Dali House

Where everybody knows your name: Fernand Leger comes to grips with Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso while Henri Matisse and Georges Braque wisely look for hiding places.

Ah, the Musee du Montparnasse – genteel, meditative, scholarly. Actually, this quiet little pile of bricks in south central Paris is where the post-impressionists posted some very, very bad impressions with nightly piss-ups early in the last century. That was long before it became a museum, of course.

The gendarmes were summoned more than once to 21 Avenue du Maine, seen here in a Google Earth view, most memorably one night in January 1917 when they had a party there for Georges Braque, who’d just been drummed out of the military on account of having a hole in him. See the rest.

A little joie de vivre with “Happy Quartet” and “The Football Players”, both from 1908.

Second of three parts, continued from here.

This is “View of the Ile de la Cite, Paris”, painted sometime in the 1890s, an extraordinary scene from Rousseau’s imagination concocted in crimson paint and contrasts. It seems to suggest the destruction of the old city to make way for the new, but has also been interpreted as a representation of the mystery he always found in the City of Light.

Rousseau finally retired from the Octroi in 1893 to paint full-time. Just 49, he supplemented his small pension with part-time jobs and busking in the streets with his violin. Soon after he met the iconoclastic writer Alfred Jarry, who coincidentally also hailed from Laval (and would be buried in the same cemetery as Rousseau).

It was in fact Jarry, soon to be the infamous playwright of “Ubu Roi”, who gave him the nickname Le Douanier. In the avant-garde review Mercure de France, he praised Rousseau’s “War”, from 1894, seen above: “The black leaves that populate the purple clouds; the ruins, tumbling like pine cones among the corpses, translucent with lack of oxygen, littered with pale-beaked crows.”

With its striking use of allegory, the work, alluding to the Franco-Prussian conflict of 25 years earlier, almost prophetically broke from Romantic tradition and showed only the horror of battle – and it convinced many that Rousseau was much more than a minor landscapist. It marked the beginning of his recognition as a serious painter. See the rest.

Charles X hands out the honours at the 1824 Salon at the Louvre in this painting of paintings by Francois-Joseph Heim. You can see it at the Louvre today, which isn’t nearly this crowded anymore.

Online murmurs of approval over a 2005 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum might leave one thinking that modern art and gossip have always been kissing cousins, or at least snuggle bunnies. I found the reviews of “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons” inadvertently chuckle-worthy, though, of course, my mirth wasn’t exactly politically correct.

There’s something about salons anyway that reeks of absurdity. The most famous art salons – in Paris during the 19th century – were nothing more than droll competitions, with exclusion often far more damaging to an artist’s self-esteem than inclusion was any benefit. At best the salons were a shot at stardom, at worst a corrupt tool of elitist social climbers and hidden-agenda fat cats.

Leaving aside Leninist dialectic, though, the big Parisian salons were very much the Oscars of their time. All juried art competitions are risky sprints with dodgy rationales, but for generations, the Académie des beaux-arts’ official Salon de Paris involved major suck-up time, a fevered popularity campaign and, with the prize in hand, more viewers coming through the box office and thus more money in the bank, the better to mount next year’s entry. See the rest.

“Une âme au ciel” (”A Soul in Heaven”) by William Bouguereau, 1878
Click the image to see it much larger.

Pretty feisty bunch down at the Art Renewal Centre, where they’re giddily passionate about the 19th-century realists and won’t spare a poop for anything more modern. Cantankerously building barricades in preparation for an anticipated jihad against the Establishment is Fred Ross, the centre’s chairman, who’s got a major rant going on that seems almost perverse in the way it’s trying to turn art history upside down. But, he has his points (and some terrific art to back him up). See the rest.

It’s fascinating how life progresses – always appearing to be aimless and then gradually congealing from every which direction and somehow making perfectly concrete sense. When I was but a teenager wearing the first blush of Art Appreciation, I had (a) a yen to be creative and (b) a whole crate of childhood artefacts that held no value at all for anyone else but me. The then-newly-chic concept of assemblages popped up, in Time magazine, I think, so I turned my crate on its side, rearranged the toys and stuff, daubed on a little paint and pasted in paper cut-outs, and had myself a 3D collage, a spectral display of Christmases Past. Cool or what? See the rest.