The Best American Poetry

Ellen Kozak's Latest Work (Opening January 10, David Richard Gallery)

 

December 26, 2023

Press Release - Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller River-Rising

ELLEN KOZAK AND SCOTT D. MILLER
River-Rising

January 10 through February 8, 2024

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 11, 2024 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM

David Richard Gallery
508 West 26 ST, Suite 9F
Chelsea, New York City
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present River-Rising an exhibition of Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller’s collaborative 4-channel video and music installation, as well as a series of Kozak’s night paintings created in 2022-2023. This exhibition is the second time Kozak’s paintings and work in video have been shown together. The first was her solo show at the Katonah Museum of Art, which commissioned a single channel video in 2009.

River-Rising is filmed from the shorelines of three river estuaries, the Garonne River in France, the Bilbao Estuary, and the Hudson River. Also, interspersed throughout the channels are recurring rhythmic passages of nighttime illumination filmed along the Venice Lagoon.

River-Rising is comprised of intimately observed and gradually changing images that inspire an identification with the river as a living organism. Abstract in their appearance, the images convey the movement and luminosity of rivers without offering views or realistic representations. Kozak uses the surface of the river as a giant aquatic lens and synthesizer that assimilates reflection, color, movement and pattern.

The video channels and musical score vary in length; they play as non-synchronized loops, so that viewers experience ever-evolving configurations. In continuous play, any composition of all four channels will not repeat for more than 11 years.

Embedded in this lyrical work is deep unease about the ecological damage that we continue to inflict upon our living waterways. Close observation deepens our connection to the environment. This connection is viscerally underlined by Scott D. Miller’s musical composition. Miller's score is written for 11 wind instruments—a singular ensemble of clarinets, trombones and tuba. It is conceived as a series of larger and smaller wave forms.

Each note lasts the duration of one long breath, in most instances between 12 and 16 seconds, and consists of a gradual crescendo followed by a gradual decrescendo. This languorous phrasing mirrors the slow transitions of Kozak's imagery. Ever-shifting pitch relations are evoked through the emergence/dissolution of distinct instrumental groupings and their associated dynamic profiles. Microtonal tunings and an absence of vibrato create eerie, almost-major, almost-minor tonalities. At times, ominous ascending phrases suggest the sea-level rise that we have provoked. The music is performed by Miller’s Tilted Head Ensemble, conducted by Carl Bettendorf.

Kozak’s paintings take visual inspiration from close study of the surface of bodies of water. While her primary source has long been situated in the landscape, Kozak’s work is chiefly abstract. Working only from reflections in the river’s lens-like surface, her paintings do not have views and they include no horizon. Although we may not recognize the specific motif (landscape, river, sky) the authority of perception in her series of night paintings is tangible.

At the time Kozak began this series, she was mesmerized by the reflections of the illuminated nighttime river traffic, the barges, tugs and tankers passing her studio on the bank of a narrow stretch of the Hudson River in upstate New York. Responding to the drama of the silent radiant reflections, her paintings focus in a reductive way on the phenomena of color, light, and a sense of pulse and meter. Working in an intimate scale, the paintings compress the monumentality of her subject and linger between weightlessness and gravity. Both water and oil paint share the property of viscosity. Exploring paint as a mimetic medium, Kozak uses its physicality to perform in ways that are similar to her subject.

About Ellen Kozak:

Ellen Kozak (b.1955) is a painter and video artist living and working in NYC and the Hudson River Valley. She received a MS in Visual Studies from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where she worked primarily in video and in 1979 created “Information Space”, her first 4-channel video installation. Kozak continued as a Center Fellow. She received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Between 1982 and 1984 she worked in Japan and studied shod? (traditional Japanese calligraphy).

Kozak has had twenty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the Hudson River Museum; the Katonah Museum of Art; the Osaka Contemporary Art Center and the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, in Japan; the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and Katarina Rich Perlow Gallery in NYC and Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hudson River Museum, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. She serves on the Board of Directors of Riverkeeper, Inc. This is her second exhibition at the David Richard Gallery.

 

See https://davidrichardgallery.com/artist/1418-ellen-kozak/exhibits
https://ellenkozak.com/about/artist-s-comments

Live Performance Pilgrimage, with Walkabout: Normandy’s Spring International Festival of New Circus [By Tracy Danison]

Les filles du renard pâle, "Révolte". Photo © Kalimba

Just when good ideas for whiling away the coming months seem so thin on the ground, a great one comes along.

Spring, 16ème Festival international des nouvelles forms de Cirque (“Sixteenth International Festival of New Circus”), features pretty much five weeks of “New Circus”.

"New" Circus because it does not exploit other species: in New Circus, humans do the unexpected and extraordinary, the clowning and derring-do that makes circus such a unique experience.

 

Heka, “Gandini”. Photo © Camilla Greenwell

The Spring festival is an opportunity to make a pilgrimage into contemporary live-performance as well as to enjoy the best in real live people. Its 45 acts and 116 performances include innovations and permutations on the whole range of visual and performing arts plus the usual thrills and laughs: high-wires, bars, cages, wheels, trapeze, ropes, juggling, acrobatics, plunging and soaring, fantastic twirling, whirling, costumes brief and wild, eroticism.

And New Circus acts, like traditional circus acts, travel, are made for a wide, culturally-diverse audience. Beyond a little basic English, word-wisdom is not really needed.

The palette of intentions and artistic endeavors of the troupes performing at Spring at the festival are enormous: philosophy, morality, personal transformation are played out in the juggling ring and on the tight-wire.

 

Galapiat Cirque, “Courbatures”. Photo © Sébastien Armengol

With its Hot Dog and Frasques performances, for instance, Galactik Ensemble promises spectators acrobatic fresco, burlesque and human foible. Les filles du renard pâle - three woman acrobats and two woman musicians - bill a savage and sensual Révolte: the body is the vocabulary of revolution, they say. Circo Aero’s Trilokia turns on the Hand of Man. With a soaring of chimeras and phantasmagorias, dance, magic, prestidigitation, poetry and dream, the troupe aims to warn about the dangers at hand today.  

The festival’s walkabout potential complements its pilgrimage possibilities.

With performances at 65 urban and rural venues - town and village theaters, culture centers and outdoor and big top and in-the-landscape sites – the fesstival opens on pretty much, if not all, historic upper and lower Normandy. The old Duchy was and remains one of Europe’s north-south pivot points, a land in equal measure sea and country, fisher and farmer, sailor and soldier.

Cie EA EO - Neta Oren, “Biographie”. “Photo © Marc Lahore

Though lushly and deliciously, rurally, out of the way, Normandy, at least since1066 and all that happened, is also quite in the way: big towns and charming villages with easy links to Paris, London and the Low Countries.

With Faire Corps (“Unity-Solidarity”) as its guiding theme, Spring opens 5 March 2025 with Douce Révolution, an exciting in-situ exploration of new ways to enjoy live performance by the Cie des Mutants and Side Show at Théâtre du Champ Exquis in the Caen suburb of Blainville-sur-Orne. From Blainville, the festival invests all the historic territories of the ancient Duchy: Rouen, Littoral Seine Maritime, Cotentin, Orne, Manche, Eure and Calvados. It closes under the Big Top on 16 April with Théâtre des Frères Forman’s high-flying Conférence des oiseaux in the Presqu’île de Caen urban redevelopment area.

_______________

Spring, 16ème Festival international des nouvelles forms de Cirque is a cooperative effort by the La Brèche, Pôle National Cirque de Normandie, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, a regional artistic center focused on circus development and Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf, a regional culture development center organized around circus history, equipment and production. The Spring festival website provides more complete information on companies, show-types, venues and a complete calendar of events. The Parcours tab on the site has suggestions for organizing an itinerant stay.

Circus Companies, Creators/Choreographers, Acts/Performances

Just below is the list of all circus companies involved in the festival along with an indication of the creator/choreographer and act/performance. A slash (“/ “) separates companies, the creator/choreographer is indicated to the right of the hyphen (“-“). The act/performance is indicated in italics after a comma.

Cie EA EO - Neta Oren, Biographies / Club Optimiste - Fanny Alvarez, Feu /  Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger - Raphaëlle Boitel, KA-IN / Cie KIAÏ - Cyrille Musy, Loops / Cie Defracto - Guillaume Martinet, Monographie  / Cie The Ratpack - Xavier Lavabre & Ann-Katrin Jornot, Sans regrets? / Cie Takakrôar, Si c'est sûr c'est pas peut-être / Galactik Ensemble, Hot Dog &  Frasques / Les filles du renard pâle - Johanne Humblet, Roue Giratoire, Révolte ou tentatives de l'échec  / Cie El Nucleo - Jimmy Lozano & Joana Pinard, L'Enjeu / Cie Bêstîa, Fratello / Cie MPTA - Mathurin Bolze Immaqaa, ici peut-être / Galapiat Cirque - Jonas Séradin, Préviens les autres - Elice Abonce Muhonen & Chloé Derrouaz, Courbatures  / Cie Baro d'evel, Qui som? / Cie MMFF - Arnaud Saury, Aimons-nous vivants / 36è promotion du CNAC, Martin Palisse & David Gauchard, Brûler d'envies / Circo Aereo - Jani Nuutinen, Trilokia : I’eau, Harbre & FerFeu /  Viivi Roiha, V / Cie El Nucleo - Jimmy Lozano & Joana Pinard, L'Enjeu / Cie Grensgeval & Circus Katoen, iRRooTTaa / Cie Lunatic - Cécile Mont-Reynaud, Entre les lignes / Cie Des mutants & Side-show - Aline Breucker & Quintijn Ketels, Douce révolution / Académie Fratellini & Béné Borth, Ça a l'air facile / Les Tréteaux de France - Olivier Letellier, Le théorème du pissenlit / La main de l'homme - Clément Dazin, Thomas Scotto, L'envers de nos décors / Cie UNA - Valia Beauvieux, Et la mer s'est mise à brûler / Cie Unlisted - Julian Vogel, Ceramic Circus / Cie Pilot Fishes - Léa Rault & Agathe Rault, En haut en bas /  Gandini Juggling - Sean Gandini & Kati Ylä-Hokkala, HEKA / La sociale K & Halem, Invisibles / Liam Lelarge & Kim Marro, La boule / Théâtre des frères Forman - Petr Forman, La conférence des oiseaux / Cie Quotidienne - Jérôme Galan, Nartiste /  Cie La Supérette, Nous on n'a rien vu venir... / Cie La Mondiale Générale, Réfugions-nous / H.M.G - Jonathan Guichard & Lauren Bolze Thaumazein / Théâtre en oeuvre - Jean-Yves Lazennec, Une Bérénice  / Victoria Belen & Milena Csergo / Elsa Caillat & Marie Vauzelle

"Matisse’s Open Window" [by David Lehman]

On Matisse's Birthday (December31)
Matisse’s Open Window

Do you believe that Matisse’s “Blue Nudes” (1952)

in its simplicity — one color, one fluid motion —

was easier to compose than his “Open Window” (1905),

a harbor of sails framed by the shutters

of his hotel room window in the bright fauve day?

Matisse didn’t have to think. He looked and knewt

he harbor is life, and blessed be the light

that results in such blossoms of color,

an exuberance that proves every seascape

is a lover’s state of heart. “Blue Nudes,”

a set of four lithographs, reflects Matisse’s “cut out”

method of composition, paper on paper, blue on white,

no paint at all. With this in mind, which

would you say was the more avant-garde?

https://www.literarymatters.org/16-1-three-aesthetic-questions/

Defining cultural times: big booms, social movements and individual experience [By Tracy Danison]

“That Is No Longer Our Smoke Sign” (1950s) by Justino Herrera. Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum

One of the unique things about the experience of people born after 1935 is the frequent cognitive dissonance induced by living long enough to have experienced the “eras” and “ages” of contemporary (potted) history.

Take the “Civil Rights Era 1950-1963”.

Born in 1955, I do remember the shock of running into a segregated water fountain in South Carolina and buying some candy in a “Negro” grocery in Georgia (and, notably, getting warned off afterwards, by a white man). I witnessed then, have witnessed since, witness now a lot of racism, legislated and cultural, have benefited a lot from legislation made to remedy it. But I can’t for the life of me locate a “Civil Rights Era”.

That’s because if “history” is something that has happened, which events, effects and outcomes are known and accounted for, then I’m living, along with others born on the tail-end of the Baby Boom, the struggle for race equality right now. Maybe the “Civil Rights Era” references a time period when elites were obliged to notice; Jim Crow may be down by law but not, by any means, out. The South is still solid, too.

“Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll” (1945) by Salvador Dali. Photo © Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali

Again, born in 1955 and placed in a Catholic elementary school in Wadsworth, Ohio, I learned early to squat correctly under a school desk in the event of atomic attack. Also, I remember, am still today touched by, the scene from the Time Machine where the elderly Filby (Alan Young) urges George (Rod Taylor) to get to the shelter, atomic satellites, you see. I reckon, then, as well as the Civil Right Era, I’ve been living, have lived, am living the “Atomic Age”.

But “Atomic Age” doesn’t name the time I’ve experienced, nor the outlook I’ve developed or, for that matter, those of my fellow humans. “Atomic” is not the right adjective, “Age” not the right noun.

Uranium (Pink), Urangestein (Rosa),1992. Photo, Sigmar Polke © The Estate of Sigmar Polke 

“Atomic” puts aside the awful realization that “the bomber will always get through” as well as the actual experience and effects of the non-atomic firestorms at Dresden and elsewhere, the flattening of Warsaw, the flattening of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany and then of Viet Nam, then of Afghanistan, now of Ukraine. If “Atomic Age” names the politics and social psychology involved in threats of indiscriminate mass killing with ecocide, why so? With a single exception none of the experienced horror has involved atomic booms.

Since 2022, for instance, not a week has gone by without Vladimir Putin, a fascist strongman who runs a now capitalist, neo-colonial Russia, threatening atomic war. It is said, and I believe it, the United States promises a non-atomic response more than adequate to such occasion. As previously, both sides hesitate. That all seems to me to be about getting in the best boom, not the atomic-est one.

“Bomb, Canopic Jar, Victims” (1967) by Nancy Spero © Nancy Spero

Instead of “Atomic Age”, why not “Best Boom Age” or “Age of Boom”, then? Because the absurdity of “Age of Boom” points, at least for poets and lovers of irony, the absurdity of using “Atomic Age” to name humanity’s urgent struggle to get a grip on its relationships with each other and the rest of nature.

So, cognitive dissonance was my first reaction to the exhibition Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique(“Artists confronting history – the Atomic Age”), which recently opened at the Musée de l’art moderne de Paris. The curators say that the invention of the atomic bomb and its use marked a turning point in the modern history of the atom, starting a “new”, second Atomic Age. Since that big boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, art, science and politics have become indissociable.

Virginie Roux-Cassé (re-)discovers the sainted woman [By Tracy Danison]

Sainte Jeune Fille à la Licorne © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Carnets pour l’exile: According to tradition, every exile needs to wander aimlessly from time to time, not so much to find a shard of home at the next whiskey bar but to see what there is to see when the city has become your life to live.

Also, a good-hearted exile should think about year-end presents for those at home who have not yet been arrested.

 

Sainte Embrasée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I ran into Virginie Roux-Cassé‘s painting, and Virginie herself, quite by accident some years ago now. Her latest exhibition, called “Les Saintes”, she says, is inspired by an encounter with the Roma holy patron Sainte Sara la Noire, repudiated African Queen of King Herod and servant to holy patrons Saintes Marie-Jacobus and Marie-Salomé*.

 

Sainte Marthe 1 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

“The people pray to [the saints’ icons], venerate them, adore them,” she told me during her opening cocktail the other day, “They dress them, they cover them with, they pile on them, various-patterned, many-colored, golden, ornamented scarves, tunics, coats, crowns, jewels, crosses, rosaries…The beauty, divinity, humanity just bowled me over”.

 

Sainte Sara La Noire © Virginie Roux-Cassée

From that experience, she decided to investigate the lives and deaths of woman Catholic saints: more than a year of portraits in tempera and engravings on the theme is the result.

 

Sainte Marthe, engraving © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I have two paintings by Virginie Roux-Cassé. The one, acrylic or water-based housepaint on fiberboard, is a tilted dry sink (?), a tray (?) of apples hanging just over my dining table. Somebody picked these impish apples from an untended tree in (Virginie’s?) back garden.

 

Sainte Marthe 2 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The other picture –  I call it “Bird Cage” –, in clotted acrylic with smudged newsprint collage, perches above my talk-on-the-phone-red-overstuffed-armchair (since my mother died mostly used with my Son, who lives far away, and Karine, with whom I like to touch a word when she’s away).

 

Sainte Solange © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The Bird Cage is, I think, a lamp or lampshade in crinkly paper (flame-resistant crinoline?) and thick structuring wire with, set alongside it, a small vase. The vase has a big twig of (cherry?) blossoms jammed in it, too big for it. (‘Though you’d not guess it to see her walking home in the evening, Karine sometimes tears off flowering twigs or plucks up flowers and brings them home to make a “found bouquet”. It shocks me. Please don’t call the cops.)

 

Sainte Véronique © Virginie Roux-Cassé

In the foreground of it all I’ve described is a triplet of round fruits. One of the fruits is a distinctly different color than the other two, set slightly but distinctly behind. I sometimes try to make out the smudged newsprint but I’ve never succeeded.

 

Sainte Phanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I bought the impish apples and Bird Cage because Virginie Roux-Cassé’s take on the world around is not mine but is accessible to me, opens a garden gate for my feelings and my imagination. What’s that poem about the path not taken?

 

Sainte La Vierge Stephanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Like everybody else, contemporary artists such as Virginie Roux-Cassé have to come to grips with the increasingly vast pile of past and present and their infinite substacks:  artists, oeuvres, esthetics, theories, concepts, approaches, materials and techniques. Most triangulate their hands at a point between story-telling and radical expression of a reality uniquely within them and what I think of as "esthetic life extensionism".

 

Sainte Mariam © Virginie Roux-Cassé

For story-telling, put somebody like, say, “post-black” painter Rashid Johnson, who did, notably, the interior “Broken Nine” mosaic at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For unique reality, think, say, of Jorinde Voigt, who paints the bio-quantic reality that undergirds our ordinary here-below. For esthetic life extensionism, an artist called Leon Loewentrautsprings to mind. Loewentraut has mastered a certain "Picasso signature style" that enables him to target an Audi-driving market that won’t pay for one of Picasso’s many thousands of second-rate squiggles, can’t afford the real thing, but, nevertheless, aspires to class and taste. 

 

Sainte Blandine © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Virginie Roux Cassé's triangulates someplace between all three. Her distinction is that when I look at her work, I feel her standing looking with me. She's not whispering as an other artist might; sharing the experience of visual emotion is enough.

 

Sainte Jeanette © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I once visited the upper-story greenhouse that serves as her workshop. I was taken aback to see - some unfinished, some painted over with other styles - in recognizable painterly styles lopped about the place. They were well done, too!

 

Sainte Ecervelée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I was taken aback because for me the thing that has marked for me Virginie Roux Cassé's work is that it reminds me of nothing else that I've run into as I look around the world. Among the many excellent painters active today, Virginie Roux Cassée is my very own Le Douanier Rousseau.

 

Sainte Marthe (leading her monster) © Virginie Roux-Cassé

 

Later, it struck me that the discarded “style” paintings did not represent a search to produce an effect or a search for a technique or for a style but rather represent her effort to understand, maybe to find and isolate, an effect on an (herself as an) onlooker. Doing that, she brings out my "emotion of seeing": in dance, I would say that the choreography has enabled the "sensibility" that enables the experience of dance performance.
____

*Saint Sara la Noire is patron of the Roma (or "Gypsy") folk. Many of them claim an origin in India, an, indeed, Wikipedia identifies Saint Sara with the goddess Kali. Saints Mary-Salome, Mother of Saint John, author of the Apocalyptic gospel, Mary-Jacobus, Mother of Saint James the Apostle, along with Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ companion in love, were among the original disciples of Christianity’s Messiah. Most were witness to Jesus Christ's Resurrection. All are mentioned in the canonical gospels. Fleeing Israel in a rudderless boat sometime in the third decade of the present era, these woman disciples of Jesus providentially washed up on the French coast. They were long believed to be the founders of Christianity in France. The pilgrimage site for Saint Sara is at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a village in the Camargue.

Contact Virginie Roux-Cassé through her website: virginierouxcasse.com

Hans Josephsohn, sculptor of genius, artistic heritage, Solomon Grundy and Emily Dickinson [By Tracy Danison]

Untitled, undated, Hans Josephsohn. Photo © Musée de l’art moderne de Paris

Sick of your compatriots after months of gazing anxiously into their inscrutable faces? Thinking of Paris as a place where you might get away from all that? It’s not all a bad idea. Remember, though, that, here-below, in the hell nobody’s yet out of, a body’s only defense against reality is absorption in something interesting.

Thus disabused, a body may, for a while, calmly say goodbye to the home front with a visit to an interesting exhibit called Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen, a life-time retrospective of the sculpture of Hans Josephsohn at the Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

It’s hard to find an adjective to describe Josephson’s work. He kept himself to himself pretty much; he has been little shown outside Switzerland. Albert Oehlen, a contemporary multi-materials artist who first came to attention as an art scene bad boy in Germany in the 1980s, and is curator of the exhibit, discovered Josephsohn’s work when he visited Kesselhaus Josephsohn, a dedicated storage and display space. Kesselhaus Josephsohn was founded in 2003 as part of the Sitterwerk arts and culture complex in St Gallen, Switzerland, where Oehlen lives.  Oehlen’s adjective is to organize the show around the sculptor’s life-process of creation: chronological, closing with a totem by contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren (b. 1964) - taken from Oehlen’s personal collection. Josephsohn’s all there, Oehlen’s adjective says, words just get in the way.

Oehlen’s right.

Untitled surface,1950-1951, Hans Josephsohn. Photo © Tracy Danison

I was a little breathless when I got to the top of the stair where the exhibit begins. When I looked up, I stopped wheezing to goggle breathless: morsels of whole sense, visual haikus. Haikus, haikus everywhere and nothing to do but look. This Hans Josephsohn guy is about how eyes make feelings, processes of creation.

In plaster or bronze, bits of wall, classic-shape kores, faces and figures capture visual expectation and form. A little section of stone wall full enough image to make signs enough to make portents… But then, it’s a stone wall, natural, made, size, rock pieces, rock types, cracks, fissures, surfaces, fractures, filler, place. It’s a stone wall. I see not so much “essence” as the fleeting sense of the whole thing.

From beginning to end, I had the feeling that I was noticing each thing for the first time.  Shape, texture, relief, light, associate into visual clues into perception, into posture (movement) into character, into personality. Toward the end I was looking at heads were mysterious, maybe ancient, because their personality had been lost to time.

 

Untitled female figure, 1957, Hans Josephsohn Photo © Katalin Deér, Josephsohn Estate

 

If it’s hard to find a single adjective to define the work, it’s even more difficult describe the feeling that Hans Josephsohn and the experience of his work inspire in me.

Born in Konigsberg in 1920, Josephsohn died in Zurich in 2012.  As a Jew in post-1933 Germany, the boy was refused entry to his local art school. In 1938, he got a scholarship to study in Florence. He arrived just in time to be expelled under Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali. Fleeing to Switzerland, he found a friend in sculptor Otto Müller (1905-1993) before he was interned at the start of the world war in 1939. Josephsohn began working again in 1943. In a film about him and his work, he remarks that he has never visited Auschwitz, where his family was presumably murdered as he began his career; he was afraid a memorial might distract attention from them.

Although this is the first Josephsohn exhibition in France (and perhaps in Europe outside of Switzerland), the contemporary artist and culture activist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) featured certain of Josephsohn’s sculptures in Third Mind, a 2007 group show of contemporary artists at Palais de Tokyo. Rondinone wanted to build a heritage frame for the younger generation he was featuring.

From all this, my feeling creates Josephsohn as a created artist’s elder artist, genius honored by posthumous recognition rather than cold cash and a coffee. Josephsohn was sandwiched into the helpless tragedy of human existence both by natural routine,

 

Hans Josephsohn, 2004.Photo © Katalin Deér, Kesselhaus Josephsohn

 

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday, 
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
Poor Solomon Grundy

… and a need to work and work and work, some work to keep thought at bay, some work to get the expression of vision just right. Like Emily Dickinson,

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

________

Properly called “Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen”, the life-time retrospective is part of a triptych exhibition called “Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique/Josephsohn - Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices”: a museum-wide sweep of history, high art and contemporary inclusion culture. It runs through 16 February 2025 at Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

Att 7 pm October 30: a celebration of Joe Brainard's Selected Letters

Joe Brainard is the only painter whose work adorns the cover of two volumes of "The Best American Poetry"

For Joe Brainard

The road sign said snow
‘Well, I never said it was spring’
in 1968 in whose loft downtown
under a cobweb of windshield

a butterfly beneath a branch within
a border of blue 1953 Easter Seals
the sun surrounded by streaks
of blue and white in a frame

and a wave crashing against it
the logic a rhyme of college and collage
the logic a rebus the message simple
Nancy a blueprint bingo cherries

and two fragments of letters
handwritten big block letters neat
I looked and the three hairs
in the sink spelled out Joe

David Lehman, 12/ 20 / 2000 

On October 30, 2024, at 7 pm at St Mark's Church in NYC there will be a reception in honor of Joe Brainard's Love, Joe: Selected Letters (edited by Daniel Kane; Columbia UP). .The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach.

Paul Auster and others remember Joe Brainard here.
https://youtu.be/I2Znn0oGrfE?t=304

See, too, this "Homage to Joe Brainard."

Charles Bukowski: Woodcut by Loren Kantor

 

Charles Bukowski (c) Loren Kantor

Woodcuts are by their very nature brusque, harsh & bold," writes woodcut artist Loren Kantor.  "What makes a woodcut portrait come to life are age lines, wrinkles and weathered faces." 

Kantor has been posting images of his woodcuts of actors, writers, artists, family, and friends over at Woodcuttingfool for about a year.  He sent me this likeness of Charles Bukowski last week and I love it, especially because of the way he's captured the weariness in Bukowski's eyes.  Thank you Loren for letting us share this image with our readers.  See more about Bukowski here.  Read Bukowski's The Laughing Heart (a personal favorite), here.

-- sdh

from the archive, first posted May 25, 2012

Charles Bukowski (c) Loren Kantor

Woodcuts are by their very nature brusque, harsh & bold," writes woodcut artist Loren Kantor.  "What makes a woodcut portrait come to life are age lines, wrinkles and weathered faces." 

Kantor has been posting images of his woodcuts of actors, writers, artists, family, and friends over at Woodcuttingfool for about a year.  He sent me this likeness of Charles Bukowski last week and I love it, especially because of the way he's captured the weariness in Bukowski's eyes.  Thank you Loren for letting us share this image with our readers.  See more about Bukowski here.  Read Bukowski's The Laughing Heart (a personal favorite), here.

-- sdh

from the archive, first posted May 25, 2012

"Leda and the Swan" [by Leonardo & Wm. Butler Yeats]

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                                       Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

-- William Butler Yeats

"Reader, Why I Married My Harlequin" [by Molly Arden]

My Harlequin

Reader, this is why I married him, my harelquin,
At the Punch-and-Judy stand amid children's din.

Ok. Here's why. Because he hollers at the TV set
I believe in America, the underfaker said (stet).

And he throws beer cans at the TV set.
Do I have to tell you about every offer I get?

He buys the SI swimsuit issue and keeps them all.
How did things ever get this far? It's all

Because of what we did in the car.
No shame, no games, just a late-model used car.

Also, because he doesn't look like a scared rabbit
And we don't discuss business with George Babbitt. 

I went to "the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art,"
And got the part. He gave me a new smart

Phone, and sang "I'm not that clever, I just adore you,"
To me, and to me alone! (It's true, too.)

(2019)

A Scary Prediction from June 2012 [by David Lehman]

On January 6, 2012, we ran this piece under the heading “A Scary Prediction -- China: Better Dead Than Red”:

<<<  Back in January 2008, when the media was fixated in Iowa, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidency and be re-elected. Stacey can confirm this prediction. Scarcely infallible, I picked Kerry to win in 2004. Nevertheless -- I think it's fun to go on the record with a prediction, and here is mine of the season:

I believe that in my lifetime the Unted States will go to war with China. And by war I mean military conflict -- to be fought primarily on the sea. It will require the shifting of our navy to the Pacific, which is under way, and our disengagement from the fruitless and basically irrational forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, which are winding down, as the Obama Administration replaces boots on the ground with drone strikes in Pakistan and computer hacking in Iran.

Since this is an interactive blog, I invite you to choose the Sarajevo or pretext for the naval battles to come in the ironically named Pacific Ocean:

(1) China's ancient cultural conflict with Japan rears its head. The Chinese interfere with a Japanese ship, and the loss of face in Japan is such that they ask the US to intervene.
(2) Chinese efforts to control North Vietnam spills over into South Korea
(3) China presses spurious claims to mineral-rich islands off Japan and the Philippines
(4) On the corporate level, China eats America's lunch because Chinese regulations put US firms at a decisive disadvantage
(5) A recession in China exposes the fundamental contradiction between the capitalism the Chinese practice and the government's repressive policies. Google makes its inroads. Riots break out among people whose consciousness has been raised. Among the rioters are parents dying to have more children than the government permits, laborers who feel exploited, and an intellectual class that learns there is a discrepancy between the government's official line and the truth -- as in: what were the real reasons the earthquake of May 2008 was so devastating?
Your pick, dear reader?  -- DL >>>

The collage is by David Lehman Copyright (c) 2012

RJG BD [on Dick Gallup; by Ron Padgett]

RJG BD

Richard John Gallup, wake up,
it’s your birthday, or maybe you’re
already awake and the spotlight
of the day is following you around
the stage and you can’t get away,
you are shining and special all
this very day you came sliding out
and your mother said Oy vey
though she was not Jewish
and in fact had never even heard
that expression before you taught it to her,
but let me explain that she said it
because having a child can hurt
and plenty, and being a child can hurt too,
which is why we never grow up or if we do
we’re awful, so it’s great that you never did
and I never did and probably won’t,
for even though we might totter and drool
we can always say Oy vey!

—Ron Padgett
2003 (previously unpublished)

Here's the cover of Ron Padgett's forthcoming book, a memoir of Dick Gallup, which Cuneiform Books will publish.

Roger Eagle [by John Harbourne]

from the artist John Harbourne, this missive from Liverpool:

<<<
The drawing was done in 2017. It’s a portrait of Roger Eagle, who was manager of the world famous Eric’s club in Mathew Street, Liverpool in the 1970s. In the 60s, Roger had been DJ at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, where he played his vast collection of R&B records and eventually promoted his favourite artists, who came over to Britain to play. Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker and Howling Wolf were just a few of the famous names he promoted over here. 

The jukebox in Eric's club was famously eclectic, full of Roger's favourite music and was an education to many of us back in the day. My drawing shows three of his favourite artists: Bo Diddley, Charlie Parker and King Tubby (on the lapel badge).

>>>

johnharbourneartist.com

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes [by Thomas Gray]

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

'Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

-- Thomas Gray

with thanks to Henri Matisse for the great painting. A critic recently wrote that "One poem like Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems."  Thomas Gray is anything but dull in such poems as this one, or "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," about which I wrote this..Here is an excerpt from the piece.  DL

 <<<
I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.
>>>   

https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

https://panoply.fm/podcasts/slatepoetry/episodes/yfUbNxo70OwA8us0iCy0K

Innisfree (eg. Greg McBride): Poems by David Lehman

Dutch Interior

He liked the late afternoon light as it dimmed
In the living room, and wouldn’t switch on
The electric lights until past eight o’clock.
His wife complained, called him cheerless, but
It wasn’t a case of melancholy; he just liked
The way things looked in air growing darker
So gradually and imperceptibly that it seemed
The very element in which we live. Every man
And woman deserves one true moment of greatness
And this was his, this Dutch interior, entered
And possessed, so tranquil and yet so busy
With details: the couple’s shed clothes scattered
On the backs of armchairs, the dog chasing a shoe,
The wide open window, the late afternoon light.

Click here for this special issue of Innisfree, edited by Greg McBride, with a portfolio of poems by David Lehman.

paintings by David Lehman. copyright (c) 2024 by David Lehman

"El Greco’s Elongations" [by David Lehman]

from "Three Aesthetic Questions" (in Literary Matters:)

El Greco's Elongations

Do we agree with Roger Fry who
commended El Greco for “his complete
indifference” to what the public wanted?
Do we admire the artist’s uncompromising
self so much that “verisimilitude of texture”
ceases to be a virtue and any “harshness of
accent” or “crudity of color opposition” is OK
if necessary to the realization of an idea?
Fry wrote in 1920 in advance of any guard.
He influenced everybody, and I speak from
personal experience, because when
I started looking at art, the harder it was
to understand, the better I liked it.
In short: what is art?

See too "Schubert's Unfinished": https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/07/schuberts-unfinished-in-literary-matters.html

Max Beckmann, "Paris Society"

This is our Saturday pic of the week.

Kandinsky in Paris

Peter Paul Reuben's Judgment of Paris

Peter Paul Reuben's Judgment of Paris 

 

At Tibor de Nagy Gallery (starting June 8, 2024)

Painting Within A Painting Nell Blaine, Joe Brainard, Rudy Burckhardt, Jane Freilicher Louisa Matthiasdottir, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, and Trevor Winkfield June 8 to July 26, 2024       Jane Freilicher Studio Interior, 1982 oil on canvas 50 x 60 inches I have been painting small paintings of wildflowers from photographs from a wildflower book. Several have turned out as fake Fairfield Porters without me even trying. And almost all of them have bits of you in them. I don’t know if other people can tell or not, but I can tell.         Joe Brainard to Fairfield Porter, circa 1966/1967 – excerpted from a written letter You could argue that every painting is a painting within a painting, right? The journey a painting makes from the easel to the gallery wall is full of iteration, trial and error, and practice. In Jane Freilicher’s painting, Studio Interior, 1982 we see that journey quite explicitly and joyously. Other journeys are long and relational, for instance Fairfield Porter’s dedication to the Maine Coast and other settings. Those who admired Porter, such as Joe Brainard, looked to Porter for guidance and found himself, unjustifiably, lacking. The painting canon provides fodder, bombast and competition for artists like Larry Rivers to interpret Matisse’s Dance, 1909, in a punchy riff, as three-dimensional object. Nell Blaine’s Autobiography, c. 1980 is a very personal painting, by an artist with an unusual story of physical resilience, in it she shares her influences, and significant people and places – a Cezanne postcard, an image from important trip Mykonos in 1959, a newspaper clipping of football players – within an all-encompassing still-life. In Rudy Burckhardt’s paintings you see the photographer within a painting, or the photographer’s eye for an elegant composition made in a deliberately articulate painting style. Louisa Matthiasdottir painted the same Icelandic mountain ranges, in purple, grey, and blue, dotted with sheep, horses and dogs, however she painted almost all of them in her studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City – a faraway icy country within a tumultuous metropolis. Trevor Winkfield’s Self-Portrait, 2001 portrays the painter, and possibly his inner life, as a hunter equipped with a paint palette and a quiver of arrows with one arrow through the artist’s own head.         Larry Rivers Free Dance and Still Life, 1992 oil on canvas mounted on foamcore mounted on panel 78 x 84 1/2 x 5 inches

"If I die in a combat zone, box me up and send me home." On the anniversary of D-Day [by Stacey Harwood]

collage by Star Black

My dad landed on Utah Beach, not as part of the first wave, thank god, or I probably wouldn't be here, but days later, to clean up. He went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and to liberate a concentration camp. The Germans gave his Division the nickname "Roosevelt's Butchers" for stacking the dead in houses and along roads and refusing prisoners, lacking the means to guard and transport them. Like so many others, my dad enlisted, a tough street kid from the Bronx, the child of Eastern European immigrants who fled pogroms. During boot camp, he was court-martialed for striking an officer who called him a dirty kike. Though he was acquitted, he got shipped out soon after without having completed his training.

    I don't know much about his service, not because he was particularly reticent but because he died suddenly at fifty, before I was mature enough to imagine my parents had lives worth learning about. How I regret that I never asked him about those years. Anyone who has tried to get WWII military records knows that a fire destroyed many of them. Thus, all I have are the things he carried, a French-English dictionary, a guide to Europe, and, oddly, a copy of Don Quixote, in Spanish. Several years ago, I gathered these mementos together and along with a few photographs asked Star Black, the brilliant poet, photographer, and collage artist to make something of them. A few weeks later she presented me with three collages, one of which is shown here. That's my dad in the middle, looking handsome, and so young! In the upper left is a page from his guidebook in which he wrote a list of the places he fought his way through, ending with "and a funeral in some god-forsaken place."

One of the more moving accounts of life as an infantryman during WWII can be found in Roll Me Over, by Raymond Gantter. Ganttner was a teacher who turned down his third deferment to serve in the army. He was unfit for officer status so he joined the infantry as a private. His service was almost identical to that of my father's. Here's a passage:

It is the slow piling up of fear that is so intolerable. Fear moves swiftly in battle, strikes hard with each shell, each new danger, and as long as there's action, you don't have time to be frightened.  But this is a slow fear, heavy and stomach filling.  Slow, slow . . all your movements are careful and slow, and pain is slow and fear is slow and the beat of your heart is the only rapid rhythm of the night . . . a muttering drum easily punctured and stilled.

-- sdh

[This post originally appeared on June 6, 2009