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.

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours. See the rest.

A bit more on the Artist.Ranking (A.R) system mentioned in our Rousseau biography, as found at ArtFacts.net.

As mentioned, lonely old Henri is currently ranked #724 with a bullet on this overtly mercenary chart, which arranges 62,436 artists by volume of exhibitions over the last five years.

Picasso is #1, Cezanne 32 and Monet 62, just to grab some examples.

“The basis of the A.R thinking is the so-called economy of attention (after a book from Georg Franck),” the website explains. “Franck says that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism. Capitalist, or economic, behaviour is based on property, lending money and charging interest.

“For Franck, the curator (eg the museum director or the gallery owner) acts as a financial investor. The curator/investor lends their property (their exhibition space and their fame) to an artist from whom they expect a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame etc).”

Here’s the top 10 after Picasso: Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Matisse, Edward Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.* See the rest.

Click the pic to see it a fair bit larger.

Good buddy Gauguin is present in spirit among the spirits in an homage to tiki culture currently on view at Dorseyland.

Last of three parts, continued from here.

During his last years Rousseau stayed close to the exotic landscapes that made his reputation, all of them bursting with turgid plants and fine detail looming from the shadows.

In “The Merry Jesters”, above, from about 1906 (click on the detail to see the whole painting), the simians play with back-scratchers and a milk bottle. In another work from 1910, the denizens of “Tropical Forest with Monkeys” are fishing. Such anthropomorphism may have been a conscious attempt to remind man that his innocence was being robbed by modernisation.

In “Virgin Forest”, or “Negro Attacked by a Jaguar” (also clickable), the action at the centre of the painting and almost engulfed in the surrounding jungle. Despite the Douanier’s painting style being unrealistic, there is a different kind of realism at work here that’s disturbingly compelling. See the rest.