Meg Nola's Blog
Posted by Meg Nola
October 25th marks the birthday of the famed Pablo Picasso, well-known for his intensity and his Cubist and otherwise visions. October is also the birthday month of Marie Laurencin, one of Picasso's friends from the exciting and avant garde days of early 20th century Paris. Born on Halloween of 1883, Laurencin is often regarded as a Cubist and abstract artist herself, and her work has a uniquely deceptive lightness and sense of quiet tension. She was romantically involved with the poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire, and with his encouragement published some poetry of her own; she painted Group of Artists in 1908, depicting herself with Apollinaire, Picasso and Picasso's then-lover, Fernande Olivier.
Marie Laurencin was complex and multi-faceted, and throughout her career she produced paintings, notable literary illustrations, set designs, and a portrait of iconic French designer Coco Chanel. Laurencin died in 1956, and in 1983 a museum commemorating what would have been her 100th birthday opened in Tokyo. The Museum Marie Laurencin houses a fascinating collection of the artist's work, and Marie would probably be happy to learn as well that a certain type of richly pink peony has been named in her honor.
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Posted by Meg Nola
Born in Algeria on September 30, 1865, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer studied in Paris and initially began creating wonderful ceramic pieces that combined Islamic influences with the burgeoning Art Nouveau forms and motifs of the time. In his artwork, he was exceptionally gifted in his use of pastels and had a haunting dreamy style that would make him one of the most admired Symbolists in France. Toward the 20th century, Lévy-Dhurmer shifted his perspective more toward landscapes and music-influenced portraits.
Some fine examples of Lévy-Dhurmer’s artwork can be seen at the Musée d'Orsay, and his pottery can be found in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of the Arts. The cryptic 1895 Le Silence pictured below is from the Musée d'Orsay as well. I also came across a 1906 feature titled "Modern French Pastellists" by Frances Keyzer in a Google Book search; the piece spotlights Lévy-Dhurmer, who was then still alive and casting his mystical spell. Here’s an excerpt:
The surroundings play a special and important part in this artist's work, for they are almost invariably imaginative, or efforts of memory…that clearness of vision which is one of M. Levy-Dhurmer's salient characteristics enables him to reconstitute and reproduce a landscape that has impressed him. In fact, the painter not only sees again the rocks and the trees, the hills and the valleys he has admired, but the same sensations that moved him at the time are revived in him with scarcely any diminution of strength.
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer died in the Paris suburb of Le Vésinet on September 24, 1953.
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Posted by Meg Nola
In 1908, a group of artists known as The Eight had an exhibit at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. They wanted to bring a more vivid realism to art and have it reflect truer views of society, and their works depicted street scenes, saloon interiors, glimpses of tenements and rooftops, and portraits of everyday people going about their lives. They were received with both praise and contempt, but their influence undeniably shifted the focus of American art. They originally started as the Philadelphia Five, four of them visual reporters for newspapers in Philadelphia, while their fifth member was the dynamic Robert Henri, who essentially galvanized the others and encouraged them to use their professional skills in a more aesthetic and enduring manner.
The Philadelphia Five eventually became The Eight, and in August, Eight members John Sloan (August 2) and George Luks (August 13) once celebrated birthdays, along with Eight follower and Robert Henri student, George Wesley Bellows (August 12). An exhibit of The Eight’s art and impact is presently at the Milwaukee Art Museum, wrapping things up this weekend if you happen to be in the area and can take in this fascinating show.
"Though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living." ** John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 - September 7, 1951)
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Posted by Meg Nola
Earlier this year, an interesting alternate theory surfaced that Paul Gauguin might really be the one responsible for cutting off Vincent van Gogh’s ear lobe, and not Van Gogh himself. The two major Post-Impressionists had been staying together at "The Yellow House" in Arles through the late autumn/early winter of 1888, with a resulting dynamic that was somewhat artistically productive, but also often combative and intense. A well-known version of the famed story states that Van Gogh had been threatening Gauguin with a razor on December 23, 1888, and Van Gogh then cut off his own ear lobe with the razor and gave it to Rachel, a prostitute at a nearby brothel. Gauguin had told Van Gogh that he had had enough of their Arles arrangement and was leaving, and this impending departure reportedly upset Vincent and triggered his erratic, self-mutilating behavior.
This newer theory, proposed by German art historians Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, suggests that Gauguin had indeed had enough of Arles, but that Van Gogh was following him through the streets trying to persuade him to stay. Gauguin eventually reacted out of frustration or anger or because Van Gogh was threatening him, and he sliced at Van Gogh’s left ear with his sword. Gauguin enjoyed fencing and was skilled at the sport, and he therefore happened to be carrying a sword along with his other luggage. Van Gogh finally subsided, gave the ear lobe to Rachel at the nearby bordello, and went back home bleeding and in semi-shock. Van Gogh never outrightly blamed his friend for the incident because he was somewhat obsessed with and dominated by Gauguin. The wound would, however, affect Van Gogh both physically and emotionally until his ultimate suicide in 1890.
Click here to read the full article on the new theory, then click here to read an argument against it. And while we can never be sure just what happened on that December 1888 night, we are sure that Van Gogh and Gauguin spent time together in Arles -- and this excerpt from the film The Yellow House brings their interaction to life.
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Posted by Meg Nola
July is packed with artist birthdays, including Frida Kahlo (July 6), Marc Chagall (July 7), David Hockney (July 9), Camille Pissarro (July 10), James McNeill Whistler (July 11), Amedeo Modigliani (July 12), Edgar Degas (July 19), Edward Hopper and Alexander Calder (July 22), Thomas Eakins (July 25), Marcel Duchamp (July 28) and Jean Dubuffet (July 31). The birthday feature for this month is photographer Berenice Abbott, whose work has a clear, painterly beauty and who was born in Ohio on July 17, 1898.
After a stint at Ohio State, Abbott made her way to Greenwich Village like many creatively inclined types of her generation. In the Village she shared a communal house with writer Djuna Barnes and critic and author Malcolm Cowley, and again like many creatively inclined types of her generation, Abbott eventually went to Europe. In Paris, she took a job as photographer Man Ray’s assistant, her lack of camera savvy at the time being a plus, as the busy and successful Ray just wanted to hire someone who would simply assist and not any aspiring photographic geniuses.
Unfortunately for Man Ray, Berenice Abbott had natural photographic talent and would eventually rival Ray in terms of doing stylish portrait work. Abbott's study of the iconic James Joyce is a great example of her style, as is her portrait of French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927). Abbott came to know Atget through Man Ray, and she became a strong champion of the then-overlooked chronicler of distinctive Paris scenes. After Atget’s death, Abbott made it a point to obtain most of his prints and photographic negatives and to promote them faithfully so that Atget’s genius would be rightfully recognized.
Berenice Abbott was also a fine photographer of the American landscape, especially her many pictures of New York during the 1930s. Her diverse interests led her to produce fascinating work in the field of scientific photography as well. In general, Abbott’s haphazard decision to become Man Ray’s assistant in 1923 led to a remarkable career during the as remarkable and swiftly-changing 20th century. Berenice Abbott died in December of 1991 at the age of 93.
Photography helps people to see. -- Berenice Abbott
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Posted by Meg Nola
Another June birthday artist is Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 - 1937), who painted such well-known works as The Banjo Lesson and The Annunciation. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Philadelphia, and he later attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the time when painter, sculptor and photographer Thomas Eakins was a professor at the school.
Eakins, an exacting realist, would later become Director of the Pennsylvania Academy; his teaching methods were innovative and exciting, and while he wasn‘t much of a nurturer, he generally tried to urge his students to reach their fullest potential. Eakins would eventually find himself in trouble for his sometimes too free-spirited behavior and insistence that his female students be allowed to sketch and observe nude male models -- instead of just male models wearing loincloths (presumably so that the delicate modesties of such female students would not be offended).
Before Eakins left the Pennsylvania Academy, however, he taught Henry Ossawa Tanner, and even though Tanner was then rather shy and reserved, Eakins liked him very much and considered him one of his favorite students. And while Eakins confined his own color concerns to the painter's palette, Tanner did experience prejudice from some of his fellow artists-in-training -- most likely due to the fact that Tanner was the only African-American enrolled in their class.
Tanner ultimately made his way to France, where he would remain for most of his career. He found a certain freedom from racial issues in Europe, along with the chance to focus more on his work and less on having to always justify his skin tone and talents. Tanner’s autobiography, The Story of an Artist’s Life, is well-worth reading to understand the issues that he faced as an African-American artist and his own quietly determined will to succeed.
Pictured below is Thomas Eakins’ portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner, painted in 1902.
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Posted by Meg Nola
I’m late with the May birthday artist so I’ll sneak him in with an earlier than usual June birthday artist. May belongs to Salvador Dalí, even though he’s so well known and often caricatured. Dalí is obviously still quite popular, however, since a piece that I wrote last year on his 1931 famed melting clocks painting The Persistence of Memory is almost always my most highly-trafficked article here at Suite101.
Born May 11, 1904 (d. 1989), Surrealist Dalí knew how to market himself and his work and was never too reticent or aloof to miss a worthwhile opportunity to get his wild eyes and curious moustache out there. He appeared to love the spectacle and drama of the artist’s life as much as creating the art itself, and he’d probably be delighted to learn that you can find his 1950s What's My Line? appearance on YouTube, along with several other live Dalí moments. But you can see in the What’s My Line? clip how Dalí easily maintains his somewhat perplexed poise throughout the questioning, then he’s sure to suavely kiss the hands of all the women on the panel as he goes over to introduce himself. Dalí would also probably be thrilled that Twilight superstar/heartthrob Robert Pattinson played him in a recent bio-movie called Little Ashes, which details Dalí’s youthful relationship with poet Federico García Lorca and director Luis Buñuel.
Moving to June, French artist Gustave Courbet (b. June 10, 1819 - d. 1877) was another gentleman who knew how to work the media. Courbet’s career and life were full of drama, imprisonment, and charges of obscenity in his Realist paintings; he liked to drink and pursue a Bohemian existence and didn’t like pandering to public opinion or art critics.
Courbet furthermore seemed to enjoy presenting himself in various self-portraits and guises, almost as if to assert to the world at large that he alone defined himself and would not be defined by others. And while you can’t find clips of the actual Courbet on YouTube, a 2008 Courbet exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art prompted NY Times art writer Roberta Smith to describe the painter's dashing and dramatic self-portrait The Desperate Man as being "like Johnny Depp’s pirate rendered by Caravaggio" -- a comparison that would most likely please the once handsome and generally always rebellious Courbet.
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Posted by Meg Nola
The Canadian Group of Seven painters collectively produced striking works during the early part of the 20th century, and asserted that the beauty of Canada’s landscape was more than worthy of being artistically depicted. Their intentions to portray their country in a distinctive style and to cast off any lingering European attitudes of cultural snobbery also ran parallel to Canada’s own emerging national identity.
The Group of Seven was influenced by other artistic movements of the time, such as Art Nouveau, Post-Impressionism, Japonisme and contemporary Scandinavian painting, but they adapted what inspired them and created their own dynamic. Several of them met while working at Grip, Ltd., a commercial art firm in Toronto, and their first collective exhibit was held in May of 1920.
Seven questions about the Seven (in no particular order) are:
1. Who was the youngest member of the original Group? ** Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945)
2. Who painted The Red Maple in 1914, a work that is sometimes noted as being symbolic of Canada’s entry into World War I? ** A.Y. (Alexander Young) Jackson (1882-1974)
3. Which Group of Seven member was born in Sheffield, England and was a Unitarian? ** Arthur Lismer (1885-1969)
4. Who reportedly encouraged the Group of Seven to become more than just seven friends and artists? ** Lawren Harris (1885-1970)
"Without Harris there would have been no Group of Seven. He provided the stimulus; it was he who encouraged us to always take the bolder course, to find new trails." A.Y. Jackson
5. Who was also born in Sheffield, England and served as a combat artist during World War I? ** Frederick Varley (1881-1969) Take a trip back in time to 1965 and watch a CBC interview with Varley at age 84.
6. Who painted The Tangled Garden in 1916, capturing a scene from his woodland Ontario property known as Four Elms? ** J.E.H. MacDonald (1873-1932)
7. Whose departure in 1920 turned the Group of Seven into a sextet, until A.J. Casson joined in 1926? ** Frank a/k/a Franz Johnston (1888-1949) left the Group and Toronto in 1920 to accept a position at the Winnipeg School of Art.
Bonus question:
Which good friend and artistic ally of the Group of Seven played both the violin and mandolin? ** Tom Thomson (1877-1917)
Although painter Tom Thomson was not an official member, his friendship with the others and love of nature were integral to the Group of Seven’s formation. Thomson is fairly well-known for his unfortunate and mysterious death at Algonquin Park in July of 1917, an incident that could have either been accidental or a homicide. Had Thomson lived beyond his thirty-ninth year he would have very likely produced many more paintings and become one of Canada’s premier artists.
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Posted by Meg Nola
Activist, author, and great talker Studs Terkel would have been 97 on May 16th, had he not signed off forever this past Halloween. Studs was born in New York with a given name of Louis; he came to Chicago when he was eight years old with his parents and made the city his home base for the rest of his life.
Studs had a long-running radio show on Chicago’s WFMT, on which he did many an interview in his characteristic raspy voice. Terkel also wrote several books, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and often used the oral history format in order to keep the full power of a person’s words and experiences.
In Terkel’s Coming of Age, he conducted interviews with a wide range of older Americans to give a collective portrait of how they felt about growing older, and what they had witnessed in their particular slice of the 20th century. One of the interviews in Coming of Age is with Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), a talented and prolific African-American artist who created such great works as the Migration of the Negro series, as well as portraits of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and another series detailing the life of abolitionist John Brown.
Since May is Older Americans Month, and since Studs sadly isn’t around to remind us about his book, I thought that an excerpt from Jacob Lawrence’s interview would be apropos:
How I became an artist? In elementary school, we were given crayons, poster paint, and were encouraged to put down color. In the great 1930s, I heard stories from older people…[t]hey’d talk about Marcus Garvey, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. I’d walk the streets of Harlem and hear corner orators talk about these people. It inspired me. I realized I couldn’t tell their lives in one story, so I painted a series of their lives....
When I was a youngster growing up, a person would never attack an older person, a weaker person, because of the fear of God. Now an older person is vulnerable because of something lost, a sense of morality, of ethics…I’m not pessimistic. I think about these things. I talk about them. I feel as long as there’s one person or two people who are aware of the quality, of our capacity to think and feel, we’re on pretty sound ground. I hope so.
From Coming of Age, Studs Terkel (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)
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Posted by Meg Nola
April is a month full of artist birthdays, including Surrealist-inclined Max Ernst (April 2) and Joan Miro (April 20), the incomparable Leonardo da Vinci (April 15), Op Artists Victor Vasarely (April 9) and Bridget Riley (April 24), French Neoclassicist Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (April 16) and French Romantic master Eugene Delacroix (April 26). Additionally, Raphael, one of the great geniuses of the High Renaissance, is often said to have been born and died on April 6, with both dates marking Good Friday.
Charles Wilbert White (1918-1979) is another April birthday artist (April 2), born to an African-American mother and a Creek Indian father. He grew up on Chicago’s Southside in a very poor neighborhood; his mother was a domestic worker who sometimes had to bring young Charles along while she cleaned houses. White took on odd jobs at an early age to help his mother pay the bills, and while he was bored at school and often skipped out, he just as often headed to the Chicago Public Library or Art Institute to further his own personal education. Eventually he attended the School of the Art Institute, working as a valet and cook to pay for what his scholarship funds didn’t cover.
Following his formal training, White produced murals for the Works Progress Administration, married sculptor Elizabeth Catlett and received a Rosenwald grant to tour and study southern America. The art White produced during this period focused on the South’s strong African-American culture, as well as the underlying segregation and inequality he witnessed firsthand. White also visited Mexico and spent time at the Taller de Grafica printmaking workshop, which included Diego Rivera and David Siquieros among its famed artists. Back in the United States, White became part of the New York Graphic Workshop and the Sugar Hill community that included W.E.B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington.
Always concerned about those who truly needed to receive the messages beyond his art, White produced portfolio printbooks of his works so that they could be more easily purchased by less affluent African-Americans. White divorced, remarried, and then moved to California in his later years; his productive career was marked by resilience and a keen consciousness of the human condition. ** Click here to take a look at Charles White’s portrait of musician Huddie Ledbetter, best known as Lead Belly.
Posted by Meg Nola
The group of American Impressionists known as The Ten was collectively most productive during the early part of the 20th century, primarily in the New England/New York area. Displeased by the way things were going within The Society of American Artists (i.e., “too much business and too little art”), these ten painters banded together and began to exhibit on their own. Here are ten questions about The Ten, whose works grace the walls of numerous museums:
Who was born in Salem, Massachusetts and descended from sea captains? ** Frank Weston Benson (1862-1951)
Who featured female musicians in some of his paintings, such as The Kreutzer Sonata, The Guitar Player and The Cellist? ** Joseph De Camp (1858-1923)
Who was a “robust, gregarious, witty individual who smoked heavily, swore loudly, and made delicate and refined paintings” (as per the Carnegie Museum’s brief artist bio)? ** Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938)
Whose real first name was Frederick, with a last name that sounded like it might be Arabic but was probably a misspelling of Horsham? ** Childe Hassam (1859-1935)
As a young man, which Ten artist teamed up with anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing to study the Native American Zuni tribe and was eventually made an honorary Zuni member? ** Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925)
Who married Elizabeth Reeves, one of his models? ** Robert Reid (1862-1929)
Whose painting The Golden Screen was used for the cover of a paperback printing of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth? ** Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938)
Who was a Harvard man (Class of 1874)? ** Edward Simmons (1852-1931)
Who painted the haunting work Springtime and was the first Ten artist to die at the relatively young age of 52? ** John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902)
Whose father was Professor of Drawing at the West Point Military Academy, and who also initially described Impressionist work as “worse than the Chamber of Horrors”? ** J. Alden Weir (1852-1919)
Posted by Meg Nola
Chicago author Nelson Algren would have marked a 100th birthday on March 28th, if he hadn't left our sphere in 1981 after suffering a heart attack. Though Algren was born in Detroit, his family moved to Chicago when he was a child and he would be emotionally and artistically linked with the city for the rest of his life. He did abandon Chicago for the East Coast in his later years, feeling that he wasn’t appreciated by his hometown despite the fame he had achieved through publication of such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning. Apparently at the time he left you could barely find his books in the Chicago Public Library, though they are certainly there now.
Algren was streetwise yet poetic, turning blighted urban views into hauntingly beautiful scenes. He could also peer into the soul of a desperate man or woman and find a whole range of experiences and emotions -- and what had led them to turn to the needle or the bottle, or to a life of crime. He wasn’t much of a schmoozer and called things as he saw them, which often led to his disenfranchisement from the literati of his day. He had a long-time affair with French writer Simone de Beauvoir, but that ended with a bittersweet (usually more bitter than sweet) resentment much like his departure from Chicago.
Reading Nelson Algren’s works is a great way to learn about the man and the Chicago neighborhood in which he found his writing “zone,” that being the then-predominantly Polish area called The Triangle. Algren wouldn’t recognize much of his gentrified, hipped-up Triangle now, but a fine way to go back in time beyond reading Algren’s fiction is to check out the movie Call Northside 777. The film is based on a real case of a Chicago man sent to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. It has an unusually low-key tone for a 1948 film, with an unusually low-key Jimmy Stewart playing a reporter unraveling errors of justice. And beyond that, Call Northside 777 offers a wonderful cinematic window into some of the bars, streets, and people of the Triangle area, truly bringing Algren’s words to life.
"...old-world markets and mid-American saloons, murmurous with poverty...bound by the laced steel of the railroads and the curved steel of the El." (Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning)
Posted by Meg Nola
Art meets literature again in Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, which follows the quest of a well-bred young man to look beyond materialism and conventional living and find a more spiritual way. Larry Darrell is from a wealthy Chicago suburb and expected to become a doctor or lawyer or stockbroker like his peers. Larry’s questioning nature and traumatic experiences in World War I make him doubt this kind of life, however, and he goes off to Europe and ultimately India to seek deeper meaning. One of the women Larry meets along the way is a character named Suzanne Rouvier, a free-spirited artist whom Maugham most likely based on the actual French painter Suzanne Valadon.
Suzanne Valadon was born in 1865 and grew up fatherless in Paris. She learned to fend for herself early on and held various jobs, including being a circus trapeze artist. Her striking looks made her a sought-after model to such painters as Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and she also found a teacher and patron in Edgar Degas. Suzanne had many romances and eventually gave birth to painter Maurice Utrillo, though it was never clear as to who Maurice’s real father was. Suzanne’s art showed a fine use of color and unique perception, and as a feline lover, she did a truly outstanding job in depicting cats.
Somerset Maugham often included artist characters in his novels, and in The Razor’s Edge it seems pretty likely that Suzanne Rouvier came from Suzanne Valadon. Maugham describes his Suzanne’s independent yet resourceful nature and her own artistic work, both as muse and creator. In the novel, Suzanne has an affair with Larry, but when Larry is ready to say goodbye, she doesn‘t question his need to move on.
Suzanne Rouvier is one of the more vibrant characters in The Razor’s Edge, though Maugham does tend to minimize her artwork. He describes Suzanne as essentially mimicking her artist lovers’ styles, “landscape like the landscape painter, abstractions like the cubist,” until her present lover and patron tells her not to imitate men but to use a more feminine style, and to not “aim to be strong; be satisfied to charm.” And while the real Suzanne Valadon encouraged her son to take up painting to challenge his often self-destructive behavior, Razor’s Edge Suzanne has a daughter instead and pragmatically urges the girl to learn to type and study stenography.
Click to see Suzanne Valadon’s portrait of composer Erik Satie, another of her boyfriends and one who apparently was pretty crazy about her. It seems that her perception of Satie was quite good and not just imitative -- and unlike Suzanne Rouvier -- that her pursuit of art might have been more than a hobby “she got a lot of fun out of.”
Posted by Meg Nola
I’ve always loved the chapter from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth where ladies of New York society take part in an evening of "living pictures" or tableaux vivants. For the entertainment of their guests, and for the presumed showcasing of themselves, the costumed women pose within sets designed to resemble classic paintings. These illusions depend "not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision. To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination."
By this point in the novel, we’ve become familiar with the female characters and to link some of them with art is aesthetically fun — and a nice fictional device by Edith Wharton. We know about the translucent-skinned "frailer Dutch type" of old New York money, perfect for bringing a van Dyck to life. We also know about the resourceful and resilient Carry Fisher, who despite being a divorcee when divorce was still questioned has managed to keep herself within society circles. With her earthy dark looks she becomes one of Goya’s women for the night, from the "exaggerated glow of her eyes" to the "provocation of her frankly-painted smile."
Then there’s Lily Bart, The House of Mirth’s heroine — beautiful, capricious, determined to find a rich husband yet not quite calculating and manipulative enough to pull that feat off. Lily chooses Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Mrs. Lloyd as her tableau, knowing that its simpler lines and similarity to her own loveliness will be a show-stopper. Which it is, and Lily is a true vision — with some of the men of course wondering privately about whether she’s got any underwear on beneath those "pale draperies" that outline "dryad-like curves."
Click here to take a look at the original Mrs. Lloyd, as done by Reynolds. The tableaux evening is a high point in Lily’s otherwise troubled quest to become one of New York's truly powerful society women — and to no doubt eventually have her own beautiful, slightly haughty portrait painted by John Singer Sargent.
Posted by Meg Nola
Catching up with the monthly artists’ birthdays — which I seem to have lost track of since December — for January, Berthe Morisot (January 14, 1841) and Édouard Manet (January 23, 1832) shared the same month. Morisot was one of the French Impressionists, and though Manet had a strong influence on the Impressionists and socialized with them, he really never fully committed himself to their group. Manet and Morisot were friends, however, with Manet advising Morisot on painting and life and often including her in his own work. Berthe Morisot even married Manet’s brother Eugene in 1874.
February belongs to Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888-1946), a hard-working and self-taught African-American painter born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Pippin came from a poor background yet persisted in pursuing his artistic dream, even after experiencing a near-devastating injury to his right arm during World War I. While the war was a great trial to Pippin, he also noted how the intensity of battle and being pushed to the edge of life "brought out all the art in me...I can never forget suffering and I will never forget sunsets. So I came home with all of it in my mind and I paint from it today."
March 12, 1918 was the birthday of Elaine Fried de Kooning, a vivacious and talented abstract painter married to modern art icon Willem. March 14, 1923 brought photographer Diane Arbus into being, her camera lens and mind fusing to create unusually compelling portraits. And March 16, 1822 was painter Rosa Bonheur’s birthday, Bonheur’s most famous work being The Horse Fair. She was a fine artist in the "animalière" or painting of animals tradition, and an otherwise 19th century free-spirit who wore trousers, smoked cigarettes and did not care to be physically and emotionally corseted. ** March is incidentally National Women’s History Month, which is a great time to focus on the accomplishments and lives of female artists — and then to appreciate them for the rest of the year as well.
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding. (Diane Arbus, 1923-1971)
Posted by Meg Nola
Recently I wrote a suite101 article about French and American Impressionist views of spring, and I used Willard Metcalf’s 1906 May Night as the closer, noting how the work has a kind of luminous spellbound aura — in the way that May nights often do. The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut is where the painting permanently resides, along with many other American Impressionist treasures and the whole rich history of how Florence Griswold’s home came to be an early 20th century artist’s colony.
Florence Griswold (generally called Miss Florence) herself was born in 1850 to an established Old Lyme, Connecticut family. Her father was a ship captain when Old Lyme was a New England hub of shipbuilding and seafaring trade. The Griswolds owned a 12 acre estate and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, until the United States experienced economic changes and the shifting of commerce toward more modern forms of transport. To make ends meet, the Griswold home was at first used as a school and then a boardinghouse, with Miss Florence eventually being the only member of her family left to run the roost.
A visit from artist Henry Ward Ranger in 1899 brought new energy and life to the Griswold house. Ranger was searching for a spot to cultivate a new school of natural and landscape painting that would establish American artists on an equal footing with their European counterparts — and he found it at Old Lyme. Other painters like Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf and Matilda Browne (to name just a few) joined the group, which ultimately became known as the Lyme Art Colony. Old Lyme’s beautiful surroundings, the lively presence of the artists, and Miss Florence’s total devotion to her guests and their work proved to be a wonderful combination and the colony thrived into the 1920s.
Today, Miss Florence’s fully-restored home is now The Florence Griswold Museum, where one can visit the actual premises and take in the paintings and atmosphere, or you can drop by on-line. The Museum has an excellent website that includes historical and artistic information, works from the collection, educational features, scholarly essays, photos, along with a blog and a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and photos on Flickr. The FGM was even nice enough to put my article about Metcalf’s May Night on their blog right next to the caricature of the artist himself from the Museum’s great Fox Chase multi-scene painting. So stop by the FGM’s main page or “get social” with them — and use 21st century technology to discover and enjoy the spirit of the past.
Posted by Meg Nola
Though I don’t live in New York, I feel like I’m always just around the corner from The Metropolitan Museum of Art via the daily featured artwork on the Met's website's home page. The Met has a vast collection and checking in regularly to see which painting, photograph or exquisite object is in the spotlight is a great way to learn about the museum's treasures and explore further. Such as on this particular Sunday, John La Farge’s 1887 watercolor and gouache of The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest's Garden is at the Met’s virtual entrance. La Farge’s beautiful and exotic scene might make one wonder what inspired the American artist to paint such a vision and did he actually visit Japan? Clicking on the link for more details about the Featured Artwork reveals that:
On a trip to Japan…in 1886, La Farge enlisted watercolor—the familiar medium of the traveling artist—to create studies for illustrations and to paint sheets for exhibition. He executed this bold and monumental composition after his return to New York, using a watercolor sketch done during his travels as well as photographs…The Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, a fifty-foot-high bronze cast in 1252, is renowned for its colossal size, its peaceful demeanor, and its unusual site in the open air surrounded by mountains and trees.
Continued Met cyber-searching among La Farge’s contemporaries brought up the fascinating and unfinished Arab Woman by John Singer Sargent. Sargent also used watercolors for his portrait, watercolors -- as detailed in the La Farge descriptive -- being the preferred artistic medium of the time for capturing scenes while traveling.
Among last month’s Featured Artworks were Walter Launt Palmer’s gorgeous snowscape Silent Dawn (1919), and the dreamy 1893 Ice Floes by Claude Monet. If you happen to miss a day, you can check in to the present month’s or even prior months’ selections by clicking here. You can also subscribe to receive the Met’s Featured Artwork each day by signing up for the RSS feed at the museum’s main entry or "splash" page.
Posted by Meg Nola
A group of artists interested in capturing the true pulse of early 20th century urban America first met in Philadelphia, then gained more members in New York. They ultimately became known as The Eight, and these Eight would initiate a style of painting often referred to as The Ashcan School, since many of their works showed a "sooty" or "unappealing" side of life.
The Eight’s premier exhibit took place in 1908 at Manhattan’s Macbeth Gallery, causing quite a stir within the art world. While not all members of The Eight focused on urban realism, they were all innovative in their own way and created a new and independent American artistic style. The roster of The Eight read as follows: pivotal founder Robert Henri, former Philadelphia newspaper artists John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn, then Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast rounding out the group in New York.
1. Which of The Eight changed his last name as a young man? **** Robert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad, but after his father shot and killed another man during a fight, the Cozads had to lay low for a while until their patriarch’s name was cleared. Robert Cozad therefore before Robert Henri, and despite the French spelling, Henri always pronounced his adopted last name in an Americanized manner, i.e., HEN-RYE.
2. Which Eight artist took a long time to finish a painting? **** John Sloan generally did not like to be rushed in his work; in fact, Robert Henri commented how the name Sloan must stand for the past participle of Slow.
3. Which member of The Eight complained that another should drink more? **** George Luks was annoyed and confused by Everett Shinn’s teetotaling ways and felt that being sober would keep Shinn from "making the grade" as an artist. As Luks claimed: "Licker does it, licker and nothing else…"
4. Which Eight painter was quite the snappy dresser? **** While he kept away from booze, Everett Shinn was apparently a sharp and colorfully-dressed fellow.
5. Which of The Eight painted the beautiful blue-green 1907 Night’s Overture? **** Arthur B. Davies, with that B standing for Bowen. Click here to view the work on the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ website.
6. Which Eight member was asked to help major collector Albert C. Barnes pick out some paintings? **** William Glackens helped his former Philadelphia high school classmate and future art patron to choose a group of Paris works, which would form the genesis of the well-known Barnes Foundation and Museum.
7. Which member of The Eight was born in Nova Scotia? **** Ernest Lawson came into being in Halifax on March 22, 1873.
8. Which member of The Eight’s middle name was also that of a South American country? **** Maurice Brazil Prendergast.
Posted by Meg Nola
Since America is already in a Presidential frame of mind, with a new Commander-in-Chief who happens to be tall, lanky and (ultimately) from Illinois, taking note of Lincoln’s Bicentennial seems in order. Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, and to honor the two centuries passed since that day, Springfield’s Illinois Historic Preservation Agency has put together a calendar of portraits of the United States’ 16th President by twelve different artists. The gallery goes as follows:
January -- A younger Lincoln just before his presidency, now at the Illinois Executive Mansion;
February -- William Camm’s 1860 depiction of Lincoln, started from a brief live posing session then finished by Camm from a photograph;
March -- William Cogswell’s 1864 study of Lincoln, Cogswell being a self-taught artist who won $3,000 in a contest for another Lincoln portrait (presently at the White House);
April -- LeRoy Neiman does Lincoln in vivid color;
May -- A reinterpretation of George Peter Alexander Healy’s White House Lincoln by Catherine Carter Critcher in 1938;
June -- Alb Meyer’s 1925 painting from an 1860 unbearded, smooth-faced Lincoln photograph by Alexander Hesler;
July -- Marla Friedman’s 2001 Lincoln portrait in profile;
August -- Fascinating “dribble technique” blue-toned portrait of Lincoln by artist Umberto Romano;
September -- 1925 William A. Patterson clean-shaven portrait, one of Patterson’s many takes on Lincoln;
October -- Chromolithograph of Lincoln by Elijah C. Middleton, a proof of which was actually sent to and commented on by Lincoln himself;
November -- Artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s Lincoln portrait, Bicknell having also painted previous Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce, with this work being done upon Lincoln’s request in 1864; and
December -- 1862 work by Alban Jasper Conant, another self-trained artist who also produced the “Smiling Lincoln” work.
Click here for more information and to view the portraits, which can all be had in calendar form for a mere $7.
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Whatever you are, be a good one.
(Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865)
Posted by Meg Nola
Now that’s it’s subzero here in Chicago with a lingering aura of political corruption, I’ve started feeling more Russian in spirit and wanting to reread one of my favorite anthologies. I’m referring to a little blue book that focuses on St. Petersburg — not the city in Florida, but the city of White Nights — Petrograd, Leningrad, or just Petersburg, the once-upon-a-time home of Dostoyevsky and Pushkin and backdrop for this gem of a collection.
The book, not surprisingly titled St. Petersburg, was published by Chronicle in 1995 and edited by John and Kirsten Miller. Not all of the stories take place in the winter, but intense winters are of course as much a part of St. Petersburg as the Neva River. Many fine writers in the anthology give their impressions of the city and its people, including native daughter Nina Berberova, Francine du Plessix Gray, Edmund Wilson, Leo Tolstoy, and the aforementioned Dostoyevsky and Pushkin. A turbulent glimpse of American journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World is featured, Reed’s complete 1919 book having inspired Warren Beatty’s award-winning movie Reds.
More intrigue can be found in Felix Youssoupoff’s “The Death of Rasputin,” which suspensefully documents the plot of Russian royal Prince Felix and his consorts to murder “Mad Monk” Grigori Rasputin, and how they definitely did not have an easy time killing this seemingly indestructible individual. Then there’s an excerpt from the many-volumed and irresistibly-titled (I Am the Most Interesting Book of All) diary of artist Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884), who wrote how “Petersburg acts upon me at night. I know nothing more superb than the Neva trimmed with lanterns contrasting with the moon and the deep blue, almost grey sky…I would like to be here in winter.”
One of my favorite tales is Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Most Beloved,” recounting the life of humble and industrious Zhenechka — older, unmarried, wearer of a hearing aid and orthopedic shoes. Through her energy and good nature, however, Zhenechka’s small world is enchanted with magical moments and an everyday poetry, along with memories of a romance that never happened “at three o’clock on one prewar February afternoon” with a “gloomy, stoop-shouldered history teacher.” The teacher didn't realize that the hot tea Zenechka handed to him with extra spoonfuls of sugar was secretly full of love, and therefore no further words were exchanged and no lifetime built between the two of them.
So in essence, Chronicle Books’ St. Petersburg collection is a surely worthwhile read for Russian history and literature buffs, and for fans of good writing in general — but particularly those caught up in this Russian-like winter and longing to commiserate and escape into a parallel literary universe. Preferably while drinking hot tea, icy vodka, or both.
Posted by Meg Nola
Here comes January with its fresh white calendar pages, new resolves, new hopes, and a peck of wisdom to ponder:
- You must pray that the way will be long, full of adventures and experiences. --Constantine Peter Cavafy
- Joy is not in things; it is in us. -- Richard Wagner
- The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. -- Zeno (335 BC – 264 BC)
- Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -- Edith Wharton
- A goal without a plan is just a wish. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind. -- William James
- In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it. -- Robert Heinlein
- Drive thy business or it will drive thee. -- Benjamin Franklin
- Don't open a shop unless you like to smile. -- Chinese Proverb
- The future will be better tomorrow. -- Dan Quayle