Dali House

Dali House hasn’t had anyone running frantically around since Nicolas Poussin showed up toting “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake”. Now here’s another Frenchman, Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy (1757-1841), with another mysterious flight through the woods.

“A Neo-classical Landscape with a Young Woman Running on a Path” is the title that Sotheby’s Paris credits to this curious relic, which it’s trying to sell for, hmmm, who’ll bid 15,000 euros? It’s in the “Old Master Paintings and Drawings” auction on June 25.

A Paris Salon regular, Dunouy specialised in landscapes, often with historic or palatial buildings and once, memorably, with Vesuvius erupting, a commission from Louis XIII. He was “associated with the artists known as little masters”, as one online source puts it, meaning fans of classical, highly detailed scenes.

But I’ve found no explanation as to why the young woman in this piece is on the lam. And on closer examination, she appears to be a nun!

Maybe we should have a caption contest.

What happens when a painting’s title forgets its place and crawls all over the canvas? Too ambitious to loiter meekly in the little sign card next to the frame, the words decide they’re just as important as the picture, and the next thing you know you have anarchy, graffiti run amok, images and text forming a labour union and subverting the millennia-old conventions governing visual representation.

A detail of Georges Braque’s “Pedestal Table” from 1913.

Pop art made words in paintings commonplace, but its grandfather, cubism, was a sucker for shards of text blowing through the scenery, and its crazy old great-uncle, surrealism, kept scrapbooks of every flitting message scrap, quite sure they would one day all make sense.

Andre Derain’s “Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper” from about 1912.

Pictures and words are natural enough collaborators, of course, both being central to the fine arts, but traditionally they never appeared onstage together. I really don’t want to dig too deeply into this, because there are websites that are quite happy to take you on very long and not particularly interesting strolls along Semiotics Street, returning by way of Semantics Boulevard. In the case of Rene Magritte the University of Washington has an especially heavy-breathing thesis online, but do watch out for words like “intersubstitutability” — you could injure yourself.

Then there’s David Scott’s 2005 essay for Image & Narrative, “the Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative” about the words found in Paul Delvaux’s art, which I found a bit more intesting since Delvaux is a bit more interesting, not least because he was forever painting naked women sleepwalking around train stations. (He also painted a fine “Leda” in 1948, a subject I’ve lately been rattling on about.)

Dali House has also joined the wool-minders pondering the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, but that was hardly on the same level as Magritte’s patient experimenting with what exactly it is that words and pictures do, how they do it and how you can pull the rug out from under them.

“This is Not a Pipe”, from 1929, and it’s still not a pipe today. Magritte did a string of variations on this picture over the decades in a bid to expose “the Treachery of Imagery”, ultimately putting the words on a bolted-down plaque so it looked as though the affirmation could never be removed. I think of the image every time I hear David Byrne sing, “This is not my beautiful wife!”

What was Magritte on about? Michel Foucault found a litany of layered possible interpretations in a 1973 book about the pipe picture, one cancelling out another. This picture of a pipe doesn’t make the pipe a pipe, of course, but there’s much more. This painting is not a pipe? Art is not a pipe? If you focus on the words and realise this sentence is not a pipe, suddenly a picture reclaims its dominance over the written word. See the rest.

For me, at the moment, one of the great disappointments of Google Earth is its unreadiness to focus on Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on the briny shore of Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. Not only would it be a pile of fun zipping around over it like a bird, you could keep an eye on how it’s doing from time to time. As you can see below, the satellite was obviously having a fuzzy day.

This is easily the most famous of the many earth-moving efforts of Smithson (1938-1973), who came out of industry-minded Passaic, New Jersey, and obviously wanted to sculpt a better world. He fashioned “Spiral Jetty” over the course of six days in April 1970 out of basalt rocks and earth, a counterclockwise coiled dragon 1,500 feet long and 15 wide. See the rest.

Click the image to see it much larger.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) isn’t the kind of painter who would normally grab my attention – too bucolic and lah-di-da for my taste – but intriguing things do keep popping up in his work, not least the claim that “The Shepherds of Arcadia” answers the riddle of the Holy Grail.

Like millions of others, I came across this ultimately enervating contention in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”. Co-author Henry Lincoln followed that up with “The Holy Place”, which I think Ron Howard and Tom Hanks are going to make into a movie. Poussin was rumoured to be a Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Even the word “rumour” doesn’t have as much weight as it used to, does it?

Now I’ve found out (probably after millions of others) that Poussin’s “Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake” has quite a story behind it too. The title’s pretty darned good on its own.

And the original title was “The Effects of Fear”, which is even better. See the rest.

This is a companion piece to my Google Earth travelogue about the great English impressionist. The GE post is here.

“The painter of light”, “the great pyrotechnist”, one of the finest landscape artists in English history, if not the best, Joseph Mallord William Turner produced more than 20,000 paintings and drawings in his lifetime, and his frequent rambles across Europe happen to make him a perfect subject for Google Earth.

JMW Turner was celebrated in his own time, and deluged with commissions, but he was also the Jackson Pollock of his day, scathingly reviled for “hurling soapsuds and whitewash” at canvases with a mop – even Queen Victoria thought him mad – and his foul temper and reclusiveness lost him many friends. Just five foot four inches tall, he was hobbit-like in size, but he was the artistic giant of the early 19th century. See the rest.