no beauty's ever free I

maybe some people get it at a younger age, but i'm turning sixty-five next month, and this somehow seems the appropriate age to realize some things. i suppose one might call it 'the duality of things,' or not. but the realization, of course, brings delight and melancholy in equal parts.

we have looked at the development of plakatstil, with its german outgrowth of hand-written posters, and that style as an outgrowth of both japanese calligraphy, and a long tradition of hand-lettering in german posters. here we begin to see how that style jumped the ocean and was perfectly suited for the new industry of railway posters. (and we've also looked at the changing needs of travel.)

some wonderful artists emerged at this moment in time. see extensive, full-color coverage in zega & gruber's "travel by train." sam hyde harris's posters are so amazing (see next post as well) that i have a very difficult time keeping it in my head that they were created over 80 years ago! they are so fresh, and beautiful to me; harris just jumped into the middle of my favorites list right next to maurice logan.

numerous other emerging artists included are maynard dixon, winold reiss, and w h bull, whom we have looked at before, and louis treviso, for example, whom we have not, and numerous others are featured in luxurious color; wish i could find online images on all of them. but in studying their work it becomes obvious from whence come their roots.

the romance of the railroads is born in these posters, created to ensure wanderlust, a greener grass on the other side of the railroad tracks. for unparalleled beautiful vistas, for the opportunities of self-reinvention, try a train.

so where's the dark side?, you are wondering. you mentioned melancholy? indeed i did. i've mentioned it before. the baton of art and design is handed on, the baton raised comes down again, always, generation after generation. martin lermann-steglitz, like so many of his contemporaries, was lost to the camps, lost permanently, finally declared dead in 1962.

there's nothing one can learn that finds one only delighted, there is no inside without an outside, no yin sans yang. i felt for many years that happiness required the vanquishing of the dark side and now i know that place has never existed. krishna, vishnu and shiva braided inevitably together, inseparable. there's no way to love the world fully without an open heart, which bars nothing.

in the next post, we'll hold these wonderful rail posters up to the light. what do you think we will see?

read more background:

railroads
travel
posters

no beauty's ever free II

INDIANS! (as they were obviously ubiquitously known then). indians were such a draw to these new american tourists that not only were they featured in so many of the railway posters, but locomotives, no, whole trains were named 'chief,' and destinations such as 'indian days,' and 'indian-detour tours,' were created by santa fe, canadian pacific, southern pacific, great northern, and other railroads to draw the sight-see-ers on.

the artwork, you may agree, is often stunning; railway posters seem to have the ability to maintain mystery and romance wherever they occur. indians were what? an unknown culture? or the tokens of one? 'wild' animals in zoo-parks? simple-minded crafters of pots and baskets? it's hard to know.

at the same time as they were being used as lures to well-to-do gentlemen and their wives and children, they focused another attention on their very existence:

The first European Americans to encounter the western interior tribes were generally fur traders and trappers. There were also Jesuit missionaries active in the Northern Tier. As United States expansion reached into the American West, settler and miner migrants came into increasing conflict with the Great Basin, Great Plains, and other Western tribes. These were complex nomadic cultures based on horse culture and seasonal bison hunting. They carried out strong resistance to United States incursions in the decades after the American Civil War, in a series of Indian Wars, which were frequent up until the 1890s, but continued into the 20th century.

The transcontinental railroad brought more non-Natives into tribal land in the west. Over time, the U.S. forced a series of treaties and land cessions by the tribes, and established reservations for them in many western states. U.S. agents encouraged Native Americans to adopt European-style farming and similar pursuits, but European-American agricultural technology of the time was inadequate for often dry reservation lands. In 1924, Native Americans who were not already U.S. citizens were granted citizenship by Congress.

In 1906, 300 Ute under the leadership of Red Cap left the White River Reservation in Colorado headed for South Dakota. The Ute were upset about the allotment of their reservation and increase of non-Indian settlers. In South Dakota, they hoped to form an alliance with the Lakota and with the Crow to stop the allotment program. The army stopped the group and detained them as prisoners of war at Fort Meade, South Dakota. The army was unconcerned that courts had ruled that Indians could not be detained or imprisoned without a trial. Nor was the army concerned that no actual state of war existed at the time. The army viewed the Ute as potential enemy combatants and felt that it had the right to hold them in prison indefinitely.

While the army often ignored due process of law when dealing with Indians, there are cases in which the army did attempt to see due process carried out. In 1915, a Mexican sheepherder was murdered in Colorado and popular opinion assumed that he had been killed by an Indian. The court of public opinion blamed Tsenegar, a Ute Indian, for the death. Subsequently a posse of 26 cowboys crossed into Utah and surrounded the Ute camp of Old Polk. Their supposed goal was to capture Tsenegar who was rumored to be in Old Polk's group. The cowboys, who were drunk at the time, began firing into the camp with no warning. The Indians had no idea who these men were nor why they were shooting at them. The Indian response was to fire back to distract the cowboys and then to slip away. When the smoked cleared, there were dead on both sides and the Ute had vanished.

In 1913 there was a rebellion among the Navajo which came to be known as the Beautiful Mountain Uprising. The uprising started when the Indian agent learned that Hatot'cli-yazzie, the son of Ba-Joshii, had three wives in spite of the agent's edict against plural marriages. Fed by information from the Indian agent, local newspapers painted a picture of the entire Navajo nation in revolt with a horrible massacre impending. To avert this massacre and save the non-Indians, according to the newspaper accounts, military action was needed. In response, the army sent in the cavalry with 261 men and officers to put down the Navajo "hostiles" who were under the leadership of Ba-Joshii. The Navajo force numbered only twelve men.

source: native american roots more background: "indians"

THE DELIGHT SONG OF TSOAI-TALEE

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive

N. Scott Momaday

from In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991. Copyright ©1991 by N. Scott Momaday

Haven't They Always Been Saints?

Washington D.C., Jan 20, 2012 / 06:02 am (CNA/EWTN News)

The recent announcement that Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha has been approved for sainthood is generating great excitement among the Native American community. “There’s an awful lot of interest,” said Monsignor Paul A. Lenz, the vice postulator of Bl. Kateri’s cause for sainthood. Msgr. Lenz told CNA on Jan. 19 that he has seen an “unbelievable response” to the news of the canonization, with reactions pouring in from all over the United States and Canada. Msgr. Lenz, who previously worked in the Black and Indian Mission Office in Washington, D.C., said that Native Americans are extremely excited about having a saint come from within their own community.

Although the date for the canonization has not yet been announced, he said that multiple groups are already organizing pilgrimages to Rome to be present when the first Native American is officially elevated to sainthood. When the date for the canonization is made public, Msgr. Lenz believes it will attract lots of attention in both the religious and secular media.

Known as “the Lily of the Mohawks,” Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in upstate New York in 1656. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and her mother was an Algonquin who was raised Catholic. She was orphaned at age four by a smallpox epidemic that left her with poor eyesight and a badly scarred face. After encountering several Jesuit priests, Bl. Kateri was baptized, despite objections from her family.

Her conversion caused her tribe to disown her, so Bl. Kateri fled to Canada, where she lived as an outcast, devoted to prayer and the Blessed Sacrament. She died at age 24. After her death, witnesses said that the scars on her face disappeared, leaving her skin radiantly beautiful.

In 1980, she became the first Native American to be beatified. On Dec. 19, Pope Benedict XVI formally recognized a miracle attributed to the intercession of Bl. Tekakwitha, clearing the way for her canonization. The miracle involved a young boy in Seattle who was inexplicably cured from a flesh-eating bacteria that had disfigured his face and left him near death.

Msgr. Lenz said that the boy, who is of Native American descent, looked “worse than a leper.” However, he completely recovered after his family prayed and asked Bl. Kateri to intercede with God for him.

Msgr. Lenz explained that Catholic Native Americans have a strong faith and devotion to Bl. Kateri, whom they are familiar with from the Jesuit writings that have been handed down since the time of her death. In his 35 years of working with Native Americans, Msgr. Lenz has found that they are almost “always a friend” of Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha. “They’re very proud” of her, he said. (from)

But... wait a minute...! All of the notables here are pictured with halos, and for good reason.

By the Jewish calendar, we are currently in the holiday of Passover, where Jews celebrate with a ritualized dinner called a Seder. (The Last Supper was a Seder.) There is a word sung in a joyous song at the Passover Seder. The word is Dayenu and means “it would have been enough.” It is a word of gratitude and awe. 1 Dayenu lists the 15 gifts and miracles (like parting the Red Sea) bestowed upon the Jewish people by God in the Book of Exodus. The idea that each blessing would be enough on its own, even without further or more profound blessings, is a central theme during the holiday. 2

Looking back at the deserved sainthood of may generations of Native Americans, I think we can make a Dayenu for them easily.

If you had brought us seeds and foodstuffs in exchange for blankets of disease -- Dayenu!

If you had honorably tended your land and kept your faiths in the face of those who would steal both from you -- Dayenu!

If you had taught us to tap the Sugar Maple for her sweetness while your voices were silenced -- Dayenu!

You begin to see what I mean. May we all spend our Easter and Passover goodwill on tolerance and respect, perhaps the most difficult tasks any human being has to face.

don't believe a thing i say!

okay, april fools and all that, but i'm not completely kidding (and since i didn't finish this yesterday, it might not count anyway). sometimes in the mythologies i try to untangle for you i get some things seriously wrong for one main reason: i forget to check the dates. in fact i wouldn't be sur- prised if i haven't attributed some things to some artists that happened long before, or long after, they died. i hope you know what i mean!

let us begin with, for example, gustave courbet who died at age 58, in 1877. he was born in 1819. obviously. see his example above right? very natural clouds. no outlines. (they really tend to not have any outlines; i have been checking.) and then we have hokusai: all outlines, nothing realistic about them. while he was born in 1760, he was producing artwork until his death in 1849. quite an overlap in lives, these two. the moment of japonisme would have passed hokusai by completely, while all of courbet's training and experience, and the way he saw, were set by the time of the invasion.

now to put these generational questions into some context, may i mention that hiroshige lived from 1797 to 1858 (getting closer to courbet, aren't we?) and monet lived from 1840 to 1926. monet, the impressionists, were the first artists to imbibe from the teacup of the japanese, but the next gener- ation made things extremely interesting. there were the cowboy painters, painers of the mesas of utah and arizona, dixon, cassidy, and borg: realistic clouds with outlines.

they were the next generation; they, these brilliant western painters, were of the same generation as some of the artists we have gotten to know well over the years: henri riviere, pierre bonnard, frances gearhart, and, only slightly younger, hiroshi yoshida. yoshida did not even begin to make prints (he had been a western-style painter, as they were called then) until he was in his 40s -- one year before arthur wesley dow died!

what this boils down to is that any illustration i have given you of influences yoshida may have had on dow are completely erroneous! arthur wesley dow's birth (1857 - 1922) occurred one year before hiroshige died! dow was more a contemporary of monet than the many proponents of japonisme with whom i have linked him; dow was, as was monet, the first wave -- the primogenitor of influences of japonisme, and not any part of the gang.

henri riviere, pierre bonnard, carl oscar borg, maynard dixon, and hiroshi yoshida all died within four years of my birth. these donors of legacy are no further in the past than is world war II. these artists are of the generation of my grandparents, or great-grandparents. in other words, we still swim in their stream. there was no flood diverting it.

so with regard to clouds (and we have discussed them before; just click on the 'clouds' tag to see the other discussions), we now have a much clearer line of inheritance: it is obvious that the japanese gave us outlines and we gave them perspective. they gave us simplicity and we gave them the multi-pigmented shades of color of which the world is built.

see here the same cloud, albeit different times of day, as offered by frances gearhart and hiroshi yoshida. many similarities. yoshida's work presents far more subtleties than does hokusai's, and gearhart's far more outlining and simplifying than courbet's. but who learned from whom? do they more accurately owe each other a debt as do artists working at the same time? i think they do.

her back

HOW SIMILE WORKS

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I'm telling her a childhood remini- scence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.

Albert Goldbarth

from To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth.
Copyright © 2009 by Albert Goldbarth.
All rights reserved.

the birth of clouds

THE SENSE OF THE SLEIGHT-OF-HAND MAN

One’s grand flights,
one’s Sunday baths,
One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur.
So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons
rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there.
Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly
Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays
Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.
The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.
To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine
And pines that are comets, so it occurs,
And a little island full of geese and stars:
It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

Wallace Stevens

“The Sense of the Sleight-of-hand Man” from Collected Poems.
Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens.
Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc. Source: Poetry (July 1939).

what a strange day.

at long last i noticed that japanese prints, in addition to only very rarely featuring shadows or reflections, as we've discussed before here and here and here, only rarely have clouds!, certainly never, until the shin hanga artists gave them birth, as sunset, billowing, nor multi-colored.

when clouds did appear, they were almost exclusively used to augment a painting of a mountain, an evidence of heights. the mountain were subject, and the clouds servants. certainly no images of clouds for the sake of the clouds, as one might often see waves for the sake of water.

so i found myself wondering: if shadows and reflections were not included because of their ephemeral nature, as we've read in several places now, then is perhaps the same true of clouds?

i could find nothing online nor in my books (what ever happened to indexing???!), so i decided to call "the experts." i tried tracing down curators of japanese prints at various museums, but when i found only dead ends, i started phoning dealers, some of whom are listed in the sidebar here, and essayists i know from online. and to a man (yes, deliberate usage) they said the same thing:

"its not true that there are few shadows or reflections in japanese prints!" "but but," i say, "what about the idea about excluding them because they're too ephemeral?" "where do you get these ideas?" (annoyed? angry?) "and then when shin hanga came along....," i struggled, clinging to straws. the final guy had the nerve to tell me i really needed to look at more than a basic ukiyo-e collection. had no idea whatsoever of what's online now,
not to mention on my bookshelves.

my index-less books, though, again were no help. which is why the gods invented the internet:

"Internal Light

"While van Gogh never specifically referred to optics, his remark that the Japanese "take reflections for granted" illustrates he was aware of the issue. The Sunflowers, Bridge at Arles, and the Harvest at La Crau, and the other images that painted that year all have something in common with each other and with the Japanese print. They convey a visual rather than an optical effect.

"What is the difference between them? As we saw, Van Gogh eliminated clair-obscure from his painting. Clair-obscure, of course, is the result of light, or, more specifically, light external to the picture. When he banned shadows from his paintings, and used flat, "artificial" colors, he also eliminated external light from the picture. The Sunflowers, just like the shadowless Japanese print, has neither a light source nor shadows. The light in the painting is "internal." By using color as an independent reality -- independent of optical perception -- it followed that the painting assumed an independent reality. The painting is no longer an optical facsimili of the visual world, it was a reality in its own right.

"The idea to treat a painting as a reality in its own right, of course, became the hallmark of the Modernist Revolution. The realization that a picture, before it is anything else, is an independent reality – a two-dimensional artifact – is still topical. Not only painting but contemporary electronic media are first and foremost two-dimensional, artificial media that are visually more expressive when treated as such. If contemporary Japanese imagery seems to have an unusually clarity, the reason is no doubt that the eye of the Japanese artists was never blurred, as it were, by the filter op naturalism. Esthetically speaking, Japan's traditional culture already possessed some eminently modern characteristics." 1

"Monet's early paintings show the influence of the flat planes of bold colour, asymmetric compositions, and telescoping of foreground and distant views with no middle distance – features characteristic of 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints.... Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-58) is characterised by its unusual viewpoints. Evening View of Saruwaka Street (1856) in the Kabuki theatre district of the city, with its European linear perspective and single vanishing point, is the most overtly realist view in the series. Its most unusual feature is Hiroshige's use of shadows, rarely seen in Japanese art, that produce an eerie quality." -- Colin Martin

"artists who worked the aforementioned style circa 1860, shows the integration of western stylistic elements, such as shadows and perspective, juxtaposed to the typical elements of the ukiyo-e." 2

so you tell me. what are these guys talking about?
like i said, the weirdest day!