BnF MS 1186; Psalter of St Louis & Blanche de Castile; 13th century; f.5v. From Ennius on twitter.
Saturday, July 30, 2022
August is a time for reaping.
BnF MS 1186; Psalter of St Louis & Blanche de Castile; 13th century; f.5v. From Ennius on twitter.
August and Virgo
- Reaping in August in the presence of Virgo #MedievalCalendar
- BL Add MS 60629; Psalter; 13th century; Germany, W; f.4v @BLMedieval
August is the time for threshing the wheat in the company of Virgo...BL Egerton MS 1070; 'The Hours of René of Anjou'; 15th century; France (Paris); f.9v
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Women artists born on this day: Judith Leyster, Beatrix Potter
Judith Leyster was born #OnThisDay in Haarlem in 1609. She was one of the few professional women painters of the Dutch Golden Age
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| Self portrait |
Her painting, 'A Boy and a Girl with a Cat and an Eel', was probably intended as both delightful entertainment and a warning: bit.ly/2W10ydH
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Leyster
Beatrix Potter was born #OnThisDay in 1866. She drew these charming illustrations for her 1909 book ‘The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies’.
Read more about her life and view an online gallery here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/animals/beatrix-potter-flopsy-bunnies-and-british-museum
Sunday, July 24, 2022
Good By To All That. Memories of the SFAI in better days
When I read the news that the San Francisco Art Institute was closing I was sad but not surprised. I had been watching their overspending for many years and even the ever increasing tuition wasn't going to be enough to cover a 19 million dollar debt.
I remember the first time I visited the school. My parents were visiting SF and I had a chance to visit the school. When I walked into the courtyard, a young women came out of one of the corridors. She was dressed in tattered jeans and an oversized shirt. Some paint was splattered on her face and hands. She had an air of careless freedom. I knew then that this was my place.
It took a while and there were several detours before I could come back but by By the end of the summer of 1965, my grandparents put me on a Greyhound bus bound for SF. I packed my trunk, put in a scarf knitted by my grandmother and tucked in my tattered copy of Herb Caen’s book, Baghdad by the Bay. As the bus drove through the night, through Southern Oregon and Northern California, I dozed and gazed through the windows into the darkness with the lights of little towns rolling up and then, disappearing back into the night.
As we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, the sun came up. I saw the hills of SF in the distance. I felt that I had finally arrived in paradise. For me, for several years, it was. I worked various night and weekend jobs, took classes during the day and while I enjoyed my classes, still agonized over how to make a decent living.
I remembered those intoxicating early years in SF. I will never again walk up that vertical hill, and into the glorious patio with its tile-lined fountain, carry my drawing pad and supplies into one of the studios, eat lunch in the cafeteria with its huge Venetian glass doors opening out into the grassy and tree-filled back yard. I will never again watch the sculpture students use the yard for their experiments with sculptures morphing from a car to a camel to an octopus to something alien with multiple tentacles. I remembered my first life drawing class where I was too embarrassed to look at the nude model. The teacher was very understanding and I soon got over my embarrassment and grappled with the problems of human anatomy and how to set it down on paper .
I discovered color and was intoxicated by combinations of vibrant colors thickly laid on whatever backing I could afford – canvas, cardboard, even wood. I remember seeing Jay De Feo in the cafeteria who was already a myth in the SF art world. She was alone, sitting and smoking so I gathered up my courage to talk to her. I started babbling on about my love of color and she stared at me, puffing away on her cigarette. Finally, she replied, “I find all the color I want in black and white.” I slunk away, crushed.
My sculpture teacher was not as rude, but he certainly wasn’t helpful but then, I didn’t have a clue about what to do. I finally settled for making igloo shapes out of the chicken wire that we had in abundance, smoothing plaster of Paris over that and painting it in the colors of the American Flag. I got an A. Grading was extremely idiosyncratic, but I didn’t care. I was there to be a painter and grades didn’t matter.
I was told that there was a resident ghost in the tower, although I never saw him, her, or it. I know that when I was going to the school in the 1960’s some students lived in the tower. Perhaps they were the ghosts?
But this was all part of the most exciting and optimistic time of my life. We all were young, poor, naïve, idealistic and ready to solve the problems of the world, especially after a few glasses of wine at the US Café. After a pitcher of rough red and a big plate of pasta, we would get philosophical. We would say to each other - we are art artists. Just undiscovered ones. The art world is extremely mercurial. Do not expect material rewards or recognition for your work. Make art because you must.
I never graduated from the SFAI; The political turmoil of the late 60’s intervened. But living in SF and going to that school was my first taste of freedom and living the life I wanted to live.
The city has had its ups and downs and right now, more down than up. But with Herb Caen, I still say:
“One day if I do go to heaven...I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.”
Saturday, July 23, 2022
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: The Last Movie Stars
Among the many inspired, even wondrous choices made by Ethan Hawke in “The Last Movie Stars” is opening with a clip from “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” Adapted from two novels by Evan S. Connell, the 1990 Merchant-Ivory production starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in one of the 16 films the couple made together, and sets them up the same way Mr. Hawke’s documentary series frames them over its six episodes: Newman, even at age 65, seizes the screen, as he had for most of his career. But Ms. Woodward is the subtler artist, delivering a performance of such delicacy that Oscar watchers were probably shocked that she received a Best Actress nomination at all. (And then lost, predictably, to Kathy Bates for “Misery,” thus setting the universe back on its axis.)
The title of the series, originally planned for the defunct CNN+, comes from a quote about the couple by Gore Vidal: “They presided over the end of the movies as the universal art form”—cinema having been overtaken by TV—“so I think people will think of them as the last movie stars.” The soundness of such a statement hinges on one’s definition of stardom, but Mr. Hawke’s premise is that the Newman-Woodward partnership, off-screen and on, survived—with grace—the demise of a Hollywood system that had existed since the ’20s, and on which they themselves had, professionally speaking, grown up.
The director has a remarkable resource at his disposal: Newman, who died in 2008, had begun a memoir with screenwriter Stewart Stern(“Rebel Without a Cause,” “Rachel, Rachel”), and they had recorded interviews with scores of people who had worked with the actor, or lived with him, or without him. Then Newman apparently burned the cassettes—but not before, as Mr. Hawke reveals in a “ta-dah!” moment, Mr. Stern had had them transcribed.
The hundreds of thousands of pages are essentially the script for the series, with Mr. Hawke enlisting fellow actors to read the parts of various characters taken from the interviews done either by Newman or elsewhere. The “cast” includes George Clooney as Newman, Laura Linney as Ms. Woodward plus Melanie Griffith, Sam Rockwell, Billy Crudup, Sally Field, Zoe Kazan, Karen Allen, Steve Zahn, LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Oscar Isaac. The “characters” include Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet, Karl Malden, Sydney Pollack, Sidney Poitier, Vidal and Jacqueline Witte—Newman’s first wife and the mother of three of his children, whom he left for Ms. Woodward in 1958. That chapter of Newman’s life is told to candid and painful effect, through the words of Witte herself, and her daughter Stephanie, who appears on screen.
Aside from everything else, “The Last Movie Stars” is a masterwork of editing. Barry Poltermann pieces the archival aspects together from a wild variety of sources, while mostly sidestepping the kind of confusion into which Mr. Hawke’s scheme seems apt to topple: The sources are not always being impersonated by the actors—sometimes it’s their own voices we hear—and while Mr. Clooney is clearly distinguishable from Newman himself and Vincent D’Onofrio sounds nothing like Karl Malden, someone like Brooks Ashmanskas does a dead-on Vidal, so one is occasionally in the dark. The interweaving of clips and interviews and ambient footage of various locales in which the Newman-Woodward story unfolded is an unorthodox but captivating series of juxtapositions.
Mr. Hawke, who appears throughout in video chats with his various cast members, exhibits a passionate devotion to his subjects and perhaps as a result oversells them—and their era, and their acquaintances. How fantastic that they were at the Actors Studio when Marlon Brando and Kazan and James Dean were there; how incredible that they were friends with Vidal! The director/narrator’s enthusiasm serves to undercut the importance of his subjects, because he’s obviously afraid we don’t know who they are. It may be that they have faded in the public mind, though Ms. Woodward was nominated for Best Actress four times (winning once, for “The Three Faces of Eve” in 1957) and Newman was nominated eight times. (Having been robbed for “The Verdict”—which had the misfortune of being up against the interminable “Gandhi”—he finally won for “The Color of Money,” which felt like Academy atonement.) The dynamic between the couple is a large part of the story—Newman is very frank, in his own recorded interviews, about what he believed were his shortcomings as an actor, and the superior gifts of his wife. She had genius, he did not. But Mr. Hawke’s concern is that no one knows them anymore.
Ms. Kazan admits to him she’s never seen a Woodward movie, and Mr. Hawke concedes that she might not be alone. So he gushes, and they shrink.
Perhaps you have to be a fan of either of the actors already to burrow into “The Last Movie Stars,” though in terms of film biography, or documentary in general, it’s a remarkable piece of work in the way it toys with structure and freewheeling impressionistic portraiture and creates a knowing account of what it meant to have a life in pictures, and marry it to another, and then figure out who is going to be who, and which part to play. As a story about stars, it may be a period piece. As a story about relationships, it doesn’t really have an expiration date. Nor did the romance, evidently: Back in 1994, this writer, assigned to interview Newman on the set of “Nobody’s Fool,” accompanied him to his trailer, which was predictably well-equipped and had a landline, which was ringing. Unable to figure out the handset (it was a bad time for phones) he lost the call, then immediately excused himself: “I have to call home to see if it was Joanne.” Her picture, in a diaphanous white gown, wading into the surf on some ’50s-era beach, was in a frame on the desk; they’d been married 36 years. She hadn’t called, as it turns out; but, like he said, he wanted to make sure.
Appeared in the July 20, 2022, print edition as 'Hollywood’s Power Couple of the Past'.
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Gustav Klimt
July 14, 1862. Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 - February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by frank eroticism. In this image: Lady with a Muff (1916 - 1917).
Klimt was born in Vienna in 1862. He was a craftsman's son and trained as a painter, becoming a high-class decorator who painted the walls and ceilings of some of the most opulent public buildings in Vienna. He rapidly became the definitive visual artist of the last years of the Habsburg empire, a star in a culture of great daring: the composer Gustav Mahler, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Robert Musil, and the architect Adolf Loos were Klimt's contemporaries. But the contemporary he most resembled was Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis. With their unabashed eroticism, Klimt's paintings share a basic belief about human nature with Freud, who shocked the world with his insistence that sexuality is at the centre of everyone's emotional life. You could even compare Freud's sessions, listening to his women patients as they lay on his couch, with Klimt's portrait practice. Klimt was a very private man who never married, but it was said that he slept with most of the women he portrayed: certainly his bold drawings point to an intimacy that goes beyond the polished eroticism of his paintings.
Klimt turned his back on the conventions of academic painting. Disillusioned with the stifling restraints of the Künstlerhaus, the artists’ society which all Viennese artists felt obliged to belong to, he and a number of other artists broke away to form the art movement known as the Vienna Secession.
Klimt's art is deeply entwined with the story of Jewish Vienna, and the fate of a community that - until Hitler forcibly unified Germany and Austria in 1938 - was central to the city's modernising culture. This community was doomed: by 1945, the Nazis had murdered 50,000 Austrians solely because they were Jewish. Klimt's art is full of traces of these lost people, and at the Belvedere, there is a crucial clue to their shared past.
Klimt's Judith and Holofernes hangs beside a window looking out over Vienna so that its darkness and light is set off against the bright sky. Painted in 1901, it is one of his truly great paintings. Unlike The Kiss or Portrait of Adèle Bloch-Bauer I, it cannot for one second be dismissed as merely beautiful. This menacing Judith brings us closer to those works destroyed by the Nazis.
Klimt was a kind of neoclassicist; as well as painting this biblical story, he had a passion for Greek art and mythology. But instead of celebrating the rationalism of the Greeks, he evoked their dark side. A profound influence on his work was Friedrich Nietzsche's 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy, which argues that Greek tragedy grew out of music, the purest of the arts because it taps into the deepest, most primitive parts of the psyche (the book is addressed to his friend Wagner, whose music famously does just that). Klimt dramatised this radical theory of art in two paintings, Schubert at the Piano and Music II, painted as a pair in the late 1890s: in the former, Schubert gives a drawing-room performance; in the latter, the more primal image of a Greek lyre-player is flanked by mythological monsters. Both paintings were burned in 1945.
Klimt got his chance to develop his revolutionary ideas about art and the irrational when he was commissioned to create ceiling paintings for the ceremonial hall of Vienna University. This, his most ambitious commission, resulted from 1900 to 1907 in three huge paintings - Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medicine - designed to be fixed to the ceiling and seen from below, painted one by one in increasingly embattled circumstances.
Philosophy, the first to be finished, was an explicit Nietzschean manifesto. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that western culture is driven by a superficial confidence in facts and a coarse drive to manipulate the world: this "optimistic" rationalism, he writes, must now give way to a tragic sensibility that accepts the uncertainties of our perceptions. In other words, while science as it was understood seemed to offer certainties, Nietzsche championed a more subjective understanding of the world. Klimt's Philosophy makes this idea movingly visible with its great, agonised column of human bodies - loving, longing, being born and dying. The universe through which they cascade is a vertiginous empty space dotted with stars.
Philosophy is gone forever - burned in 1945 along with Medicine and Jurisprudence, paintings that express the same pessimistic view of the world. But even looking at these paintings in monochrome reproduction, you can see their power. Look at them long enough, and you start to grasp how devastating their deep, unresolved spaces, their fierce erotic energy, must have been for the professors of Vienna University. They didn't like Philosophy - in fact, they hated it; they understood that Klimt was attacking everything they stood for.
In 1904, Klimt decided to terminate his contract with the university and pay back his fee. The man who came to his rescue, buying Philosophy and eventually owning all three of the huge canvases, was his greatest patron: a Jewish factory owner named August Lederer. This businessman and his wife, Serena, became Klimt's most dedicated collectors, owning the university paintings, Music II and Schubert at the Piano, several landscapes, a portrait of Serena and, later, his Frieze. Their Vienna home had a room for Renaissance masterpieces, and another devoted to Klimt. But in 1938, the Nazis moved quickly to seize Jewish property in Austria, and the Lederer collection was confiscated.
Strangely enough, in 1943 the Third Reich sponsored an exhibition of Klimt's work in Vienna. Famously, the Nazis hated all modern or "degenerate" art, but the exhibition revealed there was nuance to their position, at least in Austria - they evidently decided to celebrate Klimt as a national icon. So it wasn't out of contempt but in order to preserve them that, after being shown in Vienna, most of the Klimts in the Lederer collection were transported to Schloss Immendorf - where they were eventually incinerated.
Lederer died before the war, and Serena Lederer in 1943; their son Erich survived and later reclaimed the one great work from the Lederer collection that had escaped the fire by being stored elsewhere - Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, an ambitious cycle of wall paintings the artist created for a Beethoven-themed exhibition at Vienna's temple of modern art, the Sezession. Here, Klimt had tried to turn art into music: the empty spaces between his golden figures resemble the immense stillnesses and voids in the music of Wagner or Mahler. The most spectacular scene, in which the demons threatening human happiness include a giant ape and a group of emaciated Furies, plummets you into the dark, irrational depths of myth.
A replica of the Beethoven Frieze (the original is on permanent view at the Vienna Sezession) will be shown in Tate Liverpool later this month, and people will argue over an artist who can look, according to your mood, either subversive or a bit flashy. But it is only the vicissitudes of history that have created this doubt. Seen whole, with all his works redeemed from destruction, Klimt could never be dismissed as an artist of mere dazzle or surface beauty: the lost paintings he created for Vienna's university were the first great revolutionary works of the 20th century, foretelling the darkness that was to come.
1918 Dies in Vienna of pneumonia, aged 55
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani. Born on this day in 1884
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| Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, Jeanne Hébuterne, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 73 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Female Head 1911/1912 |
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| Picasso |
July 12, 1884. Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (12 July 1884 - 24 January 1920) was an Italian-Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces, necks, and figures that were not received well during his lifetime but later found acceptance. In this image: Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude (Céline Howard), 1918, Private collection, Geneva.
He lived his life according to Cocteau's famous saying...."Ne t'attardes pas avec l'avant-garde” (“Don’t wait for the avant-garde”).
What remains of this extraordinary man is a body of work that modernized figurative painting. Often characterized by their elongated bodies and blank eyes, his subjects are distincively 'Modigliani', each telling a different story about his life and art.
“Modigliani in his personal life is almost a caricature of the misunderstood bohemian painter,” says Tamar Garb, an art historian at University College London. “If Van Gogh is the quintessential mad genius, Modigliani is the quintessential tubercular alcoholic.”
https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/modigliani-beyond-the-myth
https://www.wikiart.org/en/amedeo-modigliani
https://www.theartstory.org/artist-modigliani-amedeo.htm
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| Nude on a Divan |
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| Nu Couché au coussin Bleu, 1916 |
HIS NUDES WERE VERY CONTROVERSIAL
For his first and only solo exhibition, Modigliani painted a series of nudes, which are now among his most famous paintings. Legend has it that the nudes drew such a crowd around the gallery that it eventually caught the attention of a police officer. The officer was offended, not so much by their nudity as by the fact they displayed pubic hair, and promptly ordered them to be taken down. Whether or not this actually happened, the exhibition certainly caught the imagination of the public, and contributed to Modigliani's reputation as a scandalous playboy.
In addition, Modigliani’s ‘modern women’ are seen by some as a symbol of sexuality and defiance. Their unapologetic stares and poses convey women in control of their bodies and their livelihoods (models at the time earned relatively good money). This, in itself, made a real statement.
https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/modigliani-beyond-the-myth
https://www.wikiart.org/en/amedeo-modigliani
https://www.theartstory.org/artist-modigliani-amedeo.htm
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