Dali House

Vincent’s brother, Théo, took him today to see Rev Frédéric Salles, the Protestant pastor, and then got the train back to Paris, taking Gauguin with him.

Above, Southern France, showing Van Gogh’s destinations beyond Arles and, ultimately, Saint-Rémy.

On his first visit, in 1934, Salvador Dali was so happy to be in the United States (his fascist pals back in Europe were proving ruder than he’d expected) that he churned out all kinds of cheerful, delightful art.

It helped, of course, that the news media were nuts about him. He repaid their fascination by laying another of his celebrated eggs. (Yes, that’s really him in the beard and cap.)

In “Allegory of an American Christmas”, above, the egg makes a return appearance following “Illumined Pleasures”, and it’s hatching a new idea, as it would again in “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus”.

Dark clouds roil the suspense and figures gaze upward hopefully from a bleak landscape as an airplane emerges from the egg, from just about where New York sits. Dali was afraid of flying, so perhaps he had in mind Santa’s airborne arrival.

Eight years later he was back in the spirit. “Christmas” is much more traditional, possibly overly so. The trees are decked and baubles dangle from a classic Dalinean archway in an almost mirror image, accented with the shadow of an angel and a pair of buttressed columns with noses and lips that could almost by harps.

Ths was, after all, about the same time Dali was clowning around with Harpo Marx. Maybe this was the Christmas card Sal sent him.

They say that when you master Photoshop, you go out and buy yourself a special microscope that your camera latches onto so it can take pictures like this.

This is soap, specifically “micro-flow pattern in thinning soap film”, an image that has won Dr Tsutomu Seimiya of Tokyo Metropolitan University an honorable mention in this year’s Nikon Small World competition.

“Portrait of Barker Fairley”, done in 1920 by Frederick Varley of the Group of Seven, now hanging at the National Gallery of Canada.

Barker Fairley’s picture of the Group of Seven’s AY Jackson from 1939, now at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

I remember seeing an exhibition of paintings by Barker Fairley some 30 years ago and being positively unimpressed. They were a bleak, washed-out lot. Renewing contact recently with John and Gisela Sommer, at whose Gallery House Sol in smalltown Canada the show was held, prompted me to have another look.

And now I think I see the point.

“Francis Sparshott”, 1957: Fairley depicts his colleague at the University of Toronto, the author of “The Structure of Aesthetics”.

There’s something quite moving in the gaunt portraits and sparse landscapes, particularly the latter. Rather than washed-out, the scenes now seem blindingly bright to me. I wonder, too, if he was consciously stripping away the utensils of the scenery so that we could see the countryside fundamentally naked.

“Dale Fields”, 1975

“People keep asking me if painting is hard work,” he once said. “Painting isn’t work. Painting is making decisions. I make decisions, nothing more.”

There’s an interesting political sidebar to Fairley’s career as well: he and his first wife Margaret Adele were once ridden out of the USA on a rail, their reputations tarred and the Canadian government in no mood to help them remove the feathers.

Fairley, who was born a headmaster’s son in Britain in 1887 — in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in fact, just down the road from my hatchling nest in Lancashire — but who spent most of his life in Canada, was far better known in his time as one of the world’s foremost authorities on German literary beacons like Goethe. He was an academic through and through, a literary and art critic, author of many books, and only then, it seems, a painter.

It was well after he brought his scholarship to the German department at the University of Toronto that Fairley was prodded to take up a brush by one of his former students, Robert Finch, himself a painter as well as a poet.

He couldn’t have needed too much encouragement. By then he’d encountered all of the Group of Seven, though he’d missed out on Tom Thomson, their spiritual heart.

“I knew them all,” he told an interviewer. “I met Jimmie [JEH] MacDonald in the fall of 1917. I never met Tom Thomson, he had died a few months before.”

Fairley began by rendering landscapes in watercolour but, lamenting that “Canada has no tradition of portraits, no tradition of freely painted faces”, soon switched to the human physiognomy in oil (without ever abandoning landscapes).

“Cathy Edmonton”, undated

“Ought not the painting of humanity … draw ahead of the landscape [and] take priority over it?” he wrote in 1939. “Ought it not do so in any age, and especially in this age of intense human conflict and suffering and innovation? There is everything in the world about us, the world of today, to suggest that the luxury of dwelling on empty landscapes is likely to recede in men’s minds and the urgent human issues to assert themselves with growing force.” See the rest.

Unless you really want to talk about Jackson Pollock some more, we don’t do “fight club” at Dali House — our boys are mostly the lovin’ type. Some of them get carried away with it, like JW “Bosom Buddy” Godward and Louis “The Ladies’ Man” Eilshemius, and this curious little Casanova here, Félicien Rops.

Though he wrestled with inner conflicts, Rops was gleeful in celebrating the female, and had as his resolute motto “No desire to be otherwise”.

His reputation precedes him, quite a long distance actually, from the pages of history: He’s been dead 110 years and people are still keen as hell to hear about his adventures.

“He never drew the nude but, rather, like Manet in ‘Olympia’, naked women,” Sotheby’s said enigmatically in its catalogue notes for last month’s European paintings sale in London, at which it was flogging the Rops “masterpiece” shown above — “Pornokrates”, also known as “Woman with a Pig” — for up to £350,000 … or more! (It’s “only” watercolour and pastel.)

Whatever term you use for bare flesh, Rops was a connoisseur, a nighthawking whirlwind of sketches and etches, many bags full. “I am Jack the Ripper!” he exclaimed of his own prolific output.

Ah, but he did rip well. Ensor, Munch, Beardsley and even Rodin thought he was the black cat’s meow and cheered every midnight howl from the leading devil of “Dark Symbolism”. Deliberately shocking to the lecherous edge of perversity, he was actually quite refined and a barrel of laughs, if occasionally struck by melancholy at the lash of women’s whimsy.

“The love of women, like Pandora’s Box,” he wrote, “contains all the grief of life, but they are enveloped in such luminous golden spangles, they are so brilliantly coloured and have such a perfume, that it is never necessary to repent for having opened it.”

Félicien Rops (1833-98) was born in Namur, Belgium, the son of an industrialist. Soon enough the Catholic Church surgically implanted the sacramental coal in his heart that spoils all Catholics’ fun for the rest of their lives. See the rest.