Another epiphany rocks the word, another Christmas season ends. Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart reminds us that all is not lost in the art of our time. This year, let's all stand up and change everything, retake our culture from the vile corporations and the sick, demented people who run them.
What good are you anyway if you can't stand up to some old businessman?
— Bob Dylan
[Image by Gentile da Fabriano, just a toiler in the trenches of Renaissance art.]
FRAUD!
SEDUCTION!
RODENT INFESTATION!
. . . from Las Vegas! No taste, no shame, no problem!
Looking for something a little more Baroque?
Father Time Overcome By Love, Hope and Beauty by Simon Vouet.
Same deal, folks.
[With thanks, for the Vouet, to Tristan Forward at The New Emotional Blackmailers Handbook]
. . . salute you! Pluckiness and faithfulness never go out of style!
The tapestries depicted here, La Dame à la licorne, The Lady and the Unicorn, are part of a cycle of six, created during the 15th Century. The designs were drawn in Paris and the tapestries woven in Flanders from wool and silk. Among the greatest glories of medieval art, they now reside in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where my friend Coralie recently went to visit them. She sends this report about her reaction to them:
Je n’ai pas rendu visite à la Dame à la licorne depuis mon
adolescence. Je suis très impatiente de la retrouver. Il me faut
traverser plusieurs pièces de l’hôtel de Cluny, monter des escaliers,
avant d’accéder à la salle où elle réside. Je me demande si je la
trouverai changée. J’ai une forme d’anxiété qui envahit mon corps. Un
étroit corridor m’invite au recueillement ; je devine sa présence à
proximité. Le couloir débouche sur une immense pièce dont le sombre
m’empêche de distinguer le plafond autant que le sol dans lequel mes
pas s’évanouissent. Il me semble pénétrer l’immensité de la nuit. La
tranquillité est celle de l’infini. Le noir est tellement épais que je
ne perçois aucune présence autre que la sienne. Au milieu de cette
sphère céleste, un petit banc métallique sur lequel je me libère de mes
affaires, flotte comme par enchantement. Je tourne lentement sur
moi-même et tandis qu’elle m’enveloppe de son manteau intemporel, je
m’immerge dans son monde hypnotique.
L’inscription À mon seul désir qui surplombe la tente de la sixième tapisserie, me fige sans pensée, m’épanouissant de son mystère. Il s’entame dès lors un échange entre
nous, comme s’il se déroulait à mon insu. Puis, elle anime – en moi –
sa beauté, s’y déplie, comme en territoire conquis. Le phénomène
s’avère si naturel, qu’une résistance en serait inconcevable.
M’ennoblissant de présence initiatique, elle se fait l’hôte de mon
corps, lieu de son apparition.
Sans permettre au temps qu’il puisse se signifier, je quitte la pièce machinalement. Malgré la lumière extérieure, je porte en moi, l’empreinte de son passage. Elle vaut
tout autant. Ce sentiment véhicule une complicité, sans que les jours
qui se succèdent, ne puissent en altérer la fraîcheur. Je ne suis plus
comme avant.
[Photographs © 2009 Coralie Chappat]
Let the laughter of children ring out, let joy be unconfined, watch your back!
[With thanks once again to Golden Age Comic Book Stories.]
A beautiful, sad, sweet image by Chris Ware . . .
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1848) was the greatest of French sculptors — indeed, one of the greatest of all sculptors. His marble portrait busts represent the pinnacle of his art, with their startling realism and feeling of life, deep psychological insight and sublime treatment of the marble itself.
He did famous portraits of most of the leaders of the Enlightenment and standing before these portraits today you feel yourself in the presence of these extraordinary men — closer than even their writings bring you. Voltaire's smile, Benjamin Franklin's genial intellect, Thomas Jefferson's emotional reserve are things you experience directly though Houdon's art. If I recall correctly, the portrait above is of an actress — her dramatic expression is not Houdon's but her own.
Franklin sent Houdon to America in 1785 to make a portrait of George Washington at Mount Vernon, where the hero of the American Revolution sat for a life mask and wet clay models, which became the basis for many subsequent commissions of busts and statues of the great man. In all of them, Washington looks both severe and modest, grand and simple — he could be a teamster or a king, which I guess made him such a perfect candidate for first President of the United States. His mystery, impenetrable even by his contemporaries, remains intact in Houdon's portrait.
My friend Coralie sent me the picture of the bust at the head of this report, which I think she took in the Louvre, from her iPhone just as her plane was about to take off from Paris for her return to Geneva. She said she wanted to share it in case the plane crashed. This makes perfect sense to me. With all of Houdon's portraits, you get a feeling they might change their expression, might leave the room, at any moment. Houdon's work doesn't seem to have been made for the ages, but in the now for the now, whenever that now might be. They have the immediacy of ancient Greek sculpture, of real life coursing through stone — pure miracle.
My friend Coralie, who lives in Geneva, is making a visit to her hometown of Paris. She asked me what places in Paris I would visit if I went back there, and I said that I would very much like to see again the unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny. This morning I got a message from her and the photo above sent from her iPhone as she was standing in the presence of the tapestries.
It's not the same as being there myself, of course, and no photograph can do justice to the deep colors of the tapestry threads and the texture of their woven surfaces . . . but I still feel as though I'm seeing them again through my friend's eyes, in something very close to real time.
It's a kind of miracle, isn't it — like the survival of the tapestries themselves?
Subterranean Forces, 1926-27
Jean Béraud left us the most charming records of the boulevards and cafés of Paris during the Belle Époque. The Impressionists often treated the same subjects, but their emphasis on the surfaces of their canvases, on effects of light and color, took precedence over documentary concerns. Béraud wanted us to know how it felt to physically inhabit the places he painted. Like all academic painters, he concentrated on the drama of space, as a way of drawing us imaginatively into his images.
The painting above depicts La Pâtisserie Gloppe on the Champs Élysées in 1889. Béraud evokes the magical use of mirrors in the shop's interior, the behavior of its patrons, the bourgeois ordinariness of the scene. It is rooted in the here and now, which has become the there and then, and so oddly poignant, in a way the Impressionists rarely are. Béraud recedes into his work, creating a space for us to enter this bygone moment of a bygone age.
The image has something of the authority of a photograph and something of the intense subjectivity of the artist's desire to record just what he saw, just what he thought we might have seen if we had been with him that day in the shop, and no more.
He has created a profoundly democratic work of art, radically out of step with the neo-Romantic egocentricity of the 20th-Century modernist.
Hundreds of years from now, when historians look back at the intellectual life of the 20th Century, I think they will be struck by two extraordinary, almost inconceivable delusions, one aesthetic and one political.
In this post I'll discuss the aesthetic delusion, which involved the violent reaction against the art of the Victorian age. The disillusionment with the European political structure brought on by the madness of WWI created a sense among intellectuals that all aspects of the 19th century world had been invalidated at a stroke. Modernism in the arts arose as a response to this, attended by great glamor and energy. It was primarily reactionary — the new forms it embraced rarely had value in themselves . . . their juice derived from the simple fact that they were not Victorian, were anti-Victorian.
Most of what had made art valuable as a cultural force — as an example of virtuosity, of discipline, of social community, of faith — was simply jettisoned. In their place was substituted “attitude”, the attitude of rebellion. The fine arts of the 20th Century instantly became irrelevant to the popular mind, finding a home in the esteem of an increasingly hermetic elite, dependent on institutional support for their survival.
The irony of this was little appreciated. The academic art of the 19th Century, against which the modernists rebelled, had depended on official endorsement, but also on the approval of a wide and diverse public. The “anti-academic” art of the new, permanent “avant-garde” had no life at all apart from the patronage of museums, institutes of “higher learning” and a gallery establishment catering to the very wealthy.
The old functions of art continued to be performed in areas outside the control of these elites, in the arts of film and popular music, for example — which is why film and popular music became the most exciting and dynamic art forms of the 20th century, even as what were formerly seen as “the fine arts” went on enacting their increasingly tiresome rituals of negation, carried to absurd extremes. Painting, we would eventually be told, was about nothing but paint.
The establishment which once endorsed Victorian academic art, and by extension all traditional art, had become repulsive in the 20th Century. Those who sought to replace this art with “modern forms” became romantic. These labels acted as blinders, almost as blindfolds, until it became impossible to see that the reactionary gestures of the modernists had little content beyond the gestural, while those who toiled away in discredited or unsanctioned forms (like Mr. Armstrong, above) were creating the truly great, valuable and enduring art of their time.
In an upcoming post I'll have a look at the seminal political delusion of the 20th Century.
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.
— Matthew 22:21
Somebody didn't get the message!
You have to wonder if anybody on the extreme Christian right ever actually reads the Gospels. I personally suspect that many of them just get briefings with all the out-of-context quotes that seem to support the social and political goals they've already embraced and would embrace even if Jesus had never set foot on the earth.
Jon McNaughton, the guy who painted the image above (and whose narrative ambition I sort of admire), has depicted Jesus as a kind of President of Presidents, the über- generalissimo of the American state. This Jesus is presenting the republic with a copy of the Constitution, instead of a copy of the Sermon On the Mount, as though he's the actual author, or Holy Ghostwriter, of the document.
There's no doubt that the Constitution owes a lot to the Christian tradition, with its radical respect for the worth of each individual before God, but really — if Jesus wrote the Constitution, or even Ghostwrote it, do you think he would have left in the original clauses allowing slavery, which evaluated the worth of a slave at three-fifths the worth of a white person? A perusal of the actual Gospels would suggest otherwise, which may be one reason the extremists can't afford to peruse the actual Gospels.
We may be grateful for the Christian influence on the Constitution, but while we're at it, how about a little gratitude for the Masonic influence? Many of the Founding Fathers were Masons, and the Masonic tradition has always incorporated a radical respect for all religions. As President, George Washington, a Master Mason, the highest rank in the Fraternity of Freemasonry, met with Jewish leaders and told them that Jews would not just be tolerated in the new republic but welcomed as full citizens of it. That attitude, which is one reason America has, to an almost unprecedented degree among nations, risen above violent religious strife between its peoples, is not one which has normally characterized the Christian tradition, with its long history of virulent anti-Semitism. It is quintessentially Masonic, though, and also, one might add, most perfectly in tune with . . . the actual teachings of Jesus.
It might be good to start thinking of the Gospels as “the lost books of the Bible”, and to deal with the irony of this, since the world would probably be a better place all around if they were the only books of the Bible.
Part Two — The Case For the Defense
As I wrote in the first part of this look at Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, the film can be appreciated on one level as sheer melodrama. The tensions of the story are so well established and developed that one's attention is riveted on their inherent suspense throughout the whole four-hour length of the film. The acting, especially by Michel Piccoli and Emanuelle Béart, is very fine — nuanced but intense and alive.
The characters' understanding of what is happening to them may be facile, and it may seem to mirror the filmmakers' understanding of what is happening to them, but the dramatic dynamics of the story are sound and believable and well-observed.
But the level on which the film truly excites is the documentary. A great deal of La Belle Noiseuse simply records the process of an artist working with a nude model. Piccoli, as I say, is convincing as the artist, but much of his work is shown in close up, with the hands of a real artist creating works on paper and canvas before our eyes. All of the film's intellectual claptrap about what art is dissolves in the miracle of art coming into being in real time while we watch.
In all of these passages, Béart is naked before us, too. There is so much nudity that we cannot read any of the passages as a “nude scene” — as that conventional and usually contemptible device which presents the exposed female body as a sop to the male gaze, a titillation, a visceral punchline. We see the whole woman here, as the artist is trying to see her, not in bits and pieces, not as tits and ass, but as “the nude” — a glorification of the female form, and the female essence.
The sight transcends the erotic and becomes powerful in another way — as a symbol of the male's eternal struggle for existential gravity, part of which has always involved paying homage to, celebrating, female power.
Nudity in modern films is almost always obscene. The idea that it can sometimes be done with “body doubles”, flashing a little tit here, a little ass there, is beyond obscene — it is depraved. It doesn't just commodify women, it exposes the full cowardice of the collapsed male psyche.
If La Belle Noiseuse did nothing more than strike a blow against this depravity, take a small step towards the redemption of the female nude in art and culture, it would be an important film.
