Dali House

“Arrival of the American ambassador in Peking”

The terrific Daumier Register recently issued an alert about a small but dazzling online collection of drawings of China by old Honoré with incisive commentary by a Chinese collector, and by “incisive”, I mean biting.

Montreal physician Pei-Yuan Han reckoned something else could be added to the typically dusty captions on Daumier’s series “En Chine”, published between 1848 and 1860. Dr Han’s website appends a choice line or two putting the drawing in a clear historical context.

“What are the others saying, that this pigtail of the Chinese serves no purpose? For swimming lessons, it’s invaluable.”

Daumier made fun of everyone involved in those greedy colonial days, the British, French Americans and the Chinese too.

Han also provides a link to a jolting letter that Victor Hugo wrote in late 1861 to a Captain Butler regarding the destruction of the Summer Palace in Peking by troops jointly serving Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon.

Butler had asked for the author’s opinion and he got it: the sack of the palace, “a wonder of the world”, was hardly a “glorious victory” for the Europeans. Hugo had his own skewed perspective, but he was mostly right.

“Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art …

“Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building …

“Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it … This wonder has disappeared … See the rest.

“The Burden (The Laundress)”, circa 1850-53

Born 200 years ago this year, Honoré Daumier endowed caricature with art and art with humanity. But where was he 166 years ago today, August 27? He was starting a jail term for being a wise guy.

Too much of the sweet life only leaves you with wisdomless molars in agony, and where is Daumier when you need him? “Have a toothache? See Daumier!” Van Gogh wrote to Theo. He’d seen a Daumier drawing called “The Excursion Train” and forgot all about his rotting bite.

You would think Honoré Daumier would be everywhere in this bicentennial of his birthday. There have indeed been a string of exhibitions in Germany, and according to Wikipedia, Asia and Australia dusted him off for his 200th, but for the most part it seems that the French keep him pretty much to themselves, amid couched allusions to his whereabouts.

Where is this “Villa Daumier” where he died early in 1879, blind and destitute and dependent upon the kindness of better-off painters? Was the little house that Corot bought for him in Valmondois or Auvers? Online sources can’t seem to agree, though surely the website of Valmondois itself, from which this photo came, can be trusted when it says it’s there … but where? It offers no address, just a “Come and see the latest of the exhibitions by other artists that we put on at the villa.”

It’s on Chemin Bescherelle, another source says, but try finding the great lexicographer’s name anywhere in the vicinity. Instead, others insist, it’s right on the main drag, and since a Place Honoré Daumier adjoins it, the house must be there, right? Here’s Google Earth’s view of the neighbourhood.

That’s presumably the town square just beyond Place Honoré Daumier in this shot, where there’s a bust of Daumier by Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume.

Valmondois says online it installed the sculpture in 1909, the centenary of Honoré’s birth in far-off Marseilles.

When Daumier died his body was carted over the the town cemetery, but it didn’t stay there long, as we shall see in a moment.

Not far from Place Honoré Daumier are Allée Maurice de Vlaminck and Rue Dorée. Vlaminck certainly spent time in Valmondois, well after Daumier’s day, but I’m not sure about Gustave Dorée. France has a tendency to honour its artists this way in any old town, no matter where they hung out. Charles-François Daubigny is said to have been a resident of Valmondois, but his famously decorated house is in Auvers, adding to the muddle.

Where is the house of Théodore Rousseau in Barbizon, where Daumier spent his summer vacation in 1865? Barbizon has a Rue Théodore Rousseau — you can see it shouldering off from the main street in the image below. Interestingly, that road is crossed by little Allée John Constable, just in case the English forgot to pay tribute to their landscape maestro.

Daumier’s final and forever address is easier to find. He’s here amid Death’s busy clutter in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, his friend Corot within eternal reach. Daumier’s admirers decided a year or so after he died that he deserved to be among the greats in Paris’ best-known graveyard, so they disengaged him from Valmondois’ clutch.

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.

Corot surveys Corot’s “Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld”.

French rocket scientists have asserted that Corot, the name of their just-launched planet-hunting spacecraft, stands for COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits, but it’s pretty obvious that somewhere in the midst of their planners and designers is a guy who knows his art history.

Face it, if the satellite namers really wanted to call this one Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits, it would be CRPT, but in English that might come out looking like something between “crap” and “crackpot”, so they called in the arty guy.

“Well,” we can hear him meekly suggesting (in French, of course), “there was the painter Camille Corot, who travelled a great deal around the countryside looking for subject matter.”

Magnifique! See the rest.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.

He’s buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you can also see several statues he made for fellow artists who committed suicide, among them “The Kiss”.

Quite a character, Brancusi, mostly blue. Tsuguharu (often called Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968) was another character, but mostly red.

His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour. See the rest.