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.)

layers of meaning

i have heard, and read, many different explanations of the many layers worn under kimono. the first thing i was told, years ago, was that it was a way of establishing status.

more recently i have heard that each layer has very particular meaning, as does the particular design, color, etc. i do not exaggerate when i say i haven't the foggiest.

today i read that the many layers was a fashion in the heian era, and then was revived during the edo era. this latter is when utamaro kitagawa made this print.

correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems to me that the only times we in the west have had a particular reason for wearing many layers, other than when it was cold, or we were escaping a pogrom in the dead of night wearing as much as we could, is when we wore many layers of petticoats, and then surely for 'decency,' but yes, probably fashion as well.

and perhaps the jokesters and pundits made wisecracks about the petticoats as they did about the layers; i wouldn't be surprised.

some info on this can be found in a discussion about a woman of the court, but obviously this is not a courtier but rather a courtesan. you can see by her hair ornaments, even if you didn't know the image was called The courtesan Imose of the Yoshiwara House.

and for the regency fashion plates, see cathy decker's fascinating pages. and pray these clothes never come back in style.

from Spring Day

Bath

The day is fresh-washed and fair,
and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.

The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish- white. It cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.

Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance,
and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger
sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light
in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water,
the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost
too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day.
I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.

The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is
a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

--Amy Lowell

(mathews; mucha; will source others later)
[note: somehow the images disappeared from this post completely so i put them back. now the first ones will probably come back and there'll be two. i'll come back and fix it again.]

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

(carl moll; kawase hasui; henri riviere --thanks for the reminder, green tea--; hiroshige ii utagawa)

can't jump, either

i never noticed this consciously before, but it seems white people haven't had much in the way of bold, colorful pattern in their textiles (other than perhaps scandinavia?) until exposure to the fabrics from japan. at least the ones in the prints.

i'm not crazy about raoul dufy's paint- ings; grandma dee had a print of one over her sofa and that seemed just about right. but when i discovered his fabric design recently i loved them! while these are slipping towards the fauve/matisse-y era of western art, they wouldn't have happened at all without the required inspiration.

perhaps these were completed during his early years, while he worked in a museum, before he really found his painting style. but for me they are some of the most wonderful fabric designs of the era, and i'm glad he did at least these.

gakutei yashima lived from 1788 to 1868. he was also a poet and often included his poems in his paintings.