Dali House

Georgia O’Keeffe: “Untitled (Blue-headed Indian Doll)”, 1935

Playwright Robert Patrick, ex of New York, now of Los Angeles, commented not long ago on Dali House’s post about Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the artists who appears in his drama “The Beaux Arts Ball”, staged at the Big Apple’s Theater for the New City in 1983.

The photos on this page come from Robert’s Facebook page.

Here’s Georgia with model Gigi playing Marilyn Monroe.

Set in the ladies’ lounge at the Beaux Arts Ball in Paris and encompassing in one go the years 1904 to circa 1962, the play was populated by well-known women of the arts.

“It was a custom at the ball for the artists’ wives, mistresses and models to dress in their men’s styles,” Robert explains.

The curtain rises to find the women in an uproar because Picasso’s model, Jolie, has made a scene because he was paying so much attention to Gertrude Stein.

“Compassionate Mme Seurat and stern Mme Dufy, the rulers of artistic society, disagree over whether to expel Jolie from their company.

“Nervous Mme Matisse and shocked Mrs NC Wyeth side with Mme Dufy, artists Mary Cassatt and Suzanne Valadon support Mme Seurat. Brancusi’s ambitious model, Constance, and Duchamp’s discarded male model, Rose, observe wryly.

Above, Missuses Seurat, Wyeth and Cassatt. See the rest.

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.

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.

“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.