Dali House

“Arrival of the American ambassador in Peking”

The terrific Daumier Register recently issued an alert about a small but dazzling online collection of drawings of China by old Honoré with incisive commentary by a Chinese collector, and by “incisive”, I mean biting.

Montreal physician Pei-Yuan Han reckoned something else could be added to the typically dusty captions on Daumier’s series “En Chine”, published between 1848 and 1860. Dr Han’s website appends a choice line or two putting the drawing in a clear historical context.

“What are the others saying, that this pigtail of the Chinese serves no purpose? For swimming lessons, it’s invaluable.”

Daumier made fun of everyone involved in those greedy colonial days, the British, French Americans and the Chinese too.

Han also provides a link to a jolting letter that Victor Hugo wrote in late 1861 to a Captain Butler regarding the destruction of the Summer Palace in Peking by troops jointly serving Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon.

Butler had asked for the author’s opinion and he got it: the sack of the palace, “a wonder of the world”, was hardly a “glorious victory” for the Europeans. Hugo had his own skewed perspective, but he was mostly right.

“Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art …

“Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building …

“Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it … This wonder has disappeared … See the rest.

Rogier van der Weyden was supposedly the most famous painter in Europe when he died half a millennium ago, but today you can only see works attributed to him with caution. No one’s actually sure if anything still survives from the brush of the man whose only near rival was Jan van Eyck, a far more familiar name now.

Part of “The Last Judgement”.

Scholars puzzle over van der Weyden (ca 1400-64) and what he got up to. He’s chronicled, in books that have withstood wars, under his French name, “Rogier de le Pasture”, but so is Maistre Rogier de le Pasture, in whose honour the city of Tournai “offered wine” in the spring of 1427. And so is Rogelet de le Pasture, who began an art apprenticeship the following year.

These appear to be two (or more) different pastoral Rogers, and that’s just the beginning of the confusion. To read the bomb-scarred documents of antiquity, this man became a master painter before he learned to paint, and the wine tribute might have been a toast on his graduation from school.

Tournai was the birthplace of Rogier de le Pasture, as van der Weyden was originally known, the son of a master knife-maker. He married a Brussels shoemaker’s daughter and they had four children, one of whom became a monk.

By 1436 Rogier was Brussels’ official painter, quite an honour given that the city was the primary turf of the posh patrons of culture the Dukes of Burgundy, and had transliterated his name into the Dutch Rogier van der Weyden.

He was soon wealthy with commissions, both royal and religious and, in the holy year 1450, may have travelled to Rome, where jobs awaited for the Estes and Medicis and the Duchess of Milan. This is “Portrait of a Woman”, and could be his wife.

His fame meant that people wrote down the titles of his best-known paintings, but none of these works has survived beyond that. Four huge panels he decorated at the Brussels Town Hall, which deeply moved Albrecht Dürer when he saw them, went up in smoke in the French bombardment of the city in 1695.

The art of Rogier van der Weyden that did survive is magnificent — assuming it’s really his work. See the rest.

In 1972 German painter Klaus Fussmann got himself a summer studio near the Baltic Sea, a website tells me. “There he found what was missing in Berlin: the splendour of nature in its different stages of evolution.”

I would love to know more about “Self-Portrait in Mirror with Snow”, which was painted more than a dozen years after the city boy inserted himself into “the splendour of nature”. Clearly winters in Berlin didn’t work for him.

“Flowers and Landscapes” was the telling title of the exhibition that website was touting. To be sure, there’s not much I like among the works of Fussmann, who’s now about 71.

Vividly coloured scenery predominates, without the thoughtful detail of the old impressionists and, to me, rather soulless when expressionism is applied.

But when he got his Francis Bacon mojo working, he really had (has?) something going. Below, “Portrait of Hella K — Tuch”.

German pavement artist Edgar Mueller says he was inspired by Britain’s Julian Beever, whose unnervingly temporary chalk-on-concrete paintings have appeared at Dali House several times (starting here), but it looks to me like the mentor has been surpassed by the protegé.

I don’t know enough about Polish history and culture to speculate what exactly is being announced to Jacek Malczewski in this self-portrait from just over a century ago, subtitled “The Anunciation”.

Possibly the angel is declaring that it’s time he dropped the straightforward approach in depicting his subjects and tried a little symbolism, something to feed the subconscious mind, and thus the spirit, as well as the eyes and heart.

He looks a little dubious in this picture, but Malczewski (1854-1929) got the message. In fact this self-portrait — he was his own favourite subject and this is one in a constant, lifelong procession — is rife with symbolism.

Hail the new king of Polish modernism. And look what’s happening in these vast canvases.

“Vicious Circle”, 1897

“Vicious Circle”, detail

In “Melancholia”, from 1894, the pageant of history reels and rollicks from the artist’s easel on the left to reach the window on the far right in the form of a lone, dark and rather sinister figure, pondering a leap into an unknown fate.

Below are several details from the same painting.

See the rest.