Uncover a Fresh Perspective on Frida Kahlo

 

Uncover a Fresh Perspective on Frida Kahlo

September 30, 5–6 pm \ YouTube

Learn about the life and artistry of Frida Kahlo with Hillary Olcott, coordinating curator of the exhibition Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, which is now on view at the de Young museum. Olcott will provide insights about Kahlo’s paintings and personal belongings in the exhibition, many of which are being presented for the first time on the West Coast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAD4-Ed18w&feature=youtu.be&mc_cid=d2a479f483

Suzanne Valadon. She did it her way

 A somewhat controversial figure, Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clementine Valadon) was the illegitimate daughter of a French domestic worker. Born in September of 1865, Valadon lived to be only 62 years old – but her life was certainly never dull.

As she grew up in the bohemian quarter of Paris, Valadon supported her self by doing such odd jobs as performing in a circus, working as a waitress, and even a nanny. At age 16, a fall from a trapeze sent her life down a different path.

From 1880 to 1893, Valadon modeled for several of the most important painters of her day, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Although she could not afford formal art classes, Valadon learned readily from the painters around her. Close friend and mentor Edgar Degas also taught her drawing and etching techniques. Valadon soon transitioned from an artist’s model into a successful artist. Valadon also had a complicated personal life.

 Valadon was what some  would probably call  a ‘loose woman,’ aka, free spirited and independent - causing a stir in the cabarets and clubs of Montmartre. Many articles about Valadon’s life portray her as a woman who constantly drew attention in a provocative way, taking numerous lovers at a very young age. Even her paintings demonstrate her proclivity for what some may have considered shameful at the time, many of them of nude women. Valadon also created landscapes and still lifes which were described as vibrant and powerfully rich in color.

Many believe that her bold renditions of nude women and the representation of their sexuality was born out of her years as a circus performer and artist’s model. While she could not afford formal art training, her close relationships with some of the most prominent artists of the time resulted in her transformation from artist’s model into a successful artist in her own right. She also had sexual affairs with some of the artists she posed for.

At age 18, Valadon gave birth to Maurice Utrillo out of wedlock; Utrillo also became an artist. At nearly 50 years old Valadon married Andre Utter, who was also an artist and 21 years younger than Valadon. While her artwork attracted a substantial amount of attention due to its passion and intensity, her personal life drew just as much attention. Rising to the peak of her fame in the 1920s, during her lifetime she had four major retrospective exhibitions.

In “The Abandoned Doll,” Suzanne Valadon portrays an intimate scene with a strong psychological mood. Seated on a bed, a fully clothed woman towels dry a girl. The girl, clad only in a pink hair ribbon, turns away from the woman and appears to inspect herself in a hand mirror. The pink bow echoes that in the hair of the doll, a symbol of childhood forgotten on the floor near the bed. This visual connection, combined with the girl’s maturing body, suggests that this is a moment of transition in her young life - from innocence to sexual knowledge and possibly abuse. 

Nude arranging her hair. Valadon painted female nudes throughout her career and was one of the few women artists to do so.  Her images of woman are bold and not idealized. 

• Valadon differed from her female contemporaries, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, who, born into upper middle-class families were restricted in their subjects and outlook. Born to an unmarried mother and educated by street life, Valadon developed the confidence to be independent, to paint more challenging pictures, and to define her own identity outside of the prevailing norms. What seemed like an unfortunate start in life, was potentially a golden ticket into the male-dominated art scene of the time.

• Whether or not it was her intention, Valadon adds food for thought to theoretical debates surrounding the subject of attraction between men and women and the politics of looking addressed later in the century (by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, John Berger, and Laura Mulvey). There is a very strong sense in all of Valadon’s work that she seeks to demystify sex and to present passion and libido as common experiences shared by all. Women are presented as active equals also in possession of the hungry gaze.

Valadon lived in the vortex of the bohemian world of Montmartre. History would not be the same for the famous female denizens of the newly popular Left Bank if Valadon hadn’t paved the way for them to be the mistresses of their own sexuality – and the mistresses of their own vocations and avocations.

https://www.francetoday.com/culture/suzanne-valadon-artist-and-muse-of-montmartre/

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/valadon-suzanne/life-and-legacy/

 

Alma Thomas. African American artist of color and joy

Born in Columbus, Ga., Ms. Thomas (1891-1978) attended Howard University and, in 1924, became its first student to earn a degree in fine art. After graduation she began teaching at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, continuing there until retiring in 1960. Only then, at 69, was she able to devote herself full time to painting. During the ensuing 18 years — despite acute arthritis — she produced the body of work for which she would be justly celebrated, a stream of vividly colorful paintings made of loosely applied patches configured in irregular grids and concentric circles.

In 1972, at the age of 80, she became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of her incandescent, concentric circle paintings, “Resurrection” (1966), hangs in the White House.  

Asked once by an interviewer if she saw herself as a black artist, Ms. Thomas replied: “No, I do not. I am an American.” But the tradition she participated in overrode national borders. She was a euphoric Modernist, a believer in the infinite possibilities of human progress.

“I was born at the end of the 19th century, horse and buggy days, and experienced the phenomenal changes of the 20th-century machine and space age,” Ms. Thomas wrote about her work, which incorporated inspirations from Kandinsky to color television and from the flowers in her garden to the Apollo moon landings.

The earliest works, “Yellow and Blue” (1959) and “Untitled” (1960), reveal Ms. Thomas as an adept practitioner of Abstract Expressionism with a fine feel for color and atmosphere and a suave painterly touch. Around 1964, she briefly flirted with political subject matter through two semiabstract pictures of crowds of demonstrators holding up signs, both called “Sketch for March on Washington” (circa 1964). These early works give little indication of the optical punch and material immediacy that would mark her mature works.

Ms. Thomas’s painting “Stars and Their Display” (1972). Credit Alma Thomas, Private Collection, Highland Park, Ill.

Alma Woodsey Thomas, Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses, 1969; Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; © Estate of Alma Woodsey Thomas; Photo by Lee Stalsworth

Ms. Thomas made her late works by brushing on one small block of color at a time until she had filled the canvas or most of it with her irregular patterns, as in “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” (1969), in which vertical sequences of patches in deep blue, yellow, red and orange create a syncopating rhythm. 

Unlike the many artists who have viewed modernity through jaded eyes, Ms. Thomas was excited by humanity’s efforts to constantly outdo itself. She wrote: Today not only can our great scientists send astronauts to and from the moon to photograph its surface and bring back samples of rocks and other materials, but through the medium of color television all can actually see and experience the thrill of these adventures. These phenomena set my creativity in motion.”

She didn’t dwell on the dark side. “I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life… no,” she once said. “I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at.” She was being unduly modest. In her paintings, she reached wide to embrace the physical and the transcendental, the terrestrial and the cosmic. Her kind of unfettered optimism and generosity of spirit was an invigorating antidote to the anxious negativity pervading the world of art today.

https://americanart.si.edu/artist/alma-thomas-4778

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/air-space-museum/2020/06/17/art-alma-w-thomas-colorful-response/

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Tribute/Hallelujah, Central Synagogue- Rosh Hashanah...

She fought for Justice for All with more power than it would seem possible for one human to muster. For decades. We owe her everything we can bring to the fight.

From when Great Trees Fall by Maya Angelou: 

And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly. Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us.

They existed. They existed.

We can be. Be and be

better. For they existed.

Mourner’s Kaddish in English Translation

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world
which He has created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,
and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon;
and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

The tributes have poured in by the hundreds. Here are two . 

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/100306972/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-champion-of-gender-equality-dies-at-87

https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/ruth-bader-ginsburg-1933-2020

Ben Shahn, 1898 - 1969/ Artist & advocate for social justice

 

Ben Shahn, 1898 - 1969, A Lithographer, painter, Muralist, photographer, graphic artist, & an advocate for social justice.

Ben Shahn, "Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or , 1955, brush and ink on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.264

Picture a secular Jewish socialist on fire for justice for the poor, the working class, and the immigrant.

The man in question was Ben Shahn, the 20th-century American painter, muralist, photographer and graphic artist and a leader of the social realism art movement.  Born in Lithuania, emigrated to the United States as a child, was apprenticed to a lithographer after high school. 

He studied at New York University and City College, and very briefly at the National Academy of Design. 

Shahn was shaped by his early religious education and informed by his experiences and observations of “the social and political events and history of Jews in America,” His work is about Jewish ethics, not prayer or ritual, said art historian Diana L. Linden, author of “Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene.”

Shahn's first major success came with the 1932 exhibition of his series The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Look to Shahn’s series of 23 paintings detailing the controversial trial and ultimate execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They were two radical Italian immigrants of the 1920s, convicted of murder on scanty (and now missing) evidence.

Shahn once said that he paints two things, "what I love and what I abhor," and during the Depression years his scenes of children playing in concrete urban parks, and of miners and construction workers engaged in their trades, reflect his admiration for the working American and his abhorrence of injustice and oppression. Throughout the 1930s Shahn worked for various government programs, and when the United States entered World War II, he joined the Graphic Arts Division of the Office of War Information, although only two of the many posters he designed were published. In the 1940s, Shahn turned to what he called personal realism." His late work is often symbolic, allegorical, or religious and reflects his belief that "if we are to have values, a spiritual life, a culture, these things must find their imagery and their interpretation through the arts."

Shahn’s life work was infused with the political passions of his time. He expressed them by retelling the Hebrew Bible’s stories of slavery, exile and freedom in images of garment workers, cotton pickers, labor organizers, immigrants and refugees.

Ben Shahn, You Have Not Converted a Man Because You Have Silenced Him, 1968, offset lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Source unknown, 1997.37

While never a Communist or an avowed atheist, Shahn was close to many who were, including his second wife, the artist Bernarda Bryson. Yet he also was fiercely devoted to the First Amendment, with its vaunted four freedoms.

“(It) held special significance for Shahn, as it did for many American Jews who aspired in the United States to achieve civil liberties denied them by European nations,” Linden writes.

He observed the rise of Hitler from a distance with horror, deploying his art to battle the “fervent resistance to open immigration” that kept desperate Jews from a safe haven in the United States, she writes. The doors to freedom were shuttered by Americans’ fear of “unemployment, nativism and anti-Semitism” 

Born September 12, 1898, Kaunas, Russia [now in Lithuania]—died March 14, 1969, New York, New York, U.S.

The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth

 

It's another day with unhealthy air so I am staying in and looking for ways to entertain myself. Now, I hasten to add, bad air in SF is something I can survive which is more than I can say for those caught up in the fires sweeping the west. Maybe the next time a governor (in this case Oregon) suggests setting up systems to deal with fire, the Republicans won't just walk out. Hopefully this catastrophe will create a more intelligent way of managing the forests - as in controlled burns, as recommended by the Forestry Service. In any case I have been armchair traveling and eating fabulous meals (in imagination) in the French Alps.

It all started with curiosity. Food writer Roy Andries de Groot was fond of finishing his dinners with a glass or two of a green liqueur known only as "Chartreuse". He began to wonder – what was this Chartreuse, where did it originate, who made it, and from what was it made? Who were "les pères Chartreux” who, it said on the many bottles he kept, bottled this liqueur at “La Grande Chartreuse” by a secret process known only to them? Why had they gone into exile until "France returned to normal"?

de Groot posed his questions one day to Carl Anderson, his editor at Gourmet magazine. It turned out that Anderson knew even less about the mysterious liqueur than did de Groot. The two men realized that discovering the secrets of Chartreuse might make an excellent assignment for the magazine, so de Groot was dispatched to find out all he could.

de Groot’s book is a wonderful account of these visits. In the first half of the book, he recounts what he discovered about Chartreuse and its origins. The monks of the monastery of Chartreux suffered many trials in establishing their monastery situated in a “high and lonely place” above the Valley. Though their monastery was destroyed by fire seven times, and they were driven out of France twice, the monks persevered. Their Chartreuse liqueur, based on an old recipe found by one of the monks, was the result of a desperate search for some means of income. The liqueur, made from over 130 herbs found on the mountains, became world famous and saved the monastery from certain ruin.

Later in this section, de Groot tells many stories of the time he spent at the Auberge. Each story is a small adventure in itself, and every one contains a complete menu of the dishes served on the particular occasion. de Groot's prose is so descriptive that you want to gather the ingredients and try your luck at reproducing the recipes.

So that is how Roy Andreis de Groot explored a charming inn "L’Auberge de l’Atre Fleuri, " high in the French Alps. Impressed by the owners' devotion to perpetuating the tradition of supreme country dining, Mr. de Groot returned to the inn several times to record their recipes for country soups, winter stews, roasted meats, fish, vegetable dishes, pates, terrines, and desserts—the best of French cooking. He also devotes the first chapters of the book to the history of the valley including the monastery of the Carthusian order, and the discovery of Charteruse.

The book addresses how to create a multi-course meal so that each course is in harmony throughout the meal, in the use of primarily local and seasonal ingredients to contribute to this harmony, and also an internal harmony within individual dishes. It is also a snapshot of old-school aperitifs, such as kir, and illustrates how that kitchen, run by two expert cooks, produced world-class food.

Meals are described in mouth watering and exquisite detail - every dish, every cheese (each meal seems to end with at least three different cheeses) and the wine. OH the wine. I wonder if many restaurants today have a cellar that rivaled that of the inn. He gives recipes but each one is complex, using meats that were only available in that part of France, vegetables in season and grown by local farmers as well as cheeses, wines, etc, always local and always in season . It's the cooking of a slower, possibly less expensive time.

The second half of the book contains the recipes for the dishes discussed in de Groot’s narrative. They have wonderful titles – Beef Stew à la Sainte-Tulle, Chicken Rousille of the Valley, Gratinee of Potatoes a la Savoyarde, and Artichokes a la Barigoule, to name a few. Desserts are equally appealing – Souffle of Fresh Raspberries, Mousse of Fresh Apricots, Les Crêpes Surprises, and Fried Chestnut Croquettes, for example. All the recipes are adaptable to European or American kitchens, and do not require special equipment or techniques but a great deal of preparation.

In any case, it was a lovely diversion from what's going in here, in the West and in the country as a whole. I had a hard time coming back to the present .

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Painter of peasants and rebellion

Children's Games

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525? - 1589) ‘Nature found and struck wonderfully well with her man […] when she went to pick him out in Brabant, in an obscure village, among peasants.’ That is how Karel van Mander, the Vasari of the Netherlands, opened the brief life of Pieter Bruegel in his Schilderboek (1604). The painter was, for van Mander, a humble farmer’s son who rose to a position of eminence, but never cut himself off from the world that made him. Later in life, van Mander records, the one-time peasant would don village costume once more and head out of Antwerp with his friend Hans Franckert to crash peasant wedding parties. Blending in, they gave gifts like anyone else, told anyone who asked that they were family or friends of the happy couple, and spent their time observing the peasants ‘in eating, drinking, dancing, leaping, lovemaking’. Then, van Mander implies, Bruegel returned to his workshop and set them all down in ink and paint.

Detail of Children's games 

Peasant Wedding

Peasant Dancing

By the gauge of some of Bruegel’s most famous works, van Mander’s account is a perfect fit. The closely watched peasants are there still in Peasant Dance (c. 1568) and The Peasant Wedding (c. 1567), doing all those things, in every mood, in every state of sobriety, and at every stage of life. In the five surviving paintings of the Months (1565) and the two finished drawings of the Seasons (1565, 1568), they do more besides, at every stage of the calendar. If further evidence of close observation were needed, one drawing survives of what must have been a whole series of peasant figure studies: a bagpipe player on his stool, cheeks puffed, seat tilting under the pressure of his tune. If it is unlikely, in so finished a state, to be a study from life, it is nevertheless full of life. The average Bruegel peasant is cheerfully stolid but no less animated: lovingly observed but rarely flattered, he passes through the world with a spoon stuck in his cap, forever on the way to the next meal and the next drink.

The Birdnester (1568)

Doubtless, this is a romantic view of peasants and painter both, but it is hard to deny its charm. Van Mander’s Bruegel strides out towards the reader like the central subject of his own late masterpiece The Birdnester (1568). Nicknamed ‘Pier den Drol’ – ‘Funny Peter’ – he is a humble fellow, a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face, and one finger forever forgivingly cocked at the folly of the world.

The truth, though, is less open faced. For all the temptation that the figure who emerges from the Schilderboek biography – natural genius, comedian, ethnographer – exerts, the fact is that we know little about the life behind the works that remain to us. Writing some 45 years after Bruegel’s death, van Mander may have had access to people who knew the painter – Bruegel’s own mother-in-law, for instance, outlived him by 30 years – but there is no guarantee of his reliability. Not least because of his concern to memorialize the artists of the Low Countries and Germany just as Vasari had the artists of Italy, van Mander’s anecdotes tend toward the flattering and formulaic. And the peasant Bruegel he describes is in no small part a posthumous creation, amplified by market demand for the dead artist’s village scenes, and the innumerable copies of them painted to cash in on it. With no fewer than 127 known versions of Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565) alone circulating in the 17th century – some 50 of them emanating from the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Younger – it is little wonder that van Mander should think of Bruegel as a documenter of village life, and that he recount the stories that fit that image best. When it comes to his Bruegel vignettes, it is hard to say which are the truth. Or close to the truth. 

The Beekeepers 

The art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder preserves that lost age of carnival in plump rollicking pictures that overflow with life. In his 1567 painting The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, a village square explodes into subversive fun. Masked revellers, dice players, dancers and drinkers let it all hang out. Broken eggshells litter the ground as a cook heats up an iron skillet to cook the next batch of pancakes. Bruegel is riotous, generous, and Shakespearean in his appetite for the whole of human life.

Yet he also has a lenten side. The Battle Between Carnival and Lent is not quite the simple ode to boozing, eating and questioning the social order of Renaissance Europe that it first appears. As the title implies, it is a struggle between two phases of the Christian ritual year, between two states of being. The thin grey figure of Lent, under whose sway meat will be banned and everyone must fast and purge, jousts listlessly against a chubby personification of Carnival. It looks like no contest, but once the empties are collected and the eggshells swept away, Lent will begin.

From 1556 on he concentrated, surprisingly enough, on satirical, didactic, and moralizing subjects, often in the fantastic or grotesque manner of Hiëronymus Bosch, imitations of whose works were very popular at the time. Other artists were content with a more or less close imitation of Bosch, but Bruegel’s inventiveness lifted his designs above mere imitation, and he soon found ways to express his ideas in a much different manner. His early fame rested on prints published by Cock after such designs. But the new subject matter and the interest in the human figure did not lead to the abandonment of landscape. Bruegel in fact extended his explorations in this field. Side by side with his mountain compositions, he began to draw the woods of the countryside; he turned then to Flemish villages and, in 1562, to townscapes with the towers and gates of Amsterdam.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pieter-Bruegel-the-Elder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_van_Mander