Dali House

The relentlessly meandering masses at Digg It managed to snag my attention with one of their group discoveries, the whimsical “re-paintings” of José Manuel Ballester. I usually avoid things like Digg It — far too much time wasted — but last month images originally posted at a Spanish site called Fogonazos (Flashes) were worth a chuckle.

He meticulously deletes all living creatures from familiar paintings. Below is Brueghel’s “Winter Landscape” alongside Ballester’s version, shorn of people, in a bid to “purge all human anecdotes from historical landscape painting and invert the hierarchy, giving priority to the background”. Dunno why. Must be an environmental thing.

He’s also “done” Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation”, Botticelli’s “The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti” and more. The originals are at the Prado in Madrid; his renditions are currently on view down the street at Galería Distrito Cu4tro. And his website is here, where his own original landscapes are brutally rough and sparse, and even more ghostly.

But far more interesting than all of that was another link on the Fogonazos page dated November 2006. This one tracks to a seemingly anonymous site, also Spanish, based at the University of Seville.

Here, someone’s gone to a lot of trouble unearthing the photographs on which several impressionists based some of their paintings. The idea of painting from a photograph makes “purists” wince, of course, but artists have been doing it ever since the first roll of film came back from the Fuji kiosk.

The Dutch masters painted from camera obscura projections, and dear old Dali was known to rely on photographic studies too.

At the top of the post are Paul Gauguin’s 1890 painting “Mother and Daughter”, and the snapshot he lifted it from, taken by one Henry LeMasson. Below is “Young with Fan”, from 1902, alongside a picture that Louis Grelet took in Gauguin’s studio in Hivaoa. 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.

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.

Two weeks and 140 years ago something happened in Mexico that got Éduard Manet and a whole lot of other people upset. What happened next is also an amazing story.

Manet, not content at having tossed bombs into the courtyard of public opinion with a pair of inflammatory paintings featuring gratuitous nudity, set out in 1867 to blow a hole in French politics with this festive Mexican scene. Then he exported the resentment that it caused to America, to see what kind of damage he could foment there. It was a near-complete rout all the way — for Manet, that is.

Monsieur Manet, a dementedly provocative mass of quirks on two legs, was at the time actually persevering in art long enough to be gaining some critical and public acceptance. The avant garde had started to catch up with him and tempers had cooled about the pompously naked “Olympia” and the muffin-in-the-buff in “Dejeuner sur l’herbe”. Time for another unholy scandal, he seems to have decided.

Politics obliged by providing the subject matter wrapped in newsprint: Maximilian, the Habsburg duke whom Napoleon III had maniacally named emperor of Mexico three years earlier, had been abandoned there when the French troops were yanked out at the outset of a civil war, and had now, on June 19, 1867, been shot by a firing squad. The travesty boiled Manet’s republican blood and he went after Napoleon with vermillion-tinged brushes in both hands. See the rest.