Dali House

Happy Halloween from Edvard Munch and his “Vampire”, from 1894. Actually, Munch didn’t think he was painting a scene from Bram Stoker. He told his pal Adolf Paul, who’d just dropped in to his Berlin studio, to kneel down next to his red-haired model and rest his head against her. She bent down and pressed her lips to his neck.

Munch titled the finished piece “Love and Pain”, because it was about love’s power struggle, and it was one of his series on love (”The Voice” and “The Kiss” being others) that he was compiling for his sweeping “Frieze of Life” masterwork.

But when he showed this one in public, the Polish poet Stansilaw Przybyszeski, an anarchist and, some thought, an occultist, swore he saw a vampire.

“A broken man,” he reckoned, “rolling about in the bottomless pit, weakly, powerlessly, rejoicing in the fact that he can roll about as weakly as a stone … He cannot free himself from the pain, and the woman will always be sitting there, forever biting with a thousand vipers’ tongues.”

Whew!

They were keen in those days on stories about unleashed female libido. Munch came up with something a little more genteel, though the colours are rather titillating.

It’s “just a woman kissing a man on the neck”, he insisted, and when it went on show as part of “The Frieze of Life” in 1918, he called it “A Woman Kissing the Back of a Man’s Neck”. But the public wanted a vampire, and that’s inevitably what they got.

He did four versions. One is in Gothenburg’s Museum of Art, two others at the Munch-Museet in Olso, and this one stayed in private hands. Sotheby’s is selling it on Monday as part of its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. How much? That’s probably the scariest part — the catalogue simply says prospective buyers can ask.

THIS JUST IN: Munch’s “Vampire” sold for $38 million. Yes, gulp!

Next, a really horror story, having to do with Andy Warhol’s “Dracula” from 1981, not to be confused with “Andy Warhol’s Dracula”, his oddball 1974 film. Who’s the bloke at the bottom right? His model, as seen in Andy’s Polaroid snap.

Now, according to the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, a unit of the US government formed in 1868 by President Ulysses S Grant to combat the scourge of vampirism flooding America with the influx of European immigrants (300,000 by the turn of that century), Warhol wasn’t shot by Valerie Solanis on June 3, 1968. No, not at all. See the rest.

Strange things happen all the time on northern England’s Lancashire moors, and here to keep the Pendle witches company is “The Singing Ringing Tree”, a musical sculpture in tuned, galvanised-steel pipes that twists and howls in the wind.

It brings to mind the wind organ that Dali wanted to build on a hill in Quermanco, Spain. Still waiting for that one to materialise. It might yet.

The resident curlews and merlins must wonder what to make of their moaning new neighbour, a panopticon devised by the London duo Tonlin Liu — Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, who met in Hong Kong and set about “dismantling current mythology and inventing their own”, in Austria, Indonesia and here in Thailand, as well as in England and Hong Kong, as it says on their website.

The Singing Tree was officially unveiled at the end of 2006 atop Crown Point, south of Burnley, where I was born. The Cliviger wind turbines are whirling far to the east, and to the north is Pendle Hill with its famous nick.

See the rest.

MC Escher portraying the Loch Ness monster? I hadn’t heard about this until Dali House visitor Jessy made a comment on my Escher biography post, but the work in question was supposedly discovered in 2007.

A quick graze on Google turns up a very suspicious meme, though: a very rough-English message repeated in various online forums — without any proper debate and rarely having anything to do with the subject matter to which it’s attached. Why don’t the webmasters shave this stuff off if it’s completely beside the point? They don’t so it’s replicated all over the place.

In fact this whole thing may be a giant hoax. The artwork in question certainly lacks Escher’s usual precision, not to mention draughting skills.

In the case of Dali House, Jessy provided links to a pair of videos of newscasts and a downloadable PDF of the February 2007 Giornale di Polizia, in which the mayor of Rome is quizzed about the authenticity of “Black Man Without a Face”, then in the possession of the city’s Supervisor of Police.

All of the linked material is in Italian, and Babelfish is, as usual, as unhelpful as possible with the translation.

There’s talk of a “perverse game” and “emotional repercussions”, and speculation about the “fact” that the artwork was found in the southern town of Volturara Irpina, which evidently has its own underwater monster, based on a legend that someone named Gesio killed a dragon hidden in the lake. The storyteller goes on about making the town wealthy through the enticement of flute music, but I can’t follow it at all.

“You leave me to say,” concludes the mayor, “that the monster of Loch Ness has crossed the centre of the earth in order to reach from the famous Scottish lake to the disowned lake of Volturara Irpina.” From the shore of the latter, the serpent is beckoned by the flautist. See the rest.

“Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret)”, December 1888

Vincent has a guest, Paul Gauguin, who he knows from Paris. They met last autumn and Vincent’s been begging him to come and help him launch his Studio of the South. Paul is quite a character, full of stories of his travels.

He grew up in Peru and has been to the Caribbean. He was in the merchant marine and worked as a stockbroker before he decided to become an artist, rather late in life, just like Vincent.

They get along famously, even when they argue about the “right” way to paint. Full of theories, both of them. Gauguin wants poor old Vincent to try working from memory instead of always having a life subject or a model in front of him. Maybe Vincent doesn’t have the same kind of memories as Paul.

“Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase”, December 1888

“Red Vineyards of Arles”

Van Gogh is remembered with sympathy as having sold only one painting during his lifetime, and it’s widely believed that that painting was “The Red Vineyards”. This was among the works he contributed to the 1890 exhibition staged by the Belgian avant-garde group Les Vingt in Brussels, where it was purchased for 400 francs by the host group’s own Anna Boch, the sister of Vincent’s painter friend Eugène Boch, whom he had depicted in “Le Peintre aux Étoiles” two years earlier.

It has been noted, however, that Theo Van Gogh was informed in late 1888 that a London art dealer had sold one of Vincent’s self-portraits, although this sale has never been corroborated. Another art expert has also suggested that “The Red Vineyard” was not sold until the year after Van Gogh’s death.

Thousands of sandpipers huddle against the spring chill in Sarah Palin’s thawing home state. Arthur Morris took this picture in the Alaskan fishing town of Cordova. It’s a finalist in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition run by Britain’s Natural History Museum.

Click the pic to see the full version.