Dali House

This post is about a dream. But first, a short film starring Kiki de Montparnasse, who at 14 began her career as a naked model for every artist in Paris back when the 1900s were young. She had some wonderful dreams, not always while sleeping. The clip is from “l’Etoile de Mer” by Man Ray, her long-time boyfriend. Read more about Kiki in this post.

Finished? Let’s proceed.

Google Earth only poked a big enough hole in Madrid’s Prado Museum to see a few paintings, so it’s not surprising that those few — suddenly seen startlingly up close by millions of people — generated a fair bit of natter online.

One of these paintings, now viewable on Google Earth as closely as any professional restorer has seen it, is “Jacob’s Dream” by Jusepe de Ribera, dated 1639. Unfortunately some of the talk about it on the Internet has been as wildly presumptuous as much of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpretations of Jacob’s original dream itself.

In fact those opposing interpretations are being repeated now in the context of this painting’s fresh “availability”.

What was Jacob dreaming about? Angels running up and down a ladder connecting Heaven and Earth, everyone agrees. Ah, but what does it signify? It depends on your peacher.

The Jews, who owned the copyright to the story to begin with, were magnanimous. The angels represented people’s souls descending to and ascending from their bodies, which, yes, could imply reincarnation. (That’s going to be a problem for the Christians.)

Or, said the Jewish scholars, the angels are Heaven’s stevedores, hoisting souls on board. Or, hey, maybe Jacob was just dreaming about life’s ups and downs.

The Christians saw no reason for ambiguity: This is obviously a sign from God, right there in the Bible, that Jesus saves. The Muslims said that’s right, except for the part about Jesus — the ladder clearly belongs to Muhammed. See the rest.

Well north of Charleston, Gerald and Sara Murphy try a different dance on a Long Island beach, about 1915.

Though everything’s expensive in the Hamptons these days, it was (mostly) sand-cheap back when Max Ernst was banging together his iron turtle. Still, there seemed to be a high price to pay for living swell. The artists of the 1940s got away with enjoying some advance Heaven time at the leisurely seaside — they were all refugees of one sort or another, after all.

Not so Jackson Pollock, who we’ll be meeting in a bar in a Part 4. He went crazy on the beach. Gerald and Sara Murphy had craziness thrust upon them. But they only winced when they had to.

Sara fell the furthest and never complained.

The Beach Boys series: Part 1 with Max Ernst and the gang, Part 2 with other Long Island artists both older and younger.

Download my Murphys-Jackson Pollock Google Earth post.

In October 1975 about 50 people were at St Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton to say some prayers for a little old lady who’d lived in a modest house at 1113 Basil Road in McLean, Virginia, but grew up in the fanciest mansion on Long Island.

Sara Murphy had died from pneumonia the week before at the age of 91. The service at St Luke’s took place 11 years to the day of her husband Gerard’s send-off in the same church, and when it was over, Sara’s casket was interred next to his on her family’s estate, once glory-bedecked as The Dunes.

But for the boxes of keepsakes and jottings that the couple’s surviving child would have to sift through, astonishing memories were buried with them, of Hemingway and Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Léger and John Dos Passos, and of course the bittersweet tang of F Scott Fitzgerald, their very good friend once, who had dedicated to them the novel that he considered his best.

“Tender Is the Night” was inspired by the Murphys, Fitzgerald said, though the caricatures he drew of them, as Dick and Nicole Diver, evolved in the course of the book into a tragically unmistakeable portrait of Scott and Zelda. Sara and Gerald didn’t grasp the psychological transference, though, and were put off. Hemingway missed it too, and bawled Scott out for screwing around with the truth. See the rest.

Never one to malinger creatively, Max Ernst built himself this Giant Tortoise while loafing through a few summers in Great River, on Long Island’s south shore. It was the last half of the 1940s.

His chief companion was fellow artist Dorothea Tanning but, then as now, there was a whole crowd of creative types kicking back among the dunes. New York City was just at the end of the island, a short train hop away, life here was cheap, and who doesn’t like being a kid again at the seaside?

Or was it Amagansett where Ernst lived? They’re certainly not the same place, quite a distance apart in fact. Yet among the many online accounts of Long Island’s bustling arts community, when it comes to Max Ernst they hop between little Great River and tiny Amagansett, a village whose name is Montaukett for “place of good water” — not the rivers or the sea but a fresh inland source.

Ernst had spent his first summer in America on Long Island, with the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim who’d bought so many of his paintings and helped him get clear of the Nazis and move to the States.

He married her, but by 1943 that was over, and in ‘46 he would make Tanning his fourth wife in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills. The Ernsts, pictured together here, settled for awhile in Sedona, Arizona, before returning east.

Ernst, who was 52 in 1943, turned the garage of their rented house in Great River or Amagansett into a workshop where he could transform all sorts of bits and pieces into sculptures. Among these were a few born of necessity: He’d sent a postcard to art dealer Julian Levy in New York complaining that he couldn’t find a chess set anywhere on the island.

So Levy came out for the summer and shacked up with him and Tanning. He didn’t bring a chess set, though — they made their own. See the rest.

Police are on the lookout for this man, seen wandering around by the River Limmat wearing a cardboard tube and a dunce cap and gesticulating like a madman. He’s wanted for disturbing the peace and trying to destroy Art As We Know It.

The year was 1916. The man was Hugo Ball, a German poet and theatrical producer who’d been tagged a traitor for quitting the army because “men have been confused with machines”. His anarchist streak was a mile wide, but it wasn’t militant, merely revolutionary.

The costume was something he’d dreamed up with the Romanian painter Marcel Janco, his legs and torso swallowed by bright blue cardboard cylinders so that he’d “look like an obelisk”, a cape of gold cardboard lined with scarlet paper that he could flap, along with his grotesque mittens, like a pair of wings, and a tall, blue-and-white striped magician’s hat.

The place was the Spiegelgasse, a little street in Zurich where Lenin, ensconsed at No 14, was among the neighbours complaining about the din coming from No 1, the Cabaret Voltaire, at all hours of the night. He could barely hear himself think about killing the Tsar, and that was some noisy thinking! (James Joyce was also in Zurich at the time, writing “Ulysses”, though he appears to have been unharassed by the commotion, and may even have found additional inspiration in it.)

Below, Google Earth images of the scene of the crime. in the lower shot, the cabaret is in the centre with what looks like a rainbow carpet outside — just light through a prism, I’m sure, but fitting enough.

Lenin and Joyce had their own plans. Hugo Ball’s destructive scheme was dada.

Ball (1886-1927) had founded the Cabaret Voltaire with fellow poets — his future wife Emily Hennings (1885-1948), Tristan Tzara from Romania and Richard Huelsenbeck from Germany — the painters Janco and Arthur Segal from Romania, the Germans Hans Richter and Christian Schad, Dutchmen Otto and Adya van Rees, Alsatian Hans Arp and the Swiss painter and dancer Sophie Taeuber.

Most of them were expressionists for whom expressionism was no longer expressive enough. Some would soon follow Kandinsky toward pure abstraction. All had come to neutral Switzerland to stay clear of a blood-soaked world war.

Something had to be done about man’s habit of fighting, they felt. It was getting out of hand. But the only answer, they decided, was to shred the whole of civilisation and start all over again. They would issue a declaration, said Ball, “to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals”.

Since they were artists, society’s demolition would begin with art, and the wrecking ball would be “anti-art”. They would pull pomp from its pedestal and level the Louvre. Art would return to the innocence of its youth. It would grow anew in random acts of creation, straight from the subconscious, rid of self-consciousness. In a fever, Ball embraced the “total work of art” — gesamtkunstwerk: “A fusion, not merely of all art, but of all regenerative ideas. The background of colours, words and sounds must be brought out from the subconcious and given life, so that it engulfs everyday life and all its misery.”

The movement needed a name, and anti-intellectually, Tzara poked a paper knife into a French-German dictionary, so one story goes, and it came to rest on dada, the French word for “hobby horse”, the German for “goodbye” or “get off my back”, the Romanian for “absolutely right”. On this vehicle of affirmative farewells they would ride into man’s better future. See the rest.

Dalí’s collaborator Philippe Halsman took a series of photos of Sal’s divine whiskers for the 1954 book “Dalí Moustache”, including the Mona Lisa embellishment above (a real moustache, apparently), which I’ve lined up against Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “LHOOQ” from 1919.

At least one commentator has chastised Dalí for being far too late with this gag, regardless of whether this was intended as a mere pun or as a renewed declaration of war on old-school painting. But maybe Dalí knew something about Duchamp that still isn’t widely known.

“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.

Maybe “LHOOQ” is supposed to be read in English as “look”, said another, which is a good title for an artwork, after all. I suggest that, read in English when very, very drunk, the letters suggest, “Shhhe’s sooooo cute.” Any takers?

The most interesting thing about the postcard view of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Duchamp randomly defiled in 1919 is that it’s apparently not a randomly defiled postcard of the Mona Lisa. See the rest.