painting in a minor key

this whole rather stream-of-con- sciousness meandered from one inspiration to another (i'll get to that), and since much of this travel was through the nabis' neighborhood, i tried to find that tune in my head. forgive my synaesthesia, but i realised that the only way i could describe it was through sound.

this adventure began when i when i saw the elmes poster at the (below right). i knew it reminded me of something,
and it was clearly indebted to nabi music.
(see more at this amazing blog!)

i looked through my nabi books, and i think that this vallotton (above left) comes the closest, and that perhaps the ones i was seeing in my mind's eye were conflations of a few of the other ones.

the next two are just echos, the synapses skipping.

while bernard was the only one of these two who were part of the pont-aven crowd, you can surely see the route. but all this made me want to grasp what message i was getting from their work.

and i found that for me, it is non-verbal. it like the minor- key in the key- strokes of symphony, like a rotation that leaves every- thing rotated, not quite in

free-fall...........

three of these bottom images are from another won- derful site, i added the fourth, from ernest batch- elder, but its original artist is not attributed. personally, i think the bonnard more matches the batchelder.

there is something terribly attractive about that skewing, that minor key; it can be almost unbearable to come right-side up again. yes, the artists were heavily influenced by japanese prints, their flatness, their blocks of color, and their their knowledge of the importance of the non-linear line, and symbolism, and a response to the impressionists. but i believe that the goal, probably unconscious, was to play by the music that they heard, not anyone elses.

which is like so many of us today.

the music of wallpaper

while actually reading the text in my copy of 'hidden impressions,' the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the MAK in vienna, of instances where the japanese influenced the austrian arts. we'll get back to that catalogue in a future post, but for now, let's follow this little adventure.

i was wildly taken with the two images of japanese endpapers, the cranes on the salmon background and the puppies. sure i had seen a western equivilent, i searched for days to no avail. all of the western endpapers, even those from childrens' books, were, to my eyes anyway, far more rigid by design.

refusing to give up, i started perusing some others of my books. i double-checked the catalogue and all of my other books about design in vienna at that time: nothing. why, i asked myself, and still do, have japanese endpapers in the catalogue with no japonisme version for comparison?

i started on my other books about paper, wallpaper, and had myself an aha moment. i recalled having noticed so many times how actually un-equivalent these matches-up usually are. rarely does a japanese design form get re-interpreted in some into something comparable back and forth. usually, it, like some inherited traits, skips a generation.

but once i found these, not only didn't they surprise me, but they gave me deeper understanding in both sides of the equation. first, we've discussed the lesson that the west learned that caused them to question the validity of any differences between art, decoration, and craft.

no one embraced this concept more strongly than the nabis, for whom there was no less a creative act in creating wallpaper than in painting a painting. much of what we know as paintings are actually bits of a wall-hanging or a screen (see here), but even when the item was a painting itself, it was covered with wallpaper, and, or, the sort of design that hangs in an invisible balance between subject and surround.

in fact, the more one looks at the work of the nabis (here represented by maurice denis, pierre bonnard, and vuillard), the more one sees rhythm, pulse. these pieces do not make a statement, they make a song.

and the songs have continued out in ever widening circles. whistler sued over it; the right to see a surface as something other than flat, the right to name a painting a symphony, a rhapsody, a song.

losing currency

one of my favorite mystery writers, stuart kaminsky, i recently learn, died. oddly, nobody told me. why should they? but....

this is one of the things about getting older about which no one would ever even think of mentioning, but to me it's surely emblematic of becoming part of a fading time.

i don't mean to be morose! not at all. if you're paying attention you notice stuff. that's all. young marrieds are nostalgic about stuff you grew up with. stuff like that.

you find that things that you knew were valuable -- everyone agreed -- now are unheard of. having not only been to woodstock, and seen the beatles in person, you were a groupie with roadies for both dr john and bonzo dog, and, like, what's cooler than that? they humor you with a quick smile, if they have even heard of any of these. your currency is no longer worth a thing, and you realize it probably never was!

and it doesn't matter if it wasn't, either.

sometimes really finding out "whatever happened to..." completely breaks your heart. and sometimes something that you've forgotten having done gives a gift to someone you didn't meet till decades later. oh joy!

in the end, what point has there been in your life deciding what's important, what is not? aren't you going to change your mind some day and then feel yourself to have been a fool? are your memories filled with what you would have expected?

there's every chance you will be known then remembered by some impression you left, even if it was a misinterpretation, or a misunderstanding, or an attribution that was assumed but never deserved. in fact the chances of that lasting impression have anything to do with the real you are very very small.

isn't that freeing? or is that a shade of green you're turning? and then you realize you must turn it around. did you ever know anyone at all? if your opinions, your agreements and disagreements, your mad dervish plans and your careful arrangements, looked silly one day, would that matter?

if you can't just laugh at this point, well then, i guess you just can't.

meow • (halloween suite)

THE GARDEN BY MOONLIGHT

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope
and night-scented stock.

The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.

Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds
of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum
flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on
leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting
through the snow ball bush.

Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks
the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.

Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white
like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.

Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.

Amy Lowell

the panama-pacific, that is! • part 3

Aside from the construction of the $50,000 pipe organ, which, after the Exposition, will be placed permanently in the Civic Auditorium, the two most important musical items found on the schedule of Exposition enterprises are the engagements of Camille Saint-Saens and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The former, who maintained that "Beethoven is the greatest, the only real, artist, because he upheld the idea of universal brotherhood," is perhaps better fitted than any living composer to write special music for the Exposition.

This he has done, -- writing two compositions in fact; and their presentation has been an outstanding feature. "Hail, California," was dedicated to the Exposition. Scored for an orchestra of eighty, a military band of sixty, a chorus of 300 voices, pipe organ and piano, its first presentation was an event.

The Saint-Saens Symphony in C minor (No. 3) Opus 78, composed many years ago, has become a classic during the life-time of its creator. It was one of the wonders of the Boston Symphony programmes played in Festival Hall. Its yield of immediate pleasure and its reassurance for the works of Saint-Saens to be heard later, grew from the fact that it was scored for orchestra and pipe organ, and in this massive tonal web the genius of the composer to write in magnificent size was overwhelm- ingly evident, thus forecasting the splendors of "Hail, California."

The French Pavilion is a dignified and impressive structure, as those who recall the Legion of Honor Palace in Paris will understand. The entrance to the court is a triumphal arch flanked by double rows of Ionic columns on either side, with figures of Fame as spandrels. The arch is connected by lateral peristyles with the wings of the pavilion, the attics of which are adorned with has reliefs.

Ionic colonnades extend along the sides of the court to the principal front of the building, which is decorated with six Corinthian columns, forming a portico for the main entrance. The portal opens on a stage, above which a great central hall, flanked by lesser halls, extends back through the palace.

More notable than the building itself, or its priceless contents, is the fact that these are here. That, in the midst of war and its demands, France should still find time for the ideal, and for this beautiful tribute to the long-standing friendship between the two countries, is a demonstration of French spirit and of French culture that will not escape the attention of any thoughtful American. For France herself, as it has well been said, her appearance here means as much as a victory on the battlefield.

But the glory of the building is in its exhibits. France poured out the treasures of the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the National Museum to adorn this pavilion. Fine as is the exhibit in the French section of the Palace of Fine Arts, the best pictures and Sculptures are shown here. In the Court of Honor stands the masterpiece of the master sculptor of modern times, "The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin. (p. 158.) In the galleries are his "John the Baptist" and other important bronzes.

Vast, unique and of the greatest interest is Theodore Riviere's wonderful group in bronze representing a triumphant band of desert soldiers dragging captive the Moroccan pretender, secured in an iron cage. There, too, are splendid paintings by Monet, Meissonier, Detaille, de Neuvilie, and many other French artists approved by time. **

(these all are actual pieces shown in that exhibit, accompanied by the music played there, described by someone who visited there. and this is just the teensiest fraction of just one country's offerings, just france. and the world was there. bibliography to follow.)

the bath, part 4

TEODORO LUNA CONFESSES AFTER YEARS TO HIS BROTHER, ANSELMO THE PRIEST, WHO IS REQUIRED TO UNDERSTAND, BUT WHO UNDERSTANDS ANYWAY, MORE THAN PEOPLE THINK

I am a slave to the nudity of women.
I do not know with what resolve

I could stand against it,
a naked woman
Asking of me anything.

An unclothed woman is
sometimes other things.
I see her in a dish of green pears.

Anselmo, do you know what I mean if I say

Without clothes

Her breasts are the two lions
In front of the New York Public Library,

Do you know that postcard of mine?
In those lions there is something

For which I have in exchange
Only sounds. Only my fingers.

I see her everywhere. She is the lions
And the pears,
those letters of the alphabet

As children we called dirty, the W,
The Y, the small o.

She is absolutely
the wet clothing on the line.
Or, you know, to be more intimate,

May I? The nub, the nose of the pear,
Do you know what I mean?
Those parts of the woman

I will call two Spanish dancer hats,
Or rounder sometimes,
doughboy helmets from the War.

Sometimes they are flat
in the late afternoon
Asleep. Like drawings,

Like a single rock thrown into the lake,
These parts of a woman
an imperfect circling

Gyre of lines moving out,
beyond the water.
They reach me at the shore, Anselmo.

Without fail, they are stronger,
And they have always been
faster than I am.

It’s like watching the lassoing man,
The man with the perfectly circling rope,

Pedro Armendariz in the Mexican movies,
Or Will Rogers. Wherever one is from,

Whoever this man is.
And he is always there.
Everybody knows one.

He always makes his big lasso,
twirling his rope
Around himself and
a woman from the audience

Only I am the woman,
do you understand, Anselmo?
Caught in the circling rope. I am the woman

And me thinking of a woman
Without clothes

Is that man and that rope
And we are riding on separate horses.

Alberto Ríos

from Teodora Luna's Two Kisses. Copyright © 2000 by Alberto Ríos.

are the men who are the capturers, the 'nurturers,' the captured, in fact? in the whole bath series, we have naked women being seen by (presumably) clothed men. i have tried to choose images in which the women are not apparently posing, apparently unaware of being observed. but in fact they are.

i have to admit that i don't exactly know what to make of all of this. when i used to do my magazine i realized that both male and female artists were most likely to feature their nudes female.
i like looking. feel comforted by looking.

so is it sexist? fashionable, yes (at that time, 'bathers' was a de rigour subject), but oppressive too? i just don't know. what do you think? if you are a woman, do you feel you are capturer or captured?
and men -- same question.