced with stones, just like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, just like the columns with Oriental birds that alternately mean life and death and are repeated in the mirage of the clothes, in a deep blue that, as my eyes approached it, became changeable, thanks to the same transmutations that, in front of the advancing gondola, became metal enflaming the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined in cherry pink that is so Venetian it is especially called Tiepolo pink."

 - Marcel Proust,  excerpted from La Prisonnière (1923), translated from the French by G. K. Scott-Moncrieff.  

Poetic but not exaggerated, Proust's vignette of the Delphos dress alluded to the Moorish influences in Fortuny designs.   Granada, where Mariano Fortuny was born,  a city on the Iberian Peninsula  had been part of the Moorish Al-Andalus (now Andalusia). for eight centuries, from 711 to 1492.

Mariano Fortuny died in 1949 and was buried at the Verano in Rome next to his father.  The Fortuny home was donated to the city of Venice to be maintained as a museum in 1956 by his widow, Henriette (Negrin) Fortuny.

Images:  from the collection of Museo Fortuny at Museo Civici Veniziani .
Visit the website: Museo Fortuny.
Also: Fortuny

 

Fabrics  designed by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo & Henriette Nigrin.

Photograph of Henriette Nigrin -c. 1909   by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo.

Unidentified photographer - Marano Fortuny in his atelier, Campo San beneto, Venice.

For further reading:
1. Anne-Marie Deschodt - Mariano Fortuny: un magicien de Venise. Paris, Editions du Regard: 1979.
2. Guillermo de Osomos - Mariano Fortuny: His Life and Work, New York, Rizzoli: 1980.
3. Cathy Gere - Knossos & The Prophets Of Modernism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 2009. 

Gremlins In The Studio

In case you have trouble seeing this picture at this scale, there is a little gremlin dancing under the painting of the Newbury marshes.  He smirks as water drips off the painting and onto the floor. The naughty little guy pulled on the canvas and now the floor of the studio is getting wet.  Trompe l'oeil or trick of the eye is a genre in painting with its own story and people who write about art like to worry the subject of the artifice in art. 

It is easy to forget that humor is not a recent invention in art.  Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)certainly was aware of the serious debates among other artists of the Hudson River School about the merits of naturalism versus artifice.  With one (actually, there are two versions of Gremlins in The Studio) work the size of an  ordinary book page, Heade winked it all away. 

Of course, Heade was a serious artist and the marshlands were his chosen subject.  Out of six hundred paintings, fully a fifth were  images of of a landscape subject to the constant movement of the tides, its moist air fragmenting the light and changing colors before his eye.  To create works of evanescent beauty on canvas requires many skills.  It turns out that one of Heade's was a sense of humor.

And then there is Charles Jones (1866-1959) a British gardener and amateur photographer, forgotten by the world until Sean Sexton discovered a cache of his work when he purchased an old trunk at a London bazaar in 1981.

Plant Kingdoms (1998), the resulting book, is impressive in every respect, from Jones's photographs to Sexton's text, full of poetry and insight, to the appreciation penned by Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California.

Jones usually photographed his fruits and vegetables in front of flat, blank backdrops. We seldom see them this way now, gleaming with moisture, dug from the ground or plucked from the vine, found works of art. It was Jones' wit to see that what he had made was worthy of recording.

Garden Scene with Photographer's Cloth Backdrop (c. 1900) is a premature example of modern irony. We realize that the backdrop is a photographer's studio cloth when we notice a crooked elbow and part of an apron peeking out from behind the scrim.  Jones, who liked to move in on his subjects for close-ups, here backs off the camera to show truly giant-sized flowers.  That crooked arm resting on hip telegraphs the joke: wow!

Images:
1. Martin Johnson Heade - Gremlin In The Studio II, c.1865-1875, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. 
2. Martin Johnson Heade - Salt Marsh Hay, c.1864-1876, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH.
2. Charles Jones - Garden Scene With Photographer's Backdrop, c. 1900, courtesy Plant Kingdoms by Sean Sexton.

You may also be interested in these posts:
Alongshore With Martin Johnson Heade - April 23, 2008.
By Salt Marshes: Everett Stanly Hubbard & Arthur Wesley Dow - May 14, 2008.
Plum Island - July 12, 2010.
Waders - May 29, 2010.

The Grief Gondola

        I
"Two old men, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner,
         are staying on the Grande Canal
together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas
he who turns everything he touches into Wagner.
The green chill of the sea pushes up through the palace floors.
Wagner is a marked man, the well known Caspar profile is more tired than before
        his face a white flag.
The gondola is heavily laden with their lives,
two round trips and one one-way.

        II
A window in the palace blows open, they grimace in the sudden draught.
Outside on the water, the garbage gondola appears, paddled
        by two one-oared bandits.
Liszt has composed a few chords so heavy they ought to be sent
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meteorites!
Too heavy to rest, they are able only to sink and sink through the future
        all the way down to the year of the brownshirts.
The gondola is heavily laden with the huddled stones of the future.

        III
Openings toward 1990.
March 25: Worry about Lithuania.
Dreamt I visited a large hospital.
No staff. Everyone was a patient.
In the same dream a newborn girl
who spoke in complete sentences.

        IV
Compared to his son-in-law, who is a man of his time, Liszt is a
        motheaten grandseigneur.
It's a disguise.
The deep that tries out and discards various masks has chosen
        just this one for him—
the deep that wants to join the humans without showing its face.

        V
Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his own suitcase through sleet and sunshine
and when the time comes to die there will be no one there
        to meet him at the station.
A tepid breeze of highly gifted cognac carries him off
        in the midst of an assignment.
He is never free of assignments.
Two thousand letters a year!
The schoolboy who writes the misspelled word one hundred times before he is
        allowed to go home.
The gondola is heavily laden with life, it is simple and black.

        VI
Back to 1990.
Dreamt I drove a hundred miles in vain.
Then everything was magnified. Sparrows as large as hens
sang so that my ears popped.
Dreamt that I had drawn piano keys
on the kitchen table. I played on them, mutely.
The neighbors came in to listen.

        VII
The clavier which has been silent through all of Parsifal (but it has listened)
        is at last allowed to say something.
Sighs...sospiri...
When Liszt plays tonight he holds down the sea-pedal so that
        the green force of the sea
rises through the floor and flows together with all the stone of the building.
Good evening beautiful deep!
The gondola is heavily laden with life, it is simple and black.

        VIII
Dreamt I was starting school but came late.
Everyone in the room wore white masks.
It was impossible to tell who was the teacher."
 - Grief Gondola # 2 by Tomas Transtromer, translated from the Swedish by Malena Morling, 1998.

Call it La lugubre gondole, or the funeral gondola.  In French it sounds fitting for the experience of a grieving widow.  Let us specify Cosima Lizst von Bulow Wagner, whose name merely hints at  a life rich in incident. Daughter of composer Franz Lizst, wife of the influential music critic Hans von Bulow, mistress, wife and finally widow of composer Richard Wagner. 

In the poem (above) by recent Nobel Literature laureate Tomas Transtromer it becomes  Grief Gondola #2.  The "#2" refers to Lizst's several versions of a piece he composed in the wake of his son-in-law's death on February 13, 1883 in Venice.  The second version for piano is the best known and was included in the composer's portfolio of Transcendental Etudes.
"My wife is very strong-willed,"  Hans von Bulow had noted mildly of his young bride.  Cosima was the mother of two young girls when, at twenty-six, she began a flagrant affair with Richard Wagner.  Seven years and three children (whom she passed off as von Bulow's) later, and after an apology from Wagner's royal patron for exiling the composer when rumors ran rampant, the lovers were finally wed in 1870.
Strong-willed as Cosima was, she was not granted her wish to die with Wagner "in the selfsame hour."   When Wagner died  the making of the death mask had to be postponed while Cosima clung to the decaying corpse.  The funeral procession that took Wagner's remains back to Bayreuth sailed down the Grand Canal, with a gondola draped in black.  No one could see the widow who had cut off her  hair and stuffed it into the coffin. 
Lizst had disapproved his daughter's conduct but the two reconciled and he visited the Wagners for the last time at Christmastime 1862.  Perhaps his own numerous health problems contributed to Lizst's premonition of Wagner's death.  We know his imagination was transfixed by the funeral processions, gliding silently along the  canal like so many black swans, by his use of poignant augmented triads, drifting toward atonality.

Tomas Transtromer was one of those writers I had meant to look into, until he won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year and events overtook me. Now there are books to choose from and not just the odd poem included in an anthology here and there.  I've wrestled with Lizst's piano pieces,  especially the beautiful Consolation in B-flat, but not Der Trauer Gondel and failed to mention the celebrations of Lizst's bicentennial year in 2011. 
Images:

1. Joseph Saint-Germier - A Burial In Venice, 1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Edward Steichen - Late Afternoon - Venice, originally printed in Camera Work for April 1913, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

For further Reading:
Cosima Wagner: Lady of Bayreuth by Oliver Hilmes, Yale University Press: 2010.
The Deleted World by Tomas Trasntromer, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2011.
For the Living And The Dead by Tomas Transtromer, Ecco Press: 2011.
The Great Enigma by Tomas Transtromer, New Directions: 2006.
Inspired Winter by Tomas Transtromer, Dedalus Press: 2011.
The Sorrow Gondola by Tomas Transtromer, Green Integer Press: 2010

Gustave Moreau: Khnopff's Favorite Painter ?

At the retrospective of  Fernand Khnopff's work at the McMullen Museum in 2004, his early painting After Gustave Flaubert. The Temptation of St. Anthony (1883) was displayed next to Salome Dancing by Gustave Moreau.  Moreau (1821-1898), a French Symbolist whose pronouncements on art sound familiar to admirers of Khnopff, said  "I am dominated by  one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract." Truer in Khnopff's case than in Moreau's.   Khnopff made no secret of his admiration for Moreau, and the obvious influence it had on him before he discovered the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Edward Burne-Jones, who became his friend. 

Imitation, being the sincerest form of flattery, comparing Villa Khnopff with the Musee Moreau in Paris is enlightening. In Moreau's case, he tore down the place where he had lived and worked for years in order to build the perfect showcase.  Khnopff's project was much the same, except that he chose his site near the beautiful rose gardens of the Bois de Cambre in Brussels and then built.  

The  area of the Faubourg-Montmartre remained determinedly seedy throughout Moreau’s lifetime.  In a manner familiar to Americans from the fight over the Alfred Barnes Collection, Moreau, who willed his house and its contents to the French state, made his gift conditional on its maintenance as is.  With museums, in perpetuity seems to mean a century more or less.

The similarities between the two artists are many and obvious.  Khnopff also came from a well-to-do family.  He had regular, appreciative patrons.  Like Moreau, he refused to offer the key to his symbolic language, although he was the more diplomatic, talking genially but revealing little.  Moreau, on the other hand, was known to simply refuse to answer his collectors’ questions about what it all meant.  Moreau, too, was  asked to draw a self-portrait that was to hang in the Vasari  Corridor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, an honor accorded to a select company of  the world’s greatest painters.  But, unlike Khnopff, whose sister Marguerite donated his auto-portrait to the Uffizi, Moreau never delivered his.  Apparently he considered himself undeserving of such an honor.

Moreau designed his house/studio so that his works would be displayed in color coordinated settings among the objects that inspired him.  I think of a photograph taken at Villa Khnopff that shows the artist's portrait of his sister Marguerite hung over a mantel on which sits a pair of crossed tennis rackets, referring to Memories, a painting of seven women, all Marguerites, five of whom are holding rackets.

Moreau completed his museum in 1896, two years before he died and it is quite likely that Khnopff would have known of it and may have visited it on one of his Parisian trips.  The first indication that Khnopff had something similar in his mind was a letter  in autumn of 1899 to an English friend, John Parker-Compton.  Khnopff didn't draw a comparison but that wouldn't have been his style.

I am left with the disquieting thought that Fernand Khnopff may have intended Villa Khnopff to become a museum for his work.  He had the means  and it may explain why he stayed there during the German occupation when so many Belgian artists fled to England that his countryman Jean Delville became the head of the League of Belgian Artists in London.   What if Khnopff's feuding heirs thwarted his intentions by allowing the destruction of Villa Khnopff?  

Images:

1. Fernand Khnopff - After Gustave Flaubert.The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1883, private collection.

2. Gustave Moreau - Interior of Saint Mark's Basilica. Venice, undated, Musee  Gustave Moreau, Paris.

3. Fernand Khnopff - Requiem, 1907, Hearn Family Trust, New York.