Dali House

I’ve just signed up for online notices from Sotheby’s, which may turn out to have been a huge mistake. Right off the bat I’ve had email alerts about three upcoming shows in New York at which the jaw-dropping collection of Texas property magnate Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy is being sold off. Not only are the pieces stunning, Sotheby’s terrific presentation suggests to me that I’ll have to use considerable restraint to avoid reproducing everything here.

But what the hell. With amiable thanks to Sotheby’s and a respectful nod to Mr Nasher, who died in March 2007 (and his wife, who predeceased him by 19 years), here are two of the items up for bids. Above, Paul Signac’s “Clipper (Opus 155)” from 1887, and here, Rene Magritte’s “l’Okapi” from 1958.

The Nasher collection is going on the block in three segments — an “Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale” on May 7, “Property from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection” on May 9 and “Contemporary Art Evening Auction” on May 14. Included are Morisot, Monet, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Leger, Munch, Giacometti and many others. The catalogue alone is a droolfest.

Nasher, who built Texas’ biggest shopping mall before he established the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina and founded the Nasher Sculpture Centre on Flora Street in Dallas in 2003 (pictured below from Google Earth), started collecting art by buying a Ben Shahn (Dali House post) painting in 1954. He and Patsy invested in pre-Columbian art, then Arp and Moore, and just kept on going.

Signac’s “Clipper”, expected to bring between $5 million and $7 million, was painted in the same vicinity as the considerably more famous “Bathers at Asnières” by the considerably more famous pointillist Georges Seurat, a work that will coincidentally be popping up again in a forthcoming post here.

As Sotheby’s notes, the northwestern Paris suburb was popular with avant-garde landscape painters in the 1880s. In 1887 both Van Gogh and Emile Bernard portrayed the same parallel bridges, but Signac had been there before them, and returned twice more afterward to capture the scene. Like Seurat, he was struck by the mingling of industry and leisure, sailboats sharing the frame with factories.

Magritte’s “l’Okapi”? Yours, perhaps, for $3 million or $4 million. Stay tuned.

Wangechi Mutu’s “Untitled”, 2003

History’s parade finds its way to cut-up specialist Wangechi Mutu by way of dada, of course, with Hannah Höch pointing out the path ahead and warning that it’s not always downhill. The course is littered with exquisite corpses.

Collage has always struck me as the poor country cousin in the art tribe, still at school and with no hope of ever actually graduating and joining the family business. I think that’s why the dadaists embraced it: It was a geeky, clumsy sort of art, more Anyman artisanship in fact, so it suited their anti-art ambitions. Plus, it involved piecing together bits of newspapers, snapshots and mementoes — putting the mundane on a pedestal — and left room for subconscious selection. And it could be done fast.

Hannah Höch’s “Grotesque”

Everyone keeps scrapbooks at some time or another, and In Europe at the time, collage was something your mother might do with her favourite pictures from the weekend magazine. Like the surrealists’ rounds of exquisite corpse, collage was something to be “played” in the parlour after supper.

But I still love collage, the big lug, and both of these women are very interesting, especially side by side — a German who, like Picasso, borrowed African art’s backwardness to push Western art forward; and an African native who cadges urban Americana to leap oceans and kick down social borders.

Back in Nairobi where Mutu was born, and in the other big African centres, contemporary artists like Bill Bidjocka, Odhiambo Siangla and Lubaina Himid have found a measure of fame, but Westerners keep asking their agents if they can get some tribal antiquities instead. These new fellows, the buyers presume, are just copying Modigliani, aren’t they?

Below, “Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus” from 2004, chiding the typical gender bias of yesteryear’s medical diagrams.

No wonder Mutu shifted to the West ASAP, albeit to study anthropology along with art at Yale. It worked out fine: Now about 36, she’s great at bending minds with her collages of women made from Mylar, flourishes of deco paint and a lot of thoughtfully chosen magazine clippings (National Geographic being an obvious source). From a distance it looks like you’re in for some eye candy, but up close Mutu’s exotic beauties turn out to be gargoyles on a feminist mission, some armoured, some haemorrhaging body parts or dragging around prosthetics.

“Mask”, 2006, archaic sculpture and modern tease.

Goddesses and glamour models there are, but they’ve clearly just been released from hospital following a horrendous accident. Their skin is inhuman and they’re at least partially bionic, not in a good way.

They are very much science fiction, but as we always discover once we get there, the future isn’t clean and stable — it’s a junkyard of the past. Our robots aren’t going to be young, curvy, soft-skinned Japanese handmaidens; they’ll be brides of Frankenstein, with serious issues that, like the glitches in Windows software, refuse to be resolved. See the rest.

“Sexy Bar” by Chris Coles

“I Cover the Waterfront” was Max Miller’s 1932 book about his gritty turn as a docklands reporter for the San Diego Sun. The title told you that nothing but trouble was ahead. Chris Coles covers the Bangkok waterfront, though not (yet) its awful Klong Toei Port. His beat is the expatriate neon triangle — Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong Road — where the wildlife gathers at the waterholes in the cool of the night.

I used to haunt those places, but after awhile it got to be like that scene in “Chinatown” where Jack Nicholson has had pretty much enough of banging his head against walls trying to make sense of things and Joe Mantell tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

“Isan Nightclub Singer”

Coles, originally from Maine, formerly a passenger aboard Swahili trading dhows among Africa’s Bajuni Islands, once of Australia and Greenland, now bounds between Bangkok and LA, and his shield against the psychic ravages that the Big Mango’s nightlife imposes is being able to paint it up in all the lurid colours it deserves. Art as a defence mechanism is not unknown.

Chris got in touch with me about the January Dali House post “Politics and the profanity of disbelief”, regarding Warthit Sembut and Anupong Chanthorn’s run-ins with Thailand’s guardians of the moral fibre.

“There are so many creative people in Thailand and sometimes they just get stifled by the Ministry of Culture types,” Chris wrote. ” Too many pretty paintings of the countryside, passive Buddhas and pale imitations of modern concept art and not enough paintings like the ones of the monks with a real edge and power.”

“Pedophile Priest”

Chris Coles’ paintings are not (usually) pretty. He proudly waves the expressionist flag that first appeared over the mounds of bloody corpses in World War I, when German artists reacted in horror to the efficiency of their own country’s fighting machine and laid their emotions out on canvas. The impressionists could have their damned sunlight and keep on living in a dream. This was realism, scarred and scared and howling.

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See the rest.

Dali’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja Fixing a String of his Mandolin” from 1960 is sometimes referred to as “Maelstrom”, although, suspiciously, only the online poster shops seem to use the alternative title. It’s also typical of the whirlpool that Dali’s output has become that you’ll come across reproductions of this painting in three or four different hues, with the get-cheap-prints-here websites favouring Hallowe’en orange. The website of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where the original hangs, has it in greyish brown, as seen in the detail below. The version above comes from Olga’s ABC Gallery.

Here Dali is honouring Diego Velázquez, borrowing the palace-official-in-a-doorway from his feverishly adored 1656 “The Maids of Honour” (”Las Meninas”). Dali has him watching a commotion of a different order, and also utilises the subject of Velázquez’s “Portrait of Juan Pareja” from 1650. Pareja’s hand is at the lower centre, with a tack in the thumb. His head is in profile, with Velázquez’s quartered easel forming the bridge of the nose and the princess and her attendants his goatee.

I’m going to have a proper look at Velásquez soon, but this post is about maelstroms. Shown below is “Maelstrom” by Scottish-born Canadian Ruth Palmer.

I’m still puzzled about this notion of getting to the centre of the earth (here’s an early Dorseyland post about one hilarious plan). Is it a womb thing? Nothing to be ashamed of if so, seeing as how visionaries like Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne wanted to get back inside too.

The latter took his cues from the former, and even pushed his characters into the unknown abyss pit from a Scandinavian locale, as Poe had done, although Verne reckoned on an Icelandic volcano rather than a Norwegian whirlpool.

No one outside of Norway had heard of a maelstrom before Poe (read about his curious demise at Dorseyland) published “A Descent into the Maelstrom” in 1841. The Nordic word came from the old Dutch maalstroom, a grinding stream. It was Poe who parlayed little-known accounts into a convincing, culture-spanning argument that a maelstrom was a whirlpool, not a cranky creek.

By 2007 Disney buccaneer ships were fighting it out in the maw of a monstrous maelstrom in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”. The picture below comes from the 1997 TV miniseries “The Odyssey”

Ten years after Poe’s short story, Herman Melville had Captain Ahab vowing to chase Moby-Dick around the world, right “round the Norway Maelström” if he had to. Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, published in 1870, characterised it as a “whirlpool from which no vessel ever escapes”.

It’s not that bad, really. The Moskstraumen, as it’s properly known, is fairly powerful, but it’s just a tidal current. It’s probably never sucked down a ship in its life. Don’t blame Poe — he’d been up all night reading other people’s “journalism” on the Lofoten Islands Moskstraumen. We’ll have a look ourselves in a moment.

As viewed on Google Earth, This is the scene of “the Sicilian Charybdis”, the two-mile-wide mouth of the Strait of Messina, with a prominence called Scylla shown in the foreground. They catch a lot of fish here, even swordfish, but the daily double high and low tides are barely noticeable today. They may well have been more powerful in Homer’s era. An earthquake shifted the sea floor in 1783 and calmed things down, though right up to the 19th century they could still turn around a heavy ship. See the rest.

From 1849, “The Shipwreck (The Wreck of the Hope)” by the Irish-born Francis Danby (1793-1861), whose career was built on Bible scenes and purer fantasies but triumphed with “Sunset at Sea, After a Storm”, sometimes referred to as “Shipwreck Against a Setting Sun”, in 1824, only to lose ground in a row with the Royal Academy after Constable topped him for the presidency by a single vote. Danby fled to the continent but returned to favour with “The Deluge” in 1840, and never again strayed far from the sea, though he fell well short of Turner’s popularity.

In “The Wreck of the Hope” Danby emphasises humanity’s helplessness in the face of monstrous nature, his ship all but demolished and the crew chaotically close to doom, a lifeboat capsized and nothing but a battery of rocks to offer meagre hope of salvation.

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900), whose gripping scenes opened Part 1 of this post, also painted “The Ninth Wave” in 1850, above and detail below. More than half of his output was seascapes, beginning with views of all the coastal towns in his native Crimea and ultimately winning him a commission with the Russian Navy and a favoured place in the Turkish court.

As Wikipedia notes, he was the most prolific Russian painter of his time, with more than 6,000 works — and is believed to be the most forged Russian ever as well. The three paintings on these pages are all in private collections.

Down on the vale of Death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke
With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak:
Till like the mine, in whose infernal cell
The lurking demons of destruction dwell,
At length asunder torn, her frame divides;
And crashing spreads in ruin o’er the tides.
— More from Falconer’s “The Shipwreck”. Like him, Percy Bysse Shelley lived by the roaring waves and died by them.

William Adolphus Knell painted his “Shipwreck” in 1856 and showed his sons the way. If historians are confused today about whether he was born in 1802 or 1818, it’s probably because there were at least four well-known marine painters in the Knell family, all living the same London address, but unclearly related. The family tree was “at sea”, as it were. See the rest.