is it true what they say about hats?

i have read (though i can't find it just now) that the japanese hairstyles that were 'discovered' in prints and in visits to japan had a great influence in the hats of the day.

what is it with hats, and hair? why is it that century after century we do things with our hair or wear things on our heads that seriously increase its volume?

is it a frame for the face? a crown? an unconscious wish to appear threatening? a wish to enhance beauty?

in any case, at that point in time, japanese styles were influencing everything, so why not hats?

As the 19th century drew to a close the hats got big enough to use as fire buckets... (more)

immense, yard-wide hats, laden with plumes and feathers or with basket-loads of artificial flowers... (more)

(left: edouard vuillard, georges de feure, utagawa kuniyoshi, and again kuniyoshi. right: not known yet, kunisada utagawa, jules-alexandre grun, gabriele munter.)

the art of loie fuller reemerges

On Tuesday, April 3, 2007 the Westminster Arts Center at Bloomfield College will host the performance “Dance of the Elements,” a powerful celebration featuring dance pieces by Jody Sperling (Time Lapse Dance) which bring The Art of Loie Fuller to life. The performance will begin at 7:30 pm in the Van Fossan Theatre located on the corner of Franklin and Fremont Streets in Bloomfield, and will also include a lecture-demonstration.

Artistic Director Jody Sperling (Time Lapse Dance), a choreographer, performer and dance scholar gives a postmodern twist to vintage genres, from the mesmerizing spectacles of Loie Fuller, to circus and music hall entertainments. Sperling, who is based in New York City, has gained an international reputation as an expert on Loie Fuller and as an interpreter of Fuller's style of dancing. She combines research with imagination, to craft inventive, visually lush, and often humorous dances. Her luminous works in the style of early modern dancer Loie Fuller are a mainstay of the repertory; other dances draw inspiration from such eclectic imagery as sideshow contortion acts, partner acrobatics, hula-hooping, low-flying trapeze, burlesque, Degas ballerinas, magic-lantern shows, mermaid myths, and... (more)

for more about fuller, see our earlier post; also check out kora in hell about fuller and other dancers of that era.

swimming in memories

it occurs to me frequently that while i have a list of where to access japanese prints, i do not have one, exactly, for their western counterparts. my reasoning is that i more often do mention them in calendar and commentary. which i'll continue to try to do more and more.

i tried tracing the the artist of this harper's cover, and the closest i could come was that it

was very possibly will bradley. bradley has been mentioned here a couple of times, and certainly deserves a post of his own, which will come. in the meantime, i've provided a link to more than you could possibly read at one sitting, so i have faith in your patience.

on the right is a postcard, from japan--turn of the century. i haven't mentioned these before though because i wasn't sure how to place them, exactly. well, too bad. i still don't but they certainly deserve mention! there are so many wonderful ones.

done during the meiji era's mixing of cross- cultural influences, this body of work, available online at boston's mfa, demonstrates just how crossed that cultural moment was. the cards illustrate everything from blonds in art nouveau settings to travel cards of locales around japan, from deco to ukiyo-e. it's hard to tell who the work was made for, the new tourists, for overseas sales, or for domestic, but they do make clear that the days of two radically separate cultures were definitely over.

of the artist here, ichijo narumi, i could find nothing.

[turns out it's not will bradley. michael ward, magazineart.org personified, was kind enough to send me this signature that was too small to read on the reproduction. but which kerr it is, we have no idea. there are so many that i finally gave up on my google search. anyone know?]

don't miss magazineart.org (as i was just reminded by '100 years of illustration'), source of many years of wondrous magazine art.

grace

merci
florizel




(la seconde est keinen imao, le premier, je ne savent pas.)
[turns out to have been lalique! should have known. thanks again florizel, poet of images, for the info.]

time travel

yesterday turned up additional serendipitous time-travel as well. another alert, this time for 'japonisme,' landed me here. there, i learned of an artist who was new to me: louis anquetin.

so what does one do in such a case? why, a google image search, of course. and that turned me up here. what a wondrous site. (for an even fuller experience, go here.) in addition to introducing me to many wonderful new artists, this site taught me two things: 1.) there really were quite a number of painters at the time who didn't seem to be at all caught into the japonisme frenzy, and 2.) that adding their work to one's knowledge really begins to give a more full feeling for what it was like to be there then. (the site even compares paintings with photographs.)

anquetin was profoundly influenced by the new japanese influx, specializing in what he called 'cloisonnisme,' just another word for 'it,' i think.

others of the new artists i met were ramon casas,

giuseppe de nittisouge,

and federico zandomeneghi.


and yes, i do see diagonals, and blocks of color, and screens.... but what i see beyond these things is that moment, that moment when all of this was taking place, so thrilling, decorative, and profound.






if you go through all the images on the lautrec site, you will see many faces that are decidedly not the sarah bernhardts, nor the jane avrils. they are not necessarily having any fun. their hairdos occasionally look rather odd, as though they were trying the fashion because it was the fashion, and not because it suited them.

in short, in a way, you will see yourself. ordinary people of another time.

(anquetin, anquetin, casas,casas, de nittisouge, zandomeneghi)

internet as bible

it's the begetting i'm talking about. a google alert leads one to a new blog which lists another blog which thanks another blog which credits yet another. even word of mouth is slower.

grateful enough today to discover mountshang.






follow his begats, then follow hers, to learn something more about this set of lithographs, amour, by maurice denis, from a show on offerings from the influential art dealer and publisher vollard currently at the art institute of chicago.







vollard seems to be, perhaps, an equivalent to bing or watanabe in their passion to show, publicize, and inspire the artists (or craftsmakers) of the day.

not surprisingly, and in case you're interested, we've already talked about denis several times in this blog: here, here, here, and here.

mirroring the living

For Anne Gregory

'Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'


'But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'

'I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'

- WB Yeats

... or red, or black.... or white. i guess today's question, if there is one, might be are these stereotypes as well? was this one moment in art the last gasp towards a particularly defined femininity in the face of women's increasing self-determination? or do these images, like yesterday's, portray something cherished about "the other"?

(l: gekko ogata, guy rose, david gauld.
r: george henry, yoshitoshi taiso, chikanobu toyohara.)

i'm just saying....

same thing?































not the same thing?

holding the moon

been thinking a lot today, about the nature of holidays and the holidays of nature. in japan, the blossoming of the cherry trees calls for cherry-viewing parties at the highest levels.

in persia, the first day of the spring
is new year's day.

yes, we have nature-based holidays. our spring holidays are easter and passover. these are really celebrating the equinox as much as chanukah and christmas
celebrate the solstice.

but for the japanese, it's much more conscious. something about us being part of nature, nature being part of us, has not been lost.

van gogh may have been right, writing his brother about the regard with which the japanese hold a single blade of grass. the blossoming of the trees is cause for poetry.
this is ono no komachi writing a poem.
could this sad poem be it?

How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower
of the human heart.




(Chikanobu Toyohara, Shunzan Katsukawa,
Nobukazu Watanabe, Arthur Wesley Dow,
Gesso Yoshimoto, poem from Ink Dark Moon, tr. Hirshfield/Aratani.)

the ver sacrum

Nothing Stays Put

by Amy Clampitt

In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985


The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes--a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom--
for sale in the supermarket! We are in
our decadence, we are not entitled.

What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics--
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labor?

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother's garden: a prairie childhood,
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.

But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above--
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.

Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we're
made of, is motion.


From The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © 1997

The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings

June 24, 2007 -
September 16, 2007
Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute
225 South Street,
Williamstown, MA

This unprecedented exhibition challenges the conventional, long-held understanding of Claude Monet’s artistic process and life. Drawing upon recently discovered documents and a body of graphic work largely unknown to the public and scholars alike, the exhibition reveals that Monet (1840–1926) relied extensively upon drafting in the development of his paintings in addition to painting his subjects directly. Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, having denied the role of drawing in his working method in an effort to advance his public image as an Impressionist.

The Unknown Monet is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s graphic works, including pastels, finished drawings, and sketch- books. The show sheds new light on several aspects of Monet’s creative process by presenting a significant body of these works, many of which have not been previously exhibited, alongside related examples of his work in oil. more

it never really occurred to me before how much of the color was determined by the medium. this reminds me of redon--something monet certainly never did before.

Lalique revolutionized jewelry and glass design.

By Amber Haq

Newsweek International

March 26, 2007 issue - Around the turn of the 20th century, the French artist, jeweler and glassware artisan René Lalique spent hours studying Japanese plants in the botanical gardens of Paris. Japanese horticulture was in vogue all over Europe, and Lalique labored relentlessly to complete intricate sketches of unfamiliar plants such as hydrangeas and chrysanthemums.

His aim: "To create something no one has ever seen before," he wrote.

Now visitors to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris can witness those wonders. "The Exceptional Jewels of Lalique, 1890-1912" (through July 29) is the largest-ever exhibition of the French master's work, gathering together some 300 pieces from around the world.

Visitors are plunged into a magical universe of color and texture: orchids carved out of opal and jade; Japanese-style hair combs adorned with wasps and Egyptian beetles; bats and cats in lacquered enamel; dog collars embellished with pearls; the soft, fleshy female form metamorphosing into a dragonfly, or couched supine on a bed of moonstone. more

(many of these pieces can be seen regularly at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian.)