Dali House

My sister had the wonderful taste to send me a birthday card some years back that featured this classic 1937 photograph by Ansel Adams. Taken at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, it shows Orville Cox and Georgia O’Keeffe, who looks for all the world like character from one of Carlos Castaneda’s metaphyical journeys.

I’ve tinted the black-and-white original, which was among those issued by the Ansel Adams estate during the ’90s and it’s widely available online now, with one website offering a mounted print signed by Adams for between $15,000 and $18,000. (You can get a knock-off poster for $12.)

Adams had taken one frame of O’Keeffe and Cox conversing, but Cox was blocking her, so he knelt down and got this shot. Over the years lots of people imagined there was something flirtatious in Georgia’s gaze. Henri Cartier-Bresson saw the picture for what it really was: simply one of those “decisive moments” when a photographer gets everything right.

Adams’ career-making US government commission to photograph the national parks was still four years away when his pal David Hunter McAlpin organised a month-long camping tour of the Southwest for him, O’Keeffe and McAlpin’s cousins Godfrey and Helen Rockefeller. Cox, their guide and interpreter, was the head wrangler at Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu, New Mexico, which is currently more about soul than sagebrush.

O’Keeffe, originally a farmgirl from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, spent half a century in and around Ghost Ranch, and that’s where her ashes were scattered after she died in 1986. She painted flat-topped Mount Pedernal at its southern boundary numerous times. “It’s my private mountain,” she said. “God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it.”

Below is “Datura and Pedernal” from 1940.

See the rest.

This is a muddle of Salvador Dali clips I sewed together to the accompaniment of British ska band Madness performing “Madness” live. Included are glimpses of Dali’s TV ads, Mike Wallace pitching cigarettes, the scenes from Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” and more. It’s on the insane side, but mercifully brief.

As a smalltown boy I had few chances to meet working artists, but being a smalltown newspaper reporter brought some encounters. Frank Black I’ve invited into Dali House several times, and Robert Bateman has been for a visit. Another artist of my acquaintance was Josef Drenters, a sculptor whose biggest project, it might be said, was giving new life to a near-dead century-old building.

This was the Rockwood Academy in Rockwood, Ontario, a village not far from my hometown. I’m pleased to see that the academy has its own page at Wikipedia, one of the modern age’s rewards for being rich in history.

That history began in 1850 when William Wetherald bequeathed rigid, Quaker-style private tutoring upon young lads who roomed in the vast building, three storeys and all massive, locally cut stone. Among the alumni were JJ Hill, who went on to make a fortune building railways, Sir Adam Beck, who pioneered the use of hydroelectric power, and Arthur Sturgis Hardy, who served as Ontario’s premier. Below is a very old photo of the rear of the academy.

By 1883 the provincial government’s own colleges were good enough to put the Rockwood Academy out of business. The school building pretty much haunted the village for the next eight decades, until Josef Drenters bought it in 1960 and got to work restoring it, as well as a log barn and chapel on the property.

In his remaining 23 years, Drenters drew on his own education in a seminary and the skills he learned in all sorts of tough manual jobs to make the academy a living place once again. The lofty-sounding website RockwoodHeaven.com wondered if the local gossip might be true — that Drenters was Headmaster Wetherald reincarnated to save the building from damnation. See the rest.

Another piece from the Sotheby’s auctions of Russian art on June 10 and 12, and it’s more “Sots art”, the quasi-Soviet version of pop art. This is the 1991 silkscreen “Gorby”, offered for £4,000 to £6,000, by Alexander Kosolapov, who’s about 65 years old now.

Hard to say whether Gorbachev’s lipstick and eyeliner are meant to denigrate his dismantling of the Soviet Union or not, but it’s still as much a nod to stoic Kremlin portraits as it is to Warhol.

This is Émile Bernard chipping his name into the granite of 20th-century art history, a lovely painting by any measure, “Le Repos a Pont-Aven”, which also shares the title “Le Gardeuse d’Oies”. Here the guardian of the geese is a Breton lass recalled from his hike around Normandy, possibly Émile’s sister Madeleine.

The Grimms’ tale of a lost princess destined to mind geese and pine for her royal fiance, “The Goose Girl” had been delightening readers since 1815, though here, eight decades later — and in Camille Pissarro’s slightly earlier etching, seen below — I can’t help thinking that Leda and her swan aren’t making discreet appearances. See this post.

The main title of Bernard’s version is intriguing. Much has been made of his bravery in breaking with Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School and going “beyond modernity and present-day reality”, as he put it, in pursuit of the stark post-impressionist vista that’s known rather weightily as pictorial symbolism. “What I wanted to do was create a style for our age,” he wrote.

In fact, what didn’t become abstract became merely decorative.

Was Bernard putting Pont-Aven “at rest”, or was he putting it “to rest”? Without an answer, I fail to see any bravery in his retrograde reclamation of the Renaissance and the classics, and I wonder if the lack of clear inspiration in this painting had anything to do with the fact that it raised “only” $301,000 at Sotheby’s New York on May 8 when the seller was hoping for between $400,000 and $600,000. See the rest.