Dali House

One hundred years ago Amedeo Modigliani painted “Beggar Woman”. He’d only been in Paris a short time and had done his share of scrounging too.

Seen up close, the oil looks as though it’s gone begging as well, which won’t sit will with collectors, who have of late been willing to part with a routine $6 million for a Modigliani (in good condition) and as much as $30 million if it’s really got something to say for itself.

Don’t expect “Beggar Woman” to climb that social ladder, but surely she’s got something to say behind the scars of a century’s neglect.

Modigliani turned 25 in 1909, but he was still a poke-about adolescent in Paris, fresh off the train just three years before. He still hadn’t found his way out of the sticky goo of bohemian chaos, swapping Toulouse-Lautrec for Cezanne and then being talked into Africanesque chisel-work.

The son of a money-changer who’d lost all his money, sickly since childhood, fond of hashish, in 1906 Modigliani nevertheless had gusto to go, and rolled up in Montmartre spewing lines from Nietzsche, Dante and Lautreamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror”, and wondering why the great Picasso dressed like a junkman.

He squatted in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a real dump, but got a nice studio in Rue Caulaincourt and tried to maintain a semblance of Venetian poshness. Fine clothes. Clean fingernails. Then he went nuts.

By 1909 the studio was a shambles, and Modigliani had shredded his old paintings and couldn’t be trusted with the new ones. He’d get drunk at parties and then get naked, afloat on absinthe and hash. Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Apollinaire and Cocteau tried not to look.

Ah, but that’s what made him a genius, said the art critic Andre Salmon, not the first and certainly not the last to sanction stimulants as the stepping stones to creative transcendence. Had Salmon met Rimbaud, do you suppose? See the rest.

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.

“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.

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.

Paul Cézanne: “Leda with Swan”, from around 1881

Let’s go back to swanning Leda. She was, after all, was the mother of Helen of Troy, with whom we recently dallied (pun intended). More raunchy Greek mythology through the filter of the all-illuminating Catalan sunshine.

“Leda is lying between the swan’s wings,” wrote Ovid in “Metamorphoses”. He seemed to have no qualms about sex between consenting animals. But was Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, a willing lover of the swan, who was in fact the supreme god Zeus in feathered form? Or was she the lusty old goat’s victim in another of the serial rapist’s assaults? Two juries have convened and two contradictory verdicts rendered.

Leda produced four eggs, from which hatched Castor, Clytemnestra, Polydeuces and the future Helen of Troy. The first pair may have been Zeus’ children, the latter her husband’s. (Helen is elsewhere the daughter of Nemesis, the goddess of disaster befalling the proud, but one suspects some wishful editing here.)

For the painters and sculptors of earlier times in particular, who lacked the psychological reference tools, portraying the story was no easy matter. By way of analysing WB Yeats’ 1928 poem on the subject, Belgian art lecturer Stefan Beyst offers an interesting physiological analysis of the way the human-avian coitus has been cast on his website. See the rest.