The Best American Poetry

Met Percent: Week Twenty-Four [by Alec Bernstein]

Nize Baby!

Top: Épinette des Vosges, Amant Constant Lambert, late 19th c., not on view.
Bottom: Film credits, The Third Man, 1949; Album Cover, Soothing Sounds for Baby, 1962.

An épinettier (a player of the musical instrument; see above) followed Montaigne, along with his tutor, from room to room, playing tunes whenever he was tired or bored. This was a ritual he learned as a child.

“Being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them violently and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more profoundly involved than we), [my father] caused me to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose.” - Montaigne, Of the Education of Children.

Raymond Scott, mid-century composer and early electronic music inventor, felt the same way about children and sound and recorded several volumes of Soothing Sounds for Baby. His quiet drones remind me of the zither’s constant vibrations. When I was about 10 years old I got an “AM / FM clock-radio” and contemplated each night what station I should wake up to the next day. Today, we have apps like Mornify or Spotify, “with science-backed morning playlists . . .” in case you don’t know how to wake up properly.

The zither, the dulcimer, and the pedal steel guitar, all descend from the French épinette. If you can get to Vienna . . . and if you are willing to sit in a theatre (the Berg Kino Theater, to be exact), you can hear modern zither music featured over real rubble in real post-war Vienna in The Third Man. The title theme was a Billboard number-one hit from April-July, 1950 - unheard of for the zither!

Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime seems like the kind of guy who would have an épinettier following him around Vienna to play whenever he got tired or bored. And as his lover Anna (played by Alida Valli) said, “He never grew up. The world grew up around him”.

 

Trumpet and Verse

Left to right:
Parade Trumpet, 1700,  gallery 680. 
Natural Trumpet in D, 19th c., gallery 680.
Bass saxtuba in E-flat, 1855, Adolphe Sax, gallery 680. 
Over-the-Shoulder Soprano Horn in E-flat, ca. 1880, John F. Stratton, gallery 680. 
Coach Horn in C, ca. 1825–89, gallery 680. 
One of Evelyn Waugh‘s ear trumpets, Forum Auctions, 2017 (estimated value, £1000-1500).

Left to right: 
Jean Cocteau reciting through a megaphone in his production of Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, 1921. 
Evelyn Waugh with one of his ear trumpets. 

There is little casual about these horns. From the Old Testament to the hunt, to our ongoing battle cries, they announce — “forcible” — attention.

“Cleanthes said . . . the voice, forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect.” - Montaigne

Cocteau needed force in his ballet, because his themes were outlandish: "Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life.” So he turned to a horn, an “over-the-head-voice-trumpet”, increasing the power of his delivery.

Waugh used silence against those who displeased or bored him. By middle age, he’d become a pantomime villain with his ear trumpet — removed mid-sentence and brandished with devastating effect.

“They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of a trumpet.” - Montaigne

 

Bells and Whistles (and Rattles)

The Kagura Suzu is associated with Shinto rituals at shrines and at court. Kagura (神楽) translates "god-entertainment" and encompasses instrumental music, songs, and dances. 
The Mayan bird whistle has two chambers: one in its head and one deeper in the body. The blow holes are in the tail and crown.  
The Native American Tlingit whistle depicts a double-headed eagle, and this bird could represent contact between Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Russian explorers. 
The polished Kuba whistle is used for the arrival of a king or the delivery of messages during hunts.

The Pre-Columbian rattle wards off evil. The terracotta mother figure nurses, and her mouth, belly, and necklace make soothing sounds.  
The English “precious and protective” baby rattles have whistles, a piece of teething coral, and silver bells. They were thought to ward off enchantment and disease. I think of Neil Postman’s Prisoners of Childhood, where he argues that preciousness signals both protected childhood and class structure. 

I wish I’d had any of these fine instruments as a kid. . . . I just had a pink rubber elephant squeeze toy. Years later working as a composer, I layered tape recordings of it, slowed and enlarged in my first studio Musique concrète piece,   Elephantomachia,   (battle of the elephants). Perhaps attempting some overdue off-warding.

 

Twist it, Clap it, Rub it, Whack it, Strike it

Top left: Damaru, 19th c., Tibet, gallery 684.
Top center: Clapper, ca. 1850–1750 B.C., Egypt, Middle Kingdom. 
Top right: Friction Drum (Lunet) 19th– 20th c.,Papua New Guinea, New Ireland, gallery 684.  
Bottom left: Gamelan, Saron Panerus Slendro, 19th c., Java, Indonesia, gallery 681. 
Bottom right: Robotic player piano, roto tom drums, and vibraphone, Aesthetic Research, Alec Bernstein & Daniel Carney,  Baltimore, 1980s.

The thod-rnga, or damaru is made from two human skulls. The drum is played by twisting it back and forth with one hand so that the small pellets at the ends of the strings strike the two drumheads. Buddhist power-tools to fight evil.

Clappers are among the earliest percussion instruments in ancient Egypt. This clapper is shaped like forearms and hands “wearing” bracelets on each wrist. Musical clappers were used at banquets, funerary processions, and other rituals. Precursors to the secularized applause machines of 1950s television.

Lunets are "friction drums" with three sound-producing wedges or tongues on top. The musician moistens a hand with water and rubs the wedges. The tones echo the cry of the island bird for which the drum was named.

The structures of gamelan music share forms with Javanese poetry. The Macapat texts, especially Kinanthi, fit into their individual melodic patterns, which are sung with the percussive orchestras. Themed metric systems are marvelous: Kinanthi, love poems; Durma, violent passions or fighting; Mas kumambang, longing or homesickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_poetry#Sekar_madya_and_tembang_macapat.
And love those hammers. Not so far from my performance art/sound poetry, back in the day, the 1970s.

By the 1980s, digital control of analogue instruments was in vogue. My partner and I constructed systems to extend pianistic technique — any note, chord or cluster of notes could be performed live by aligning it to keys on a computer keyboard. The system relayed strike information to solenoids which struck the piano keys at the desired moment and volume. This same technique was applied to drums and mallet instruments, like the rosewood marimba I had. Real instruments, natural acoustics, no finger limits. This we called Aesthetic Research. 

“John Zisca of Bohemia, a defender of John Wicliffe’s heresies [the influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood], left order that they should flay him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war against his enemies, fancying it would contribute to the continuation of the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them.” - Montaigne 

While viewing these instruments of the past (including my own), I felt more in than out of the tradition. Power tools go way back.

Twice Told (a poem) and Bonjour Precipice (a picture) [by Geoff Young]

I was there, I’m sure of it, at the San Francisco
Art Institute to hear the Sun Ra Arkestra play in the
Courtyard, late 70s, just as I was in New York
City, at Slug's Saloon, on a Monday night in ‘67,

Having dropped a quarter tab of Owsley acid
Before entering the bar and the music
At Slugs was four hours of traveling
The spaceways with John Gillmore, Marshall

Allen, and Pat Patrick, et. al., the Sun perched
Stage left at the keys, burning bright. Took two sips
Of a beer that sat by itself on a table, or just one.

Music over, guys packing up, I pass the leader
Standing back at the bar and all I can say to him
Is "Sun.” And Ra looks me in the eye & says, “Dig.”

Met Percent: Week Twenty-three [by Alec Bernstein]

The Founder

Top left: The Adoration of the Magi, Giotto di Bondone, c. 1320, gallery 644. 
Top right: The Adoration of the Magi (detail), Giotto di Bondone,1305-06, Arena Chapel, Italy. 
Bottom right: Halley’s Comet, 1986, ESA’s Giotto Spacecraft photograph.
Bottom left: c. 1100, Fresco, The Cloisters, New York City. 
Center: The Virgin and Child (detail), Giotto di Bondone, 1320-30, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

As I wind up the galleries of European Painting, I must touch on a few last painters before proceeding on to Musical Instruments (680-684).

At least a nod to Giotto, the founder of European painting: “Real” space was his contribution. He created a sense of depth, by simply placing the figures in tiers, one behind another. Big steps to naturalism and perspective. Compare to the earlier fresco on a similar theme at the Cloisters.

Compare also his Halley's Comet — the model for his “Star of Bethlehem” — to a spacecraft photo of it.  The European Space Agency named its mission to Halley's Comet “Giotto”, because, although the comet was noted much earlier, he made the first “scientific'” drawing of it in recorded history.

And what a punim on that Madonna.

"For pictures formed by his brush follow nature’s outlines so closely . . .  so realistically that they appear to speak, weep, rejoice and do other things.” - Filippo Villani, De origine civitatis Florentiae et euisdem famosis civibus.

Trade, Tronies and DINKs

Left to right:
Study: Head of a Young Woman, Anthony van Dyck, 1618-20, not on view. 
Bearded Man with a Velvet Cap, Govert Flinck, 1645, gallery 964. 
Study of a Young Woman, Johannes Vermeer, 1665-67, gallery 964. 
Study of an African Man with a Turban, Peter Paul Rubens, 1608, present location unknown.

The four oils above are all technically tronies, not portraits. “Tronie” comes from an informal Dutch word for face, like “mug” in English (from the Old French troigne). Unlike the portrait — a commissioned piece with a known sitter — the tronie is an “intriguing” but anonymous face to be sold in the art market. First used as studies and as storehouses of expressions and facial types for history paintings, the tronie developed into its own genre.

Van Dyck was directed toward the genre by Rembrandt, who painted many tronies and used them to advance his reputation as a master of rugged human experience. Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, had so internalized his teacher’s method that, within a year, his paintings were sold as the master’s own. Here he captures the “sitter’s craggy physiognomy”. The Vermeer, in a 1696 auction, was described as “a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful”. Rubens painted Study of an African Man with a Turban (his earliest surviving Black tronie) while observing other artists making head studies in Rome. All tronies; no names, no stories.

The mercantile class wanted faces from their own societies on their walls, not Heracles, Aristotle, or Marie Antoinette. I was never particularly interested in the museum plaque hypotheses, such as “possible cousin of . . . likely the shopkeeper next to . . . ” But I was equally uninterested in the characters in most history paintings.

It’s sobering when one discovers the accuracy of one’s own market demographics; I do purchase as a DINK (dual income, no kids). And now I must accept my merchant class predilection for anonymous heads. I intend to enjoy many a craggy physiognomy, with no concern for origin, lineage or identification.

Advertising has modernized the tronie — “models that don’t exist” — anonymous “expressive” faces generated by algorithm. Cheap, no copyright fees, no model releases. Rembrandt kept 300 plus tronies  in his studio as virtual models.

Foot Notes

Left: Entries 298, Theologia, and 212, America, Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1593.
Top Right: The Allegory of Faith, Johannes Vermeer, 1670-72, gallery 964. 
Bottom right: America, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1750s, gallery 600.

Vermeer and Tiepolo (two of my all-time favorites) reference Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia — a massive illustrated encyclopedia of allegorical “guidelines” for the arts. I recommend adding him to your library, https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/noh390b2714105.pdf.

“Ripa describes Faith as ‘having the world under her feet’, and Vermeer used the symbol quite literally, showing a globe of the earth under the woman's right foot”. — MetText. 

“Sitting upon the Globe fhews that Divinity repofes in no inferiour thing”. — Cesare Ripa.

“The monochrome allegorical figure of America is accompanied by her standard attributes . . . She wears a feathered headdress, while sitting on a crocodile and holding a palm branch”. — MetText. 

“The Lizard, they are fo big here, that they devour Men”. — Cesare Ripa.

“If music be the food of love, play on.” 

Top left: Venus and the Lute Player, Titian and Workshop, ca. 1565-70, gallery 638. 
Top center: Archlute, David Tecchler, 1725, Austria, gallery 684.
Top right: The Musicians, Caravaggio, 1597, not on view.  
Bottom left: Ūd, son of Gamil Georges, 1977, Egypt, gallery 681. 
Bottom center: Allegory of Music, Laurent de La Hyre, 1649, gallery 684. 
Bottom right: Lute, Sixtus Rauchwolff, 1596, gallery 684.

The de La Hyre painting explicitly follows Cesare Ripa’s allegory on Music and Love. The Caravaggio does not. His only concession to the conventional terms of allegory is the “winged cupid with grapes”, and the X-rays show he painted out his wings and quiver. This, despite the dedication of the Iconologia to Cardinal Del Monte who was Caravaggio’s patron and commissioned The Musicians. The controversy was part of the plan. 

The Titian alludes to a typical humanist debate between "seeing" and "hearing". Which is the better means of perceiving beauty? Classical hierarchy of the senses (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) deems "sight" the highest. Martin Luther goes for sound — because of the all-important “word”. Taking a stand on these topics was critical. For top dollar, paintings had to inspire intense discourse in the owners’ great rooms.

“There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that does not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If we were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of our science; for, besides what belongs to the proper effect of every sense, how many arguments, consequences, and conclusions do we draw to other things, by comparing one sense with another?” - Montaigne

My German meetings often ended auf Wiedersehen (literally, see you again). But phone calls ended (naturally) with auf Wiederhören (literally, hear you again), which I love and found myself using in English. I fear that logical extension auf Wiederzoom. For now, I say auf Wiederblog, LOL (Lots Of Lutes).

Poetry Challenge: A Prompt [by David Lehman]

Prompt: Write a poem sparked by the deliberately unidentified portrait above. Imagine that it is the portrait of either (a) a celebrated modern poet or (b) a wounded World War I veteran war or (c) a dashing art critic, champion of Cubism or (d) an avatar of Frank O'Hara in Paris.

Quiz: Name the subject and identify the painter, who denounced anti-Semitism ("not only a phenomenon of sadistic evil, but also one of great cowardice") in the controversial conclusion of his memoirs. He feels that Jews have been too eager to assimilate and be accepted and that they therefore "place themselves in a state of inferiority before the non-Jews." In his view, "Anti-Semitism will end only when the Jews stop hiding and assuming the attitudes of whipped dogs and will say in a loud voice and to everyone's face: 'I am a Jew and I am proud of it!'" 

Portrait of Anne Porter [by Fairfield Porter]

Fairfield Porter, Anne, 1965, Oil on canvas. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.

Bascove's Bridges on the Streets of New York City

Crediting Saul Bass [by Stefanie Green]

The credit sequences that open a movie constitute an under-appreciated art form, as you will conclude if you watch an hour of Saul Bass’s film title sequences on youtube.com [https://youtu.be/qqM3McG4-LE ]. Distinctive and recognizable, Bass’s style relies on all manner of graphic images: cut paper, printed ephemera, close-ups of objects, signs and symbols. Some of the most notable directors of the 1950s up through the ‘90s chose Saul Bass to do the credits for their films, and his creative output tells you why.

Bass, who was born in 1920, was of the same generation as Milton Glaser and Herb Lubalin: a trio of tremendously talented Jewish boys from New York City. At Brooklyn College, Bass studied with Gyorgy Kepes, the influential Hungarian emigré designer and film maker, and was influenced by the Bauhaus and its American version, the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Running through his work, as through that of Glaser and Lubalin, is the idea of combining word and image, and presenting it boldly, either with color or strong direction, or jagged type, or any other number of graphic techniques.  

Of the three designers, Bass's work has the most immediacy. It is as if he ripped the lettering right out of paper. (In fact, the title sequence for Bunny Lake is Missing shows a hand ripping paper.)  In contrast, Glaser and Lubalin seem to me to have a more literary and historical style, although both were immensely innovative in their use of color, imagery, and typography. Bass’s work, both his animation and graphic design, feels much more raw.

Bass was a master of logo design as well as animation. The sales pitch film for his ATT logo redesign in the mid 60s  [https://youtu.be/xKu2de0yCJI ] is a beautiful example of the post-war ideal of mass communication. I noticed, also, that his ATT bell logo is used in the titles of Ocean’s 11 (Sinatra version). The bell shows up as one of the slot machine figures.

In what follows, links are embedded in the movies' titles.

The Man with the Golden Arm

            Bass loved using the human body in abstract form. In this case, he was lucky that the film’s title included “Golden Arm.” The arm and hand in the poster are jagged, and with the rectangles that surround the actors’ photos, that edginess expresses the drug-induced state and its withdrawal. The mock handwriting typeface also has that jagged quality.

Vertigo

            A closeup of a woman’s lips, then her eyes. The music has a clock-like beat, and suggests hypnosis. The image then dissolves into a turning eye, and then a spiral getting larger and smaller. The optics prepare the viewer for the feeling of vertigo to which James Stewart is susceptible.

Anatomy of a Murder

            The movie’s score was written and performed by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The film itself is a courtroom drama, but the music signs that you’re in for something unexpected. The case involves not only a murder but also a rape, and the couple involved, as played by Lee Remick and Ben Gazzara, are not quite believable. The score, along with Jimmy Stewart’s jazz piano hobby, set you up for a cool noir story. In the title sequence -- and in the poster -- Bass returns to the graphic of body parts made from ripped paper. As strong as the graphic is, it misses the mark for me, because the story doesn’t analyze the murder so much as the emotions that lead to it. Still, it’s one of his most memorable images. I remember it from the time the movie first opened.

North by Northwest

            The opening credits, with Bernard Hermann’s pulsing, atonal score, is all angles and lines going in vertical and diagonal directions. Again, the typeface is a bold sans serif---not Helvetica, the European typeface, but something resembling Franklin Gothic Condensed, which US newspapers used before Helvetica became the symbol of modern design. “Bass had experimented with graphic animation techniques as far back as The Seven Year Itch in 1955, but the title cards themselves had always remained static. North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type — or simply, type in motion.” (www.artofthetitle.com/title/north-by-northwest/) The credits beautifully convey the movie’s urbane finish and comic undertow as we move from animation to street scenes, crowds walking, people descending subway stairs, and the city bus slamming its door in Alfred Hitchcock’s face, arguably Hitch’s greatest cameo.

Psycho

            As in Vertigo, Bernard Hermann’s score and Bass’s animation work together beautifully. This time the lines are vertical and horizontal, moving in and out of the frame with the same pulsing movement in the ear and the eye. There are several different versions of the print poster but they all use the same lettering for the title: the word “psycho” --- all caps and split through the middle.

Spartacus

            The sequence opens with hands bound, dissolving into ancient artifacts, more hands from statues, busts of Roman generals and leaders, then close-up images of Roman inscriptions. All these images fill the screen and move in and out of each other. The images are simple but multiple and immediately recognizable as ancient. It’s like a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Exodus

A burning flame suggests the memory of the Holocaust and the struggle for Israel’s independence. Ernest Gold’s soundtrack is sweeping and heroic. The poster incorporates a hand raised, holding a rifle. The addition of that graphic creates movement and a powerful emotional response in the viewer.

Ocean's 11

Digital numbers, one to eleven, fill the screen like a Times Square flashing headline. Then playing cards, slot machines, dice. Wow.

West Side Story

Here the end credits are amazing: graffiti on city walls. The soft background music from Leonard Bernstein’s score contrasts sharply with the rawness of the scrawled lettering.

Cape Fear, Casino, The Age of Innocence

These three Martin Scorcese films have beautifully-crafted title sequences. Cape Fear opens with a screen full of dark, gently rippling water from which a pair of dark menacing eyes appears. The Casino titles are a shocking surprise, and the background music of the Saint Matthew Passion by Bach, plus the floating body in flames, really set you up for an epic story. Finally, The Age of Innocence sequence is a lush time-lapse of sensuous flowers opening in slow motion. It’s a perfect use of imagery. You can tell Scorcese must have worked closely on the design of the titles. It’s a perfect collaboration.

-- Stefanie Green was the art director of Cornell Alumni Magazine and Weill Cornell Medicine from 1987 to 2015.

Met Percent: Week Twenty-two [by Alec Bernstein]

Still Life With . . .

Left: Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, gallery 824.
Top right: Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, Jan Davidsz de Heem, 1640, gallery 964.
Center right: Still Life: Fish, William Merritt Chase, 1908, gallery 774.  
Bottom right: Still Life with an Apple, Alberto Giacometti, 1937, not on view.

Inclined to try an “on-line tour”? Search the Met for “Still life” (https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=Still%20life).  You will find 2,453  results, all relevant, with the exception of the painter Clyfford Still. A few to start:

Fantin-Latour always appealed, even in my anti-academic periods. Which is why it seems amusing that the Paris Academy was not a fan . . . and sad that Fantin-Latour himself loathed his own flowers. The Academy considered still lifes the lowest genre of painting, “even allowing woman to exhibit them”. Fantin-Latour said of his flowers, “Never have I had more ideas about Art in my head, and yet I am forced to do flowers. While painting them—standing before the peonies and roses—I think of Michelangelo. This cannot go on.” But many were captivated: Monet, Manet, Sergeant, Whistler, and over 150 years of collectors.

Part of the Met’s Founding Purchase of 1871, the de Heem is of the vanitas  sub-genre pronkstilleven. (Dutch for “ostentatious still life”), commenting on the “unrelenting lure of earthly pleasures and the sinful nature of humankind.” - MetText. Vanitas  usually has death images combined with luxury items but not these. These are filled with known symbols of opulence: lemon peels, oysters, and Roemer glasses (German crystal for white wine). Some art school should claim the motto “Lux et Vanitas”. Ja, natuurlijk!

Worried that he would be known to future generations only as “a painter of fish”, yet pleased by his success, Chase considered his fish paintings, "an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you've done it." His students wrote about his speed: “He went to the fish market, bought the fish, he painted it, and returned the fish before it went bad". Chase said, “It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.”

Giacometti’s mature style evolved through his early struggle with scale. Until 1945, none of his figure sculptures were more than 2.5” high. “Often they became so tiny that with one touch of my knife they disappeared into dust.” His still lifes were no exception — “I was in [father’s] studio drawing some pears on a table, at the normal distance for a still life. And the pears kept getting tiny. I'd begin again, and they'd always go back to exactly the same size. My father got irritated and said, 'But just do them as they are, as you see them!' And he corrected them. I tried to do them as he wanted but I couldn't stop myself. . . . Half an hour later they were exactly the same size to the millimeter as the first ones."

 

Sisters on the Bridge Blues

Left: Nuns at Work, Follower of Alessandro Magnasco, 17th c. Gallery 539 (Jack and Belle Linsky Collection).
Right: Bacchanale,  Alessandro Magnasco, detail, 1720–1730, J. Paul Getty Museum.

When I saw Magnasco’s Nuns at Work, the palette grabbed me: dark monochromes, usually earth-tones with blue accents. His unusual subjects also intrigued: synagogue services, Quaker meetings, grave robbers' gatherings, catastrophes, and interrogations by the Inquisition. One blog added, “His sentiments regarding these subjects are generally unclear”. 

I was thrown back to my “generally unclear” student days, working as a parking lot guard in a Catholic hospital . . . in Baltimore in hard times (my own and city wide). 

“Unit 5, Unit 5, Sisters on the Bridge” . . . Apparently, I was Unit 5. My walkie-talkie instructed me to drive my golf cart to the bridge on level 4 and help the nuns. What exactly their fears were went without saying. I drove 20 feet behind them very slowly as they walked to their cars and followed them safely off the grounds. We never spoke. 

The only color to be seen in all 16 floors of exhaust-covered concrete and nuns’ habits was my blue J&L Parking Co. shirt and hat. The same blues, the same browns Magnasco used.

Years later, a friend sent me a news clipping of my old lot being demolished by explosives. All 16 levels dropped in a pile of rubble. That image fit well with Magnasco’s gothic visions of embattled nuns or grave robbers barricaded in institutional ruins. Would have been perfect for him. 

 

Naturalism (Hybrid and Faux)

The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, gallery 684. 
Inset left, detail: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago. 
Inset right: The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Both The Organ Rehearsal and Sunday on La Grande Jatte were painted and exhibited between 1884-86 in the same town. They are in opposing camps - Lerolle a naturalist and Seurat an impressionist/pointillist. The woman model with the red flower in her hat may have received two fees for one sitting.

The Swedes purchased a second version of the Lerolle to honor Naturalism - not Impressionism - as the major influence on Swedish art.  

Édouard Manet evolved from the naturalists but became the adopted father of the impressionists. He described his relationship with nature, “. . . And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal.”

Joan of Arc, and detail, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879, gallery 800.

For a time, the Bastien-Lepage seemed to combine attributes of naturalism and impressionism. Naturalists demanded realistic subjects from daily life. Impressionists could admire the loose brush work. Instead, a barrage of criticism followed. Émile Zola felt that Bastien-Lepage had vilified his own work by including the three floating saints and abandoned his previous support. Joris-Karl Huysmans accused the artist of "false naturalism". Gustave Courbet added, “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”. 

Decades later, critics remained irked. One argued that the dreamy expression of the model was rendered "only by the aid of hypnotism", which fits, as long as hypnotism is accepted as an activity of daily life.

 

Hands-On

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653, gallery 964.

“Aristotle compares two sets of values: on the one hand, everything that he admired in Homer—gravity, humility, unequalled diction and thought—and, on the other, wealth and worldly honor, as embodied by the gold chain and medallion bearing an image of Aristotle's royal pupil, Alexander the Great.” - MetText

All three characters in the painting appear in Montaigne’s essay, “Of the Most Outstanding Men”. Homer is the best of all, Alexander the Great just under Christ, and Aristotle is there, but with very mixed reviews. Montaigne greatly preferred Socrates the “know-thyself” “master of masters . . . who surpassed even Alexander the Great”.

I remember my favorite Greek professor’s lesson on a particularly difficult use of the men/de (point/counterpoint set) construction in a Socratic speech in Plato. A long phrase is introduced with O’men (on the one hand). At the very end of this tome was only O’de (on the other hand). That meant, “go back and re-read the phrase, reversing each positive with a negative, and each negative with a positive.” Very efficient, but not an easy read. On each end of his desk, he kept a little flag, one with O’men, the other O’de.

Met Percent: Week Twenty-one [by Alec Bernstein]

POV . . . LOP

Enlarged detail and inset painting: Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes, Marie Denise Villers, 1801, gallery 629.

In my corporate days, I lived with many a LOP, a list of open points. This fine work, always considered exceptional, has one serious LOP.

1. Artist: First attributed to Jacques-Louis David, it was then assigned to Marie Denise Villers, Constance Marie Charpentier, Marie du Val d’Ognes (self-portrait of the sitter), or even her sister.
2. Scene: Whoever made the portrait depicts a woman in one of the studios available in the Louvre to qualified artists. Professional women . . . with private lives . . . in radical outfits? Much is proposed, little is certain.
3. Details: The broken window pane can be read as a subtle reference to the chaos and violence of the French revolution. The pink of her ribbon was “the color” of 1801.
4. Technique: “Perspective is represented by sight lines that cross through matter. Is this why the pane of glass is broken in the Met portrait? Are perspective rays powerful enough to break glass?” - Anne Higonnet “Through a Louvre Window,” Journal18, 2016.

But Montaigne would say, “The soul which has no established viewpoint gets lost; for, as they say, he who is everywhere, is nowhere.”

 

Three Knaves and a Diversion

Top:The Fortune-Teller, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, gallery 634.
Bottom left: The Cardsharps, Caravaggio, 1595, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.     
Bottom right: The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.    

Quatremère de Quincy coined the term petit genre in 1792 . . . and ranked landscape painting at the bottom, because observation from nature supposedly required little imagination. At the top were grande genre (history paintings), because history required a great deal of imagination. Petit genre (ordinary people in common activities) was in the middle, requiring only some imagination. And of course they were priced and sized for the new bourgeois collectors.

The card playing scenes are a mix of diversion and isolation. Modern criticism sees the minimal eye contact of the subjects “as aloneness”. Other readings are possible. 

The Caravaggio could be titled Maesh, Louie and Babe, after my great uncles. Once, after taking my 10-year-old cousins’ allowance money in crazy eights, Uncle Maesh (a Chicago mob lawyer in the 1920s-30s) advised, “don't bet more than you can afford to lose, and never play cards with strangers”. I asked Uncle Babe (day manager at Caesar’s Palace) why they had Evil Knievel jump the casino fountain. “There will be an extra million dollars of private bets - how many bones he will break, will his bike catch on fire . . . and half of those betting will be ‘ahead’ at our door. That money will not leave the property.” Uncle Louie (a bail bondsman and pawn shop owner) had a standard greeting: “You got two tens for a five and I’ll owe you five?”

These petit genre paintings feel like a reunion . . . familial slights of hand. I am retroactively surprised that Aunt Edna, who re-knitted my favorite sweater out of the same yarn each year as I grew, did not take up fortune telling. She would have been great. My favorite detail is the glove, “the fingertips exposed, the better to feel marked cards” (MetText) which I'm sure Edna would have re-sized as needed.

 

Madonna of the Plaga Magna

Top: Madonna and Child with Saints, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1510, not on view.
Bottom left: Madonna della Misericordia, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, 1308-10, Pinacoteca, Siena.  
Bottom center: Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Clare, Cima da Conegliano, 1510, not on view.  
Bottom right: Madonna della Misericordia, Piero della Francesca, 1460–1462, Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro.

Of all the Madonna taxonomies, and there a lot, I only knew a few, like Our Lady of the Flowers and the Madonna of the Rocks. There are many categories, such as religious purpose (humility, misery, childbirth) and place (garden, stairs), but my favorite remains “of the___” (quail, cherries, harpies). 

I found no compositional categories. Both the Bellini and the Cima (and many others) have these wonderful centered stripes. They are found in the purpose category of “sacred conversations” (Mary “interacting” with assorted saints). Why not call it what it is?

The big stripe behind the Madonna is a cloth of honor, derived from the Baldachin (a pattern from Bagdad), resembling the thrones which were common in sacred conversations. The cloth creates a boundary line between the sacred space and the profane landscape. Its Byzantine effect takes a path away from Florentine perspective toward a very abstract spacial plane. 

If I could add a category it would be the Madonna of the Plaga Magna - L. Big Stripe. It would include the Misericordia Madonnas, in which an oversized Mary not only defines the sacred space, but she herself is the big stripe.

Catchlights and Cropped Skulls

Top left: Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Top right: detail, Albrecht Dürer, 1519, gallery 640.  
Center right: Merle Oberon in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, 1944.  
Bottom right: Carpenter, Vincent van Gogh, 1880, Rijksmuseum KrollerMuller, Otterio.  
Bottom center: Cropped skull drawing lessons, Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999.  
Bottom left: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, A Place in the Sun, 1951.

The catchlight used in film/photography goes way back; we see it as early as Dürer. Those tiny reflections that bring life to the eye. “Saint Anne’s eyes show Dürer’s typical placement of catchlights opposite a minute, crisp reflection along the inner rim of the iris.” - MetText. After Merle Oberon’s car accident, cinematographer Lucian Ballard hid his wife’s scars by slightly washing them out with a small lamp - dubbed an “Obie” after Oberon. The lamp, so close to the axis of the lens, created a catchlight in Oberon’s eyes. 

Betty Edwards found a systematic drawing error in her students; they consistently reduced the size of the forehead. Even when pointed out, they had difficulty “seeing” it. Van Gogh had the same issue in his early drawings. He was self-taught but observant enough to identify and correct the error. The perception that the forehead doesn't have enough information to be valuable somehow suggests the use of skull cropping in the close up. Remove the forehead if it’s a blank slate.

“. . . no one can do what he really wants in the beginning.” (January 1873). “I am trying now to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague.” (May 1888). - Vincent van Gogh.

Two Dogs [by Stacey Lehman]

Left: Johnny © Stacey Lehman 2020 R: Whippoorwill © 1974 by Joe Brainard

Met Percent: Week Twenty [by Alec Bernstein]

Bellini, Raw Pork and Opium

Left: Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child, Giovanni Bellini, 1460s, not on view.
Top: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, Henry Fuseli, 1796, gallery 633.
Bottom: The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts.
Right: The sleep of reason produces monsters, Francisco de Goya, 1799, not on view. 

Getting the gestalt of gallery 633, titled Goya and the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was tough. Tiepolos, Goya's portraits from his “black period” - when he almost died from illness - and Fuseli’s Night-Hag. 

The influences on Fuseli are noted: Bellini’s infant on a stone slab; classical pyramid compositions; masterful chiaroscuro. And his utterly personal vision not based on typical themes of the canon.

The Nightmare became a mark of Romanticism. “She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818.

The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) compares one of the paintings in the Usher House with Fuseli’s painting: “irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.”

Freud had a copy of The Nightmare in his study, enamored of Fuseli’s aphorism, “One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams.” Ernest Jones used the image for the frontispiece in his On The Nightmare. 

Although rumors would attribute Fuseli’s visions to consuming raw pork and opium, the results were horrific, but not diseased. Somehow the Enlightenment brought fantasies floating in clouds, winged beasts, and  demonic imagination.

Five Ways To Conjugate an Oil Sketch

Allegory of the Planets and Continents, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1752, gallery 633.
Top left: Madame Théodore Gobillard, Edgar Degas, 1869, gallery 815.

Top right: Woman with a Dog, painting and riccordo (14 fantasy portraits), Jean Honoré Fragonard, 1769, gallery 630.

Bottom left: Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau, Camille Corot, 1832, gallery 803.
Bottom right: Sketch for The Haywain, John Constable, 1820, not on view. 

The general term “oil sketch” comes long after the creation of these rapid intuitive paintings. Earlier, more specific names were derived from the function of the work. The modello, for example, was made for clients and was a business task in ateliers. All of these forms were seen only as stages toward finished works and not considered worthy of public exhibition.

Modello: A finished presentation sketch specifically for “patron approval”.  (Tiepolo’s proposal included this sketch for the Residenz Palace fresco in Würzburg, Germany.)

Ébauche: Unfinished (for any reason). (Degas, after several dry media studies, left the oil sketch unfinished. It was a favorite of Mary Cassatt.)

Riccordo: A reduced version of a large work for the artist’s records. (Fragonard, after completing his 14 fantasy portraits, copied each oil sketch as a thumb-nail for himself. Although not in oil, they are “riccordos of oil sketches”.)

Esquisse: Smaller than final. (Corot enlarged the small landscape (shown above) in his large biblical canvas Hagar in the Wilderness. Interesting to see a French Oak in the Palestine desert scene.) Met gallery 803. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435962

Étude: Study (often fragmentary). (Constable, understandably proud of his “skying” period, studied the physics of the sky. “You can never be nubilous,” he told a friend, because “I am the man of clouds.”)

The French Academy battled over the oil sketch for 40 years. The Poussinistes denounced the rough gestures of the oil-sketching Rubénistes. “The loaded brush” won. I would have been a proud Rubéniste. Et vous?

 

“(The/A) (God/Devil) (is) in the Detail(s)”

Residenz at Würzburg, Germany:  Stucco work, Antonio Bossi, White Hall, 1744-45; Insert: Allegory of the Planets and  Continents detail, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, grand staircase ceiling fresco, 1752-53.

I travelled to Germany a great many times (205 trips, 543 hotel nights, 530,000 + Lufthansa miles). When business trips spanned weekends, I kept regular company with three of the Pinakothek museums (Alte, Neue, der Moderne) in Munich. In a deep Tiepolo period, I visited his ceiling frescos at the Residenz, Würzburg.

The Residenz is an astonishing assemblage of European Arts: German, French, and Austrian architects; a Bohemian garden artist; Italian sculptors; and one lone Italian painter Tiepolo — who was brought in to create the largest fresco (600 square meters) in the world.

I had come for Tiepolo’s The Continents, especially the giant crocodile in The Americas - A rococo fantasy of our supposed wilderness. 

But then I was stopped on the stairs, looking off to the left, at the walls; the hallucinatory surfaces with floating dragons. I had not known Antonio Bossi or his stucco work in the White Hall: What a room! An explosion of detail. Excess as ecstasy.

“Der liebe Gott steckt im detail”. - Early German proverb, commonly falsely attributed to Mies van der Rohe.

"Le bon Dieu est dans le detail." - Gustave Flaubert.

“If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they ‘artialize’ nature.” - Montaigne

 

Woods Half Empty?

I had a note to follow up on a description I found, when studying Brueghel’s landscape The Harvesters: “Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors.” I didn't think much on it until Cosimo. Here was terror; how is it ideal?

So I hunted . . . back to Edmund Burke on the sublime: "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger . . . Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . and know there is an inherent pleasure in this emotion.” - A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757.

After these immersions, in Burke and Breugel, beauty, Cosimo, and the sublime, I had a Met dream: “By a winged something, arrived six everything I write(s)”. These writings appeared as volumes of “Iberian ancient poetry”. Likely memories of the Arms and Armor galleries: Moorish verses engraved on chivalric weapons foretelling “a barbarous pandemic”. It felt just like A Hunting Scene.

“A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods”

 

 

"Young Dancers Dancing" by Eric Fischl [from Drive-By-Art organized by Warren Neidich]

Coming May 9 & 10: "Drive by Art" in the South Fork [The Hamptons, Sag Harbor, Wainscott et al]

Drive-By-Art (Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing)

Organized by Warren Neidich

DATES:

May 9th and 10th , 2020 -- 12 - 5 pm

(Rain dates May 16th /17th )

LOCATION:

South Fork, Long Island including Southampton, Watermill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Wainscott, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, North Haven

FEATURING: Eric Fischl, Young Dancers Dancing, 2017, Bronze [above]

Met Percent: Week Nineteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Couple Politics 

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, Fra Filippo Lippi, ca. 1440, gallery 644; Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze), Jacques Louis David, French, 1788, not on view; Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, John Singer Sargent, 1897, gallery 771.

The Filippo Lippi caught my eye, even online, while simulating my Met visits. This inconvenience is certainly a petty annoyance compared to our viral trauma. Covid-19.  If history is a model, the plague that devastated medieval Europe did lay the foundations for humanism and the Renaissance. May we be half as lucky.

So . . . I go to the Met map . . . pick a gallery, find its title (e.g. 603, Filippo Lippi to Botticelli) . . . search by gallery number and title . . . hope to find the works in that room. Be wary . . . the search lists every 603, including, for example, the 19th century horse carriage drawing, Design for Coupé, no. 603 ("Medium Size Clarence on C Springs"). 

The Filippo Lippi is the earliest surviving double portrait. It demonstrates the Italian preference for the profile over the three-quarter view. Her sleeve is embroidered with letters spelling "lealta" (faithful). The scale and pose of the couple invite a lot of discussion in the blog world. . . . They are on separate planes. . . . His hand is on an ownership crest . . . his to share? his to gain? And of course the male’s shadow refers to Pliny’s origin of painting; “a lover traces the contours of the shadow cast by his beloved” (my italics). Does this mean she is the inventor of painting? Robert Burton in his 17th-century bestseller The Anatomy of Melancholy claims the action is by the woman, tracing her man’s shadow, to comfort her while he is off in the wars.

Lavoisier was a research chemist, analyzing gunpowder, oxygen, and the chemical composition of water. In 1789 he published a chemistry textbook illustrated by his wife. Because of his politics, Lavoisier’s portrait was withdrawn from the 1789 Paris Salon and not exhibited for a century. Madame Lavoisier sits unusually higher than her husband in the painting and is looking directly outwards . . . at David with whom she had studied. Lavoisier was guillotined, David died in exile, not allowed burial in France. And Marie Anne? She remarried “badly” and kept the portrait in her rooms for the rest of her life. 

Sargent decided to portray Edith Minturn Stokes in sporty daywear with a Great Dane at her side. Her husband had "a sudden inspiration," he later recalled, when the dog became unavailable, and "offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture." - MetText

 

Blackboard My-Opia 

Left: Mrs. Welch’s class photo; Right: Monet’s Haystacks, Art Institute of Chicago.

Mrs. Welch, my 1st grade teacher, discovered I was myopic. The blackboard was interesting, but I was unaware of anything written on it. Or aware of maybe a pattern. A few marks. Impressionism was the first painting genre that - I remember feeling relieved when viewing the Haystacks at the Art Institute in Chicago. They made sense. 

Much later, I read Trevor-Roper’s The World through Blunted Sight. He argued that, compared to the general population, “most of the Impressionists” were myopic. And most refused to wear glasses while painting, if they wore them at all.

“Take those vulgar things away!” - Cezanne, when offered glasses.

“Bon Dieu, je vois comme Bouguereau.” - Monet, rejecting both glasses and the conservative painter.

Left: Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884, not on view; Right: Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines, Claude Monet, 1889, gallery 800.

I still prefer Seurat’s studies to his final paintings. I draw with my specs on - more so the view from each eye is similar - but I view art without them.

 

Speaking of Bouguereau

Left: Tobias Saying Good-Bye to his Father, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1860, Hermitage. 
Right: Tobias Curing His Father's Blindness, 1630–35, gallery 637; Healing of Tobit, 1630-40, Hermitage; Tobias curing his father's blindness, 1640, San Zaccaria, Venice; Bernardo Strozzi.

The Bouguereau is a lovely Pre-Raphaelite work and clearly illustrates Monet’s fear and loathing. 

The three Strozzi canvases all have vibrant brushwork. The apocryphal Book of Tobit is the subject: archangel Raphael directs Tobias to cure his father’s blindness with the gall of a fish. Bile, irritating as it is to the eye, was evidently a traditional trachoma remedy. It must have had some success, as it remained in use for two thousand years.

Tobit, father of Tobias, earned the cure by paying the debts of the unburied dead. Only then could they be legally buried. Strozzi painted this theme at least eight times. The theme also inspired Rembrandt, Jan Massys, de Vos, van Hemessen, Carracci, Carlone, Assereto, Feti, and Guardi. There is a lot of Tobit Art.

In Funk and Wagnalls’ Folklore Dictionary, the spirits of the rescued deceased - often in animal form (the attentive dog) - are known as The Grateful Dead. This entry did not go unnoticed by Jerry Garcia, who came upon it while playing a game of Fictionary.

There is something about paintings of the blind . . . It would have been interesting to see the myopics interpret the subject. 

 

Gallery 638: “The Most Perfect Style”

Left to right: Michelangelo, Attributed to Daniele da Volterra, gallery 638; Raphael self-portrait, Uffizi, Florence; Leonardo (assumed) self portrait, Uffizi, Florence; Titian self portrait, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Frames left to right:  Pierced-Acanthus frame, not on view; 603 gallery frame; Reverse frame, 1640, gallery 958.

The Most Perfect Style: Finding out what is in Gallery 638 online is a challenge. Who’s in there is most clear: Masters and Influencers. “The sixteenth century in Rome, Florence, and Venice mark a high point in the history of art. Artists as different as Caravaggio and Ingres, Rubens and Reynolds, defined their achievement vis-à-vis the legacy of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian.” - MetText

Goethe recounts how, when in Rome in 1787, he and a companion “argued about the rival merits of Michelangelo and Raphael . . . and we ended up in joint praise of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Left to right: The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist, Andrea del Sarto, 1528; Venus and the Lute Player, Titian, 1565–70; Mars and Venus United by Love, 1570s, Paulo Veronese. Gallery 638.

There are as many “top Renaissance master” rankings as there are rankers. The Met rank, noted above, is made “vis-à-vis” its superlative modifier of an absolute adjective:  “most perfect”.

Del Sarto has been in and out of the canon for five hundred years. Sometimes “out” because of character (an opinion of character, usually Vasari’s), or because of innovations (by, for example, Tintoretto) - adamantly painting religious subjects in contemporary dress. Then again one could be “in” by impact: “Veronese was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest pictures in the world." - Henry James

My father always cautioned me, “De gustibus!” - so often, that the “non es disputandem” was not needed. No need to be distracted by the taste of others . . . perfect, more perfect, or most perfect.

"STOP Window" [by Susan Gunter]

 

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This month we are showing some of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here.  DL

"Leaf" [by Susan Gunter]

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This week we are showing five of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here. -- DL

"Laundry" [by Susan Gunter]

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This week we are showing five of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here. -- DL

Poets and Painters in the Garden of Drunkenness [by Michael Fontaine]

This is post #3 in the series. Click here for part one and here for part two. Pro tip: click on any picture in this series to find out more about it.

 

Fun cocktail party fact: the word for drunkenness in ancient Greek is methe (pronounced méth-ee).

Actually, you already knew that. How?

Because it – or rather "she," since the noun is grammatically feminine – shows up in English in the words crystal meth and amethyst. (An amethyst is the gemstone you wear to keep the lady at bay.)

Methe was never really an official goddess in ancient Greece, but since people do “worship” her, Greek artists thought she made a great allegory. What's more, that allegory works in two ways, since (like “drunkenness” in English) methe can mean either intoxication (getting drunk) or addiction (alcoholism).

In The Art of Drinking, Obsopoeus exploits that ambiguity at several points, especially in the teaser he ends book one with:

The next book depicts the haunting portraits and problems of Drunkenness, composed by me in classical verse. You, binge drinker, who are constantly getting hammered, look at them as if you were looking in a mirror, and see how truly disgraceful the sight is! Once you’ve seen Drunkenness, you should turn and run from her for all your life, if you love the glory of true sobriety.

As he repeatedly says, Obsopoeus thinks getting buzzed or tipsy is okay, but getting drunk--hammered, blitzed--is wrong. It's a distinction worth bearing in mind.

Moreover, in speaking of "portraits" here, Obsopoeus means what he says literally, but in a totally surprising way.

He starts book two by referring to Apelles, one of the greatest of the "old master" painters of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. Think Raphael, Michelangelo, Artemisia Gentilischi, and you're on the right track:

Among the paintings of Apelles—those monuments of old—that learnèd Greece celebrates in its writings, his ingenious hand left behind a masterpiece. It surpasses both the Venuses he created—the one of her emerging naked from the waves of the sea, and the other for the people of Kos that he only managed to get a start on. I’ll describe that picture, though its excellence outdoes my song and its precious art defeats my verses.

The picture at right is a Renaissance recreation by Titian of the first one of Apelles' lost paintings of Venus mentioned here, the "the Venus Anadyomene." He painted it around the year 1520, sixteen years before Obsopoeus wrote The Art of Drinking.

Apelles' other lost painting of Venus, the "Aphrodite of Kos," was also recreated in the Renaissance by Botticelli in the 1480s. I'm sure you've seen it:

Like Botticelli and Titian, Obsopoeus also wants to recreate a painting by Apelles. The difference is that instead of using pigments, he's going to use poetry.

In formal terms, Obsopoeus is going to give us an ekphrasis. That's the fancy term for a poet's attempt to outdo the beauty of a painting by describing that painting in beautiful language. It's an ancient and classical technique, and as a rule rather than exception, the poet's description ends up far more artificially alive and animated than any painting could ever be. 

That's true here, too. Obsopoeus spends the next few hundred lines describing a painting you could call “The Garden of Drunkenness.” It's a sweeping allegory for people who cannot stop partying when the party is over.

The crazy thing is, though, no such painting by Apelles ever existed. Obsopoeus made the whole thing up, inspired (it seems) primarily by Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490–1510). That's the painting featured at the top of this post. Here's a wonderful short video introduction to the painting:

Like Bosch, Obsopoeus' "painting" shows us a green field filled with flowers and people. Unlike Bosch, his people are leisurely drinking wine at a festive gathering, and when the party's over, most of them get up and go home.

Others can't or won't, though. Instead, those people head for a walled garden in the center of the field. The garden is full of bad figures, like Hangover, Dementia, Self-Indulgence, Memory Loss, Depression, and a few others. And then--

Presiding in the center of the garden is a woman in royal raiment, drunk and surrounded by an entourage of women. A grassy garland’s encircling her styled hair, and she’s holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it. … As I studied these details, at first I thought the queen standing in their midst was Circe, but it wasn’t her. It was Drunkenness, labeled in Greek letters: Methe, Queen of all Wine-Drinkers.

This is a glass "phiale," or shallow wine bowl, from the time of Apelles (now in the Corning Museum of Glass in central New York).

By telling us that Methe is "holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it," Obsopoeus is doing something quite extraordinary.

To wit: at this central moment in his imaginary ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale, he’s alluding to a real ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale that once hung inside a shrine in Epidaurus, Greece -- and a famous one, to boot.

That painting was not by Apelles but by Pausias (4^th c. BC), another old master of ancient Greece. And what made it so famous is that it depicted Methe drinking wine from a crystal phiale, with her face visible through the glass. Not an easy feat!

(Pausias’ painting is lost, but his idea was imitated in the late Renaissance by Annibale Caracci, long after Obsopoeus' death. That's it at left.)

I'll come back to this point in a minute.

Meanwhile, what happens in the Garden of Drunkenness? As you might guess, things go badly.

The people inside continue drinking until they pass out. They transform into animals -- sheep, pigs, donkeys, monkeys -- and when they wake up, they start vomiting or attacking each other in a wild frenzy.

Some try to escape the Garden, but they're met by an entourage of old women as they do. The women lash the people trying to leave; they handcuff the compliant ones and bludgeon the resisters, and ultimately enslave them all. Obsopoeus then tells us their names: Fever, Edema, Psoriasis, Poverty, Old Age, and, yes, Death. Yikes!

Obsopoeus' allegorical painting is haunting and glorious. It’s the climax of the whole poem, and clearly designed to be. Rather than go into more detail, though, I'd like to share related material with you that I didn't have room for in How to Drink.

In my last post, I quoted a “liminary” poem in Greek by the Renaissance scholar Joachim Camerarius. In fact, Camerarius wrote two Greek poems for Obsopoeus’ book, and I’m pleased to present the other one here. It’s a miniature masterpiece, and it's a fantastic specimen of how learned and playful Renaissance poetry can be.

It alludes to the Garden of Drunkenness by way of Pausias' painting, and you could call it Poetry is a Painted Crystal Bowl. 

Like Obsopoeus, Camerarius is struck by the inherent competition between representing reality in the written word vs. the painter’s art. He heightens the similarity between those two arts by punning on the similarity of words used to describe each.

In his view, Obsopoeus’ written (engraphon) poetry is as beautifully, skillfully, and clearly executed as Pausias’ painted (graphike) crystal bowl because, through each one, you can discern the orderly rethe (features) of disorderly Methe (Drunkenness).

Here's the poem:

They say there was this one work of the painter’s art

    by Pausias that was really worth seeing:

Drunkenness drinking from a glass phiale that she was tipping up

    while facing forward, so that her whole face showed through,

and though the bowl covered her lips and eyes,

    all her features were still quite clear.

Unquestionably, then, this—a painting like that—was a work of art.

    But a greater work of art is the written one in your hands,

by our friend Vincent.

    It has the gorgeous adornment of the Muses’ verses,

it teaches you how to drink a lot with understanding and without harm,

    and it has found a system in an unsystematic business.

In it, not only will you be able to view Drunkenness,

    you can consort with her, and with pleasure and understanding.

Here’s the Greek for those of you who can read it. I’ve highlighted and color coded the many words that correspond or pun on each other in each part of the simile:

Παυσΐεω τέχνης ἔργον τόδε φασὶ γενέσθαι                  

      ἄξιον ἓν γραφικῆς, ὅ ττι μάλιστα θέας·

ἐξ ὑάλου πίνουσα Μέθη φιάλην ἐπέχουσα

      ἀντία, φαίνεσθαι ὥστε πρόσωπον ἅπαν,

τῆς φιάλης τ’ ἐπιπροσθούσης χείλεσσι καὶ ὄσσοις,

      εὔδηλ’ εἶναι ὅμως ὡς τάδε πάντα ῥέθη.

τεχνικὸν ὧδε γραφὲν—τίς δ᾿ οὔ φησ᾿;—ἦν ἄρα τοὖργον.

      μᾶλλον δ᾿ ἐν χερσὶν τεχνικόν ἐστι τόδε

ἡμετέροιο φίλου Νικήτα’ ἔγγραφον ἔργον,

      κόσμον ἔχον μέτρων πάγκαλον Ἀονίων·  

πολλὰ πιεῖν ἀβλαβῶς μετ᾿ ἐπιστήμης τε διδάσκον,

      καὶ λόγον εἰν ἀλόγῳ πράγματ᾿ ἐφευράμενον·

ἔνθαπερ εἰσιδέειν γε Μέθην δῆθ’ οὐ μονον ἔσται,

      ἀλλὰ συνεῖν’ ἀυτῇ εὖ καὶ ἐπιστάμενως.

 

Notes in the Margin

Since this is a blog for poetry lovers, I thought I'd end with a liminary poem of my own I wrote for How to Drink -- one of a couple I wrote in Latin. (Yes, to say that's old fashioned and nerdy beyond belief is an understatement.) I composed them in the Baroque tradition, a tradition that's distinguished by all kinds of wordplay.

Here's a one-liner I'm especially proud of because it manages a pun on methe, method, and methodicus. Depending on how you analyze it, that last word can mean (1) "methodical" or (2) "who talks about methe." The meter is dactylic hexameter.

 

"Tarascon" [by Susan Gunter]

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This week we are showing five of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here. -- DL

 

"STOP Window" [by Susan Gunter]

 

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This week we are showing five of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here. -- DL

Goat Rock Beach [by Susan Gunter]