Dali House

I see the City of Baltimore is burying Edgar Allan Poe again today, which might confirm the common wisdom that you can’t keep a good man down except that it’s the city that keeps digging him up every year. He’s still decent tourist bait in that economy-throttled town.

And who could blame them even if it were just for fun (which it also is)? Poe is dear to many readers’ hearts, including mine. Last year I tracked his final meanderings up and down the US Eastern Seaboard on Google Earth, wrote it all up and posted it on my personal blog, Dorseyland, with my own illustrations, a few of which appear here.

This is a specially good year for Baltimore’s perennial spadework, 2009 being the 200th anniversary of the great man’s birth.

Poe’s Funeral is the annual “Nevermore” anniversary re-creation of the original ill-attended event for the benefit of all who missed it. Today there are two afternoon services to accommodate the crowds at Westminster Hall, where Poe really is interred, with actors portraying his few friends and supporters and, strangely, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Hitchcock and HP Lovecraft.

Another actor, John Astin, will again officiate, though he no longer looks anything like Poe, as he certainly did in “The Addams Family”.

The burial followed last Wednesday’s open-casket viewing of “Mr Poe’s body” at his former home on North Amity Street, the all-night vigil that ensued at the Poe Monument outside Westminster Hall and a funeral procession involving an antique horse-drawn hearse.

Meanwhile the Baltimore Museum of Art is presenting “Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon” through January 17, a collection of prints and drawings depicting him and his tales — with a bit of a surprise, for me at least: Among the artists who dabbled in Poe were Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet and René Magritte.

Odilon Redon and Robert Motherwell are also represented, as are illustrations for Poe’s stories by Alphonse Legros, Alfred Kubin and Arthur Rackham.

The museum notes that Henri Matisse did a portrait of Poe too, though that one’s evidently not in the show.

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.

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.

“Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night”

Vincent bought a pair of beds and finally moved into the yellow house yesterday. It’s as sunny inside as the exterior walls. He says he likes the atmosphere there and seems to have forgotten the row he had with the Carrel over the rent.

He’s done paintings of two cafés, one over by the Roman forum where he sometimes has a drink and something to eat, the other around the corner from his house that stays open all hours. Both pictures are quite startling. One shows an exterior all ablaze with light, but up in the sky the stars seem to be competing for attention. They’re shimmering crazily. Vincent is quite proud of the fact that he’s rendered the night sky without any black, just blue and green and violet.

He’s done the same thing with the new gas lights in his interior picture. They glow with a fierceness that casts strange shades across the vagabonds and drunks who linger in the place. “Little sleeping hooligans”, Vincent calls them. No wonder he says it’s a place to “go mad or commit crimes”. He seems to have gone mad himself – all the surfaces are askew.

“The Night Café”

Today on the Place du Forum, the Café La Nuit invites tourists to pretend they are Van Gogh and Gauguin by joining the locals for a drink on the terrace outside the brightly painted bar.

“Starry Night over the Rhone”, September 1888

This is Émile Bernard chipping his name into the granite of 20th-century art history, a lovely painting by any measure, “Le Repos a Pont-Aven”, which also shares the title “Le Gardeuse d’Oies”. Here the guardian of the geese is a Breton lass recalled from his hike around Normandy, possibly Émile’s sister Madeleine.

The Grimms’ tale of a lost princess destined to mind geese and pine for her royal fiance, “The Goose Girl” had been delightening readers since 1815, though here, eight decades later — and in Camille Pissarro’s slightly earlier etching, seen below — I can’t help thinking that Leda and her swan aren’t making discreet appearances. See this post.

The main title of Bernard’s version is intriguing. Much has been made of his bravery in breaking with Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School and going “beyond modernity and present-day reality”, as he put it, in pursuit of the stark post-impressionist vista that’s known rather weightily as pictorial symbolism. “What I wanted to do was create a style for our age,” he wrote.

In fact, what didn’t become abstract became merely decorative.

Was Bernard putting Pont-Aven “at rest”, or was he putting it “to rest”? Without an answer, I fail to see any bravery in his retrograde reclamation of the Renaissance and the classics, and I wonder if the lack of clear inspiration in this painting had anything to do with the fact that it raised “only” $301,000 at Sotheby’s New York on May 8 when the seller was hoping for between $400,000 and $600,000. See the rest.