Name That Movie

The Birthday that Wasn't

Today, Star ought to have had a little birthday party at school, but there was much ado about nothing in Beirut today and school was canceled. But I wasn't to know that last night when I was preparing for the festivities. Star decided that bubble-blow would be a great party favor for all her little friends at school. I liked that idea, except for the fact that bubble-blow is exactly the kind of thing that gets branded all the time. You can't just get bubbles, they're going to be barbie, pooh bear, dora, or diego bubbles. That's bad. Yes, it is. I think kids ought to be free from that kind of thing, especially when they’re blowing bubbles.

So, I got out my wrapping paper and covered up the labels. I did a nice job too, see?


I've got all 25 of them ready (oh, I don't think there are that many kids in her class, but I figured better too many than too few) and waiting. Just as soon as the "mood on the ground" stabilizes and people go back to their day-in day-out, Star will have a great class party. This weekend of course, there will be two parties. Dandelion on Saturday, Star on Sunday.

See and be Seen

I'm about half way through the first book in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. Why am I reading the trilogy? First, because Mahfouz is the only Arabic-language writer to ever receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Second, it came highly recommended. Third, it is well written. Not even being translated into English could ruin the quality of the writing.

(those reasons are in chronological order, not priority order. Nobel Prizes have not redeemed other authors I’ve picked up in the past)

So, like I said, I'm about half way into the first book, Palace Walk, and I just (literally 5 minutes ago) read the passage where Amina, the mother in the story's central family, has been persuaded by her children to venture out into the street for the first time EVER. This is a very traditional family, with a very authoritarian, unkind, and distant father. He leaves for a short business trip when her teen-aged and adult children convince her that there is no sin in visiting a nearby mosque/shrine (Amina is devout). She covers herself with her maid's shawl, veils her face, and is accompanied by her male sons. We get a third-person omniscient description of it:

As she crossed the threshold of the outer door and entered the street, she experienced a moment of panic. Her mouth felt dry and her pleasure was dispelled by a fit of anxiety. She had an oppressive feeling of doing something wrong. She moved slowly and grasped Kamal's hand nervously. Her gait seemed disturbed and unsteady as though she had not mastered the first principles of walking. She was gripped by intense embarrassment as she showed herself to the eyes of people she had known for ages but only through the peephole in the enclosed balcony. Uncle Hasanayn, the barber, Darwish, who sold beans, al-Fuli, the milkman, Bayumi, the drinks vendor, and Abu Sari', who sold snacks - she imagined that they all recognized her jsut as she did them. She had difficulty convincing herself of the obvious fact that none of them had ever seen her before in their lives.

I've often thought about what the veil does both to the one veiled and to the one seeing it. It certainly sets up an uneven relationship, one in which I would guess that the concealed party has more power. Sort of like the soldier in camo--there's a degree of protection in being able to vanish.

I've also thought a lot about my relationship to the fact that some women cover (to varying extents). Our neighbors on the floor below are Muslim, and the wife covers her head and wears clothing that covers her from neck to feet (pant-suits, but the kind that reveal nothing). Inside the house though, she dresses just like me. My husband has never seen that. He's also never seen her hair, the way it compliments and softens her face. He has no idea that she is beautiful. I, because I'm a woman too, have access to a part of her world that is not available to any man who isn't blood-related to her.

Appearances, what we allow others (and which others at that) to see is ultimately about control. You can't stop others using their eyes to judge the world. The best you can hope for is to really get what it is that they might see in you.

Will to Art

I've written about artistic intent, originality, authorship etc. on a number of occasions. Those exercises are interesting, but today we are faced with something of a conundrum in the form of a Jean Arp collage.


That's Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 1916-17.

To make this collage, Arp apparently dropped the blue and white paper scraps onto the lager, gray paper and then "further developed the collages by arranging the pieces automatically, without will."

Now that's really something. Is Arp saying that he is able to overcome free will? I think he must be, because if he was a determinist that would be stating an irrelevant, obvious fact. Why bother? I don't think he did. I think Arp thought he had a will that generally got in the way of the automatic process he favored.

So we've now come to the $50 question (except the $50 is fake). Assuming you've got free will (and those of you who follow my husband's blog know that he's been thinking a whole lot about that lately) can you shut it down? Can you will not to will? Isn't that like thinking about not thinking?

Well, Arp thought he could, and according to MoMA's page about this collage, it was by willing not to will that Arp's subconscious was able to allow a more essential, natural composition to emerge. Yeah.

For a while I've been thinking about doing a series here at Impart Art where I go through and recreate the works of other artists, and every time that thought crosses my mind this collage comes with it. But now that I've gotten myself good and confused about free will and whether I can will myself not to will, well, I don't think I'm interested.

The Family Jewels

Here is an image of two necklaces that my paternal grandmother gave me. I'm sure that they were Christmas presents.

The green one most definitely came from Central America where my grandparents lived for two years in the late 1980s. I could not have been older than 12 when I received it. At the time I'm sure I didn't know or care that I'd been given jade. 10 years later fashion had changed, I was an adult, and suddenly the necklace was interesting to me for the first time. I've been wearing it ever since, and wearing it out. A few years ago I re-strung it with plastic spacer beads between the jade stones.



I have no idea about the origins of the other necklace (other than its entry into my life as a gift from grandmother). It came in a very lovely orange box. Because grandmother traveled the world several times over I have no idea where it might have come from. My amateur-gemologist husband tells me that this one is amber. Maybe it is. Grandmother has very likely been to the Baltic States and the Dominican Republic where amber comes from. When I saw her two weeks ago I didn't have the necklace with me or I would have asked her. But she might not have remembered anyway. Like the jade necklace, this one sat in the basement of my parents’ home for a decade before I changed my mind about it, and quite likely two decades before I retrieved it.

In part I value these necklaces simply as gifts from my grandmother. But part of me values what they represent to me now; the foolishness of my youth, the transience of fashion, the merits of waiting a few years or decades before discarding another's treasures. And another part of me reflects with something like wonder that my grandmother never seemed concerned that I (as a child) didn't know how to appreciate these gifts.

The Bastard of Istanbul

While in the US I started and finished 'The Bastard of Istanbul' by Elif Shafak. In the author's acknowledgements she states, "Between the Turkish edition and the English edition of this novel in 2006, I was put on trial for "denigrating Turkishness" under article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The charges that were brought against me were due to the words that some of the Armenian characters spoke in the novel; I could have been given up to a three-year prison sentence, but the charges were eventually dropped."

Well, folks, that's pretty much why I bought the book, and I only bought it because there is no library to borrow it from. I really wanted to read it. I'm glad I did. It is a book full of characters who are (usually in more than one way) between cultures. And since that's my whole life, I was interested.

Its the first time I've read a book and thought "I could write this better". How's that for arrogance? But honestly, there were too many times when the reader is told rather than shown, and the telling wasn't convincing. On the other had there were some sections that were perfect. There's no other word for it, they were really that good. Its too bad that many of the characters seem like rough sketches or paper-doll cut-outs. Oddly, its the dead characters that really seem alive.

Anyway, enough of that. In one rather neat section, the author describes various dishes in a restaurant in terms of modern art they resemble:
Sesame-crusted ahi tuna tartare with foie gras yakiniku appears as Francesco Boretti's The Blind Whore (you'll have to scroll down). Prime rib-eye with hot mustard cream sauce on a bed of pasison fruit vinaigrette and jicama materializes as a Mark Rothko Untitled. (No I don't know which 'Untitled' the author intended, and I've made no effort to find one that could be recreated in steak, mustard, and passion fruit.)

These dishes are brought to the table where one of the central characters is having dinner with a cameo-character who is even more paper-doll like than she is. When dessert arrives (without the reader hearing the characters order) they are described as Peter Kitchell's April Blues Bring May Yellows and Jackson Pollock's Shimmering Substance.

At first, both characters find it a bit overwhelming to munch their way through great works of art but eventually forget and eat freely.

Art as Food, made by a chef who wanted to be a philosopher and then an artist, and after failing at both turned to food. I'm still trying to figure out why the author included this restaurant scene at all. It wasn't one of the books strong moments, and I can't help trying to figure out what she meant for it to accomplish, because I must be observing its failure to deliver. Otherwise, would I be wondering?

Ahem

Happy April. I just got back from St. Louis and a trip to see my grandparents who are just outside Vegas. Yes, this is the first time I've posted in a month. No, that wasn't intentional. No, I haven't given it up. Yes, I expected to have more down time while in the US, but yeah, that was silly of me. What's that? Yeah, it was a good visit, but I'm happy to be back. Yes I am.


That's me on the way back down from Angel's Landing, a spectacular hike in Zion's National Park, with siblings, of course. My dad took the picture.

I've been reading, reading, reading which has been a nice diversion from writing, writing, writing. Art played an interesting bit-part in one of the books I got on the trip and I think I'll blog that tomorrow.

A trip to St. Louis always involves at least a few hours of going through my old stuff (which is very neatly confined to two cedar chests--when I impose on people I'd like to think I do it with care), and this visit I hit the jackpot. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon my photo album from highschool, which really was more like a portfolio showcasing the wish I briefly entertained to become a photographer. I also retrieved a necklace that my grandmother gave me at least 15 years ago that (like most things she has given me) I had no appreciation for at the time. My parents had taken good care of my 'Northern Renaissance' and 'Art and its Significance' text books after I left them there six years ago. Anyway, foder, all of it is foder.

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun's Marie Antoinette and her children, 1787.


Vigée-Le Brun is yet another french woman that I really wish I had learned more about a long time ago. Unlike some of the other 'forgotten French ladies', it is easy to find information about Vigée-Le Brun. I've linked to a fantastic web-resource where you can view a copy of nearly every painting she ever made. It is nice that, while we know almost nothing about some of the marvelous lady-painters that France produced around the turn of the 19th century, there are others who have had their stories told.

Vigée-Le Brun was (as the image here indicates) a well regarded portrait painter and in the good graces of the French royal family. They and the aristocracy kept her busy until the French Revolution swept them all away. Worried that her connections with them were a bit too tight, Vigée-Le Brun left France for Italy, Russia, and Austria (later she would leave again for Switzerland). One admirer wrote that she "knew and painted the portraits of just about every prominent figure in Europe and Russia from approximately 1770 to 1835." Not bad.

She was a member of artists' acadamies and societies around Europe. First the Académie de Saint Luc in 1774, then Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg, and later the Swiss Société pour l'Avancement des Beaux-Arts. A cosmopolitan, if there ever was one.

Read more here.

Marguerite Gérard

This is Marguerite Gérard's 1804 Bad News



Clearly, the lady in blue has just read a letter bearing bad tidings. Her attentive friend has produced the smelling salts, which a woman surely needs in such times as these. And even the dog, as though to prove that this isn't just some melodramatic act, looks on with great interest.

Gérard (1761-1837) is another one of those French women painters whose legacy resides at the margins of art and art history. Unlike the other French ladies we've seen this month, Gérard's work wouldn't be confused with David's. It would (and has been) confused with the work of Fragonard, her brother-in-law. The two collaborated, influenced the other's work. It is easy enough to find web references that put Gérard forward as Fragonard's very savior, the influence that saved him from his dedication to Rococo even after the style had fallen out of favor.

Many of Gérard's images are much like the one above. Bad News is a scene of women, and I'd guess it is also intended for women. After all, they attended exhibitions too. Like other painters of her day, Gérard's work centers on the world she lived in, and that world consisted of well appointed homes, loving families, and wealthy friends. With so many women painting and patronizing the arts, it is unsurprising that mundane moments of their lives ended up on canvas.

Belle Kinney

Matthew got back from NY on Saturday night, and with him came a pile of books I'd specially requested. I'm in heaven, partly because new books are a rarity and partly because these particular books are so very interesting. The one I'm reading right now is G. Kurt Piehler's Remembering War the American Way, which is indeed thesis related. In the introduction (I can't understand why I always skipped the preface/introduction when I was younger. Increasingly I find these sections remarkably useful) I found a reference to yet another book, which will doubtless be added to my library some time soon. The title grabbed me at once--Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscape of Southern Memory. Women, it appears, were the ones who organized and advocated for Confederate commemoration. Eager for more information, I googled it, and found a review overflowing in details about the text (enough detail, even that I've decided I probably am ok NOT citing it in my research, which means I don't have to import it, for which my pocketbook is already heaving a sigh of relief). In one particularly useful section, the review catalogued the artists named in the book, who are responsible for many a monument to the 'Lost Cause' (ie. US Civil War). And among them, one woman was named.

Belle Kinney was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1890 and later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She taught there for a time. Her sculptures, almost all of them in bronze, are scattered around the nation. Here's an incomplete list of her work:

Statue of Jere Baxter, Jere Baxter School Nashville
Monuments to the Women of the Confederacy, Nashville
Monuments to the Women of the Confederacy, Jackson, Mississippi
Statue of Andrew Jackson at the U.S. Capitol
Statue of John Sevier at the U.S. Capitol
Bust of Admiral Albert Gleaves at Annapolis
Bust of Andrew Jackson at the Tennessee State Capitol
Bust of James K. Polk at the Tennessee State Capitol
Bust of Alexander P. Stewart
Statue of Richard Owen in the Indiana State University (pictured here)
The Bronx County (WWI) Memorial
Pediment sculptures of the Nashville Parthenon (based on the original Greek)

She is generally remembered as Tennessee's best sculptor, and for a few decades there, anyone who was anyone in the state's past or present had their likeness rendered by her. She is one among a few women who executed the monuments that the United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted with such tenacity. Somehow, that seems fitting.

Baroness Elsa : Dada Muse

We started this ill-fated week with Hannah Höch, Dada Artist, and so I suppose it is fitting that we end it with an ill-fated Dada Muse.

She's got quite a name: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She acquired the title with her 1913 marriage to Leopold Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven. I suppose the foregoing description 'Dada Muse' isn't quite enough. She was a dancer, a poet, a model, a farmer. But no matter what she was up to, she did it as a complete exhibitionist, feminist, and artist. The image here is a photo of what she called a "portrait of Marcel Duchamp" in 1920. In perfect Dada style, the portrait is made up of everyday rubbish. Feathers, beads, wire, a champagne glass. Very little of her art survives, but her poetry and some of her letters have. Oh, and descriptions of her clothing, appearance, and antics can be found in the work of any author remotely connected with NY Dada. That's how outlandish she was.

The Baroness was resourceful, bold, and persistent enough to fend for herself. Even though it was certainly humiliating, she took work in a cigarette factory once, selling newspapers on the street on another occasion when the men and the money ran out. She also used her own flamboyance to cultivate as much material advantage as she could. And it worked. Ezra Pound wrote about her in his "Cantos", Frederick Philip Grove wrote a few books based on her life before abandoning her in Kentucy in 1911. She modeled her way to NY where she modeled some more for Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia. Modeling was a means to an end. It kept her close to art, and the money got her closer to being able to afford to actually do art. She eventually returned to Germany in 1923, where her life and finances got particularly bleak. Several friends (women who were all part of the first circle of American feminists and authors) came to her aid and bankrolled her relocation to Paris, where she died in 1927.

Unlike some of the other women we've seen here this month, there is no shortage of information out there about the Baroness. She's an enigma, a fascinating one. And even though 90 years have passed since her outlandish Greenwich Village escapades began, they'd still look like outlandish escapades today. Currency. Just something an artist has got to have.

Love Hate

At about 3:30 this afternoon I decided to drive the kids to their favorite park, and about half way there plowed into the back of a car stopped ahead of me. It was embarrassingly stupid of me. I had taken my foot off the pedal for a split second to mess with my sock, and then couldn’t find the brake pedal in time. Quite likely the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Ever. (Which I suppose is comforting. Stupid goes downhill a long way from there, but still.) It took more than an hour and a half to sort everything out, and it was an even bigger mess that it might have been because our insurance had lapsed. Yes, it had.

Star fell asleep like a little cherub, while Dandelion played contentedly in her car seat. Karim appeared at the last minute like a deus ex machina, and prevented any further bungling of things by me, and sent me home with a wave of the hand and an “I’ll take care of it.”

I swear, I’d hate this place if I didn’t love it so much. Or maybe I’d love it if I didn’t hate it the way I do.

Lebanese Mother's Day

If there has been a downside (which is not a foregone conclusion) to WHM here at Impart Art, it is that I have blogged nothing about Lebanon, and nothing about my kids, which are big parts of my world. I'm going to try to bring all that in today, since this is our Mother's Day.

Yesterday, Star's preschool had a party for all the moms. I walked in 15 minutes late, which is nothing in Lebanon. Late happens all the time. So it should bear some significance that when I arrived late, my child was the only one without at least one maternal figure sitting close by (yes, some kids had mom and Grandma). All the other moms where there. All of them. They had quite obviously already started the crafty-portion of the day's festivities. Star was totally unconcerned by my late arrival, but I got enough dirty looks from the other moms to make up for it.

It's a big deal here, Mother's Day. My husband keeps track of holidays by the banner ads online. But with only 15% of the Lebanese online, advertisers are sticking to billboards. For the past week or so, many billboards around town have been given over to suggesting anything from shoes to luxury watches for Mom. Some of these have been absolutely fascinating. Oh yes, I will elaborate.

1. There's a huge billboard on the costal highway from Exotica, the local fancy-schmancy (expensive) florist. The advert's only text is the company name and 'Mother's Day'. It shows a child's hand holding up a cut flower, and a woman's hand lazily half-inclined toward it. I swear, the positions of the hands are exactly out of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. In Michelangelo's image, God is about to give Adam life, through the touch of both beings' gently reaching fingers. How interesting, to put the mother in as God, the child in as Adam, and reverse the giving role. Are children who appreciate their mother essentially giving her life? Does a child repay the gift of his/her life by showing devotion to the mother (in the form of an annual flower)? What does it mean?!?

2. All along the road to Damascus, another billboard will greet you again and again. It shows two women seated, one on the right and the other on the left half of the image. Both are young, pretty, smiling. The one on the right is dressed in a suit with hair nicely done. She's a woman ready for the office. Her gaze is directed at the woman on the left whose clothing is comfortable, a t-shirt and knit pants, obviously not an office type. We see these two women just as the comfortably-clad one has unwrapped her mothers day gift--a lovely pair of shoes. Text running along the top reads: It's Mother's Day, Not Yours. Huh? Women who wear suits aren't moms? Or is it women in the work place aren't moms? Or moms are dowdy, so get them fancy shoes! Or what? What does it mean?

I'll get pictures when I can. Our camera is currently spending time with Matthew in NY.

Art Goes to the Movies

And now, a brief, sorta-break from Women's History Month to bring you a divergence (in which women outnumber men 3-2, if that matters).

I've written about movies and art once before. It was boring, so don't bother clicking the link. Don't bother re-reading it. It was about movies that have art crammed into the background. For my second swing at the Art in Movies theme, I've decided to respond to Modern Art Notes' request for bloggers to list their five top paintings that would make a good movie all on their own. I was intrigued, but not entirely by paintings. Here are my painted-and-not selections:

1. Jeff Wall’s 1978 Destroyed Room
It's the prefect candidate for a mystery. I blogged all about it here. Some third party person could stumble on the room and try to figure out who it belonged to, why it was destroyed, and attempt to put things right. Or it could be like Suz's room meet's Groundhog's Day, where the main character works all day to tidy the room and despite all their heroic efforts they wake up the next day and the room is a disaster again. I'd like to see Jennifer Hudson play the owner of the room in either case.

2. Any one of Louise Bourgeois's Spiders (1999-2001, I think?)
The biggest of these creations are huge (30' high) sculptures designed for public spaces. They stand on spindly legs and look positively menacing, and yet Bourgeois has named them things like 'Maman', mommy in her native French. The spiders have been on a bit of a world-tour, Russia, Japan, UK, Canada, and they are totally terrifying. But I imagine a movie in which they are benevolent, as Bourgeois intends them to be, only in CGI rather than steel. HUGE terrifying-yet-benign spiders take up residence in major metropolitan centers. Conflict over what to do about them (ie. how to co-exist with them if at all) will be the movie's central theme. Disaster movies need Tommy Lee Jones, so he could be the mayor or something. And the Spiders will need a human advocate--that could be Julian Moore.

3. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's 1799 Dublin-Tornelle
The painting itself is almost too boring, but the story behind it is nothing if not dynamic. The movie could trace the material reality of the painting. I would have the movie start in the 1950s when the debate over authorship began, and the movie could showcase the two women who have been given credit for it. This picture would be like the diamond necklace in the Titanic--central to a story that explains why it matters so much.

4. James Ensor's 1889 Christ's Entry into Brussels
Not only is this painting packed with people, details, life, all perfectly setting the stage--the painting asks the impossible. Imagine if Jesus appeared in your city, right NOW. Ensor's Christ is absolutely LOST in the crowd. You'd hardly know he was there at all but for the title. I imagine a movie of this painting going something like a cross between Dostoyevsky's hypothetical appearance of Jesus in the Brother's Karamazov and the recent movie Lady in the Water. I have no suggestions for who should play Jesus or any other role in this movie. No idea.

5. Ann Hamilton's 1993 Torpos
It seems like a long time ago that I referenced this installation, but it was just so good, and like Ensor's painting, Hamilton was able to really create a feeling, an atmosphere in this project. She clouded the windows, raked the floor, covered it in horse hair, and then in the middle of all that methodically had book after book slowly, and deliberately burned as it was being read. It makes me think of the never ending story, where the pages suddenly go blank. Tropos allows a more educated, adult contemplation of the 'nothing'.

Hannah Höch, Dada Artist

I can hardly believe that there are only 10 blogging days until the end of March. I've frankly liked my Women's History Month project. It has made my whole formal education look so, well, male-centric, which, let's face it, it was/is. It took this project for me to see that for what it was: incomplete.

One other note before I devote my full attention to the next fantastic woman: my extra verses for Follow the Prophet are on view here, with (what for FMH is indeed) a tiny, bitty discussion. Chime in, if you want.

When people get bent out of shape about the 'state of art today', their issues generally go directly back to Dada, a movement that was as tied up in pre-WWI angst and post war disillusionment as a movement ever could be. Dada, as we all know from the urinal-legacy of Marcel Duchamp (read more here, and here), engaged in the presentation-as-art of common things, material things, things that were drawn right out of the nitty-gritty of every-day life.

Hannah Höch's collages, made from magazine and newspaper clippings, fit easily into the Dada framework of common things. But while Duchamp's images critiqued the art establishment and its values, Höch and other Berlin-Dada artists were engaged in (often biting) social commentary. Dada was perhaps foremost an effort to expose the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. The vulgarity of the masses, along with a sharp criticism of it, emerged in their work again and again.

No one did this better than Höch, in part because she was a woman. The absurdity and vanity of the bourgeoisie, though clearly ripe for a good parody was nothing to the way women were thought of, constructed, limited by the customs of the day. In the image I've selected, Höch has literally constructed (collaged) a woman out of images of her--the way she has been depicted in various times and places. And she's a mutant, a freak. Höch's sense was that her own culture's view of women was no better, and she wanted to show the viewer what she saw.

Höch, unlike so many of the artistic Avant-Garde, stayed in Germany, survived the war, and died there in 1978.

Olga Rozanova

Back on 7 March, I said that I'd returned to my old text books, searching for women. Same story here, but in a different book. Nearly 200 pages into Art in Theory, you'll find Olga Rozanova's 'The Bases of New Creation' from 1913. Here is one of her paintings from the same year.


In 'The Bases of New Creation', she wrote:

A servile repetition of nature's models can never express all her fullness.
It is time, at long last to acknowledge this and to delcare frankly, once and for all, that other ways, other methods of expressing the World are needed.

What is she talking about? A lot of things probably, Abstraction chief among them. Five years earlier, Picasso and Braque had begun their cubist experimentation. But even in 1913, Rozanova's was a bold proclamation. Over the years, she was associated with a number of movements and groups. She is best remembered as a Suprematist, a super-modern artistic revolution in Russian, with among other things, total abstraction as an aim. Rozanova's essay proves her committment to the main ideals of this movement well before it had taken shape. She and one other woman, Kseniya Boguslavskaya, were important enough in this movement to be mentioned by name in their earliest publication (1915) among aritists who "had led the struggle for the freedom of objects from the obligations of art".

Rozanova died in 1918. A picture that she made the year of her death shows nothing but a verticle green stripe. She was 32, and like all artists that die young there is lots of specuation about what she might have done if she had lived longer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Like Lady Hawarden of yesterday's post, Julia Margaret Cameron was a British woman who got into photography in the medium's early days. She was given a camera in 1863 as a birthday present when she turned 48. 48! Back in the mid-1800s, 48 was OLD. That ought to give hope to anyone out there. It is never, ever too late. I love it.

Anyway, Cameron was well-connected, so well in fact that she had the opportunity to make portraits of some of the notable figures of her day: A. L. Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Edward Burne-Jones, among others. And it is primarily because of these portraits that we have any record of Cameron's work. In 1926, these portraits were published under the title Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by none other than Virginia Woolf. Cameron was her great-aunt. I admit that I was a bit surprised that the title wasn't something like J.M. Cameron's Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. That her name wasn't included leads me to believe that in 1926, she was totally unknown, and therefore it wouldn't have helped the volume sell. Besides, in 1926 photography's status as art was still a matter of debate.



Anyway, many of Cameron's photographs were complete fantasies, Allegorical images as they are called. She posed her family, servants, neighborhood children, even Sri Lanken natives when her husband's employment took them there, and these are the images that I find most engaging. The image above is one of these, an Allegorical portrait of the Madonna and child, with Cameron's maid posed as the Madonna.

The differences between Cameron and Hawarden are slight. They both photographed their children in varyingly fantastic situations, were recognzied for their technical competence and skill, and both were very nearly forgotten entirely. Cameron's work is seen by many as a forerunner to the images Sally Mann made of her children during the late 1980s and early 90s.

wikipedia
science & society picture library

Lady Clementina Hawarden

We’re back in Europe for the next installment of Women's History Month artists (artistresses?). Across the channel in Britain, where in 1861, Lady Clementina Hawarden was busy taking pictures of, among other things, the neat things her dog could do.


Most of her surviving photographs are in the V&A in London, where I found this image along with everything else I can report about Hawarden. I love a good, informative page.

Haraden was a respected photographer, and even won silver medals at the Photographic Society of London. Many of her photographs are of her daughters play-acting, posing in costume, or otherwise being theatrical in their home. I think photography gave Hawarden an opportunity to entertain fantasy, realize imaginations, and explore slight variations on reality. Like the dog's precarious perch, the images of her family that I find most engaging are the ones that feature uncommon moments.

Another interesting note: see how the edges of the photograph are missing? Apparently the prints held by the V&A were damaged when someone removed them from an album before the museum acquired them. Of the ripped, cut, cropped corners, the V&A text offered the general observation that, "the state of a print reveals much about a photograph's material history." I like that.

Kiyohara Yukinobu

UPDATE: 15/03/07--the image is here!

Just a reminder, in case you missed the post heralding my current project, March is Women's History Month. I'll be posting about women artists all month long. After my post about Louise Nevelson, who is quite famous, I decided to focus on women who aren't so well-known (or at least those who were hitherto totally unknown to me).


So far, there has been a definite focus on France, and I don't know about you but I'm getting wanderlusty. Not that France isn't all that. It really, really is, but there's a world full of women out there and the month is already nearly half over. Today, we're leaving the continent all together and moving far, far east.

Art was every bit as much a man's pursuit in Japan as it was in Europe during the 1600s, the century in which Kiyohara Yukinobu lived. Painting was one among the "Four Accomplishments" that upper-class men cultivated (the other three were music, calligraphy, and the chess-like game go). But Yukinobu's father was a master Kano-school painter, and so she had access to a world that normally would have excluded her.

I've tried off and on for the better part of an hour to upload a good example of her paining, but alas, blogger will not comply. You can find one at the Kyoto National Museum. The link will take you to their search page. Enter Yukinobu's name, and you'll find it. I recommend that you use their picture viewer to magnify the image as much as you can. Her brushwork is amazing.

I have not been able to find much else about her life or work. I can see a trip to the library in my future. Just as soon as good reserach libraries re-enter my world of possibilities.

Césarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault

Ok, ok, ok. I'm sure everyone is just dying for another "Oops! It isn't a David after all" story, so here it is.


A portrait of Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni, 1804.

This time it concerns a woman (big shock) named Césarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault. I've been able to find very few web references, and she is unsurprisingly absent from my library of art books. So, if you feel you can trust Time magazine ca. 1960, here are the facts:

Césarine Henriette Flore Davin-Mirvault was "the daughter of a geographer and the goddaughter of a marquise, presided over small dinner parties that artists and musicians, now long forgotten, loyally attended. She exhibited fairly often, was always listed in catalogues as a pupil of David."

Davin-Mirvault's connection with David is clear enough, so when the Frick Museum bought the portrait of the violinist Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni and it was attributed to David, no one should have been too surprised. That was in 1952, and about a decade later, they settled on Davin-Mirvault--but only after they could prove that she knew the violinist. The article continues:

"For the answer to that, [Dealer Georges] Wildenstein went to the diaries of a certain Mme. Moitte, one of Mme. Davin's cattier friends. On Feb. 3, 1806, Mme. Moitte went to Mme. Davin's for dinner. She reported that the wine was inferior, that the fried cakes were undercooked, and that the candles "reeked of grease." As a final social note, she added that Mme. Davin sang and that Signor Bruni "played the violin."

See the image at the Frick's site.