Dali House

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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.

JUST BOOKED IN AT DALI HOUSE!

I am so very, very sorry to Matt Drudge, the blogger who somehow became a kingmaker in American presidential politics, for unabashedly stealing his webpage’s design, I truly am. The Dorse Report is just a bit of fun, really, a mock-up of the bizarrely mega-popular Drudge Report, in this case pulling together links to recent posts here and at Dorseyland.

Unlike the originator, though, I really don’t think I can update my report daily or even regularly, so for now, it’s just out there.

Dali House has new linked acquaintances with a pair of art-minded websites. The proprietors of both recently checked in here for a look around, and their own premises are well worth a visit.

By far the newer of the two is a youthful website called the Pablo Picasso Club. Though it hasn’t been rolling for long, the club is getting up to 200 visitors a day, mostly Americans, and already has a lively interchange of ideas underway.

The forums are a little argumentative for my tastes, but there’s some decent commentary and quite valid questions being asked about the nature of art and what artists go through in the creative process. There are loads of images, not all of Picasso’s works, though also a dearth of titles. Most of the members seem attuned to admiring art, not analysing it.

Good fun for the old bull of the Spanish plains, where it gets very hot. Still, us foreigners can get a chuckle out of these undated newspaper photos. The double image comes from the archives of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group.

Meanwhile there’s a site with dada intentions but wide-ranging interests, Rosenbush Cafe, whose author, Henry Rosenbush of Alabama, bills himself as the Existential Nihilist and “a dadist since 1971″.

The cafe’s own roots run much deeper: Henry’s great-uncle Edwin opened the original Rosenbush Cafe in 1926, where Henry spent “every Sunday in the ’50s”.

He’s now keeping those memories alive and at the same time collecting dada and surreal items, especially movies, doing general video and film reviews and writing a surrealist novel called “The Cool Side of the Pillow”.

“Anti-art,” Henry laments. “How I wish I had lived in that era, but we do what we can in the modern era to keep it alive so it will never die!”

The year before he died, Noel Leaver is seen in the middle of this group admiring someone else’s work during Civic Arts Week in the town of my birth, Burnley, Lancashire, England.

While Dali House was fully booked up for the seemingly interminable Salvador Celebration there were a few other things happening in the world of art, of which some I want to take note while pretending the rest didn’t occur.

One development that would have gone almost completely unnoticed was the establishment of a website dedicated to British watercolourist Noel Harry Leaver (1889-1951). I came across it after receiving an email from Kristian Baxter of the UK-based Briercliffe Society geneaological website, who said there was information online about Noel, a cousin (I think) of my late Uncle John Leaver, the husband of my late mother’s late sister Elsie.

Because of the family linkage I’ve written it all up on my personal blog, Dorseyland, but I wanted to get some of his paintings on show at Dali House as well. These images come from the Noel Leaver website set up by Robert Bruce.

The site has more than 250 works on view, and I was surprised to see that Noel had roamed quite far in his time. “His famous ‘Eastern Scenes’,” as Robert Bruce calls them, were unknown to me. These are actually North African (possibly some Middle Eastern), pocked with mosques and minarets, but sharing the same fascination with high walls as his paintings from France, Germany, Italy and the length of England. There are a few American views too, including Hoover Dam (which is nothing but a very high wall). The one show here is titled “Italian Town” on the website, and the one at the top of the post “An English Country House”. See the rest.

For reasons I’ve yet to determine, my replies to comments are being blocked at the moment, obviously a glitch in the Blogsome / WordPress scheme of things. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.

Meanwhile, to Amy re David F Thomson, I don’t know of him and can only find references to Canadian painter David Thompson of nearly a century earlier. I suggest emailing the National Gallery in Ottawa, whose staff has been quite helpful to me in the past.

To Gorilla Bananas re Dali’s male chauvinism, he did indeed Amanda Lear that “cohones” are essential to creativity, and thus women are only useful in the kitchen. It’s in Dali Planet #139, re the Monastery of St Pere de Roda.