a man for all seasons: 1906

1818

.それ馬が馬がとやいふ親雀
sore uma ga uma ga to ya iu oya suzume

"Watch out for that horse!
Watch out!"
mother sparrow calls

issa

1809

.我庵やあくたれ烏痩ぼたん
waga io ya akutare karasu yase botan

at my hut--
rascally crows
emaciated peonies

issa

1810

.かすむぞよ松が三本夫婦鶴
kasumu zoyo matsu ga sambon meoto-zuru

in spring mist
three pines, two cranes
husband and wife

issa

1805

.鳥もなき蝶も飛けり古畳
tori mo naki chô mo tobi keri furu tatami

birds singing
butterflies flitting...
old tatami mat

issa

Or: "a butterfly flitting." Shinji Ogawa points out that naki means "sang" in this haiku, not, as I originally thought, "devoid of."
With his correction, the haiku now makes perfect sense.
Issa sits on his old tatami mat, enjoying the spring day along with the birds and butterflies.

1820

.鳥の巣に明渡したる庵哉
tori no su ni akewatashitaru iori kana

surrendering it
to the nesting birds...
my hut

issa

Issa ends this haiku, simply, with "hut" (iori kana). In a revision four years later (in 1824), he clarifies his meaning by ending the haiku with "the hut that is empty because its owner is away" (rusu no io). Issa is leaving his hut for a while, generously offering it to nesting birds. Shinji Ogawa notes that the verb akewatashitaru denotes Issa's abandoning or surrending his hut.

1813

.けふもけふもだまって暮す小鴨哉
kyô mo kyô mo damatte kurasu ko kamo kana

today too
keeping perfectly quiet...
little duck

issa

1796

.旅笠を小さく見せる霞かな
tabi-gasa wo chiisaku miseru kasumi kana

their traveling hats
looking small...
mist

issa

year unknown

.青の葉は汐干なぐれの烏哉
ao no ha wa shiohi nagure no karasu kana

some stay behind
in the green leaves...
low tide crows

issa

Nagure is the same as nagori ("vestiges," "remains"); see Kogo dai jiten (Shogakukan 1983) 1213. The crows at low tide are doing the same thing as their human counterparts: looking for shellfish. A few linger behind in trees and field.

1807

.近づけば急に淋しき紅葉哉
chikazukeba [kyû] ni sabishiki momiji kana

drawing near them
a sudden loneliness
autumn leaves

issa

1811

.うしろから大寒小寒夜寒哉
ushiro kara ôsamu kosamu yozamu kana

behind me--
big cold, little cold
night cold

issa

1825

.雪の日や堂にぎっしり鳩雀
yuki no hi ya dô ni gisshiri hato suzume

on a snowy day
the temple is packed...
pigeons, sparrows

issa

many continued thank yous to the amazing david g lanoue and his glorious issa pages, revealing the poet's humanity, humor, and the nature and customs of his world.

as is obvious, i have not yet been able to find a july for 1906 yet.
will remedy and announce when i do.

the real van gogh

Monday, 25 January 2010

First Impressions: The Real Van Gogh

by Kathryn Hadley

‘The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters’ opened this weekend at the Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition focuses on Van Gogh’s correspondence to provide an insight into his ideas about art, nature and literature and the way he defined himself as an artist and human being. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) wrote mostly to his younger brother Theo (1857-1891), who was an art-dealer and supported Vincent both emotionally and financially throughout his life and career.

Other letters are addressed to his sister Willemien and to fellow artists including Paul Gauguin. Many are illustrated with small detailed sketches which Van Gogh used to show a work in progress. The first major Van Gogh exhibition in Lon- don for over 40 years, ‘The Real Van Gogh’ provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a misunderstood and misrep- resented artist. The diversity and ver- satility of his works is striking; the breadth of his talent, which was only recognised after his death, is stunning.

Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert in the southern Netherlands in 1853. His father Theodorus van Gogh was a Protestant pastor of the Dutch reformed Church. Vincent began work, in 1869, for Goupie & Cie a firm of art-dealers in The Hague. He was thereafter transferred to London and then to Paris. His employment was, however, terminated in 1876 and the following year he travelled to Amsterdam to study theology. In 1879, he began working as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium.

Van Gogh’s career as an artist did not begin until 1880, when he was 27. During his relatively short ten-year artistic career he produced over 800 paintings and 1,200 drawings. In the last 70 days of his life, he completed more than 70 works. On July 27th, 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. He died two days later.

Van Gogh is most famous for his colourful depictions of still lives and landscapes using rhythmic and swinging brush strokes; however, the majority of his paintings were in black and white. He only used colour during the last four years of his career after he moved to Paris in February 1886. The first section of the exhibition is devoted to Van Gogh’s Dutch landscapes, which he painted, at the beginning of his career, in black and white and shades of brown.

For Van Gogh one of the key duties of an artist was to study and depict nature. He wrote in a letter to Theo in July 1882: ‘the duty of the painter is to study nature in depth and to use all his intelligence, to put his feelings into his work so that it becomes comprehensible to others’.

Van Gogh’s art was rooted in nature, and he returned to nature during the last years of his career, with his depictions of the seasons and landscapes of Provence that are most typically associated with him. From Dutch landscapes, however, he moved on to depict figures and the farm labourers and local weavers of the rural community of Nuenen, where he lived between 1883 and 1885.

Van Gogh became a colourist when he moved to Paris in February 1886. Based on his studies of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Adolphe Monticelli (1824-1886), he deve- loped a theory of contrasting complementary colours (red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet), which he perfected in a series of flower and fruit still lives. In the summer of 1887, he produced Two Cut Sunflowers, one of his earliest depictions of sun- flowers. Van Gogh’s paintings became even more colourful when he moved to Arles in Provence two years later. He worked on a series of canvases based on complementary colours and increasingly came to view colour as a means to convey feeling and visual energy rather than reality.

A second secret and often underestimated facet of Van Gogh’s work is the influence of Japanese art. Van Gogh’s fascination with Japanese wood- block prints also developed following his move to Paris, where japonisme, the taste for all things Japanese, was very fashionable at the end of the 19th century.

Vincent and his brother began a collection of Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige and he later informed Theo that ‘all my work is based to some extent on Japanese art’. This Japanese influence is striking in the series of paintings and drawings that Van Gogh completed in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the Rhone delta.

Although Van Gogh's gift for writing letters is somewhat obscured, the breadth of his talent as an artist shines nonetheless: he drew and he painted, in both colour and black and white, he painted landscapes, portraits and still lives, and was strongly influenced by Japanese art. 1

The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters
Until April 18th
Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London W1J 0BD
Telephone: 020 7300 8000
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

a man for all seasons: 1903

from INTERNATIONAL STUDIO 1896

SOME RECENT WORK by TH. VAN HOYTEMA

It is not the first, nor the second time that the work of Mr. T. Van Hoytema has been illustrated in THE STUDIO; yet one is surprised to find that the individuality and fantasy of the designer is not, so far,
as widely recognized in England as it deserves.

His work is too personal to be brought into any well-defined group and criticised accordingly. In spite of its shortcomings —or rather to speak more accurately, and at the same time more politely—in spite of its self-imposed limitations, within the little field Mr. Van Hoytema has chosen he is easily first.

For in his work there is a curious quality—that distinction which may be unobservant of academic scholarship, as in the case of Blake, or coupled with rare knowledge, as in the case of Mr. C. H. Shannon, and yet in both these unrelated examples entirely outside the ordinary standards. Mr. Van Hoytema's owls are always delightful, and his sketches of parrots, storks and turkeys show no less ingenious humour.

Nor is this quality achieved by humanising his feathered models; the touch of caricature he infuses is not in that direction. It is rather what you might expect if a bird developed powers of drawing, and started a series of portraits a la Rothenstein, in a limited edition issued by some winged equivalent of Mr. John Lane or Mr. Grant Richards.

Those who remember The Ugly Duckling (D. Nutt), or The Happy Owls (Henry & Co.), need not be told how cleverly Mr. Van Hoytema uses the resources of lithography in colours to express his ideas. Of course they suffer by translation to black and white, but at the same time much remains to prove his very facile handling and wayward fantasy.

They are un-English ; but that is no crime, for Mr. Van Hoytema is not a Briton. Much as one may prefer English ideals for England, it is still obvious that any other country which appreciates them does best when it assimilates, not imitates.

Because these birds are entirely unlike any of our own artists' impressions of fowls of the air, and are equally unlike birds as a Japanese would record them, they assume a distinct value ; because they add to the art of the world something not previously existing. It is a pleasure to make them known to a wider audience in England.

The two earlier books were obviously lithographed, and unless memory is at fault, in some previous announcement it was stated that the artist drew them himself upon the stone. If this be true, it is possible that his technical mastery is responsible for the only quality open to criticism, which is a fondness for superimposed cross-hatching and tints.

The charm of Mr. Walter Crane's mosaic of flat colours in his early toy-books, or of the graduated wash of Mr. J. D. Batten, and Mr. Morley Fletcher's colourprints, both satisfy one more entirely. In each the limitations of woodcut printing are evident, and the ordered result is more simple, yet more enjoyable.

But this is no doubt partly due to the scarcity of coloured lithography done by the artist himself, the millions of chromo-lithographs extant being almost, without exceptions, translations by skilled mechanics. Some modern Frenchmen have experimented in colour lithography
with the happiest results. In their work the economy of line,
which is in favour to-day, has produced a less complex,
but not less complete, effect.

Yet a certain drawing by M. Aman-Jean, and another by
L. Levy-Dhurmer (both reproduced in The Studio), pull you up sharply in any attempt to proclaim that flat pigments are alone admissible, and leave you again in presence of the truth, that any and every method can be justified in an artist's hands. 1

truth be told, that may not be the right december for this year, but it was a 'loose december,' so i'm glad to at least find a possibility for a month that is otherwise nowhere to be found! believe me, if i ever find the right december (if this isn't it), i'll replace it.

this is for evan

men & women for all seasons: 1903 (the calendars)

the wiener werkstatte began just as the important journal,
ver sacrum, ended. while it had published calendars before, the participants outdid themselves, going out in glory, with their calendar for 1903, which also happens to be the only one nearly completely traceable today.

i will admit how i've cheated at the end,
but in the meantime, a little info.

Between 1897 and 1932, the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) served as magnets for Austria’s avant garde. Unlike modernists in other European countries, these Austrians shared no concrete stylistic program, but rather were united by their belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork): a completely coordinated visual environment.

Although the Gesamtkunstwerk’s proponents anticipated many aspects of modern design, their underlying ideology was essentially conservative. The architect Josef Hoffmann and the designer Koloman Moser, collaborators at the Secession and co-founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, wanted to recapture the aesthetic values of the preindustrial era, to make whole a world that seemed to be fragmenting. Vienna’s artists and artisans were engaged in a communal project aspiring to offer nothing less than spiritual redemption.

The totalizing tendencies of the Secession were manifested both in its evangelical mission and in its attempt to achieve a synthesis of multiple art forms. Not only painters, but also architects and designers were admitted to the organization. “We recognize no difference between high art and low art,” the Secessionists declared in Ver Sacrum. “All art is good.” A pronounced interest in the applied arts was expressed in the type of work shown at the Secession as well as in the care lavished on customized installations.

The Secession’s most ambitious and successful Gesamtkunstwerk was its 1902 exhibition devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven. This multi-media presentation included interior design, sculpture, graphics, painting and music, but the best remembered contribution was probably Klimt’s raised frieze, which encapsulated the reigning artistic philosophy with unparalleled concision. Quoting Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” (the poem set to music in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) in the mural’s final, redemptive panel, Klimt proclaimed his solidarity with the poet and the composer as emissaries of aesthetic deliverance.

The philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk was unabashedly elitist: the self-anointed would lead, all others must follow. And though the Secession ostensibly comprised a community of like-minded individuals, its members were not particularly inclined to democratic compromise. In 1905, friction between the Secession’s more traditional easel painters and the Gesamtkunstwerk devotees caused the latter group (including Klimt, Hoffmann and Moser) to walk out en masse.

The Wiener Werkstätte, established in 1903, now became the sole institution uniting Austria’s more advanced artists. While painters such as Klimt and, a bit later, the Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele were drawn into its orbit, the Werkstätte was first and foremost a design collective. As a result, the organization’s interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk was less introspective, more practical and expansive than had been the case at the Secession.

In 1932, after several brushes with bankruptcy, the Wiener Werkstätte closed its doors for good. Despite its ultimate demise, however, the Werkstätte left a powerful legacy. In addition to anticipating the meshing of form, function and construction intrinsic to modern design, the Gesamtkunstwerk concept has done much to shape the way we relate to objects. The creation of a cohesive “look”—from Donna Karan separates to Ralph Lauren home furnishings—has by now become a given of the upscale lifestyle to which many Americans aspire. Global capitalism and a highly evolved advertising industry provide our contemporary design moguls with a breadth and reach that Hoffmann, in his wildest dreams, could never have anticipated.

The premium charged for design and marketing, above and beyond the raw cost of manufacture, has become enormous today, when both discount sneakers and $150 Nikes are produced in the same Filipino sweatshops. To be sure, this is not the preindustrial Eden imagined by the Wiener Werkstätte’s founders, and present-day design sensibilities are more eclectic, less philosophically charged, than the early twentieth-century Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet objects continue to provide comfort in times of uncertainty, and the attempt to find comprehensive solutions remains seductive, even though we should know that such schemes never really work. 1

Ver Sacrum was a magazine publishing the works of most important artists of Viennese Secession between 1898 and 1903. The prints published in this short-lived but extremely important periodical are very valuable - names like Gustav Klimt, Emil Orlik, Koloman Moser or Alphonse Mucha are among those who published here. Some of the artists became famous in part thanks to the magazine. 2

Ver Sacrum was the major publication of the Vienna Secession movement, a group of artists who banded together in Vienna at the turn of the century to challenge what they saw as the conservative, academic bent of the city's art establishment. Their membership included the artists named above as well as Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and others.

Ver Sacrum was published from 1898 to 1903, running essays on art theory as well as original artwork by the members and other artists whose work influenced them. In conjunction with the magazine, a yearly calendar was published, this being the last of them. In printed, illustrated wrappers which show some toning, else fine. 3

now i fess up. the december just above is actually just november with the first part changed. wrong number of days and all. it's got the correct image, but i could not find the month form itself. and the image for june is by the correct artist, but is not the original from the calendar. that, i couldn't find either, and finding work by this artist at all was difficult because she was russian, and there are about 4,683 spelling variations for her name.

but again, i don't know of anywhere you will find even this much of the completed calendar.

and mr van hoytema: we'll return next.
i've completed several more months!

a man for all seasons: 1909

THE MUSIC IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE

John 14:2
Only a music of its own could come
from this dwelling place, formed
as the composition must be by the hallways
of larch and the black columns of lodgepole
pine lending as multiple corridors in all
directions through overlapping shadows
and into the chambers of others.

Entering this open sunroom with walls
of glass, three deer splash through the marshy
grasses, pause as one to look back
at the composers. those scribes who listen
to the measures of their passing.


Themes of osprey, loon, raven in flight,
a skein of ducks reflect off the mirrored
ceilings that ring with depth like bottomless
lakes, like the tolling bells steel-blue skies.

The stitching of the tapestries hanging
the wall: of the highest room is so exact
that the distant valleys in the scene depicted
become sensuous valleys. The threaded notes
of the rivers are heard as rivers, and the finely
sewn mountains are mountains that disappear
into the distance as departure and return,
a repeating transition in the score.

In the expanse of forests and fields
comprising this structure, what is not seen
is known by the steady beat and undertow
of its presence -- black bear, lion, root, glacier path
and its incantation, the dormant, the conceivable.

Those who are sequestered here
in this house write the music of themselves
conforming to the stone, the seed, the spacious
generation of these living mansions.

Pattiann Rogers

1909 is unique among the years in hoytema's calendars. it's all ducks. we've seen his ducks before. heck -- i love ducks. but what were ducks to him, as a human?


can we read a real quiet between the lines?, or is that silence? thoughtfulness? reflection, yes. sometimes. and repetition, so the whole year becomes like a song, with phrases which repeat, themes that are revisited, so identity becomes confused in its interchangeability.

or is there a sadness we see? we know that hoytema's last decade was not an easy one, illness and divorce, perhaps a touch of madness.
are ducks sad? pensive?

a new friend wally, who has offered to do dutch translations at some point, fills in some details from yesterday's post (a much better translation of which is here):

"The name of that first book Hoytema produced is How the Birds got a King. In brief the birds decided that the one who could fly the highest would be king. The golden eagle flew higher than all others but when he was at his maximum height and exhausted the wren who had been hiding on his back flew up beyond the eagles reach -- and hence was named the king. The dutch name for the wren is winterkoning, literally winter king. You can see the little bird on the back of the eagle on the cover of the book.

Hoytema had an uncanny ability to show the character and attitudes of birds in his images. From the elegance of the vain white herons, the squinting thoughtful owls and the nonchalance of his shrugging crows. They speak through him to become timeless.

There is one other artist who does a similar job and that is Jan Mankes. He is truly unknown outside the Netherlands. Poke around the website that shows almost all his works. Check out all the birds...."