Dali House

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.

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!”

On the eve of Salvador Dalí’s 104th birthday on Sunday, a buyer in disguise handed Sotheby’s a cheque for $802,600 this week in return for the painting above, “Portrait of Madame Schlumberger”, begun in 1963 and signed in ‘65. The auction house was expecting about half a million dollars, so many happy returns all round.

Carstairs Gallery in New York bought the oil painting when the paint was barely dry, and Sotheby’s was flogging it in the same city for an “important” private collector but didn’t say who, so it’s not clear whether his model ever actually owned the thing.

“I don’t really like it,” São Schlumberger told Women’s Wear Daily in 1987. “I was expecting a fantasy … but he did a classic.”

Of Portuguese and German descent, Madame Schlumberger and her husband, the French-American oil tycoon Pierre Schlumberger, were keen on art.

She favoured Rothko, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, they hung out with Warhol, kept the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center happy and fed Mondrian and Calder to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Dalí was pulled in to do her portrait two years after their wedding. São put on the same Givenchy gown for his several visits to their place on Sutton Place in Manhattan, and at the same time he made her a necklace, though perhaps not the one she’s holding in the painting. He was indeed in his neo-classicist era with the formal pose and fine details, so São, hankering for surrealism, had to make do with a dreamy background landscape. 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.

A silver horn mimics a horse in Dali’s 1936 oil on wood “A Trombone and a Sofa Fashioned Out of Saliva”, or is that horse supposed to be a sofa, and is the trombone not more like a tuba?

The image resolution and my knowledge of wind instruments are unfortunately poor, but the ruined hull of a boat at the lower right is intriguing, as are the visages in the clouds. The smaller one reminds for all the world of JMW Turner’s “Sea Monster” (detail below).

The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation has “Saliva” at the moment, though it’s attributed to the collection of noted connoisseur Eugene Thaw of New Mexico, ever since a Sotheby’s auction in 1997. Jason Kaufman has an interesting 1994 interview with Thaw on his website.