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| Memory, 1903, marble, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek |
A cenotaph to lost time, the grieving figure of memory herself is lost in reverie, carved windswept in stone.
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
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| The Bed, 1893, oil on cardboard, 51.3 x 70.4 cm, Musee d'Orsay, Paris |
- Marcel Proust, opening lines of In Search of Lost Time"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say 'I’m going to sleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.I would ask myself what o’clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood."
Friday, 24 June 2011
As I was floating down unconcerned RiversWritten in 1871. As translated by Oliver Bernard
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.
I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.
Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas
Never endured more triumphant clamourings
The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights!
Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
The green water penetrated my pinewood hull
And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,
Carrying away both rudder and anchor.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;
Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!
I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts
And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!
I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.
Lighting up long violet coagulations,
Like the performers in very-antique dramas
Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds!
I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows
The kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-of saps,
And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!
I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
Battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows,
Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!
I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!
I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!
Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!
I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.
Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman...
Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls
And droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,
And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage
Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!
But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,
neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;
Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky
Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious,
Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,
Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort,
When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows
Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels;
I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distance
The groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense Maelstroms
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities
I long for Europe with it's aged old parapets!
I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.
I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.
Friday, 3 June 2011
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| Nevermore, 1897, oil on canvas, 61 x 116 cm, Courtauld Gallery, London |
"Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'
But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore'."
- Edgar Allan Poe, from The Raven
Thursday, 5 May 2011
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| Madame Paul Helleu, 1894, pastel on blue paper, 48 x 31 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
A women of the utmost elegance and grace, Madame Alice Helleu (the artist's wife) reclines on a chair. Perhaps after a long evening among the Parisian aristocracy, she stills wears her fashionable evening dress and gloves.
This intimate portrait is exquisitely drawn with a pale averted face, dark contours and expert, loose colouring. The result is a small but captivating image of a tender moment at the end of a day.
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
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| L'Heure Pour Tous, 1985, bronze, 700 cm tall, Gare St. Lazare, Paris |
"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
- William Faulkner
Outside a train station in Paris (the Gare St. Lazare to be exact) there is an accumulation of bronze clocks.
L'Heure Pour Tous (Time for All), with its many faces, looks down on hundreds of Parisians and tourists everyday, rushing by. All with somewhere to go, a train to catch, a deadline to meet - a clock to beat.
To stop and look up at these clocks you see that they do not move. They are all stopped on different times. It becomes a silent memorial to lost time.
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| Back of a Nude at Her Bath, 1934, oil on canvas, 107 x 74 cm, Pompidou |
Marthe disappears against the wall of her bathroom, bright yellow. She is in her element, within herself, turned from the viewer.
Bonnard paints his obsession, his muse. His art is a manifestation of their intimacy, painting as tender caress.
Monday, 2 May 2011
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| Woman Lying on a Bed, 1899, oil on canvas, 96 x 106 cm, Musée d'Orsay |
The bed - a landscape, tilted toward the viewer, with post-coital sheets bathed in soft late afternoon light.
The woman - Marthe, the artist's bath obsessed, highly-strung muse (and later wife), dozes, tautly, her left leg at a right angle to her right, exposing her sex.
Smoke from a pipe rises before her, evidence of the the artist (and voyeur), Bonnard.
This is the distillation of a moment, filled with intensity in its atmospheric portrayal. A domestic world, layered with private meaning.
Smoke from a pipe rises before her, evidence of the the artist (and voyeur), Bonnard.
This is the distillation of a moment, filled with intensity in its atmospheric portrayal. A domestic world, layered with private meaning.
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
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| The Death of Marat, 1793, oil on canvas, 165 x 128 cm, Musées des Beaux-Arts, Brussels |
Following the assassination of the radical revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday on July 13th 1793, a deputy of the National Convention (along with David) proclaimed “He sacrificed himself for liberty. Our eyes look for him amongst us. O terrible spectacle, he is on his deathbed! Where are you David? You have transmitted to posterity the image of Le Pelletier, dying for his country, there remains a picture for you to do.” To which David called out in the Convention: “I will do it too.”
The resulting work, The Death of Marat was presented to the Convention to be exhibited alongside The Death of Le Pelletier (original since lost) just four months later. It is considered by many art historians to be the single greatest political painting ever conceived. A triumph of the Neoclassical style its simplicity and distillation of feeling is profound considering the haste in which it was painted. The design has an air of concentration and finality usually resulting from a process of prolonged elimination and a pondering of every detail – David’s usual practice.
Although murdered in his bathtub, where he regularly worked due to a painful skin condition, David has managed to imbue Marat with an idealised dignity and saintly air where other lesser artists would have been embarrassed by the circumstances. Somewhat reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pieta, particularly with the elongated arm over the side of the bath, and Zurbaran’s St. Serapion from 1628, from which David has been influenced by the pale colouring and the solemn tilt of the head; the figure of Marat 
seems cast in porcelain, the grisly scene reduced to a ‘ladylike’ stabbing and some dashes of blood.
seems cast in porcelain, the grisly scene reduced to a ‘ladylike’ stabbing and some dashes of blood. David is bringing all of the might of his great skills as a painter to the role of airbrushing a tyrant of history. Holding a pen in one hand and the letter by which Corday was admitted entrance in the other, the viewer is simultaneously reminded both of David's role as journalist, ‘extoller of liberty’, and the ‘conniving, treacherous’ method by which the ‘Angel of Assassination’ murdered the ‘Friend of the People’. The solid box with Marat and David’s names immortalised, pronounces an unyielding truth while the dagger nearby still glistens with the blood of a martyr.
The result is a masterpiece – understated, stark and profoundly poignant - not least due to David’s Winckelmannesque decision to remove all distractions from the background - including the crossed muskets on the wall - merely painting a faint light coming from the top right into the darkness of the picture conveying a sense of eternity and immortality.
As successful as it is, however, the image is still no more than propaganda, if moving and deeply disturbing propaganda at that - using subject matter to convey an exceptionally morally-questionable idea. For the truly disturbing thing about this image is its service of art in the intense communication of a great lie.
Charlotte Corday proclaimed “I killed one man to save 100,000” and this is easily the case. Marat was a radical tyrant who, as an orchestrator of the Terror, ordered the guillotining of any and all ‘detractors’ of the revolution. In an image of propaganda like no other David has presented this malevolent man as a Christ-like dying hero, Marat the martyr. To put it simply, as Simon Schama does, the image is “shockingly, lethally beautiful.”
Sources:
K. Clark, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic versus Classic Art. (London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1973), 30.
D. Irwin, Neoclassicism (Art & Ideas), (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1997), 252.
Simon Schama, Power of Art, 235.
Monday, 18 April 2011
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| Liberty Leading the People, 1830, oil on canvas, 260 x 325 cm, Louvre, Paris |
Painted to commemorate the ‘July Revolution’ of July 28th 1830 Liberty Leading the People is a true icon of French Revolutionary art. A new kind of history painting in which allegory is brilliantly combined with the portrayal of an historical event - the ideal and allegorical with the contemporary and real - the subject matter is used to convey a sense of patriotic solidarity, the idea of a necessary violence in the name of Liberty.
“I have undertaken a modern subject, a scene on the barricades,” Delacroix explained, “and if I haven’t fought for my country at least I have painted for her.” Somewhat reminiscent of the corpses in Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa the foreground shows a mass of fallen bodies clearly indicating Delacroix’s understanding that ‘The People’ is nothing more than a mass of individuals caught up in historical events.
The German poet Heinrich Heine in his review of the Paris Salon of 1831, where the painting was a clear standout, described the painting in detail and exclaimed “And there we have it! A great thought has ennobled and sainted these poor common people, this rabble, and again awakening the slumbering dignity of their souls.”
At the apex of the compositional triangle is the allegorical ‘Lady Liberty’, bare breasted and determined, flourishing a bayonet and the tricolour, advancing towards the spectator whilst turning to rally her supporters. She is a personification of the Idea uniting the People, who are represented by a tenacious miscellany group of followers including, perhaps surprisingly, a man in bourgeois dress complete with top-hat, previously believed to be Delacroix himself.
Delacroix’s female personification of Liberty has become a potent symbol for the idea of liberty and has carved its own niche in popular culture.
Sources:
D. B. Brown, Romanticism (Art & Ideas), (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 2001), 116.
P. Pool, Delacroix (The Colour Library of Art), (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1969), 32.
H. Honour and J. Fleming, A World History of Art, revised 7th ed. (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 1982/2009), 651.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
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| Ma Gouvernante (My Governess), 1936, sculpture |
Well-worn high-heel shoes lie trussed-up on a silver platter. Mini chefs hats adorn the heels as if they were legs of poultry.
A surrealist object, it cleverly juxtaposes objects as a parody on the display of feminine vanity and the fine line between female sexuality and being merely the object of male desire. Subtly suggesting cannibalism and bondage, the bizarre, quirky object presents contrasting images of dependence and burgeoning sexuality and perversion (an almost oedipal attraction to one's nanny).
The combination of elements is unnerving in the extreme, referencing food as well as a basseuse sado-masochism. Being used the shoes are a token of domesticity, mixed with a foot fetish. Trussed-up they present the image of a disagreeable 'nursemaid' tied up against her will, squirming against her bonds.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
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| Que Me Veux-Tu? (What Do You Want From Me?), 1928 |
André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time.” Although she produced a huge amount of work, as well as significant writings, Claude Cahun operated on the fringes of the Parisian Sureallist movement. It was not until the 1980's that she was discovered (by François Leperlier), and soon became seen as a forerunner to queer theory and feminist art.
Born Lucy Schwob, Cahun often cross-dressed, and many of her photographs are taken by her stepsister and partner (in life as in work) Suzanne Malherbe, who went by the name Marcel Moore.
Cahun was queer, and openly so. Fully out of the closet in an era when such an identity scarcely existed. Her haunting self-portraits show evidence of this ongoing identity crisis and conflating of gender norms. In comparing her to other women in Parisian Surrealist circles Max Kozloff describes her as, "a woman who insisted on being taken seriously, while ostentatiously refusing to be treated as an object."
In Que Me Veux-Tu? a deep personal tension is made visible in a profoundly revealing portrait. An androgynous two-headed creature becomes a metaphor for a splitting of identity. In her writings she eloquently expressed her artistic and philosophical objectives: "Divide myself in order to conquer, multiply myself in order to assert myself."
This, her most revealing self-portrait, shows a sinister 'demonic' head whispering into the ear of its angelic, naively curious, twin. Which of them is speaking the title - "What do you want from me?" - is unclear. But perhaps they both are, and it is the viewer, society even, who is being addressed. For she has certainly received little affirmation about who she is from a society who didn't recognise her 'kind' as sane or healthy.
This image represents an inner conflict resulting from a profound lack of any external identity cues - which we take for granted. In her art Cahun is creating herself. Becoming human. Figuring things out for herself.
A true pioneer, we are able to be ourselves because people like her took a leap, and, as hard as it would have been, fought the status-quo to be authentic to themselves.
Here we see her freedom, but also the pain suffered in getting to it.
Sources:
Max Kozloff, The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900, Phaidon, 2007.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
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| Boulevard du Temple, c. 1838 |
This is probably the first portrait photograph ever taken - albeit somewhat unintentionally. During a several-minute-long exposure Louis Daguerre, who is seen as a co-inventor of the photographic medium, has captured a pedestrian who has stopped to have his shoes shined.
No other subject or vehicle shows up. Only this anonymous figure was still long enough to become a silhouette on the light sensitive surface of the daguerreotype - a technology which was yet to be announced to the world.
With a mundane activity he has unwittingly made photographic history.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
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| View from the Window at Gras, 1826 |
The first 'photograph'. Although controversially regarded so, Niépce's View from the Window at Gras is none-the-less widely seen as the earliest existing photographic image.
The technology for the recording and fixing of light - through the invention of the camera obscura and the discovery of light sensitive silver halide - existed for many years prior to this image being created. Here Niépce brings the two discoveries together - one chemical, the other optic.
Taken from an upstairs window of his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saône by an eight hour exposure - light can be seen on opposing buildings - the grainy image can only be seen with intense manipulation and an increase in contrast. Then a blurry landscape emerges.
Taken as an experiment, Niépce surely had no full comprehension of how radical this breakthrough was, how world changing the birth of this medium would become.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
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| Untitled, from the series 'Pornographie', 2002 |
A twisted family portrait or a bizarre, neutered porno? It appears an awkward couples dinner party gone haywire. Private fantasy as a perversion of social convention.
While employing the established language of filmed sex the scene evokes the absent, the subjects' faces hidden just as their sexual organs are.
Explanation is withheld also. Clinically cold and bland, the environment is stifling to even regard, the characters appearing profoundly alienated even as they mock intimacy. Being a portrait (or rather non-portrait) without faces, encourages viewing the tableau as a dead-pan, geometric study in shape or even as a still-life. Reduced to the almost abstract, and lacking eroticism, the situation plays on the inherent absurdity of human sexual scenarios.
Sources:
Frieze Magazine, Issue 134, October 2010.
Frieze Magazine, Issue 134, October 2010.
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