Dali House

“Best of Friends” by Emile Vernon, an oil on canvas from 1917. One doesn’t know what to say.

Artists have been coming up with scary monsters since well before Bosch, but somehow it fell to Emmanuel Frémiet to provide the image that scarred us most deeply, to such a depth in fact that we will happily go see as many “King King” remakes as Hollywood can produce, just to make sure to giant ape is still safely contained on celluloid.

This is “The Nightmare” by Johann Heinrich (Henry) Fuseli, which formed a blueprint for many a vampire tale to come. It was painted in 1781, many decades before Frémiet moulded his monkey. There are numerous, frightening beauty-and-the-beast images like this in the galleries of our collective imagination; Frémiet’s model doesn’t even look that scary. Why all the attention?

Frémiet (1824-1910), Paris-born to an artsy family, was one of those guys who filled museums and army barracks with statues of horses wearing armour. He was good at animals and they were good to him. It sure beat the drudgery of lithography, which is where he started out, and was definitely an improvement on being the city morgue’s official painter. He was used to bodies in bits and pieces at any rate: He and Rousseau fought elbow duels at the Jardin de Plantes — the zoological gardens — doing sketches of flora and fauna living and dead, and Emmanuel occasionally helped dissect the critters that died.

In 1843 he sent his portrait of a gazelle to the Paris Salon and became a star overnight. Within a few years his “Wounded Bear” and “Wounded Dog” were in the Luxembourg Museum, and Frémiet spent most of the ’50s churning out military statuettes for Napoleon III. At the Place des Pyramides, just around the corner from the Louvre, you can see his equestrian statue of Joan of Arc from 1889 (his own replacement for his 1874 original). His monuments are all over Paris, in fact.

But it was “Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman” of 1887 that brought the glory: a medal of honour from the Salon for Frémiet, who was by now artist-in-residence at the Museum of Natural History. This came close to being laughably ironic, since he’d sent them virtually the exact same sculpture 30 years earlier, and the judges’ ruling was somewhere between merde and “Yikes!”

Part of the problem in 1859 was artistic quality, but mostly it was because the Salon didn’t want to freak people out. First of all, Darwin had just issued his challenge to the world order, “The Origin of the Species”, and folks were skittish about meeting the new relatives. And new they were, because second of all, the gorilla had only been discovered 12 years earlier (by white people, that is), and it was assumed to be a ferocious carnivore, and quite capable of running off with your wife. See the rest.

One of the best online resources providing an overview of the seriously eclectic art happening in Thailand is that of theRama IX Art Museum on Bangkok’s Yaowaraj Road, though even it’s still got a ways to go to approach definitiveness. There is good linkage with other galleries, though, including two over on Silom Road that specialise in “emerging artists”.

There’s an elastic term for you. At what point in his career does an artist stop “emerging” and arrive at where he supposedly wants to be/ ought to be? With his first big sale? His first write-up in the paper? When his name is in lights on Broadway?

Anyway, I’ll leave it to the dealers to decide when a caterpillar’s become a butterfly, though this facet of time’s passing is woven into the current art of a kingdom whose people proudly remember their quietly contemplative ancestral ways while rushing headlong into the loudly wired future. The country’s best-known artists fret grievously, and those not still shouting warnings from the gate look about for avenues of retreat.

La Lanta Fine Art and the Thivabu Gallery both have lots of contemporary Asian painting, sculpture, photography and drawing and do alright selling prints, frames and decorative notebooks. On this page is a cursory survey of paintings by some of their featured Thai artists, many originals selling for under $2,000.

At the Thivabu (the name is an amalgam of Thailand, Vietnam and Burma), Jitagarn Kaewtinkoy from Suphan Buri strikes me as one of the more unusual creative talents. That’s “Three Faces” at the top of this post and “Mr President” here. The cartoonist’s sensibility betrays his age, 28, but he’s got a ferocious satiric streak and a sharp eye for character. Bush isn’t the only politician who need worry. See the rest.

“Autumn in the Laurentians” by Henrietta Mabel May

Ah, feisty women painters, and they called themselves the Beaver Hall Gang. Well, Beaver Hall Group, actually, Beaver Hall Hill being a street in downtown Montreal where they had a studio at #305 during the 1920s. Most had studed at a local Art Association school that became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where William Brymner taught them to go with modern art, and they did.

“Beaver Hall Hill” by Kathleen Morris, 1936 — check the same view on Google Earth below.

Originally there were more men than women in the group — 11 to eight — and the boss was AY Jackson, another Quebecois who was also running with the Group of Seven. Edwin Holgate was involved too. But the girls were serious and not about to be tossed off as weekend decorators. When the original outfit folded after just two years, the women strived onward as a mutually supportive unit, gradually attracting more of the sisterhood and some of them exhibiting with the Group of Seven both at home and in the States and England.

“Joseph and Marie-Louise” by Sarah Robertson, from about 1930

The best-known members went down in history as the “Final Nine”: Nora Collyer, Prudence Heward, Mabel Lockerby, Henrietta Mabel May, Kathleen Morris, Lilias Torrance Newton, Sarah Robertson, Anne Savage and Ethel Seath. These artists made a go of the struggle, and ultimately — it took a lifetime and more — they came out on top. See the rest.

If necessity was one of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, then poverty must have been its wetnurse and greed the recurring colic that made it bawl all the time. Or something like that. You see, it’s just like the late American economist Milton Friedman said: “The problem of social organisation is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. Capitalism is that kind of a system.”

That’s why Dorseyland is going into retail. We’re selling stuff, and we’re going to earn millions. Listings are imminent on all the stock markets of this big old globalised world and Forbes magazine has been alerted.

If flogging Dorseyland and Dali House T-shirts, coffee mugs and other junk places our little blog archipelago in moral peril, it’s not like we didn’t weigh out the pros and cons. To the 18th-century Scottish economist David Hume, greed was the “spur of industry”. To the still-living English liberal politico Matthew Green, it’s “the sphincter of the heart”. Well, by gosh, we’re going to find out who was right!

“The point,” asserts Donald Trump, wealthy president of the Hair Club for Men and Miss Universe Pageant Inc, “is that you can’t be too greedy.”

Now GO BUY OUR STUFF.