My Inspiration for December 2018

This time I will let the pictures speak for themselves…

Picture by Natalia Drepina.

Photo found here.

pic found here.

pic found here.

pic found here.

photo by Natalia Drepina, found here.

Roses, found here.

Photo by Natalia Drepina

Marc Chagall – The Wedding Lights

Marc Chagall’s muse, lover, wife and a life companion Bella died on the 2nd September 1944. Chagall spent the entire autumn and winter in mourning and turned his canvases back to the wall. He only picked up his brush in moments when the birds and flowers were announcing the awakening of nature and a new spring of 1945; the spring that Bella never lived to see.

Marc Chagall, The Wedding Lights, 1945

When he returned to his studio that spring, one very large canvas that he had originally worked on in 1933 captivated him in particular. Although he’d already painted something on it, he suddenly felt inspired to cut the canvas in half and turn it into two different paintings. The right part of the original large canvas turned out to be the painting “Around Her”, seen bellow, which showed a crying figure of Bella dressed in pink and stand next to a magical ball showing their home town of Vitebsk, a bridal couple, a bird carrying a candle and an artist with his head upside down. The left part of the canvas became the painting “The Wedding Lights”. The painting has a strange, dreamy, nocturnal atmosphere of mystique and memories. A winged creature with a goat’s head is what remained from the original composition, but the somewhat cluttered and misty mood of the scene was new.

There’s a town in the distance, little houses that bring to mind Vitebsk, the place of Chagall and Bella’s first kisses and smiles, behind it a burning orange sky in sunset. A bride all in white and her chaperon are in the centre of the composition. A green cellist is slowly wandering off the canvas followed by the sounds of his melancholy notes. Space around the bride is grey and empty while she is paving way for the lightness, the same way Bella brought lightness into Chagall’s life back in 1909 when he first laid his eyes on that beautiful and demure daughter from a wealthy family. In the lower left corner another couple is hiding their love in the blue cloak of the night, sleeping on a rooster, they seem to be sinking into blueness.

Marc Chagall, Around Her, 1945

After Bella’s death, Chagall seems to be obsessively returning to the motif of lovers and bridal couples. He did paint many lovers before, usually flying in the air and often bearing resemblance to himself and Bella, but in later years the majority of his paintings feature newlyweds, dreamy and joyous, in an ambiguous space, shining with the promise of their future happiness. Physical Bella died, but in some spiritual way, she continued haunting his art, touching his canvases with her ghostly hand from the other world, her breath continued colouring his paintings in that dreamy shade of blue. Their love was love at first sight; they met in 1909 when he was twenty-two and she was fourteen, and instantly felt connection.

This is what Chagall wrote of Bella in his very dreamy and picturesque autobiography “My Life”: “Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me; as if she has always watched over me, somewhere next to me, though I saw her for the very first time. I knew this is she, my wife. Her pale colouring, her eyes. How big and round and black they are! They are my eyes, my soul.” Next year, in 1910, Chagall moved to Paris because of his art and stayed there for four years. He missed her terribly while in Paris and was thinking about her day and night. Bella waited for him and in 1915 they were married. Their only child, a daughter named Ida, was born in May 1916. The title of the painting “The Wedding Lights” is a reference to her memoir called “The Burning Lights” that Bella had been writing in haste just before she died.

Fashion Inspiration: Please – consider me a dream

Awhile ago I found these pretty pictures of dreamy girls wearing unusual almost circus-like make up with a lot of glitter and pink eye-shadows, often dressed in a bit old fashioned white gowns with lace, holding porcelain dolls or bunnies in their arms, or little tea cups, feathers tangled in their silken hair, smiling or just looking wistful. I was instantly captivated with the whole aesthetic so I thought why not share them with you! They all look so utterly dreamy and I thought this quote would suit the mood of the pictures perfectly:

“Please – consider me a dream.”

Note on the quote: “Once while visiting his friend Max Brod, young Kafka awakened Brod’s father, who was asleep on a couch. Instead of apologizing, Kafka gently motioned him to relax, advanced through the room on tiptoe, and said softly: “Please – consider me a dream.”’ from Franz Kafka by Franz Baumer

All pictures found here.

Anna Akhmatova – And I’m drunk on the sound of your voice, echoing here

A beautiful poem called “White Night” by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) that I recently discovered.

Photo by Natalia Drepina

White night

Oh, I’ve not locked the door,

I’ve not lit the candles,

You know I’m too tired

To think of sleep.

 

See, how the fields die down,

In the sunset gloom of firs,

And I’m drunk on the sound

Of your voice, echoing here.

 

It’s fine, that all’s black,

That life’s – a cursed hell.

O, that you’d come back –

I was so certain, as well.

Jan Steen – The Lovesick Maiden

Today we’ll take a look at a very interesting painting from the Dutch Golden Age; “The Lovesick Maiden” by Jan Steen.

Jan Steen, The Lovesick Maiden, c. 1660

In a typical Dutch interior of the period, a pale young woman is suffering from a terrible illness, the one for which no cure has ever been found – love! She is situated in the middle of the canvas as if she was an actress playing a role on the stage. Tragedy is the genre. On her right side is her maid servant, on her left is a doctor dressed in unusual clothes. His hat in particular is strange, and look at the way the servant is eyeing him. He is checking the girl’s pulse. The setting is the girl’s bedroom, there is a bed in the background, in the left corner there are bed heaters and the girl’s appearance reveals an intimate setting; she is wearing her white linen night cap, and she only carelessly threw on her ermine trimmed little coat to keep her warm I guess, her rounded white bosom are peeking above her garish red corset. She is too in distressed to care for frivolous matters such as clothes! Too ill to care, and still too healthy she appears to be sitting there like that instead of lying in bed. And that doctor too looks too much like a comedy actor. That’s because he is a quack doctor. Next to the girl’s feet a little dog is sleeping. In the context of a love scene, a dog usually represents fidelity. What exactly is she faithful to here; to her unrequited love, or to her love sickness?

I can really imagine her thinking these thoughts from Bob Dylan’s song “Love Sick” as she is sitting there with her head on her hand, her leg raised up, her rosy cheeks and her furrowed brow, half-lamenting and half-sulking:

“Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone’s distant cry?
I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile
While I was sleeping

I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it
This kind of love I’m so sick of it….

I’m sick of love; I hear the clock tick
This kind of love; I’m love sick

Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder
Sometimes I feel like I’m being plowed under
Could you ever be true? I think of you
And I wonder

I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you

Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you“

Decades before this was painted, in 1610, the French physician Jacques Ferrard published a study of this “disease of the fantasy”, named “Of Lovesickness or Erotic Melancholy: A Scientific Discourse that teaches how to know the essence, causes, signs, and remedies of this disease of the fantasy“. Here he names the symptoms of this illness that this Jan Steen’s pale girl which also have: “Lovesickness gives rise to a pale and wan complexion, joined by a slow fever that modern practitioners call amorous fever, to palpitations of the heart, swelling of the face, depraved appetite, a sense of grief, sighing, causeless tears, insatiable hunger, raging thirst, fainting, oppressions, suffocations, insomnia, headaches, melancholy, epilepsy, madness, uterine fury, satyriasis, and other pernicious symptoms that are, for the most part, without mitigation or cure other than through the established medical remedies for love and erotic melancholy… These symptoms of disease have caused many to believe that love is a kind of poison that is generated within the body itself…” (quote found here.)

Jan Steen, Physician’s Visit, 1660

In this painting, a sculpture of Cupid in the shadowy upper left corner, above the doors which lead into the outdoors stands as a symbol of love that is tormenting her. This is however just one painting in a row; Jan Steen made an entire series of paintings that portray love as an illness and a doctor as a quack. It was a comedy genre beloved in his time and especially in his home town of Leiden because the Leiden University produced many fine doctors in the country. Here is another example that he made, the same year in fact, called “The Physician’s Visit”. In this example, the painting of Venus and Adonis on the wall tell us that Steen’s girl is suffering from lovesickness. The physician is feeling her pulse because that was a way of knowing whether the patient suffers from the “erotic melancholy”. The illness could also be detected through the urine, and we can see that the maid is holding an urine bottle. Also, the little boy in the left corner is a Cupid dressed in contemporary costume, ready to shot his arrow.

Apart from doing mischief, Cupid was especially fond of idleness and even in the Ancient times Ovid wrote how avoiding idleness makes you immune to Cupid’s arrows. During the Renaissance it was thought that idleness in fact triggers erotic melancholy. “In “L’Antidote d’amour”, Jean Aubery delineates the “particular dispositions” that make one susceptible to passion and thus to love-sickness. Chief among these are idleness, youth, luxury, and springtime. When all of these factors are present, passion is inevitable. Why are artisans and laborers exempt from erotic melancholy, even during springtime and even if they are young? Because, the author concludes, they know neither luxury nor idleness.” (Virginia Krause; “Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance”)

If Steen’s lovesick maidens had been doing their embroidery regularly or had other occupations, they might have avoided the trap of pining and yearning. All in all, these painting are comedies of love and everyday life and the possible buyer most likely had a good sense of humor.

Fragonard and Goya: The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure?

Jean-Honore Fragonard, A Game of Hot Cockles, 1775

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a master when it came to turning fantasies into realities, in the realm of his canvas at least, he wasn’t a magician or a magic fairy. Fragonard, a pupil of Boucher, brought elegance and youthful playfulness into Francois Boucher’s sumptuous and slightly erotic compositions. Whereas Boucher intertwined mythological scenes with the unrestrained lives of the wealthy nobility, Fragonard painted worlds which are neither real nor mythological, but his own dreamy havens. His is the world where love never dies and sun never sets. The painting “A Game of Hot Cockles” isn’t even the finest example, his series called “Progress of Love” is the height of romantic escapism in that fanciful kingdom of love and dreams.

In the painting above the figures occupy just a small portion of the canvas, while the tall trees stretch on and on. He paints trees in a variety of shades, from the warm green-yellowish leaves in the foreground to the gentle hazy blue-greens in the background. The mysterious park is like a theatre stage where games take place. The inspiration for the dazzling landscapes in the background of his painting came from his travel to Rome in 1756, and so does the vibrant colour palette. In contrast to the greenness, the figures are dressed in vibrant jewel coloured clothes; ruby red, sapphire blue, amber yellow, pink as rose quartz.

Detail of Fragonard’s painting

In a dreamy park surrounded by woods a dreamy group of silk-clad figures are enjoying their leisure time and playing a game, and not just any game, but a very Rococo one called “game of hot cockles” which was a popular game for the Christmas time even in the nineteenth century. The game includes one person placing their head in someone’s lap while a third person is hitting their bottom, and the person has to guess who spanked them. A man had a unique opportunity to place their head in a pretty woman’s laps, and ladies had a chance to do the same. Such a silly and naughty game with an erotic undertone instantly became a hit with the indolent French nobility. One could intentionally name the wrong person so that this “wicked game” continues. The group is playing the game, but what are the lady in a red dress and the man in blue doing in the far left corner? Perhaps he’s telling her ‘Hey, I would like to spank you, but it needn’t be part of the game.’ To which she disapprovingly replies ‘Oh, please, can’t you see my dog is listening’.

Lyrics from the Gang of Four’s song ‘Natural’s not in it’ come to mind:

“The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses….
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the perfect life
This heaven gives me migraine”

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Blind Man’s Buff (La Gallina Ciega), 1788

The works that Goya is known for today, the imaginative, but dark and disturbing “Los Caprichos” are in the start contrast to his earlier works painted for the court. “Blind Man’s Buff” belongs to Goya’s court phase or his Rococo phase. Both the theme and the colour palette are lighter, and he was influenced by Watteau in this period. It is part of the series that Goya painted for the Royal Palace of El Pardo in Madrid. The painting shows a group of young people playing the game of blind man’s buff.

The man in the middle is blindfolded and trying to touch the other players with a long wooden spoon. I remember playing that game when I was little, but we never used a spoon, how funny! One man, the one on the right, is dressed in an elegant French attire while the other three men and the women are all showing off their vibrant Spanish costumes which they chose to wear in order to emphasise their nationality and culture. In this detail you can see the wonderful vibrant colours, that red and that yellow are so eye catching! It all looks so dreamy and naive, which goes in tune with the spirit of Rococo and its never ending pursuit of pleasure and love for enjoying life.

The Straw Manikin (La Marioneta) by Francisco Goya, 1791-92

Here is another painting from the same royal series by Goya, painted a bit later though, called “The Straw Manikin”. I already wrote about it here. Times are getting darker and Rococo is in demise, and here an innocent outdoor game is taking a twisted touch. Girls are throwing a straw doll in the air, but look at his face expression; so passive, so resigned, they can do whatever they want with him. He is powerless in the hands of females.