Dali House

One hundred years ago Amedeo Modigliani painted “Beggar Woman”. He’d only been in Paris a short time and had done his share of scrounging too.

Seen up close, the oil looks as though it’s gone begging as well, which won’t sit will with collectors, who have of late been willing to part with a routine $6 million for a Modigliani (in good condition) and as much as $30 million if it’s really got something to say for itself.

Don’t expect “Beggar Woman” to climb that social ladder, but surely she’s got something to say behind the scars of a century’s neglect.

Modigliani turned 25 in 1909, but he was still a poke-about adolescent in Paris, fresh off the train just three years before. He still hadn’t found his way out of the sticky goo of bohemian chaos, swapping Toulouse-Lautrec for Cezanne and then being talked into Africanesque chisel-work.

The son of a money-changer who’d lost all his money, sickly since childhood, fond of hashish, in 1906 Modigliani nevertheless had gusto to go, and rolled up in Montmartre spewing lines from Nietzsche, Dante and Lautreamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror”, and wondering why the great Picasso dressed like a junkman.

He squatted in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a real dump, but got a nice studio in Rue Caulaincourt and tried to maintain a semblance of Venetian poshness. Fine clothes. Clean fingernails. Then he went nuts.

By 1909 the studio was a shambles, and Modigliani had shredded his old paintings and couldn’t be trusted with the new ones. He’d get drunk at parties and then get naked, afloat on absinthe and hash. Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Apollinaire and Cocteau tried not to look.

Ah, but that’s what made him a genius, said the art critic Andre Salmon, not the first and certainly not the last to sanction stimulants as the stepping stones to creative transcendence. Had Salmon met Rimbaud, do you suppose? See the rest.

Dali House was listed last December among the “100 Must-see Art Blogs” at ArtCareer.net (under “art history” at #78). See the listings here and my post about it here.

And now this site has been included in the “50 Best Blogs for Art History Buffs” at OnlineCollege.com.

It all boils down to traffic stats from Google, but it’s another feather in the fedora regardless. I collect feathers.

This new list offers “the best blogs about art history for students, professors or enthusiasts”, listing “general” subject matter through #21 and “niche” specialists from there, with Dali House at #31.

I thanked OnlineCollege sincerely, but I had to point out that Dali House isn’t a “niche” blog about Salvador Dali, as it states in its recommendation. It’s about a much larger swath of art, of course.

The Salvador niche is occupied by my other art blog, Dali Planet, but alas that one’s still too young to be showing up on Google’s hit parade. Hopes are higher than its current ranking.

How many life-enhancing stories lie beneath the pavement of parking lots, unknown to the masses as they draw the keys from the ignition and rush off to the shops? A carpark in Stalingrad hides the site of the remarkable statue in the photo above, one that was familiar to the World War II generation and keeps insinuating itself, sometimes quite subliminally, into movies.

It’s a picture worth at least 10,000 words, though you don’t need to know the background story to be enthralled by the horrific juxtaposition of youngsters at play in the wreckage of battle.

This was “Children’s Khorovod”, more commonly known as the Barmaley Fountain, and it sat in front of the Museum of Defense of Tsaritsyn. The name of its creator seems to have been misplaced by history, but its inspiration was a poem of the same name by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (1882-1969), who was a fine critic of adult literature before turning his hand to fairytales for the little ones.

Chukovsky began as a journalist in Odessa, covered the London front, and translated Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain for his countrymen’s entertainment, but he won their hearts completely with a 1916 children’s book called “Krokodil”. More such followed, including 1923’s “The Giant Roach”.

Evidently his shtick was scaring the daylights out of the kiddies. “Children’s Khorovod” reads in part (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Little children!
For nothing in the world
Go to Africa.
Do not go to Africa for a walk!
In Africa, there are sharks,
In Africa, there are gorillas,
In Africa, there are large
Evil crocodiles.
They will bite you,
Beat and offend you!

Don’t you go, children,
to Africa for a walk.
In Africa, there is a robber,
In Africa, there is a villain,
In Africa, there is terrible
Bahr-mah-ley!
He runs about Africa
And eats children!
Nasty, vicious, greedy Barmaley!

But in Africa there was also the good Doctor Aybolit, who was in the process of being roasted alive by Barmaley when a gorilla appeared carrying a crocodile.

At the doctor’s request, the croc gobbled down Barmaley to ensure the local children’s safety, but then spit him up again when he promised to mend his ogrish ways.

Barmaley kept his word and even began treating the kids to pastries, which is definitely something to dance about.

Was Barmaley Stalin, devouring whole provinces? Chukovsky got away with flaunting the Communist Party’s strictures against discussing troublemakers like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and stashed away the manuscripts of banned writers. Somehow he still earned the Lenin Prize in 1962, and after he died his daughter kept his “counter-revolutionary” flame alive.

It was, of course, Nazism, not Leninism, that shredded the Stalingrad landscape, and photographer Emmanuil Evzerikhin was there to memorialise the sad scene.

The fountain was rebuilt after the war, then moved elsewhere, and then presumably died in lonesome decay, but memories of it, bizarre enough at the outset and seared into the consciousness by Evzerikhin’s photos, wouldn’t disappear.

It had a starring role in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 2001 war film “Enemy at the Gates” and the more recent, rather daft “V for Vendetta”, but most interestingly, Stanley Kubrick incorporated glimpses of it into the rapid-cut sequence that droog anti-hero Alex is forced to watch in “A Clockwork Orange” in a bid to wean him from his beloved “ultra-violence”.

There are more pictures of the fountain on the occasionally fascinating website EnglishRussia.com.

Among the Tinkertoy scaffold of bones supporting the needlessly beautiful tombstones at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris are (probably) the ones that carried around the man who painted this picture, which was fairly famous even before it became an Internet favourite.

Local boy Edouard Joseph Dantan painted “A Casting from Life” in 1887, when he was 39. That was 10 years before his death in an accident that left him well beyond plaster casts, and 10 years after The Great Rodin Scandal, in which France’s acknowledged master of sculpture was accused of having cast his “Age of Bronze” from life.

(He didn’t; it wasn’t. See this post and the Rodin website for the 19th century’s version of The Great Britney Spears Lip-Synching Scandal.)

Edouard Dantan’s whole family must have been alternatively amused and flabbergasted at the Rodin soap opera. His father and uncle were both celebrated sculptors too, but with a decidedly more relaxed approach to the techniques used, and why not surmoulage — life plaster casts of the model?

Edouard’s grandfather sculpted in wood, his father Jean-Pierre in marble and his uncle Antoine Laurent Dantan in clay and bronze. There’s a fair bit of confusion online about the brothers, and Edouard too, whose name gets several different spellings and whose birthplace is given as either Paris or its western suburb St Cloud, where his father was born.

The confusion carries on right to the grave. The grand “ancient tomb”, as it’s called for some reason, is in Lachaise’s fourth division, where Gioacchino Rossini, Georges Haussmann, Felix Flaure, Ludovico Visconti and Colette, the beloved creator of Gigi, also rest.

The family grave is midway up the entrance avenue at the cemetery.

This photo comes from Appl-Lachaise.net. The grave stone is adorned with weeping caryatids, cherubs with bleating trumpets and four marble medallions bearing the likenesses of “Dantan father & Young Dantan” and “Mrs Dantan & Elder Dantan”. I’m left to assume this means the brothers and their parents, but is this also the final home of Edouard’s bones?

Matthew Innis, who has quite a few works by Edouard on his interesting blog Underpaintings, quotes from a 2002 biography in saying that Edouard was buried in St Cloud, but the same book says he was buried next to his father, and Dad, evidently, is here in Paris.

Most visitors to the cemetery are reportedly seeking Antoine’s grave if it’s a Dantan they seek. Whether older or younger than Jean-Pierre (again, sources differ), he achieved greater celebrity by moulding caricatures of celebrities. But then, according to some sources, including Sotheby’s, that’s what Jean-Pierre did too, and Wikipedia says that Jean-Pierre was the more famous. “The brothers are sometimes confused in reference sources,” it adds helpfully. See the rest.

Not exactly the first subject that springs to mind when you’re designing a hot-air balloon, but the end result is quite … uh, well, it’s pretty bizarre, actually.

The good ship Vincent Van Gogh has been rendering friendly skies around the world a little more startling since March 30, 2003, when it was inflated for the first time in Zundert, the Netherlands.

Professional balloonist Hans Zoet is usually, if not always, the pilot, on behalf of the Dutch brewery Bavaria, a bottler that’s even older than Vincent would be if he were still around to see his head floating monstrously if harmlessly through space wearing an advertising banner around his neck.

The photos here come from various sources, including Airliners.net, which seems a bit of a stretch, and different shutterbugs in New Zealand and Australia.

In the latter country the 30-metre-tall Vincent Van Gogh took part in the Canberra Balloon Fiesta. Australia’s quaintly named Liquorland booze chain distributes Bavaria and its sister beer Hollandia.