Dali House

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside. See the rest.

I’ve done some damage to my right shoulder and, pending a visit to a doctor, envision myself in some sort of cast and unable to type with my right hand. Could I manage with my left? Then I found this line in the basic, one-size-fits-all, self-replicating online biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919): “In 1880 Renoir broke his right arm and for some time painted with his left hand.”

For me it raises two questions: How did he break his arm, and what did his southpaw paintings look like?

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1880 paintings, even with one website that’s still under construction being quite off-handed (pardon the pun) about jumbling the dates of his works. Then I discovered that the self-replicating biography itself had the wrong year for his skeleton-rearranging accident — it was in 1897.

There was a lesson to be learned here, but I like to make the same mistakes twice, just to be sure I wasn’t right the first time.

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1897 paintings, and put the ones from 1880 back in the museums when no one was looking. The broken-arm paintings, displayed throughout this post (shown here is “Young Woman in Profile”), are fine, nothing bizarro or skewed about them that I can see, nothing you can spot and say, “Oh, that’s so gauche!” (get it?). But more on that later.

How did he break his arm? I kept searching and found the “official” reason: He fell off his bicycle. See the rest.

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. See the rest.

“Race Horses” by Edgar Degas, stabled at the Musée d’Orsay

After decades of rural landscapes lining the walls of the Paris salons, French painters in the 1860s turned to modern urban life. Edouard Manet led the parade of Parisians at play with “Luncheon on the Grass” and quickly had a rival in Edgar Degas, with his always popular ballet scenes.

Their interest converged here at fashionable Longchamp racecourse, which opened in 1857, during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, an integral element in Baron Haussmann’s replanned city. At the Bois de Boulogne home of “le Jockey Club”, seen here in a Google Earth image, Degas initially tried and failed to reproduce the imagery he’d seen in British racing prints and Gericault’s paintings of English horse races, and Manet at first struggled too.

See the rest.

Just finished a Google Earth tour of Henri Rousseau’s life and times, a hefty elaboration on Dali House’s earlier foray. See the GE post here.

This is the whole story, and then some, in three parts, on an artist who, though known and loved the world over, somehow doesn’t rate an appearance in my “Essential History of Art” from Parragon, and he’s not in my “Great Artists” from DK’s Annotated Guides either, although many lesser-known names are. There are reasons for this, not all of them good ones …

“Rousseau walks on trumpet paths,” Joni Mitchell sings against a gauntlet of Burundi drums in “The Jungle Line”.

Henri Rousseau, “the very-good-very-bad painter”, remains enigmatic nearly a century after his death. He is the not-quite-post-impressionist who always requires an explanatory sidebar of his own. All his life he felt he didn’t fit in, probably because he didn’t, until Picasso threw a rowdy party for him that enthroned him as “the master”. His fellow artists were being facetious, but they genuinely loved the way he rubbed the high-brow art world’s noses in his garish palette.

The funniest thing was, “the Douanier” really did believe his paintings were realistic. “The hungry lion throws itself on the antelope, devours him,” he trilled about one of his jungle scenes, enrapt by its frightening authenticity. “Birds of prey have each torn a strip of flesh from the poor animal that is shedding a tear! The sun sets.”

And to Picasso, at the end of the soon-to-be-legendary Banquette Rousseau, he pronounced tearily, “You and I are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.” Onlookers sniggered at the audacity, but Le Douanier knew what they did not yet know, that his spirited jungle had been colonised by a race of people who walked sideways and spoke in hieroglyphics.

It’s been said, oversimplistically but sympathetically, that “he didn’t know the rules well enough to break them”. But of course there are no rules in the kingdom of the imagination. See the rest.