Dali House

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.

Lots of people can point out on a map the exact place where James Dean crashed his Porsche Spyder into that Turnipseed fella’s car on the highway outside Bakersfield, California, at the end of September 1955. But how many know where Jackson Pollock wrecked his hulking Oldsmobile convertible 11 months later?

If you do, fill me in. Meanwhile, in the interest of mythology, as opposed to morbidity, I’m going to make an educated guess.

Pollock’s “Reflection of the Big Dipper”

There are websites that keep step with artists’ every breathing moment — the superb WarholStars.com is an outstanding resource, and I’ve used it extensively for this post. And then there are websites that say (or repeat without checking) that Pollock met his brutal demise after leaving his beloved Cedar Tavern on University Place and heading “further north on University Place to a more handsome venue”.

University Place is in Manhattan. Going further north would still be Manhattan. He’d have had to drive a long way east along Long Island to be in East Hampton, where he lived and where he actually left the road and whacked into a tree, killing himself and Edith Metzger. Photos from the scene and the Ed Harris movie version clearly place the crash in a more or less rural location, not Manhattan.

Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner

Am I being ghoulish wanting to know? Pollock was an obnoxious boor, but a lot of my heroes are when you manage to glimpse inside the inferno of their genius. And while I never have fully comprehended abstract expressionism, I know how important Pollock is in the apparatus of art history.

If I lived in New York I might consider seeking out the places he lived and died, but since I’m nowhere near, I’ll make the pilgrimage in my mind (and on Google Earth), and seek out shrines made of splintered wood.

See the rest.

The Munson-Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, which has more than 25,000 artworks, including important pieces by Edward Hopper, Arshile Gorky, Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Warhol, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Picasso, displays Dali’s “Cardinal, Cardinal!” from 1934 (detail seen here).

Far more than Chris Burden, Ed Kienholz has been much disparaged for throwing machismo around like it was nobody’s business, but although you can see where the critics were coming from when discussing installations like 1991’s “Mine Camp”, aka “Mein Kampf”, seen below, (and his work delved into rape and incest as well), I think in his case, brutish was beautiful.

If he had “an obvious desire to play God”, as one observer wrote — and he really was buried in his car, like a Chinese warlord on his chariot — Kienholz (1927-1994) was another take-no-shit American who scorned formal artistic training, took life by the horns and wrestled with it, starting with a Kesey-style gig as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, where you’re bound to get a skewed view of evolution. See the rest.

One autumn day in 1953 abstract art landed with a thump, like a heavy, unexpected snowfall, on what used to be called Toronto the Good. Splay-footed pedestrians passing Simpson’s mammoth department store at Queen and Yonge Streets were the eyewitnesses. They were used to the home-furnishings window displays and the fur-clad mannequins, but something had gone mightily askew here. The window was full of weird paintings, possibly from one one of those new-fangled UFOs everyone was talking about.

This decidedly non-gallery setting was where seven young Canadians vented the fever of the affliction that had overtaken New York.

The instigator was William Ronald, who did the artwork for Simpson’s ads and handled the window dressing at the store. His biggest challenge until then had been trying to outdo the displays at rival retail behemoth Eaton’s.

Ronald’s bold stroke got enough attention for him and the other six live wires involved in the plot that they — joined by four others and calling themselves Painters Eleven — got an exhibition the following February at the Roberts Gallery further down Yonge.

The Group of Seven had quietly blazed new paths in the woods, and with their adherents pretty much painted “every damn tree in the country”, as another top Canadian artist, Graham Coughtry, put it. Painters Eleven — Alexandra Luke, Harold Town, Oscar Cahén, Kazuo Nakamura, Jack Bush, Hortense Gordon, Walter Yarwood, Ray Mead, Tom Hodgson, Jock Macdonald and William Ronald — were chattering ice cutters noisily opening the Northwest Passage.

Ronald (1926-98) was born in Stratford, Ontario — a place that thinks it’s Shakespeare’s birthplace, complete with an Avon River — and, upon finishing studies at the Ontario College of Art, went to New York to study with Hans Hofmann. He got to go because he was a hockey player and won a $1,000 Canadian Amateur Hockey Association scholarship. Now that’s Canadiana.

In 1955 Painters Eleven had another show at the Roberts Gallery, and then Ronald moved to New York, where hi-so collector Countess Ingeborg de Beausac bought one of his paintings, and art dealer Samuel Kootz, who represented the prizefighters Kline, Rothko and de Kooning, as well as Hofmann, got interested, grabbed five more works, one of which ended up at the Guggenheim. Nice. Two years later the New York Times gave Ronald’s first American solo show a good write-up too.

“Kline complimented me on my work. I couldn’t believe it!” Ronald told a writer from ArtFocus magazine in 1997. “Rothko came to the Kootz Gallery later, when no one was there. He sat down and looked at one of my paintings for 20 minutes. I never spoke to him. I was shell-shocked!” See the rest.