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.

Just thinking out loud here.

The photo comes from the “World War II in Color” collection at Demonicious.com, not to be confused with the same site’s “Hot Girls” collection.

The 1600 version of “The Judgement of Paris” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), which was based on Raphael’s. Rubens did at least three variations, but we’ll get to that.

And the Internet always tosses up three different renditions of Salvador Dali’s “Judgement of Paris”, and I’m not sure they’re all correct. He did his etching in the mid-1960s for a series called “Mythologie”. Have a look at this post for a bit more information on the subject.

Hacking into the legend of the Trojan War and all the paint that’s been poured into recording the event that started it.

The riveting soap opera played out in and around the myth that has for 3,000 years been known as “the Judgement of Paris” has for just as long had artists falling all over each other to get their versions down on canvas. Of course, all of Greek mythology has been painted as many times as Tom Sawyer’s picket fence, including the whole Trojan War ball of yarn back to front, but consider this particular episode:

* Three of history’s most beautiful women practically or altogether nude, and each aquiver with naked jealousy
* A guy — Joe Average — called upon to be the judge in their divine beauty pageant
* God the Father watching with keen interest
* And the fate of human civilisation teetering in the balance.

Who could resist subject matter like this? No one!

The Judgement in porcelain, from about 500 BCE, at Rome’s Capitoline Museums.

For centuries it was the ancient Greek and Roman scribes who had their way with the tale, complete with ribald humour, while the pot-painters of their time fumbled with the essentials. Finally, though, the more modern artists who knew how to depict lust properly got their chance and set up their easels on Mount Ida, where Paris was tending his sheep, an odd thing for him to be doing, since he was a prince of Troy.

Paris must have wondered why he was suddenly the designated model for an art class, but then he had had his moment of fame: He’d been the adjudicator in a bullfight — his own bull against a bovine who turned out to be Ares (not Taurus). Ares, to no one’s surprise, won.

Raphael’s “Judgement of Paris” is in fact the engraving made from it in 1515 by Marcantonio Raimondi. Somebody lost Raphael’s copy. Not to worry, Marcantonio (c1480-c1534) was one of the best in the printmaking business, influenced by Dürer and exceedingly clever at adding in his own backdrops.

In this detail, viewers take note of a character who’s taking note of them. This is where Édouard Manet found his tableau for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in 1863. Raphael or not, polite people at the Paris Salon freaked when they saw a naked female picnicking with a couple of swank “customers”. So Manet borrowed instead from Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and painted “Olympia”, and you should have heard the howling then!

The reason for the impromptu painters’ salon in the Phrygian highlands began to dawn on Paris when Hermes, the messenger boy, turned up with three quite fetching ladies. The painter-paparazzi must have had advance notice of their coming, Paris thought.

Hermes was carrying an apple, never a good sign in these scenarios, Paris thought further, and then he stopped thinking because the women had shed their clothes and begun bathing in the Spring of Ida. Hermes would have explained to him, if he could have held his attention long enough, that he was holding the Apple of Discord, which Eris, the Goddess of Discord, had chucked onto the banquet table at a party that she’d crashed.

Girolamo Benvenuto (1470-1524), with all the gilded, not-quite-natural nature of the Sienese artisans in his day.

The banquet was another scene of which there are dozens of great paintings: a wedding party that Zeus had thrown for Peleus and Thetis, who would one day give birth to Achilles, who would one day be played by Brad Pitt in a blockbuster film that would be quickly forgotten because it didn’t have much going for it beyond a couple of pretty good swordfights.

Eris wasn’t invited because she was, well, the Goddess of Discord, and who wants discord at a party? Disco, maybe, in a pinch, but not discord. She showed up anyway and, staying in character, caused discord. The golden apple she added to the buffet, she said, without naming names, belonged to the best-looking woman in the universe.

“Why, that would be me!” said the goddess Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and also of Cuckolded Wives, who was wedded to (and cuckolded by) Zeus.

“No, me!” said the goddess Athena, who enjoyed a good hunt.

“In your dreams,” said the goddess Aphrodite, who was, after all, the Goddess of Beauty. “It’s me!”

All eyes turned to Zeus, the capo del tutti capo of Mount Olympus, who, like most chairmen of the board, was all bluff and bluster. He passed the buck and nominated Paris, the cattle judge, to decide which babe was the best looking. 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.

Claude Monet was riding a train in early 1883 when he first saw Giverny, population 300. Now the train is gone, having served its purpose in delivering him here.

Monet bought a spacious farmhouse and by May had moved in with his companion Alice Hosched, his two sons and her six children. The property came with a vegetable garden and a hectare of fruit trees. He rented until 1890, when he bought the place and turned it into an Eden with strictly enforced rules for the flora bunda. It saved him walking out into the surrounding countryside (although somehow his neighbours’ haystacks proved irresistible).

Monet didn’t want anything overly organised, and as long as the flowers were in rows of complementary colours they could grow any way they wanted. When he bought the neighbouring property across the railway in 1893and freaked out the villagers by widening the little brook called the Ru (a tendril of the Seine) into a pond, the water garden it eventually became was all askew and curvy.

The inspiration came from his collection of Japanese prints, and he topped it off with a bamboo grove the now-famous arched bridge, caressed by weeping willows. Monet made sure his gardener cruised around the pond every morning and scrubbed the railway soot off the lily pads. They had to be ready to have their portraits painted at any time. See the rest.