Dali House

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The Catholic Church is such an easy target. Fish in a barrel. As a recovering Catholic, I knoweth how easy it is.

So there I was in a corner, losing still more remnants of my religion while reading Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and I learned to my shock — I must have been in the toilet at the time — that Pope Benedict LMXCCVIIXI jettisoned Limbo last year!

Pardon me while I temporarily fill Dali House with fumes. I’ll soften the tirade with beautful art as I go along: These are all great paintings of Jesus visiting Limbo. Well, not all of them — you can tell which ones I did.

“Christ in Limbo” by Agnolo Bronzino, 1552

Admittedly the Limbo that’s now been stricken from the faith is limbus infantium — the Limbo where babies that died before they could be baptised supposedly had to spend eternity — whereas the preferred subject matter for artists down the centuries has been limbus patrum, the Limbo of the Fathers — that is, all the good guys who ought to have gone to heaven but couldn’t because they died, you know, before Jesus was born!

(There’s a sign at the door: “You don’t know Jesus, you don’t get in.”)

But still, if Baby Limbo didn’t actually exist, it’s just a matter of time before Born Too Early Limbo vanishes. And then what are we supposed to make of these paintings?

“Christ in Limbo” by Paul Cezanne

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I had to look it up to make sure it was true, and yes, all the big papers carried a story about the abolishment of the Catholic Church’s “policy” on Limbo. One or two asked rhetorically, “Is Purgatory next?” but for the most part there it was, a bald fact all by itself:

An international commission of theologians set up by the Vatican had advised the pope to dump the idea. It was headed by William Levada, who as archbishop of San Francisco was slagged for blocking the release of documents about priests buggering parishioners, then in 2006 became the first Cardinal named by the new pope, and then succeeded the new pope as chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“Christ in Limbo” by Albrecht Durer

How can the Vatican pull this off? By using a WMD-class rationale: Limbo was never official Church policy — it was just a “hypothesis”. See the rest.

Dali aficionado Paul Chimera, who served as publicity director for the original US Dali Museum in Beachwood, Ohio, before it moved to Florida and who’s also a member of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, has launched a website dedicated to the previously unseen works of art he’s helped bring into the public view in Buffalo, New York.

Click here to visit Dali Catalog. The link also appears in the “Call for Help” menu on the left.

In a startling revelation a couple of months ago, the widow and daughters of the late Dr Edmund Klein, a skin-cancer expert who apparently treated Dali in the 1970s for some form of a skin disorder — quite possibly cancer — unveiled 15 original, unknown Dali drawings and a sculpture that had been stored in a Buffalo bank vault.

Dali preferred to pay for professional services in his most readily available — and valuable — currency: his own art. After his manager contacted Dr Klein in 1972, the dermatologist visited Dali several times at the St Regis Hotel in New York and sometimes at the Dali homestead in Cadaques, Spain, as well.

Klein, who died in 1999, was paid with the sketches and a sculpture, all personally inscribed to him, with what Mrs Klein described as “a delightful angel theme running throughout most, because Dali told my husband he considered him his ‘guardian angel’ for the medical help and advice he gave him”.

A Buffalo-based journalist, Chimera, pictured here, handled the introduction and other text for a catalogue of the Klein collection, which is now on sale at his website for $21.99. The site features a video clip of the local news broadcast announcing the artwork’s reappearance.

As well as Dali’s angel on the cover, the works include nods to favoured themes like the DNA molecule and Don Quixote and an original sculpture with Dali’s handwritten authentification certificate.

For now, the art pieces have been returned to the vault, awaiting a decision on their final disposition.

Chimera says Dali initially contacted Klein after hearing that the skin specialist had received the Albert Lasker Award. America’s foremost medical prize. “I think Dr Klein probably treated Dali for a form of skin cancer,” he adds.

Frank Black’s “Spring Thaw” also appears in this post.

Frank Black, I’m pleased to say, has become a hometown mainstay for Dali House. His name’s in the menu palette on the left, and this my fourth post involving him.

This time it’s a glimpse of the February 1980 exhibition at Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, the small burg in southern Ontario, Canada, where Black (1894-1988) spent his last two decades or so, and where I grew up.

Frank and his wife at the opening of his retrospective at the Halton Hills Arts and Cultural Centre in June 1982.

“By the Magnetawan”, from 1948

A wish came true when a couple in that area came across one of the posts and brought it to the attention of House Sol’s proprietors, the remarkable John and Gisele Sommer. The print shown here, “Sol Duo — John and Gisela Sommer” by Edward Schleimer, comes from the website of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph, Ontario, where there’s a profile of the couple.

The Sommerses weren’t themselves online, I soon found out, and for good reason, related directly to their emigration to Canada from East Germany in the 1950s.

John has since written to me by regular mail:

“With the experience of the years 1933-1945 behind us, with the loss of our parents’ possessions, and our flight to the West, eventually finding in Canada a new home, we have tried to live according to our convictions, which means no TV, no car, nothing that could prevent us from constantly educating ourselves by reading and travelling, and studying mankind’s history and finding the crossroads where we took the wrong turns.”

John and Gisela forwarded the photos on this page, taken at Frank Black’s 1980 exhibition. You see Frank seated in a chair while John McDonald, an arts-minded council member of the local municipality, Halton Hills, formally opens the show. And in another shot, hey, that’s me on the far right! Meanwhile Frank’s paintings, big and small, fill the walls.

The Sommers opened House Sol in 1962, and for four decades it drew a steady stream of patrons from Toronto, 40 miles away (a lovely weekend drive), and around the area. Among the many artists whose works they exhibited were Harold Town of Painters 11 (see the Dali House post), Tony Urquhart of the Heart of London group, Ken Danby, Charlotte Brainerd, Yosef and Andreas Drenters, with whom the Sommerses were very close, and Barker Fairley, the British-born painter who championed the Group of Seven.
See the rest.

Sotheby’s sale “19th-Century European Art including The Orientalist” coming up in New York on October 23 has all the usual suspects among the European painters who fuelled European imaginations about what the Middle East was like in the 19th century.

A Courbet seaside and interior, a Delacroix sketch, some Corot landscapes and many other fine works are up for auction along with some almighty trash, like Carl Reichert and Émile Munier’s patented kitsch.

Bouguereau, Godward and Gerome are there too, with the last bringing along a vast panoply of his “Arabia or Bust” colleagues exotifying the souks and veiled dancers, and look at some of the prices! Fred Ross and the boys at the Art Renewal Center, where these artists are housed in plush surroundings, fed grapes by their devotees, must be rubbing their hands with glee.

Best of the bunch, I think, is the one above, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Le Barde Noir”, which Dr Emily M Weeks says in the auction catalogue is “one of only two works not in a prominent museum collection”. The Athenaeum, the London literary magazine, was knocked out by the composition, she adds, noting “the famously saturated colours, the seemingly impossible level of detail”.

The shrouded figure has been identified as “a Nubian musician” because of his East African bowl lyre, Weeks writes, but is likely a model Gérôme hired in Paris, “long after his Middle Eastern travels were over”.

The sword and slippers were perhaps already in the studio, since they reappear in many of his other paintings, and she thinks the tiled wall was rendered from a photograph (in inaccurate colours), while the carpet “seems a product of the artist’s imagination”.

No one cared; his work was by then in many wealthy homes, particularly in Britain, where he had moved in 1870 during the siege of Paris and remained for a year, using a studio at 17 Southampton Street in London, often employing expatriate Italians as models, and there began his series of Turkish bath paintings. See the rest.

Salvador Dali’s “L’Ouroboros”

From the pedant’s encyclopaedia comes the revelation that Jesus and his apostles had more than bread and wine as appetisers at the Last Supper, followed by a main course of Christ’s body and blood.

Actually the news (olds?) came via Britain’s Daily Mail earlier this month: Leonardo da Vinci decided that the Last Supper menu ought to have included eel with orange slices.

The newspaper cited an interview in Gastronomica magazine in which art historian John Varriano claimed that a 1997 restoration of Leonardo’s iconic painting showed these delicacies — “very fashionable in the 1400s” — on the table.

And besides, Varriano said, his research on Leonardo found that he too was an eel connoisseur.

Below is an actual postcard of the actual “Last Supper” purchased in Milan, the actual city where Leo’s actual painting actually is.

It was given to me just as the Daily Mail was making its “Christ Menu Shock!” announcement by my colleague Veena Thoopkrajae, who had just returned from an actual trip to Milan and seen the actual masterpiece.