Dali House

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.

You can click on this one and see it bigger.

The Catholic Church is such an easy target. Fish in a barrel. As a recovering Catholic, I knoweth how easy it is.

So there I was in a corner, losing still more remnants of my religion while reading Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and I learned to my shock — I must have been in the toilet at the time — that Pope Benedict LMXCCVIIXI jettisoned Limbo last year!

Pardon me while I temporarily fill Dali House with fumes. I’ll soften the tirade with beautful art as I go along: These are all great paintings of Jesus visiting Limbo. Well, not all of them — you can tell which ones I did.

“Christ in Limbo” by Agnolo Bronzino, 1552

Admittedly the Limbo that’s now been stricken from the faith is limbus infantium — the Limbo where babies that died before they could be baptised supposedly had to spend eternity — whereas the preferred subject matter for artists down the centuries has been limbus patrum, the Limbo of the Fathers — that is, all the good guys who ought to have gone to heaven but couldn’t because they died, you know, before Jesus was born!

(There’s a sign at the door: “You don’t know Jesus, you don’t get in.”)

But still, if Baby Limbo didn’t actually exist, it’s just a matter of time before Born Too Early Limbo vanishes. And then what are we supposed to make of these paintings?

“Christ in Limbo” by Paul Cezanne

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I had to look it up to make sure it was true, and yes, all the big papers carried a story about the abolishment of the Catholic Church’s “policy” on Limbo. One or two asked rhetorically, “Is Purgatory next?” but for the most part there it was, a bald fact all by itself:

An international commission of theologians set up by the Vatican had advised the pope to dump the idea. It was headed by William Levada, who as archbishop of San Francisco was slagged for blocking the release of documents about priests buggering parishioners, then in 2006 became the first Cardinal named by the new pope, and then succeeded the new pope as chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“Christ in Limbo” by Albrecht Durer

How can the Vatican pull this off? By using a WMD-class rationale: Limbo was never official Church policy — it was just a “hypothesis”. See the rest.

Despite the smog, red tide, cheating at fireworks, fake ethnic minorities, a perfect child lip-synching, Spielberg’s absence and the blood of millions of Burmese and Africans on the wrong side of the Chinese payroll, Beijing put on a pretty good show with the Olympics, I thought.

The one Chinese out of three billion who may not have enjoyed the fortnight is Zhang Hongtu, whose painting “Bird’s Nest, in the Cubist Style” was blocked from exhibition at the German Embassy in the Chinese capital and from its planned reproduction in Chinese Vogue. It was “too political”, as opposed to “not pretty enough”, like the little girl who really did sing the anthem at the Games’ opening ceremony.

Zhang’s depiction of the National Stadium includes bits of the Bird’s Nest structure, the words “Sacred Olympic Torch”, “One World, One Dream” and “Family, Joy, Happiness” in Chinese, the numeral “8″ and, uh-oh, the words “Tibet” and “human right” in English.

Well, I mean, no wonder.

So Zhang and his painting sat out the Games back home in New York, where the Gansu native has lived since 1982. By way of compensation he’s got Sotheby’s “Contemporary Art Asia” auction coming up in the Big Apple on September 17, and a pair of his “traditional Chinese landscapes” rendered in the styles of Van Gogh and Cézanne are expected to bring as much as $60,000 each. See the rest.

“Portrait of a Young Woman” by Pablo Picasso, 1903. Was this the same “Portrait of a Young Woman” that a New Yorker bought in 1922 for $550?

By 1922 America was already a feisty, industrial global power that had banged its stamp on world affairs, but there was still a lot of colonial thinking. The isolationist sentiment that had kept it out of the Great War for so long had come with a self-reliance that let its citizens scoff at other nationalities.

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art scoffed at the modern stuff trickling across the ocean from Europe. It would be another seven years before Abby Aldrich Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art as a cradle on Yankee soil for the new ways of looking at things. There were by then, at least, already a lot of good pictures floating around stateside.

But in 1922 the New York Times was no doubt speaking for the majority when it surveyed a gaggle of European artworks being auctioned in Manhattan and allowed itself, while pandering to the more cosmopolitan elite, a Bronx cheer at the lot.

“That there is a demand in this country for the work of modern French artists known as extremists was shown at the opening sale of the collection of French pictures belonging to Dikran Khan Kelekian [*more on him in a bit], under the auspices of the American Art Association, at the Hotel Plaza last evening,” it reported on January 31 that year. [Download the article in PDF format here.]

“What the result of the sale would be every one had been in doubt. It was the first of its kind in this country. ‘You must make your bids,’ said Thomas E Kirby, from the auctioneer’s bench, putting up the first picture, ‘we have no previous records to go upon in this sale.’”

A portrait by Matisse, the paper said, “brought a burst of laughter when it was put up. It was a small picture, a little girl with red hair, a green and black frock, orange bow on her hair, painted against a brilliant green background. The portrait had many characteristics of the work of a child on a slate, but … “

– and now it’s our turn to laugh (or cry) –

“… it started at $100 and went up to $300.”

A Matisse painting for $300. When, oh, when are they going to invent that blasted time machine? Below are Renoir’s “Portrait of a Girl”, which seems to be the one at issue here, and “Roses”, which is coming up for sale in a few moments.

“There were many beautiful things in the sale and others which, while quite normal, seemed to bring prices out of proportion to their beauty. A watercolor, by Cazanne [sic], No 31, ‘Geranium’, was simply a flourishing geranium with green leaves, not even a blossom, as someone said, in a light-toned flowerpot against a buff background. It was a small picture, altogether about the size of of a small pot of geraniums … It brought $650.

“There is little intrinsic value to a picture — its value is in the skill of the artist and his appeal to the people. Six hundred and fifty dollars would have bought a large garden of geraniums, but the sale of the picture shows that the work of the French modern artists appeals to Americans.” Cezanne’s “Two Trees” managed to earn $500.

Flash forward to May 2008. “Geranium” — by Matisse, though, not “Cazanne” — delivers $9.5 million at auction, right here in New York. Christie’s was hoping for $2.5 million to $3.5 million. See the rest.

If not in person, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has to be seen large. There’s a very good scan on this page at the Athenaeum.

There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno’s bells, the uncouth shapes and colours which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. — Kenneth Clark, “Looking at Pictures”

It’s a pretty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1885 and we’re having a petit bourgeois luncheon on the grass on on an island in the Seine. La Grande Jatte — the Big Bowl — near Neuilly has been cleaned up considerably after all those years as an industrial canker. There are restaurants and joints where you can dance further along the island, though still lots of factories on the far riverbank, which is why not everyone wants to come here. But now this end of the Jatte is a marvellous green get-away for city folks like us, nice breezes off the river, and we’re doing our best to muck it up with dog shit.

That woman with the monkey is here again too. She keeps it on a leash but it still defecates at the drop of a peanut and alarms the old ladies. Someone ought to complain to the gendarme, but he’s only here for the flirting.

After our quiche we’ll go pester that young Seurat at his easel again. He’s here almost every day, same as last summer, pecking away at his canvases like a pigeon. Millions of little dots. One picture after another. What the hell can he be thinking? He’s such a grouch too — good-looking fellow, nicely dressed, but he definitely deserves to have both of his legs pulled!

Georges-Pierre Seurat was 25 that summer, and if was anti-social, he had a brace of fair reasons. His father, who was in the law game, was a stick in the mud who only showed up at home on Tuesdays; the rest of the week he was at his country villa pecking away at his flower garden like a pigeon. Georges came by his stand-offishness honestly. And besides that, he really had something to prove with his painting. Now was not the time for distractions. See the rest.