Gustav Adolf Mossa – Symbolist Phase

“Then, O my beauty! You will say to the vermin,
Which will devour you with kisses,
That I have preserved the form and essence divine
Of my decayed loves!”

(Charles Baudelaire, Carcass)

Gustav-Adolf Mossa, The Dead Women (Les Mortes), 1908

Gustav Adolfo Mossa, a French painter born in Nice in 1883 to an Italian mother and an artist father, spent his late teens and most of his twenties painting in a Symbolist style and so that first artistic period in Mossa’s oeuvre is called the “Symbolist period” and it lasted from about 1900 to 1911. Later, upon moving to Bruges, he discovered Flemish paintings and his art drifted in another direction. In his Symbolist phase Mossa created a macabre and disturbing yet vibrant world littered with femme fatales and saints, heroes and heroines from Shakespeare, and just random skeletons. Mossa was introduced to the Symbolist art at the Exposition Universelle which he visited in 1900 and after that moment all the inspiration that was mounting in his teenage soul, taken from Art Nouveau and the literary works of Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Mallarmé, suddenly flourished in these watercolours which are all so captivating and full of interesting details. I always felt drown to the spirit of Symbolism, and yet the way these ideas were manifested in the visual arts wasn’t very appealing to me. Now, in the art of Mossa, I found what I was looking for. I love how the classic, well-known themes in art are transformed by Mossa into a festival of blood, bones, lust and roses. The delicacy of watercolour mixed with somewhat gruesome or eerie themes is especially entrancing. The beauty of the Symbolist phase of Mossa’s art is that it both disturbs and bewilders the soul. In “The Dead Women” we see the faces of fashionable ladies after the vermins had devoured them with their kisses; the velvet smooth skin, the rosy cheeks are now all eaten away and the grey skull appears – what a contrast to the radiant blueness of their dresses and the elegance of their hats. Tall and dark cypress trees in the background look gloomy and foreboding, as they do in real life.

Gustav Adolf Mossa, Salome, 1901

In the watercolour “Salome” the severed, bloodied heads spring from the most fragrant and delicate pink roses, Salome seductively licks the blade of the very sword which had severed them. Dressed in a loose white nightgown with one breast exposed, her pale flesh is revealed, her hand adorned with rings, not a trace of remorse colours her face.

Gustave Adolphe Mossa, Hamlet and the Skull, 1909, Black chalk, pen and ink, watercolour and gouache on paper, 46.2 x 28 cm

Hamlet, a solitary figure under a grey sky and clouds as heavy as lead, his figure is elongated like the figures in early Renaissance art, he is holding an exaggaretedly large skull in his hands, a cup next to his feet with spilt wine – or is it blood? The town is sleeping in the distance, the tower looming as a threat, hundreds of little windows are like dark empty eye sockets ready to swallow who ever dares to gander upon them for too long.

Gustav Adolf Mossa, La chasse de Sainte Ursule, date unknown

Saint Ursula standing on the shore of a river with snow-white swans next to her feet. Dozens or arrows are flying her way, ready to pierce her virginal flesh, but her face reveals not a sign of worry, it is as serene and pale as can be, her golden hair makes one think more of a fairy than of a saint; she is above it all, shielded from the arrows by her heavy robe, nothing can touch her.

Gustav-Adolf Mossa, Valse Macabre, 1906

In “Valse Macabre” the fin de siecle fascination with Eros and Thanatos are united, a skeleton and a femme fatale with fashionably voluminous hair are locked in a kiss, their bodies intertwined, the breath of the death coming from the graveyard in the distance has extinguished the tall white candles, the lady’s gaze seems to say:

“It is eternity when your kiss grazes me,

My heart, my heart rises,

ah! so high that it flies away.”

(Remy de Gourmont, Hieroglyphs)

Gustav Adolf Mossa, Pierrot, 1906

Pierrot is wandering the old rotting town with a dagger in his hand and a mad look in his eyes, a face of sleepless night and madness, his under eye circles darker than the dark waters of the canals in Bruges. St Sebastian looks less like a saint and more like a charming boy, his poor, tortured body is convulsing in pain from the arrows while the crow is feasting on his eyes.

 

Gustav Adolf Mossa, Sebastian Martyr, 1907

Lilian Westcott Hale – Nancy and the Map of Europe

Lilian Westcott Hale, Nancy and the Map of Europe, 1919

American painter Lilian Westcott Hale’s paintings are a doorway to the gentle and secretive world of femininity as she mostly painted interiors with women and children. Lilian was in Connecticut, studied at the School of Fine Arts in Boston where one of her tutors was William Merritt Chase and also Philip Leslie Hale who later became her husband. She painted many delightful interiors with wistful girls, but painting “Nancy and the Map of Europe” is my faovurite at the moment because it is so very simple in composition, but very interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Nothing excessive clutters the scene; Nancy is sitting on the chair, dressed in a pretty blue gown, with a book in her lap. The little porcelain doll is sitting on the floor and is dressed in the matching blue gown. A map of Europe, painted in soothing pastel shades, covers nearly the entire wall and the entire background. The scene reminds me of those long, golden afternoons spent at school which were so sunny and bright and seemed never ending; the sun coming through the curtains would reveal the dust in the air and the shadows would dance on the map of the world on the wall. This sentence comes to mind “The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.”, from Stephen King’s novel “Carrie”.

I use to spend many moments just gazing at maps; following the contours of the countries with my finger, whispering the names of the mountains and river, and imagining how beautiful all those places must be. The colours and the mood of this painting awake a certain nostalgia in me; for childhood, its simplicity, wonder and possibilities. Childhood, a time of hope, joy and possibilities. Nancy can be whoever she likes; all doors are open to her, she can visit all the countries that are shown on the map behind her. There is a mountain of books for Nancy yet to read, a plethora of experiences to gather. Nancy was eleven year old when this painting was painted, having been born in May 1908. She seems like a smart, dreamy and pretty girl in this painting, with her long hair, wistful gaze and that pretty dress. Who knows what dreams occupy her mind? What books fuels her fantasies? What secrets did she whisper to that doll on the floor? Little Nancy doesn’t yet know what a fascinating life she will have, even though the seeds of it were already planted. Nancy published her first story “The Key Glorious” at the age of eleven. A writing career,troubled marriages, emotional breakdowns, that is all ahead of her. In this lovely painting painted by her mother, Nancy is still a simple eleven year old and her head is filled with dreams.

Frederick Carl Frieseke: Lady in the Garden in June

“What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.”

(Gerture Jekyll)

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Lady in the Garden in June, 1911

Painting “Lady in the Garden in June” and many other paintings by the American Impressionist painter Frederick Carl Frieseke perfectly encapsulate the lazy and indolent mood of a summer garden. Female figures in their pretty dresses and fashionable hats serve to beautify the scenes of gardens in bloom, but Frieseke paints both the flowers and the ladies with equal attentiveness and vibrancy, they seem to be a part of the landscape. Gertrude Jekyll, a British Victorian era horticulturist, writer and garden designer perfectly described this transient and illusive, yet magical and captivating mood of June when summer has revealed to us all its charms and we feel the dream will never end. John Singer Sargent encapsulated this same ethereal and dreamy mood in his painting “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose“, but with Frieseke it’s not just a single painting which speaks of summer delights, but many.

On these canvases Frieseke translates the charms of summer into an oasis of joyous, vibrant colours and countless little dabs, dots and dashes of paint. In the painting “Hollyhocks” from 1911 you can really see how a few dabs of light pink or red can create a whole hollyhock flower. The painting looks pulsating and alive with all these trembling brush strokes and all these colours and it is easy to see why a critic had referred to Frieseke’s style as “Decorative Impressionism” because he uses the same motives as the Impressionists, the wonderful outdoors with flowers and sunshine, but fills his paintings with details, patterns and shapes and some paintings, such as the one called “Hollyhocks” from 1912-13 reminds me of Gustav Klimt’s landscapes which never feature human figures but are instead made out of garish colours and filled with details leaving no space free of shapes and dabs of rich colour.

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Hollyhocks, by 1911

There is little difference between the figure of a lady and the figure of a flower in Frieseke’s garden scenes, both are here for their beauty, colour and shape, and we can see that in the painting “Hollyhocks” above, from 1911, where the woman is seen from the profile in her garden in bloom and, seen from afar, her lean, upward figure would resemble a tall, lean hollyhock flower. In “Lady in Garden” the domineering pattern are vertical dashes which linger on and on over the canvas creating a rhythm and we can hardly see the line which separates the tall, sharp blades of grass from the stripes on the fabric of the woman’s dress. Although Frieseke was an American artist, in 1898, at the age of twenty-four he moved to France and studied art at Academie Julian. He regularly spent his summers at Giverny and in 1906 he moved into a house there, previously owned by another American painter Theodore Robinson, and found himself being a neighbour of none other but the Father of Impressionism: Claude Monet. Despite this lucky coincidence, Frieseke and Monet didn’t develop a friendship. Frieseke found Renoir to be his inspiration instead, inspired by Renoir’s voluptuous women, vibrant colours and a sense of joie de vivre and sensuality lingering through his canvases. And now, speaking of flowers and lovely gardens in summer reminded me of this passage from Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women”:

“As spring came on, a new set of amusements became the fashion, and the lengthening days gave long afternoons for work and play of all sorts. The garden had to be put in order, and each sister had a quarter of the little plot to do what she liked with. Hannah used to say, “I’d know which each of them gardings belonged to, ef I see ’em in Chiny,” and so she might, for the girls’ tastes differed as much as their characters. Meg’s had roses and heliotrope, myrtle, and a little orange tree in it. Jo’s bed was never alike two seasons, for she was always trying experiments. This year it was to be a plantation of sun flowers, the seeds of which cheerful land aspiring plant were to feed Aunt Cockle-top and her family of chicks. Beth had old-fashioned fragrant flowers in her garden, sweet peas and mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, and southernwood, with chickweed for the birds and catnip for the pussies. Amy had a bower in hers, rather small and earwiggy, but very pretty to look at, with honeysuckle and morning-glories hanging their colored horns and bells in graceful wreaths all over it, tall white lilies, delicate ferns, and as many brilliant, picturesque plants as would consent to blossom there. Gardening, walks, rows on the river, and flower hunts employed the fine days, and for rainy ones, they had house diversions, some old, some new, all more or less original.”

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Lilies, 1911

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Lady in a Garden, 1912, oil on canvas, 81 x 65.4 cm

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Hollyhocks, 1912-13

Frederick Carl Frieseke, Grey Day on the River (Two Ladies in a Boat), c 1908

John William Waterhouse – Apollo and Daphne

“Hardly had she ended her prayer, when a heavy torpor seizes her limbs; and her soft breasts are covered with a thin bark. Her hair grows into green leaves, her arms into branches; her feet, the moment before so swift, adhere by sluggish roots; a leafy canopy overspreads her features; her elegance alone remains in her.”

John William Waterhouse, Apollo and Daphne, 1908

As the title itself suggest, a motif of transformation, of metamorphosis, lingers throughout the tales from the Roman poet Ovid’s narrative poem “Metamorphosis”. Along with the motif of love, of course. A tale of Apollo and Daphne is perhaps the most explored one in the arts because the poem is filled with imagery which is easy to translated into the visual language of painting and sculpture. Bernini’s beautiful sculpture certainly comes to mind, along with many Renaissance paintings, but when I think of mythology scenes in art, I think of the prolific, imaginative, well-known and well-loved British painter born in Rome; John William Waterhouse. I am not saying that his version is the best, but it is the first one that came to my mind because I am a fan of his dreamy paintings woven with romanticism and filed with intricate details and vibrant colours. His art is always so beautiful, there is no other word for it. The tale of Apollo and Daphne is that of pursuit and lust. Daphne is an athletic, free-spirited virgin just like Diana, and she isn’t the one who falls in love easily, but she is very beautiful and Apollo simply cannot contain himself. Here is a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which describes Daphne’s personality. I really love her rebellious, independent nature:

“Many a one courted her; she hated all wooers; not able to endure, and quite unacquainted with man, she traverses the solitary parts of the woods, and she cares not what Hymen, what love, or what marriage means. Many a time did her father say, “My daughter, thou owest me a son-in-law;” many a time did her father say, “My daughter, thou owest me grandchildren.” She, utterly abhorring the nuptial torch, as though a crime, has her beauteous face covered with the blush of modesty; and clinging to her father’s neck, with caressing arms, she says, “Allow me, my dearest father, to enjoy perpetual virginity; her father, in times, bygone, granted this to Diana.” (read the entire tale here)

Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25. Picture found here.

Led by the most primal urges, Apollo, the God of Lightness and Clarity, chases the beautiful, free-spirited and wild nymph Daphne through the forest. He is holding a lyre in his hand in Waterhouse’s painting, perhaps wooing Daphne with his mellifluous music, but to no avail, for she is determined to remain free and untouched. The painting depicts the moment of climax in the story; the moment when Daphne, having had cried out for help to her father Peneus, is being transformed into a laurel tree. Notice how sensually the soft blue fabric is wrapped around her, and how she is covering her bosom with her arm and with the fabric. Her gaze shows her fear, and Apollo’s hand is stretched because he greedily desires to touch her soft pale skin before it turns to bark:

“Yet he that follows, aided by the wings of love, is the swifter, and denies her any rest; and is now just at her back as she flies, and is breathing upon her hair scattered upon her neck. Her strength being now spent, she grows pale, and being quite faint, with the fatigue of so swift a flight, looking upon the waters of Peneus, she says, “Give me, my father, thy aid, if you rivers have divine power. Oh Earth, either yawn to swallow me, or by changing it, destroy that form, by which I have pleased too much, and which causes me to be injured.”

Hardly had she ended her prayer, when a heavy torpor seizes her limbs; and her soft breasts are covered with a thin bark. Her hair grows into green leaves, her arms into branches; her feet, the moment before so swift, adhere by sluggish roots; a leafy canopy overspreads her features; her elegance alone remains in her. This, too, Phœbus admires, and placing his right hand upon the stock, he perceives that the breast still throbs beneath the new bark; and then, embracing the branches as though limbs in his arms, he gives kisses to the wood, and yet the wood shrinks from his kisses.”

Even though the poor nymph Daphne had transformed into a laurel tree just to escape his lustful embrace, Apollo still doesn’t give up and kisses the tree bark where her skin used to be and promises to celebrate the laurel tree from that moment on:

“To her the God said: “But since thou canst not be my wife, at least thou shalt be my tree; my hair, my lyre, my quiver shall always have thee, oh laurel! Thou shalt be presented to the Latian chieftains, when the joyous voice of the soldiers shall sing the song of triumph, and the long procession shall resort to the Capitol.“

Peter Ilsted – Two girls playing

Out of the three leading Danish painters in the early twentieth century; Peter Ilsted (1861-1933), Carl Holsøe (1863-1935) and Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), it was Peter Ilsted who brought the warmth, the yellow rays of sunlight, coziness and quiet cheerfulness in his interior scenes, while imbuing them with the little bit of the mystery, the kind that haunts Hammershoi’s well-known interiors. Ilsted was the oldest of the three painters, born on Valentine’s day in 1861, and his sister Ida later became Hammershoi’s wife and appears often in his interior scenes, as a mysterious figure in black.

Peter Vilhelm Ilsted (Danish artist, 1861-1933), Two girls playing, c. 1900

Ilsted’s painting “Two girls playing” exudes loveliness and warmth. Sunlight is streaming into the room, pale, peachy-orange and yellowish, and suddenly the same minimalist Northern interior which would appear cold and distant in the paintings of Holsoe or Hammershoi, is filled with quiet sweetness and hopes. Two girls, perhaps sisters are playing with something. They turned their backs on us, they don’t care about us because whatever they are playing with is far more amusing. Their appearance is matching; dark dresses under white aprons, little black boots, hair in a single plait follows the line of the neck and ends in a little bow. While the lighter haired girl is kneeling on the chair, the other seems to be standing on the tips of her toes to see better that secretive toy which seems to provide them both with so much amusement. I can imagine them chatting quietly, even giggling, but all in moderation, for the children ought to be seen but not heard. An interesting detail to notice are the paintings on the wall, little paintings in a painting, figures on them are shadowy and dreamy.

Peter Vilhelm Ilsted, Interior with girl reading, 1910

The painting “Interior with girl reading” from 1910, is again filled with the same Ilsted-esque sunshine, silence and tranquility. Sweet moments at home, the coziness and the safety. The future, its trials, tribulations and uncertainties are miles away from this little girl reading a book in her drawing room. How sweet and shy and modest she appears, in a simple grey dress, hair tied in a braid, completely absorbed in the book she is reading. What thoughts occupy her sweet and innocent mind? The bookshelf, the mirror and the drawer are the only pieces of furniture in this simple room, but again there is something warm and cozy about it which doesn’t appear in the paintings of Ilsted’s contemporaries Holsoe and Hammershoi. I love how Ilsted continually achieves this delightful warmth and coziness in his interiors with little girls playing, reading or chatting, without allowing his canvases to fall into the abyss of sentimentality. Far from it, these paintings are equally thrilling and mysterious as any interior painted by Hammershoi. This delicate, gentle portrayal of the home life and childhood resonated with me, the warm orange-yellowish light that colours the space in his interiors almost fills me with nostalgia. Just take a look at that golden sunlight on the floor, how yellow and tangible it appears! It makes me wanna lie there and take a nap like a cat.

It being winter; cold and dreary, and I am weary, weary of it, my thoughts go to “Northern” painters and writers. I recently read Knut Hamsun’s novel “Hunger” originally published in 1890, and while he isn’t a Danish but a Norwegian writer, some interior scenes by Hammershoi and Ilsted came to my mind because these cozy, quiet and sunny interiors are a stark contrast to the cold and unwelcoming outside world. “Hunger” is written in the first person by an unnamed narrator who is struggling to get his writing published, his extreme poverty brought him to the state of perpetual hunger and this hunger makes his nerves frail and his behavior somewhat eccentric. In one scene from the novel, he keeps staring at a window until a girl’s face appears, they stare at each other for a while, but then her lovely countenance disappears behind the thick white curtains, the borders between the outside world and the indoor coziness, the narrator continues staring at the window, feeling curious and slightly embarrassed.

I wonder, if the girls from Ilsted’s painting would leave their books and their toys, and if they looked through the window and saw a thin, hungry man in a tattered suit, with wild untamed hair and crazy eyes, how would they feel about him? A mix of pity and fear. Would they stare for some time, until their mother or the servant chased them away from the window because it’s inappropriate to stare at the outside world. This simple and sober middle class interior is a safe cage for the girls-birds; they are too shy, too innocent and too sweet to see the reality out there, on the other side of the curtains and windows which serve are protectors. Whatever crazy stuff is going on outside, none of it can harm them.

Peter Vilhelm Ilsted, Interior, 1897

Peter Vilhelm Ilsted, Interior with two girls, 1904

Souvenir of Velázquez: John Everett Millais, James Jebusa Shannon and Joaquín Sorolla

Today let’s take a look at three gorgeous portraits of little girls by John Everett Millais, James Jebusa Shannon and Joaquín Sorolla inspired by the paintings of Diego Velázquez’s, mainly the painting “Las Meninas” from 1656 but also some of his other portraits of Infanta Maria Teresa.

John Everett Millais, Souvenir of Velázquez, 1868

Just like Infanta Margaret Theresa from Velázquez’s painting “Las Meninas” (1656), the girl in Millais’ painting is a serious young lady. Two centuries divide the lives of these two moody girls, yet I am sure they would understand each other and could gleefully spend many idle hours giggling and chatting. Millais’ sweet, round faced girl has a pale skin and masses of strawberry blonde hair that are a stark contrast to the darkness of the background. Unlike Infanta Margaret Theresa, this girl is all alone on the canvas. Her face looks like many other from Millais’ canvases, yet her attire is noticeably different from that of any other Victorian girl. This was Millais’ homage to a very famous Baroque painting made by Diego Velázquez, the court painter of Philip IV, in 1656. But Millais used a Pre-Raphaelite colour palette and the brush strokes on the hair and details of the dress are particularly loose, unrestrained and confident. Millais was apparently so skillful a painter that he was able to paint a leaf in a few brushstrokes and achieve the liveliness and accuracy. I think these strokes are a proof of that.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, detail

Velázquez’s position as a court painter clearly placed him in a subservient position to the members of the royal family. In his time, he was just a painter and they were the grand and powerful Habsburgs and yet, looking back in time, it is Velázquez who is famous and praised now for his art and little Infanta is just one in a row of royal princesses who would scarcely be remembered today if she wasn’t captured on canvas so many times and in such beautiful and memorable paintings. It is a good thing that Velázquez painted so many beautiful portraits of her as a child because those were her glory days in a way; she married at the age of fifteen to Leopold I, and she was both his niece and his first cousin, and died at the age of twenty-one, after giving birth to four children and being pregnant with the fifth. So, if it wasn’t for these glorious portraits and especially the very much loved and enigmatic “Las Meninas” where she is the central figure, she would have been forgotten in history, she would have been just another pale sickly girl who died very young from this illness or another, childbirth or smallpox, nothing special. But because of art, she is eternal. Even now, four centuries later, she is the blue eyed girl looking back at us, with her hair combed on the side and adorned with a bow, in her wide dress, so large for her small fragile body.

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Infanta Margarita Teresa in silver dress, 1656

James Jebusa Shannon, Portrait of a Little Girl Holding a Toy (Kitty in a fancy dress), 1895

Next example is James Jebusa Shannon’s lovely portrait of his daughter Katherine Marjorie known as Kitty who was eight years old at the time this was painted. The portrait is beautifully cropped and focuses on the little girl in the moment of childlike playfulness; she is holding a doll in each hand. Still in the world of dreams and make-beliefs, her dolls are her friends. Loose brushstrokes and a colour palette of subtle colours such as white and grey, with touches of pink and red perfectly fit the at once playful and dreamy mood of the painting. Maybe Kitty is lost in the dreamland playing with her dolls and she can scarcely notice that her father is painting her once again, for she was his dear model, but her cheeks are rosy and she is smiling and we can tell she is a happier girl than Velázquez’s Infanta Margaret Theresa was in her constricted dress and constricting environment of the Spanish court. The dress Kitty is wearing resembles the one Velázquez painted, but it is only a fancy dress and life is still a game for Kitty as well.

Joaquín Sorolla, María Figuero dressed as a menina, 1901

And the last example I will be talking about in this post is an unfinished work by a Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla which shows a girl dressed in an attire of the Infanta Margaret Theresa and the kind of dress that would be worn by other noble girls at the court. Just like Kitty in the previous picture, María was eight years old when this was painted and she was not just any child; she was the daughter of Sorolla’s friend Rodrigo de Figueroa y Torres, Marquis of Gauna and later a Duke of Tovar also. Inspiration for this painting was not Velázquez himself, but his pupil Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo’s portrait of Infanta Margaret Theresa in a pink dress from 1660. Just like in the portrait of Infanta, María Figuero is wearing a very wide dress which fills the canvas horizontally, the sleeves are equally puffy and there is a pink decoration on the bodice. Her hair also resembles the hairstyle Infanta Margarita wore in some of her other portraits, for example the portrait in blue by Velázquez painted in 1659.

Juan Bautista del Mazo, Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Pink Dress, 1660

Henri Rousseau – The Dream

I recently watched the film “Love in the Time of Cholera” (2007) and I really liked the title sequence with a jungle-inspired animation, it reminded me of Henri Rousseau’s imaginative paintings.

Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910

Henri Rousseau’s life and paintings are equally fascinating. They are fascinating because he wasn’t a typical bohemian artist living in Montmartre and in fact started painting rather late in life when he was in his early forties and worked as a tax collector. He at last decided to fully devote himself to art at the age of forty-nine. Another thing which makes him fascinating as an artist is his subject matter; jungles and strange dream-like exotic places filled his canvases. Can you fathom the scope of his imagination when he conjured up such vivid and almost surreal scenes even in the greyness of Parisian winters. Cafes, boulevards, bridges, the Seine, dances and cocottes and dandies, such subjects were all right for Impressionists and Post-Impressionist, but Rousseau followed his own path.

Painting “The Dream” is perhaps Rousseau’s most famous work and an excellent representative of his style. In the middle of a jungle a nude lady is lying on a read couch, surrounded by many different trees and plants, each overshadowing the other with its intricate green colours and fine shadowing. The details seem realistic, while the composition all together is everything but. It is clear this isn’t a faithful portrayal of a jungle or a forest, but a place of Rousseau’s Parisian reveries, but nonetheless it is striking how he captured the mood of a place he never even visited. But perhaps I am wrong, for I have never visited a jungle myself! Anyhow, the nude long-haired lady is not alone. The place is bursting with life, from all corners some strange creatures are breathing, hearts are beating and wild eyes as yellow as amber are glistening strangely. Two lions are lying in the grass; both with mad stares, one is looking at her, and the other at us. Behind the lions stands a dark-skinned flautist, a motif which some art historians have interpreted as being erotic. Around the lady large blue flowers are protruding their petals, and birds are sitting on tree branches. An orange snake in the grass, you can really imagine its moist cold body moving quickly through the grass, hidden from the moonlight. The moon is white and full, and things are not as they seem.

Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer, 1907

Another interesting painting is “The Snake Charmer”. A nude dark-skinned woman is playing a flute and, well, charming the snake as the title suggests, but visually her dark horizontal figure is dividing the space on two different places, the lake on the left and the dark impenetrable jungle forest on the right. Three black snakes arise sinisterly from the grass, awaken to the beautiful mystical sounds of the flute which, I am sure, makes the leaves and flowers sigh with delight too. I am constantly amazed at how detailed Rousseau was with painting grass and trees, and how diligent, painting each one with care. Look at each leaf individually, the shape and dark matte colour makes it appear so unnatural, and when observed all together they appear even more surreal. Again, a full moon is shining low on the horizon, over the lake, but its silvery shine doesn’t reach the darkness of the forest.

Henri Rousseau, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891

Painting “Tiger in a Tropical Storm” is just amazing! Just look at the tiger’s face, full of expression, his mouth in a grin, his eyes wide open. And how vividly Rousseau has portrayed the tropical storm, the pouring rain that could drain you to the bone, the silver thunders, the swaying branches of trees and dancing leaves in many shades of green and yellow. There’s one chapter in Irving Stone’s book about Vincent van Gogh called “Lust for Life”, which is amazing by the way, where Vincent visits Henri Rousseau in his studio in a poor part of Paris. There they find the artist’s room full of jungle scenes on the walls and four boys with their violins waiting for the lecture to begin because Rousseau often gave violin lessons to earn extra money, and plus he loved playing the instrument as well. He is portrayed as someone very humble and detached from the world around him, in a good way, living in his imagination and not very worried about the things around him.

Marc Chagall – A Painter of Childhood

I have a childlike heart. (Sappho, Fragments)

Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911

Marc Chagall is the painter of childhood memories and dreams. It is hard to place his art into a specific art movement, or divide it into distinct phases. His paintings sometimes seem as if they all belong to one great psychedelic puzzle because they are connected with the same motifs that reappear again and again, regardless of the year the painting was made in. Harshness of poverty and ugliness of mud of Chagall’s little village of Vitebsk is magically transformed in his canvases into a mythical land of little cottages with cute small windows, streets where one can hear the melodies of the village fiddlers joyously dancing on roofs bathed in moonlight, vibrantly coloured cows, milkmaids and reapers, dark blue sky littered with stars is the only place where lovers find abode, love makes you feel like you’re flying into the clouds, and boyish crushes and dreams are whispered solely to the moon when the cows, roosters and hens are sleeping in silence. Innocence, cheerfulness, whimsicality, everything-is-possible mood pervades his canvases. It’s everyday reality, with its ugliness and banality, seen through pink glasses, similar to the worlds that Gabriel Garcia Márquez has created in his writings. Chagall uses paint instead of words, but portrays the similar fantasy world where colours transition softly one to another, like two cheeks touching tenderly, from white to red, blue to white, the transitions are as velvety soft as the border between dreams and reality is when one first opens one’s eyes in the morning and through tired flickering eyelashes sees rays of sunlight coming through the window.

Marc Chagall, Over the town, 1918

This is the world seen through the eyes of a gentle and dreamy boy whose great scope of imagination enabled him to escape the dreariness of his surroundings and to walk forever on the tightrope between the real world and the world of daydreams. Chagall is the Dreamer who took up painting, a Peter Pan amongst artists; a boy who refused to grow up and forever carried a light of childhood that shone through his kind blue eyes like a firefly shines in warm summer dusks in the mysterious corners of the garden. When Bella spoke of his eyes, she said they were strange, almond-shaped, and “blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky”. It’s that light from within and a stubborn faithfulness to the world of daydreams and memories of his little village that made his transcend the poverty, wars and ugliness of his own everyday reality. His tender love for Bella, his memories and childlike naivety and curiosity all fed into his art. In these poetic visions of his provincial desolation, logic makes no sense so you may throw it into the rubbish bin and you may do the same with the perspective and proportions. In “Over the Town”, Marc and Bella are flying over the picturesque village that looks as if it came out of a Russian fairy tale with wooden cottages and fences that stretch on and on, like rainbows, as the two are flying towards their castle on a cloud.

Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1912

Don’t you remember how beautiful it was to be a child and believe in everything? I honestly believed I would one day live in a castle and wear old-fashioned dresses, and that I could be everything I want. I also remember vividly how I slowly stopped believing and through tears came to a bitter realisation, which hurt like a bee sting, that the future is actually very limited and that I will probably never be as carefree again as I was that summer when I was ten and my afternoons were spent trying to find a four-leaf clover; a quest in which I happily succeeded once. These are my thoughts at the moment, and there is no answer because time cannot be returned, childhood cannot be relived, and also there are many beautiful things about now; the flowers, the meadows, the river, have not lost their charm for me after all those years.

I just remembered something that Anais Nin said in an interview from 1972; she referred to Baudelaire’s saying that in every one of us there is a man, a woman and a child. She said the child in us never dies but goes on making fantasies, in all of us, but most wouldn’t admit it. The artists are the ones who admit it, but it takes courage to share these fantasies and dreams with the world, serve them on a plate for all to see, expose oneself, only to potentially be ridiculed or judged. So, perhaps the key to nurturing and preserving the child inside is seeing Beauty everywhere around you, being excited and captivated by little things, and to believe – because children always believe, whether it’s in fairy tales or in themselves.

For more on Chagall’s art and his years in Paris, read this.

John Constable – Romantic Ruins of Hadleigh Castle

Sublime landscapes with romantic ruins are what fills my heart with delight, for nature by itself is plain and mundane. Ruin of a Medieval castle or an abbey overgrown with ivy, lovers sitting in forest glades bathed in silvery moonlight, rivers whose calm flow brings forgetfulness, sight of a lonely figure amidst wild nature; a landscape unadorned with any of these things seizes to excite me. And is there a better age in art for all these qualities than Romanticism?

John Constable, Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ c.1828–9, London, Tate Gallery

John Constable’s aim in painting landscapes was to capture the nature with honesty, to capture its beauty and simplicity without showing off in an arrogant Turner way. He is not the representative in portraying nature with passion, lyricism or melancholy; you should seek those qualities in paintings of Turner, John Martin or Caspar David Friedrich, but at one point, in 1828, he felt that his life and art were in a state of ruins and he sought in nature a vision of his own soul and he found it in a desolate scene of a Hadleigh Castle in Essex.

The brooding tower is a sinister sight indeed, seen after a stormy night; wrapped in dark thoughts, breathing in the air of decay, its glory days forgotten and only a corpse of stone walls remains, the crows flying by its only friends in centuries of solitude… The sky is a commingled mass of whites and blues, and the marshlands are drowning in darkness. A vague figure of a shepherd with his dog in the left corner, and cows and cliffs painted carelessly. The most peculiar thing about this oil sketch is the way it is painted; almost expressionistic with those thick, careless brushstrokes, heavy, thickly impasto way of applying colour with no constraint. And it’s sublime and sombre mood has since drawn comparisons to Rembrandt’s “The Mill” (1645-48). The scene seems so out of place in Constable’s usual peaceful countryside scenes painted in a very detailed way with fine brushwork, that one can’t help but wonder about this strange change of style and theme.

John Constable, Maria Bicknell, 1816

This peculiarly dark mood of the painting is caused by the events in Constable’s private life. His dear wife Maria, who was of fragile health, fell ill after giving birth to their seventh child in January 1828, and in November the same year she died from consumption. Constable was devastated; he started dressing in black and  succumbed to melancholy. The death of his angel, as he called her, changed everything. They married in autumn of 1816, when he was forty years old, after their friendship grew into deep love. But now, after only twelve years of happiness, Constable was a lonely, depressed figure, wrapped in gloomy thoughts, tormented by anxiety and brutal self-questioning of his life and career. Nothing made sense any more, and he wrote in a letter to his brother Golding “hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel—God only knows how my children will be brought up…the face of the World is totally changed to me“.

John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, sketch, 1814

As you can see from the rather small pencil sketch, about 8 x 11 cm, Constable had visited the sight way before he decided to fully devote to it and paint it on a large, six foot canvas in oils. It seems to me that the distance between two towers is bigger in the drawing than it is in the paintings. Perhaps the reason why he returned to the subject of the Hadleigh Castle after fourteen years lies in the fact that while he visited it for the first time, in 1814, he rapturously wrote to Maria of its beauty. This is what he wrote, on 3 July 1814: “At Hadleigh there is a ruin of a castle which from its situation is a really fine place – it commands a view of the Kent hills, the Nore and North Foreland & looking many miles to sea.” After she died, he may have revisited their correspondence, and with tears glistening in his eyes remembered the happier times, and he may have seen the castle as a symbol of those times.

I love the sketch, specially the birds flying around the tower and the clouds, and something about it appeals me more than the finished painting. I know what it is; in the drawing there is no figure of a shepherd and the cows; a motif so utterly Constable and so unfitting for the Gothic mood of the sublime. As much as I like the painting, I would have preferred to see it painted as a nocturnal scene, in dark magical blues with large moon shining on the horizon and a distant figure of a horseman, and the moonshine peeking through the old ruin of a tower, but that wouldn’t be Constable any more.

John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames–Morning after a Stormy Night, 1828-29

Now you can see what an impact personal life and tragedies can have on an artist, and that even a simple landscape is filled with secrets that leads us to the artist’s soul. Constable’s saddest state resulted in what is perhaps the most poetic, the most ‘sublime’ out of all his paintings, but the wild and gloomy sketch version from the Tate Gallery isn’t the only one. He painted another version of the same scene, pretty much the same, which is more in tune with Constable’s typical refined, sleek style; gloom is subtler, brushstrokes are more controlled, and you can see the details more clearly, such as the shepherd and his dog, and the cows, even the sky looks softer and less threatening. So there is a ‘passionate’ version and a ‘tamed’ one. Needless to say which one I prefer.

Osamu Dazai: No Longer Human – Art and Ghost Pictures

Osamu Dazai’s novel No Longer Human is a really fascinating book I’ve read recently and I’ve already reviewed it here. In this post we’ll take a look at the main character, Oba Yozo’s connection to art and the paintings of Western painters such as Modigliani and Vincent van Gogh.

Amedeo Modigliani, A Young Girl, 1918

Oba Yozo was interested in art and painting since primary school and wanted to go to an art school, but his father put him into college, with an intend to make a civil servant out of him. Yozo obeyed, like he always did in his life, but he couldn’t really identify himself with the role of a student, or soak himself in the ‘college spirit’, so he often cut classes and spent days at home, painting and reading – which is totally more useful for imagination and the soul than the boredom of classrooms and patronising professors at college. He also attended art classes given by a painter in Hongo, and practised sketching for hours. He said: ‘I owned a set of oil paints and brushes from the time I entered high school. I sought to model my techniques on those of the Impressionist School, but my pictures remained flat as paper cutouts, and seemed to offer no promises of ever developing into anything.’

With the help of a friend he realised the artistic truth: sometimes it’s more important to portray the truth and work from the soul, than to create perfect, lifeless pictures with a lot of skill and precision. He also says: ‘What superficiality – and what stupidity – there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them.’ From that moment on, he began making self-portraits, which is kept a secret, and showed one only to Takeichi, and no one else. In his free time, he painted these ‘ghost pictures’, but in school he kept his style strictly conventional. Later, at college, he meets a fellow art lover and painter, Horiki, who lures him into the ‘mysteries of drink, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops and left-wing thought’.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with a Grey Felt Hat, March/April 1887

Here, Yozo and his friend Takeichi are discussing the so called ‘ghost pictures’, and the name itself is so intriguing to me. ‘Ghost pictures’ – what is meant by that? It puzzles me, especially since I adore both Modigliani and van Gogh, but I never thought of their art in that way. A certain fragility, melancholy and sadness lingers through Modigliani’s portraits, that’s for sure, but now I can’t help but to notice the wraith-like quality of his women, with elongated faces and sad eyes, or his nudes in ‘coppery skin’ tones.

‘Takeichi made one other important gift to me. One day he came to my room to play. He was waving with a brightly coloured picture which he proudly displayed. “It’s a picture of a ghost,” he explained.

I was startled. That instant, as I could not help feeling in later years, determined my path of escape. I knew what Takeichi was showing me. I knew that it was only the familiar self-portrait of van Gogh. When we were children the French Impressionist School was very popular in Japan, and our first introduction to an appreciation of Western painting most often begun with such works. The paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Renoir were familiar even to students at country schools, mainly through photographic reproduction. I myself had seen quite a few coloured photographs of van Gogh’s paintings. His brushwork and the vividness of his colours had intrigued me, but I had never imagined his pictures to be of ghosts.

I took from my bookshelf a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and showed Takeichi the familiar nudes with skin the colour of burnished copper. “How about these? Do you think they’re ghosts too?”

“They’re terrific.” Takeichi widened his eyes in admiration. “This one looks like a horse out of hell.”

“They really are ghosts then, aren’t they?”

“I wish I could paint pictures of ghosts like that,” said Takeichi.‘

Modigliani, Female Nude, 1916

Yozo later draws for comic books and magazines, and, at the very end, ends up copying pornographic drawings which he would then secretly peddle, to earn just enough money to buy gin. Still, despite leaving his original artistic intentions behind, he mentions these ‘ghost pictures’ again:

‘At such times the self-portraits I painted in high school – the ones Takeichi called “ghost pictures” – naturally came to mind. My lost masterpieces. These, my only really worth-while pictures, had disappeared during one of my frequent changes of address. I afterwards painted pictures of every description, but they all fell far,  far short of those splendid works as I remembered them. I was plagued by a heavy sense of loss, as if my heart had become empty.

The undrunk glass of absinthe.

A sense of loss which was doomed to remain eternally unmitigated stealthily began to take shape. Whenever I spoke of painting, that undrunk glass of absinthe flickered before my eyes. I was agonized by the frustrating thought: if only I could show them those paintings they would believe in my artistic talents.‘

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, 1888