COFFEE & ORANGES

moving again

2009-09-09T21:02:00.000-07:00

The oranges are wrapped and ready to go to their new home (click to visit). Hope to see you there.

(Pictured: Wrapped Oranges, William J. McCloskey, 1889 -- Amon Carter Museum)

painting of the month

2009-08-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

Red Boat with Blue Sails (1906-1907) -- Odilon Redon

sara and georgia

2009-08-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Whenever I see Georgia O'Keeffe's 1927 painting The Radiator Building at Night (pictured here), I think of poet Sara Teasdale's "From the Woolworth Tower," because even though the works focus on different structures, they still give a sense of the glamour and scope of skyscrapers in the early 20th century. Teasdale isn't as well-known as the iconic O'Keeffe, but she was born in St. Louis in 1884, wrote a kind of penetratingly bittersweet poetry, and seems to be often overshadowed by her slightly younger contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay. (And ironically, according to Wikipedia, novelist Thomas Hardy once noted that America's two major attributes were the skyscraper and the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay.)

Teasdale had a significant relationship with Vachel Lindsday, another poet with strong Midwestern ties, but she did not marry Lindsay and instead opted to make businessman Ernst Filsinger her husband instead. She divorced Filsinger in 1929; Lindsay committed suicide in 1931 and Teasdale herself took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills in 1933. All quite sad, but the eternal moments behind Teasdale's "From the Woolworth Tower" fortunately live on. Here's an excerpt, and click here to read the full text.

Over the edge of eternity we look

On all the lights,

A thousand times more numerous than the stars...

The strident noises of the city

Floating up to us

Are hallowed into whispers.

Ferries cross thru the darkness

Weaving a golden thread into the night....

2009-08-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

"Someday they will know what I mean."

Tom Thomson -- August 5, 1877 - July, 1917

Painting: Thunder Cloud (1912) -- National Gallery of Canada

painting of the month

2009-07-31T20:37:00.001-07:00

July -- Fairfield Porter, 1971 (Spencer Museum of Art)

almond trees and tragic lives

2009-07-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

British artist John William Godward was one of the last great Neo-classicist painters and did not handle the advent of modernism well. In fact, it essentially led to serious depression and feelings of hopelessness, and to Godward's eventual suicide in 1922. Godward was a "beauty painter" and produced many lovely female visions during his career, and he was also considered part of the "marble school" like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, known for their frequent use of Greco-Roman marble elements and backdrops. This painting (top image) by Godward of a blossoming red almond tree makes me wonder why he was so troubled by changing styles in art, because it almost has Impressionist tendencies. However, it may have been that he dreaded new artistic trends along with changes in social values and attitudes, as the structure and standards of the Victorian era gave way to the intensities of the 20th century.

The other almond blossom painting is by Vincent van Gogh, who was of course so ahead of the curve that he wasn't fully appreciated during his lifetime. Van Gogh too was a suicide and another prisoner of his own troubled thoughts. Neither man married and both experienced feelings of social awkwardness, although Godward was supposed to have been rather conventionally handsome in his day. ** According to the Van Gogh Museum website, this work was done in 1890 by Van Gogh in honor of his brother Theo and Theo's wife Johanna's newborn son, who was named Vincent after Van Gogh himself. Van Gogh wanted to give them a painting that reflected the hopeful beauty of spring and celebrated the birth of their baby boy. Unfortunately, 1890 was also the year when Van Gogh decided that he just could not stand to be in the world anymore, and by July 29th, he was gone.

days at the beach

2009-07-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

Above: Beach Scene -- Jane Peterson, 1935 (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

Below: Summer Sunlight -- Beatrice Whitney Van Ness, ca. 1936 (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

rage against the bastille

2009-07-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 220th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, a vast prison in Paris which was attacked by a revolutionary mob on July 14, 1789. The Bastille had a history of holding -- among others -- anyone perceived to be a suspicious or seditious individual. Cardinal Richelieu was the initial main man behind these arrests, done via a lettres-de-cachet brought to the individual, who was then hauled off to the Bastille without benefit of a trial or appeal.

Once released, there could be no public objection to the arrest nor divulging of what had been experienced within the prison walls. Essentially, the Bastille loomed as a longstanding symbol of intimidation -- and it was also where huge stores of gunpowder were kept -- and eventually the outrage of the people broke through.

While only seven prisoners of dubious honor happened to be in the Bastille at the time of the revolt, the actions of the people quickly led to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and also resulted in a further striking-down of royal power tactics. The pictured Storming of the Bastille painting was done by Jean-Pierre Houel in 1789, and this website offers more information on the incident and various other revolutions as well. Today is a national holiday in France, and the Paris Daily Photo blog's Le 14 juillet 2009 entry details the coinciding 120th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower and how to watch the Bastille Day fireworks on-line.

2009-07-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Venice (1887) --
Willard Leroy Metcalf,
b. July 1, 1858 -
d. March 9, 1925

notes on floyd dell...written on a dell laptop

2009-06-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

Floyd Dell (June 28, 1887 - 1969) was the author of many things, including critiques, essays, novels, short stories, poems and plays, with his greatest fame spanning the years 1912-1925.

Dell grew up in the Midwest, eventually heading to Chicago where he would become part of the city's boho scene and, despite his youth, a formidable literary critic. He later moved to pre-WWI Greenwich Village and became part of that boho scene as well, enjoying various free-love affairs and joining the staff of the radical journal The Masses.

Although some of Floyd's works have not completely held up to the test of time, his fiction offers interesting glimpses into the issues and personalities of his day, and his non-fiction is actually pretty intriguing in terms of commentary on relationships between men and women, along with general equality, social trends, politics, education, psychoanalysis, and various other subjects -- because Floyd had many ideals and as many contradictions.

In the movie Reds, Dell is portrayed by Max Wright, who also played the father on the 1980s TV show ALF -- and no offense to Mr. Wright, but this just seemed like the not quite-Wright casting for Floyd Dell. Dell was slight and maybe a little affected at that time, well-spoken and often-speaking and with more of a pale, slender, disdainful look. Beyond this photo, Dell's portrait was painted in 1914 by Ashcan School and Eight artist John Sloan, who worked with Dell at The Masses along with Reds' hero John Reed.

Dell had a short but significant affair with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and this description of a visit to Millay's childhood home in Maine is Dell at his best and comes from his autobiography Homecoming:

"On the porch were baskets of apples, branches of pine, and there were bunches of herbs strung up to dry -- herbs of which I do not know the names, but which were a part of the earthly lore that Edna Millay learned from her mother as a child. The place was fragrant with the mingled odors of apples, pine woods and herbs. It smelled sweet and strange, like Edna Millay's poetry."

painting of the month

2009-06-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

Artists Sketching in The White Mountains -- (Winslow Homer, 1868)

son of the sun

2009-06-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

With the longest day of the year coming tomorrow, it seemed appropriate to note Henri Matisse’s love of the sun and beautiful use of light and color in so many of his paintings. This recollection by Georges Duthuit is from an interesting little book on Matissse by Anette Robinson and Isabelle Breda, published as part of the Key Art Works series from the Centre Georges Pompidou.

"During Matisse’s funeral the weather was cloudy and rather dull in Nice. But when, after the service, the cortege reformed to take his body to its last resting place…the sun’s rays suddenly split the grey canvas and blooded the sky with exactly the same radiance, the same welcoming glow that Matisse had struggled to catch and reflect throughout his whole life…."

Duthuit also described the sun’s sudden appearance on that November day in 1954 when Matisse was buried as being like the sun's own “tribute of sympathy to his most faithful servant….”

(Featured Painting: Interior with Phonograph -- Henri Matisse, 1924)

men in red

2009-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

Top Image -- Dr. Pozzi at Home, John Singer Sargent - 1881

Bottom Image -- Portrait of Leonid Andreyev, Ilya Repin - 1905

painting of the month

2009-05-31T21:52:00.001-07:00

The Tangled Garden -- J.E.H. MacDonald, 1916

athena and athene

2009-05-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

I wrote an article for Suite101.com on Modern Art & Mythology a few weeks ago and came across a pretty fascinating 1898 painting of the goddess Athena by Gustav Klimt (first image). Athena, the Greek counterpart of Minerva, presided over matters of war, intelligence and the arts, and in Klimt's case Athena had been named as the patron goddess of Klimt's Vienna Secession artistic movement. His Athena is all pale and glittering, with a beautiful golden sheen to her shield and helmet.

The other portrait here is from the William Blake Tarot, wherein Blake's artwork was adapted for a tarot deck and Athene -- not Athena -- represents the Woman of Painting card. (The William Blake Tarot has creative or mentally-inclined Suit cards, like Poetry for Wands, Music for Cups, Science for Swords and Painting for Pentacles.) Blake's Athene is bright and colorful and seems to be less at war and more focused on the arts in this particular scene. Draped in red, she's described in the deck as representing "elegance combined with usefulness," and she awards "her sacred olive wreaths to several artists for their industry, competence, and trustworthiness."

Blake's Athene always reminds me a little of Isabella Rossellini, who interestingly enough played Athena in Andrei Konchalovsky's version of The Odyssey. Konchalovsky's Odyssey was on TV back in the late 1990s and is worth investigating as a DVD rental -- if it's even on DVD -- with Isabella R. of course, and Armand Assante enduring all the wild travels and trials of Odysseus.

green glory

2009-05-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Top image -- The Green Sash,

Frederick Carl Frieseke (1904)

Bottom image -- Lady in a Green Jacket,

August Macke (1913)

American Impressionism (Frieseke), German Expressionism (Macke), and girls in green. It's hard to believe that the two paintings are only nine years apart chronologically.

his vinegar prayer

2009-04-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

Knopf's Borzoi Reader Poem-A-Day e-mails during National Poetry Month offer choice morsels of daily poetry, reintroducing us to great masters as well as opening the door to poets and poems we might not yet have heard of. One of my favorites so far has been Kevin Young's "Ode to Pepper Vinegar," (click on the title to read the actual poem) which transforms a simple Mason jar full of a family recipe into an epic entity. This ode is part of a food-related series of poems which Kevin Young wrote following the death of his father, with distinct tastes reflecting upon cultural and personal heritage. His latest collection is called Dear Darkness, and his other work is very much looking into.

painting and poet of the month

2009-04-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

Often described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" -- a phrase coined by spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb -- the great poet and adventurer Lord Byron (1788-1824) was always a study in contrasts. Notably handsome and virile yet afflicted with a clubfoot, he was also a womanizer who wrote poetry of depth and beauty while managing to avoid heavy sentiment. There is further speculation that Byron was bisexual and even slept with his own half-sister Augusta, with some reported personal anxiety on Byron's part that he might be the father of Augusta's child. While certain people brought out a sarcastic cruelty in Byron, he could be quite caring toward animals, especially his beloved dog Boatswain. Boatswain contracted rabies and eventually died from the disease, but Lord Byron kept vigil by his side until Boatswain passed away, despite warnings that he might be endangering his own life in being so close to a fatally rabid dog.

Byron traveled often and died in Greece on April 19, 1824, while joining the Greeks in fighting their war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. This portrait of Byron in Albanian native costume was done by Thomas Phillips, and while it represents Byron as he looked circa 1813, the painting itself wasn't completed until 1835. Phillips' work can be found at the National Portrait Gallery, where Byron is very well-represented. And though he wrote verse of a much greater magnitude, this short self-reflective George Gordon Byron poem is one of my favorites:

Through life's road, so dim and dirty,

I have dragg'd to three and thirty.

What have these years left to me?

Nothing - except, thirty-three.

2009-04-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Easter Morning or Easter Mystery -- Maurice Denis, 1891

we are most amused

2009-04-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

Though Queen Victoria was reportedly fond of the phrase "We are not amused" to express general displeasure, we here are quite amused and pleased to have received an Excessively Diverting Blog Award nomination from Royal Rendezvous' blogspot. The EDBA is described thusly:

The aim of the Excessively Diverting Blog Award is to acknowledge writing excellence in the spirit of Jane Austen’s genius in amusing and delighting readers with her irony, humor, wit, and talent for keen observation. Recipients will uphold the highest standards in the art of the sparkling banter, witty repartee, and gentle reprove. This award was created by the blogging team of Jane Austen Today to acknowledge superior writing over the Internet and promote Jane Austen’s brilliance.

Once nominated, you are supposed to choose seven of your own nominees, but being such an ersatz blogger and blog reader, I'm going to have to do more research before I come up with a full seven. In the meantime, however, I wanted to acknowledge the regal nod from Royal Rendezvous and say many thanks!

(Featured Painting: Queen Victoria in Her Coronation Robes, Sir George Hayter)

amy's spring day

2009-04-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

It's National Poetry Month again -- and it's spring -- which made me think of Amy Lowell's "Spring Day," a kind of Whitmanesque, morning-to-night flowing rush of verse. Amy could be a bit over the top sometimes, but I've always liked her enthusiasm for life and how her work is so full of vivid colors and impressions. Born February 9, 1874 into the prominent Lowell family of Massachusetts, Amy won the Pulitzer Prize shortly after her death in 1925. Most likely a lesbian, she was apparently disinclined toward convention and had a strong passion for poetry and the arts. This excerpt is from the Breakfast Table portion of "Spring Day," with an accompanying painting by Edouard Vuillard (The Breakfast, 1892). "Spring Day" in its entirety can be found by clicking here.

In the fresh-washed sunlight, the breakfast table is decked

and white.

It offers itself in flat surrender, tendering tastes, and smells,

and colours, and metals, and grains, and the white cloth falls over its side,

draped and wide. Wheels of white glitter in the silver coffee-pot,

hot and spinning like catherine-wheels, they whirl, and twirl -- and

my eyes

begin to smart, the little white, dazzling wheels prick them like darts.

Placid and peaceful, the rolls of bread spread themselves in the sun

to bask.

A stack of butter-pats, pyramidal, shout orange through the white,

scream,

flutter, call: "Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!" Coffee steam rises in a

stream,

clouds the silver tea-service with mist, and twists up into the sunlight,

revolved, involuted, suspiring higher and higher, fluting in a thin spiral

up the high blue sky....

painting of the month

2009-03-21T11:45:00.001-07:00

Cat Lying in Front of a Bouquet of Flowers -- Suzanne Valadon, 1919

Click here to read more about Suzanne, who apparently had such concern for her own cats that she gave them caviar on Fridays instead of meat, so that they could still be good and "Catholic."

man(et)'s best friend

2009-03-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

I've always liked artist Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and so do many other people, of course -- and so did the French Impressionists, whom he had a great influence on and associated with during their mutual careers. Manet is well-known for painting Luncheon on the Grass, which really is quite a fascinating composition, along with the scandalous Olympia and many other works, but his simpler views of life are my favorites. Like his flowers or peaches or asparagus, and like the pictured fluff of a dog here (specifically Head of a Dog, 'Bob') -- Manet was so wonderfully talented with thick, sure brushstrokes and the smaller-focus pieces really show that genius off.

"There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another." (Edouard Manet)

old el dreams

2009-03-01T19:57:00.000-08:00

"...where the flickering warning lamps burned, along the El's long boundaries, like vigil lamps guarding the constant boundaries of night...Till darkness brought her sleep again...switching her onto a nowhere train that curved and descended, softly and endlessly, out upon the vast roundhouse of old El dreams."

(Words) Nelson Algren -- The Man with The Golden Arm

(Art) John Sloan -- Six O'Clock, Winter

paintings of the month

2009-02-23T19:56:00.000-08:00

Bronzeville at Night (1949)

Self Portrait (1933, detail)

Archibald Motley, Jr.

strictly seymour

2009-02-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

This photo of the great actor Seymour Cassel is from a Daily Nebraskan article detailing Mr. Cassel's appearance at Lincoln's Ross Media Arts Center last Saturday. Seymour was attending a screening of his new film, Reach for Me, directed by LeVar Burton, and beyond the movie preview he was just hanging out talking to the audience about life in Hollywood and beyond. I have a very dear friend who's a hip university librarian and she happened to be in town for the event. She and Mr. Cassel got along swimmingly, then she called me and handed him her cellphone, so I'm the person he's talking to in the photo! I was making tortellini for Valentine's Day dinner and was totally caught off-guard; I don't remember much of what I said but it was a thrill to hear Seymour's deep and distinctive voice in person and to be able to ask him questions about John Cassavetes and whatever else I could blather out in five minutes.

Click here for Seymour's imdb profile and all the films and television shows he's been in through the years, along with his 1968 Academy Award nomination for Faces. I know that the Daily Nebraskan interview noted Seymour's unhappiness with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but I'd still like to see him actually win one of those little golden Oscar guys. I'm sure the acceptance speech would be priceless!

(Daily Nebraskan photo by Andrew Lamberson)

a gist from the gist of art

2009-02-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

"Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody. Witness Shakespeare and Rembrandt. They borrowed from the technique of tradition and created new images by the power of their imagination and human understanding."

(John Sloan -- Gist of Art, 1939)

(pictured: John Sloan's 1912 A Window on the Street; Bowdoin College Museum of Art)

lincoln, douglas, and the rivalry

2009-01-31T08:52:00.000-08:00

I just posted a blog item at suite101 about the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency's 2009 calendar honoring what would have been Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial birthday this February 12th. The calendar features 12 distinctive portraits of Lincoln by 12 different artists, and can be purchased for just $7. The portrait for February from the calendar pictured here was done by William Camm and was apparently reproduced and used as a banner for the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates.

The 1858 debates themselves were the focus of The Rivalry, a play by Norman Corwin restaged this past fall at the L.A. Theatre Works. Paul Giamatti who put such great energy into HBO's John Adams starred as Stephen Douglas, while David Strathairn played a Lincoln probably more classically handsome than the original, but then again he's managed to transform himself into all kinds of men -- Murrow, Oppenheimer, Kefauver -- so why not Abe. I liked this quote about Douglas and Lincoln size-wise by Giamatti in an NPR interview: "These two guys, they were physical freaks...Douglas was 5'4" and Lincoln was like 8 feet tall, and they both weighed like 90 pounds!"

Click here to read the full NPR interview and to hear an audio-clip from the play itself.

{1860 Portrait of Lincoln by William Camm from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency's 2009 Lincoln Calendar}

painting of the month

2009-01-21T20:56:00.000-08:00

Magpie (detail) -- Claude Monet, 1868/9 (Musee d'Orsay)

2009-01-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

"I didn't have an identity. It was manufactured. My identity now? It was written on the wall by ancient forces."

Quote by Robert Downey, Jr. -- Rolling Stone Magazine, 8/21/08

Painting by Thomas Hovenden -- Self-Portrait of the Artist in His Studio, 1875 (Yale University Art Gallery)

2008-12-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

Street Scene, Christmas Morn -- Childe Hassam, 1892 (Smith College Museum of Art)

the curious mind of f. scott fitzgerald

2008-12-21T19:29:00.000-08:00

On this day back in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack and left us too early at the age of 44. His last years were troubled and decades of heavy drinking had taken a toll on his health; he was also receiving very low earnings on book royalties, despite the successes of his youth. Fitzgerald would probably be thrilled to see how his 1922 short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is now a movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and even appears to be a critically acclaimed and well-made movie at that.

Benjamin Button is a man born not as a baby, but a seventy-year old, and his life progresses backward as he becomes younger instead of aging. There were times when Fitzgerald was most likely churning out stories to sell to magazines and pay for the cost of his high living with Zelda, but among those many other tales of flappers and gin were some true gems. Ernest Hemingway complained that Fitzgerald tended to write stories that depended on "magic," and I figure he might have also been referring to the time tricks with Benjamin Button. But then that was Hemingway and he just seemed to have issues with Fitzgerald for reasons of lifestyle, temperament, choice of spouse, who had been in actual combat in World War I (Hemingway) and who hadn't (Fitzgerald), and so on.

Click here to read the original Benjamin Button on-line, from Tales of the Jazz Age. It does of course depend on "magic" and suspension of disbelief, but it's still an interesting twist for someone writing a story at the age of 25/26 in 1922 to have come up with. And I hope the movie lives up to its Oscar murmurs, not only for the actors and director, screenplay author and crew involved, but to give Fitzgerald a fresh wave of attention and some worthwhile recognition.

2008-12-12T18:20:00.000-08:00

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. -- Edgar Degas, 1834-1917

pictured: The Singer with The Glove -- Edgar Degas, 1878 (Fogg Museum of Art)

painting of the month

2008-11-30T16:01:00.000-08:00

Cedar -- Emily Carr, 1942 (Vancouver Art Gallery)

portrait of a president

2008-11-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

Artist Elaine de Kooning at work on one of the many studies she did for her final portrait of then-President John F. Kennedy. De Kooning was connected to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism (and married to abstract kingpin Willem de Kooning), but she veered away from their non-figurative principles to create portraits that were more intuitive than abstract. Because JFK was generally too busy to pose, EDK would often just observe him on the sidelines. She was of course greatly upset by his assassination 45 years ago to this day, but her depiction of Kennedy remains one of the most vivid and unique presidential portraits ever done. The 1962 photo of her working is from the Smithsonian Museum Archives, and the portrait itself can be found at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

movieland

2008-11-15T07:11:00.000-08:00

"[Tod] was determined to learn much more. They were the people he felt he must paint. He would never again do a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy Nantucket fisherman...neither Winslow Homer nor Thomas Ryder could be his masters and he turned to Goya and Daumier."

That excerpt is from Nathanael West's 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, and describes the new creative focus of Tod Hackett, a Yale School of Fine Arts grad hired by a major movie studio to design sets and costumes. The novel takes place during the 1930s and gives a strange and seamy view of Hollywood and California at the time. Tod's East Coast friends fear that he's selling out and wasting his talent just to create a fake Movieland world, but Tod knows that this specific fake world and its weird, twisted, sometimes hapless, sometimes cruel inhabitants are exactly what he needs to paint to fulfill his artistic vision. The painting pictured here from The Whitney Museum -- The Twenty Cent Movie (1936) -- is by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), who liked to celebrate the bawdier side of American life and seems like an artist of the Tod Hackett-type. However, since Tod's great planned masterwork in The Day of the Locust is called "The Burning of Los Angeles," his visions are a bit more violent than Marsh's. Click here to read more about Nathanael West, and here for more info on Reginald Marsh.

2008-10-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist

once we grow up.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso

(October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973)

[Picasso's 1905 Family of Saltimbanques from The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC]

painting of the month

2008-10-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

Apple Tree with Red Fruit -- Paul Ranson (1864-1909)

buffalo bill and edward estlin

2008-10-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

Today's birthday belongs (or belonged) to poet and general free-spirit-at-large Edward Estlin Cummings, better known as e.e. He was born on October 14, 1894 and died in 1962; he was a Harvard boy, then spent time driving an ambulance during World War I. Cummings was also held in a French detention camp during WWI for three months, this experience bringing about his novel The Enormous Room. Cummings was a gifted artist as well and quite skilled at painting and drawing, and of course he was one of the first poets to deliberately ignore things like capitalization and putting spaces between words. One of my favorite stories about EEC is how he was a neighbor of writer Djuna Barnes in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, and while he respected Djuna's reclusive tendencies, he also wanted to make sure she was okay and would yell "Are you still alive, Djuna?" out the window every now and then. This is one of my favorite Cummings poems, but since he liked to play around with line placement, it's difficult to blog-format it exactly as it should be:

Portrait

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

painting of the month

2008-09-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

Carnival Evening (1886) -- Henri Rousseau, Philadelphia Museum of Art

one more goyo

2008-09-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

Japanese artist Hashiguchi Goyo (1880-1921) was trained to be a painter but became an expert printmaker instead, specializing in the field of bijin-ga or "beautiful women." His work fused classical style with newer European influences, including use of fully nude female figures instead of just traditional suggestions of nudity like bared shoulders or napes of necks. He also showed women with their hair completely undone, which represented another cultural breakthrough. Before this point in time, Japanese women in art had generally been shown only with hair gathered up in traditional buns; Goyo showed them in relaxed, personal moments with their hair loosely flowing, creating more of a sensual individuality.

Unfortunately, Goyo died at age forty-one of meningitis and many of his original woodblock templates were destroyed in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. He was also quite fussy about the quality of his prints, so he didn't produce many during his lifetime. The ones that remain are beautifully vivid in color, and many of his female portraits remind me of the women in Junichiro Tanizaki's novels. Particularly this featured 1920 Woman Holding Lipstick, which makes me think of Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. Click here to view Goyo's images; actual Goyo prints are rare and therefore highly sought after -- and they're also reportedly forged quite often, so if you're ever lucky enough to possibly come across one, be careful.

basho-goyo

2008-08-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

in my new robe

this morning

someone else

(Haiku by Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694)(Kamisuki print by Hashiguchi Goyo, 1880-1921)

rrose in her stylish hat

2008-07-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968): Artist, Dadaist, Surrealist, icon, observer, and pictured here in 1921 as Rrose Selavy, one of his other creative personas. As R. Mutt he exhibited a urinal as a fountain; he also turned other various everyday objects into artistic arrangements; within his lifetime the nude descended the staircase, the sad young man rode a train, and many games of chess were played -- until the ultimate checkmate.

wombat love

2008-07-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was quite the character -- charismatic and full of life in his younger days, founder of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artistic movement, racing after beautiful red or golden-haired women he saw on the street to ask them to pose for his latest work, and lover of exotic animals like peacocks and wombats. He even managed to procure his own pet wombats, and apparently they had the run of the house. Rossetti was also brother of poet Christina Rossetti, whom he painted as the Virgin Mary, and a good friend of British Arts & Crafts genius William Morris for quite some time.

Rossetti had strong feelings of guilt after the possible suicide of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and that combined with his generally intense nature and sensitivity toward critics and criticism most likely drove him to drink and become addicted to chloral hydrate. He was something of a recluse by the time he died and troubled by paranoia and self-doubts, but he clearly is remembered as both a fine poet and artist. Oliver Reed played Rossetti in Ken Russell's curious 1967 film Dante's Inferno, and Oliver did a great job in Oliver's way, but I think Robert Downey Jr. would make an excellent Rossetti if any new bio-pics happen to be in the works -- and if Robert ever wants to take a break from being Ironman and share some scenes with a wombat or two.

(d.g. rossetti self-portrait from theotherpages.org; snowy wombat courtesy of wikimedia commons)

2008-07-04T20:30:00.000-07:00

The Fourth of July, 1916 - Childe Hassam (1859-1935)

self and not-self

2008-06-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

"I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self." Artist Mark Rothko, 1903-1970 (pictured: Mark Rothko Self-Portrait, 1936)

forget your theories

2008-05-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

American Impressionist and painter of beautiful landscapes, Willard Metcalf spent most of his time in New England but also captured scenes in other lands. Additionally, as a young man he hung around the Zuni Indian tribe to observe them and illustrate a series of magazine articles, going along on an ethnological expedition with anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. There's an interesting article in Antiques & the Arts magazine about Metcalf and this self-portrait done in 1890, noting how the half-shadowed look to it indicates that he wasn't quite sure about his artistic future. It might also seem like there was a darker, troubled side beyond Metcalf's lovely style that he subconsciously or consciously was showing us--an inner restlessness and tendency to drink a bit more than he should have--ironically all part of a man who painted such calmly inviting scenes.

"Go out and paint what you see and forget your theories." Willard Metcalf (1858-1925)

being beatrice

2008-05-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Over and over I'm on the point of giving it up. (Beatrice Wood)

Well, obviously she didn't give it up and always managed to find a fresh spark of enthusiasm somewhere--or at least she didn't give it up for some time. Potter, artist, muse, actress, writer, The "Mama of Dada" and lover of chocolate and men, Beatrice Wood was still casting her spell even toward the end of her life when she became the inspiration for the character of Rose in the 1997 film Titanic. Beatrice never saw Titanic, because she knew how sad the ending would be, and she died in March of 1998, just about a week after her 105th birthday.

(Pictured: Artists Beatrice Wood, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in 1917)

little inventions

2008-05-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors. (Emile Nolde)

Artist Emil Nolde is called a German Expressionist but in keeping with the above quote, his art was pretty much his own. He was known for his intense use of color and occasionally unusual themes, although sometimes he just painted lovely flowers like these red dahlias. Many of the flower watercolors were done during the Nazi years when Nolde had been forbidden to produce artwork by the Hitler regime. He painted anyway, in secret, and though the Nazis had labelled him and his art "degenerate," after World War II Nolde saw his reputation restored and the secret paintings -- or "Unpainted Pictures" as he called them -- were made public. He died in 1956 at the age of 88, and his former home in Seebul, Germany is now a museum centered around his art and life.

nelson and edward

2008-05-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

Edward Hopper's exhibit ended its stay at The Art Institute of Chicago this weekend, but not before the Chicago Tribune ran an article about a feature they did back in 1972, of then-living author Nelson Algren's impressions of several of Hopper's paintings. The Tribune Magazine editor noted how they thought that Algren and Hopper would be a perfect match, like "light and shadow," but Hopper's art proved to be too void of feeling for Algren. As he described in this excerpt:

Hopper worked from the outside in, his concern being with illumination, horizontals and verticals. In short, Hopper was a designer; one who never permitted his own emotion to divert him from the plan on his drawing board. Thus his women are formed less of flesh than by luminosity, shadow and angle.

It seems like while Hopper's urban backdrops and isolated figures paralleled Nelson's own writing, he also needed more personal character or to have the people within the works define the scenes, and not be so mute and faceless. The full article can be found here -- although no matter what Algren wrote, his fiction and Hopper's pictures will probably still be linked together as examples of lost souls of 20th century America, living on society's fringes or caught up in dark thoughts, never quite sure what the morning will bring or whether it will come at all.

(Pictured above: Detail from Edward Hopper's Automat, 1927 - Des Moines Art Center)

lively model

2008-05-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

One of the many good things about National Poetry Month--which is now chronologically over--is that it really doesn't have to be over on April 30th and can just create more of a heightened focus on poetry that might even last all year. Also, it brings "lesser-known" poets out of the shadows as they share their 30 days with tax returns and confused spring weather. One poet I really enjoyed being introduced to through Knopf's poem-a-day e-mails was Marie Ponsot, with this poem in particular:

Live Model

Who wouldn't rather paint than pose—
Modeling, you're an itch the artist
Doesn't want to scratch, at least
Not directly, and not yet.
You think, "At last, a man who knows
How bodies are metaphors!" (You're wrong.)
First time I posed for him he made
A gilded throne to sit me on
Crowned open-armed in a blue halfgown.
I sat his way, which was not one of mine
But stiff & breakable as glass,
Palestill, as if
With a rosetree up my spine.
We had to be speechless too,
Gut tight in a sacring thermal
Hush of love & art;
Even songs & poems
Were too mundane for me to quote
To ease our grand feelings
So I sat mute, as if
With a rosetree down my throat.
Now I breathe deep, I sit slack,
I've thrown the glass out, spit,
Evacuated bushels of roses.
I’ve got my old quick walk
& my big dirty voice back.
Why do I still sometimes sit
On what is unmistakably like a throne?
Why not. Bodies are metaphors
And this one's my own.

Also thanks to Knopf's daily poetry e-mail, you can hear Marie reading her poem in her "big dirty voice" by clicking this link.