The Best American Poetry

Cardinal Zen [by Beatrice Leader]

Cardinal Zen took me under his wing.
Chicago-born Leo XIV beat the odds
fourteen to one in Vegas defeating
the Italian candidate, the hot favorite,
but remember the old conclave saw
"who enters as pope exits as cardinal."

As for Leo XIV, he is against
the state of "de facto atheism";
wears a red velvet cape
and ornate stole; roots for
the White Sox,
which shows he has faith.

filed by our Rome correspondent, Beatrice Leader. May 9, 2025. Painting by El Greco with thanks to the  El Greco-Roman Foundation.

Woman invisibility #1 : The thing about Gabriele Münter’s pictures… [By Tracy Danison]

“À l’écoute (Portrait de Jawlensky)” (1909),
Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

The thing about Gabriele Münter’s pictures is they reach out and grab my eye. And her expressionism is to her time’s Expressionism what Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry is to lyric poetry at the turn of the century. Also, her pictures are definitely hers. I have to read them as if they were.

I know Münter’s pictures grab my eye because, when I can, I usually try to avoid getting my eye grabbed by pictures at exhibitions. What I do is sidle up like a disheveled crack dealer approaching a nerved-up sex worker. That’s to say, come on the picture indirectly, suddenly. The trick usually gives me the opportunity to grok the picture before the art in it captures me but it didn’t work with Münter, early or later work. I actually experimented in getting around her eye-grab but couldn’t.

I say the pictures are “definitely hers” because even after my first encounter with her art as likely being a possible unique contribution to esthetic evolution in our times at the Sturm-Frauen show in Frankfurt – 10 years ago ! – the talk around and about Münter has always seemed to put that potentiality in doubt: “Good painter, that Gabriele Münter, but the unique contribution belongs to Kandinsky”. The underlying dismissal is there even when the “Münter was K’s girlfriend, you know” has been censored out and her work is featured. The association has been questioned but the work of clearly identifying her achievement as hers has a way to go.

 

 “Trois femmes en habit du dimanche, Marshall, Texas”
(1900), Gabriele Münter. Photo © Adagp, Paris, 2025

The exhibition Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours at Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris, with a thoughtful selection of 150 of Münter’s works as evolved over 60 years of a life dedicated to visual art gave me the visual meat and the mental space to imagine for myself the painter’s particular creative achievement. The exhibition follows on efforts over the last 10 years to present modern-era woman artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Anna-Eva Bergman. This one is the best yet.

It seems to me that were it not for Woman invisibility, Münter’s artistic significance would have long since gone without saying just on the evidence of what she was involved in as a professional painter. Determined from her teenage years to make art her profession, at the turn of the 20^th century, Münter was out and observing and extensively photographing the “burgeoning” USA and “exotic” Arab North Africa. When the visual arts world was starting to embrace new tools, Münter, too, was experimenting with techniques such as the lithography that develops, for instance, into the distinctive poster art of the entre-les-deux-guerres and into groundbreaking work by people such as Alexander Calder and M.C. Escher.

 

“Aurélie” (1906), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris

Although forbidden by law to attend art school, thanks to inherited money and determination, Münter was there and alive with fellow-artists in the dawn of the post-Impressionism, when artists were thinking about creativity and art and beauty and the individual. She was interested in the roots of human creativity:  took a strong interest in “child art” and popular or folk art.

Münter became a founder of Der Blaue Reiter group, was a colleague and friend of many of the period’s other defining creative personalities, including the remarkable art and literary promoter Herwarth Walden and the painter, professor and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky – in whom she recognized, as many others did, an excellent teacher and, as others would also, also, found a rather agreeable “bad-boy” boyfriend in him.

Münter was, literally, an attending midwife at the birth of European Expressionism. She presented for the first time at the Paris Salon des indépendants in 1907. Along with writers such as Alfred Döblin, Anatole France and Knut Hamsen, she contributed words to Walden’s Der Sturm, the reference literary and art journal from 1910-1932. With painting peers such as Franz Marc, Kandinsky, Kokoschka and August Macke, she had solo in Walden’s gallery. Münter also, apparently, kept a written trace of her thinking about life, art, her work and the work of peers, throughout her life.

 

“Nature morte au saint Georges,” (1911), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

Targeted as a “degenerate artist”, Münter preserved the art of her peers, including her former boyfriend’s, during the Hitler time, at considerable risk to herself.

Her career may be enough to make her significant in early 20^th century painting, but her particular way of painting is what makes her significant as an artist. As I wrote earlier in this essay, Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours gave me the space to make a stab at it.

I’ve said Münter’s pictures “grab my eye”.

While most painters have a predilection for one or another element in their composition, broadly, for line, color or texture as well as their approach to the “ghost image” (the way people tend to construct visual images: think, “upside down” map or “Where’s Waldo?”, Münter does not seem to. For instance, it seems to me that in a composition, Picasso tends to stress his line a little bit more than his color or texture. Line seems his privileged way of giving a looker a lot of ways of looking at an image – it’s this particularity that makes a body point and say, “That’s a Picasso”! Both August Macke or Wassily Kandinsky, tend to privilege color because, I think, that’s where they locate visual beauty or interest. Franz Marc loves texture or, I should say, textured color, because he seems to like the movement in things.

 

“Enfant endormi (vert sur noir)” (1934), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

Münter can, as Enfant endormi (just above) shows, stress her line, just like Picasso.

 

“Rue du village en hiver” (1911), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris

And she can texture color like Franz Marc, too, as Rue de village en hiver (above) shows.

 

“Le Lac bleu” (1954), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris

And she does color, too – look at Le Lac bleu (just above).

In fact, Münter’s mastery of color is often praised to the skies. But, from this exhibition, at least, I just can’t find that Münter consistently privileges color, line or texture to consistently achieve a particular visual effect, as do, I think, Picasso, Macke, Kandinsky or Marc or any other of the many other painters of her time and afterward who sought an individual or “original” vision.

I think, in fact, the praise of Münter’s colors is wrong-headed. It leads us to believe that Münter’s artistic take on “expression” was more similar to her peers than it actually is.

First, color is an inherently unreliable telltale in general and in particular in painting – usually, when I discuss it, I discuss an artist’s theory of it approach to it, arrangement of it, not color itself. And then photography, the medium where most people meet painting, systematically transforms color, these days most often toward highly saturated over-brightness. Second, Woman invisibility is likely at work in an over-association of Münter and color. Kandinsky, her boyfriend during her twenties, was of course big on color. Since it’s well known that birds of a feather flock together, especially when one of the birds is a girlfriend, Gabriele must have been as besotted with color as she was with her Wassily. No?

 

“Autoportrait” (1909-1910), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

The lack of visual evidence for a defining predilection in the elements of composition is why I am now thinking that Münter’s creative effort was psychological or perceptual, not visual.

Münter, it seems to me, was aiming to give the looker her full sense of the thing looked at, not to demonstrate a technique or state a belief. Indeed, Wikipedia, quoting the painter’s notebooks as worked up by the art historian Reinhold Heller, has her writing essentially what I’m suggesting:

“My pictures are all moments of life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously…”.

Ironically, this clear declaration of esthetic aim is embedded in an explanation of why she’s so grateful to Kandinsky for teaching her to use a palette knife “with assurance”. The palette knife let her paint faster which let her stay closer to the moment she was painting.

With her declared intention as validation, it’s safe to say, from the immediate evidence of the exhibition, that when Münter was composing, she was trying to compose “expressively”, as the thoughtful poets of the time were trying to do, and with the same aim – capture life, not a “slice of life” but the anima or movement in a moment of life.

 

“Paysage avec cabane au couchant” (1908). Photo
© Adagp, Paris

The (self-) expressive, individualized, “lyric” poetry getting born in the period, such as that of Rainier Maria Rilke (1875-1926), is said, in any case, to be at the origin of the notion of “expressionism” in painting in Germany and in the rest of Europe. In English-language terms, I am thinking of Rilke as I think of Robert Bridges’ slow-leak of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “expressionistic” or “lyric” compositions of finely balanced sense, sound and rhythm into the early 20^th century.  Lyrics such as The Windhover (published 1918) or Binsey Poplars (written 1879?), conjure the experienceof the apprehension of “God’s presence”, the anima or flow, in the world.

I'm kidding on the square; just a bit, but there is something of the sublime Emily Dickinson in Münter's own sense of her regard. 

In her search to create a visual analog to expressive or lyric poetizing, Münter would have put her greatest effort into the equipoise of line, color and texture around the anima and the sense of it in the moment. It would be, through this compositional equipoise, I think, through this very firm control over composition that “grabs my eye”.

________

I saw Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours at Musée de l’art moderne de Paris on 3 April 2025. It is part of a summer program that includes three other exhibitions. Peindre sans detours runs until 24 August 2025.

Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices; Matisse et Marguerite, Le regard d'un père; Philippe Perrot brought into the permanent collection

 

“Untitled” (2005), Philippe Perrot. Photo © Aurélie Dupuis/Azentis Technology

The museum has inducted works by Philippe Perrot (born in Paris 1967, lived and worked in the Paris suburbs, died in Paris 2015) into its permanent collection. Of Perrot’s works, I wrote in my notebook “like contemplating static”. Perrot makes cartoon geometries in a narrative style recalling for me a Shadok-like-, but grittier, alternative comic-book-, telling of the intriguing half of an untold, perhaps, bizarre hidden story. It had me gritting my teeth. But agreeably. Really agreeably. Perrot’s work shows that static is worth some contemplation – especially around his use of mediatized popular art forms? Perrot’s on show until 2 November 2025.

Concept artist Oliver Beer’s interactive child-centered installation Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices turns around, at least for the moment, a fascinating cycle of recopying of Nina Childress’ sublime Sylvie – grosse tête (2018).  Reanimation Paintings runs until 13 July 2025.

Matisse et Marguerite, Le regard d'un père, a lovely exhibition, to be sure, with virtual reality installation to go with it, but to be sure, God help me, I was introduced to Matisse by my older brother’s godmother, mater’s best friend, early in the 1960s – the godmother prospered in family and community life, became a federal judge and died, but it seems to me not a day has passed that I haven’t heard something of this Henri Matisse, painter and now père. I feel sure that others will write more and more intelligibly about it than I ever could. Matisse et Marguerite runs until 24 August 2025.

Good and giddy, arty and philosophical: “Tout Léger” at the Musée du Luxembourg [By Tracy Danison]

Niki de Saint Phalle, "Nana santé". Photo © 2024 Niki Charitable Art Foundation

Musée du Luxembourg marketing describes Tous Léger ! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring...  as “highlighting the major artists of Nouveau Réalisme (“New Realism”) and the dialogue with the American scene”.

Marketing. Tous Léger! is more and better than that, with a concept and narrative that suggests to even an inattentive visitor a way of understanding how the visual arts gets from the warm and fuzzy Impressionism of Claude Monet to the puzzling good “bad art” of Keith Haring.

 

Fernand Léger, “Nature Morte, A.B.C.”. Photo © Grand Palais RMN

 

Tous Léger focuses on the very varied production of a bit more than 20 known and less known artists born after 1920 and working in Europe and the USA from 1945 and on into the 2000s. With the exception of Haring, born in 1958 and active only from the 1980s until his early death, featured artists such as Christo & Jeanne Claude, Arman, Daniel Spoerri, Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Indiana, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein and Roy Lichtenstein, were most visible – not to say active or influential – in the 1960s and 1970s.

I used the range of paronomasia in Tous Léger – sorry, “punning” just doesn’t do the trick here – as my structuring lens. Think “Tous Charlie!” (“Everybody [is] Charlie!”). The slogan means to express solidarity and sympathy for the victims of the 2015 terror attack on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. But like most slogans, it has a lot of complex rattles and tinkles, some intended, some unintended some a result of mysterious synchronicity.

 

Yves Klein, “Vénus bleue (Vénus d’Alexandrie)”. Photo ©JeanchristopheLett

Beyond personal memories such as veteran ’68ers calling reluctant thanks to the riot police as they marched, “Tous Charlie” may, for example, in some ears, suggest support of democratic values or have echoes of historical anti-clericalism. Or some may see a link between the fact that “Charlie” is the feminine of “Charles”, not the nickname, and the misogynist Islamist attackers’ choice of the magazine as a target. Or…

The first thing Tous Léger conjures up for me is something jokey such as “Everybody’s Giddy” or, applied to the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s, especially, “Wild Child”. “Léger” means of course “lighthearted”, “not heavy”, “giddy”, “carefree”, “immoral”, “irresponsible” and “foolish”: carefree and/but/or alarming.

 

Fernand Léger, “Les Quatre cyclists”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn

 

But of course Tous Léger is an art show for serious and un-alarming people, so Léger actually points to: “Everybody [has a part of the esthetic heritage of] Fernand Léger [though trained as an architect, became a well-known early 20th-century post-Impressionist, Cézannist, Cubist painter, soldier, fascinated by film and the close-up, enthroned at MOMA in 1935, Yale professor, art teacher and philosopher of art, Vichy exile, communist, born 1881, died 1955, in France]”.

But to get back to my first feeling, “léger” as “lighthearted”, “not heavy”, “giddy”, “carefree”, “immoral”, “foolish” and “irresponsible” in a lot of ways does sum up the art scene in the 1950s - 1960s - 1970s, especially, public and critical reaction to junk cars run through a metal compactor and presented as sculpture (1961, César Baldaccini), blank walls as paintings (1958, Yves Klein), kiddy-toys treacherously inserted in plaster and representing notions of the unconscious (1959-60, Niki de Saint Phalle) or action-concepts such as signing public property (1963, Ben Vautier, “Fluxus Côte d’Azur”) or using a rifle as a paint brush (1961, Niki de Saint Phalle).

 

BEN, “Si l’art est partout, il est aussi dans cette boîte”. Photo © Ben Vautier 

Indeed, many, maybe most, of the artists and works on display for Tous Léger are more known to the public for the process of creating their different works or re- or de-contextualizing an ordinary thing than for the “product” of either.

Also, the paronomasiac gamut of “lighthearted-to-irresponsible” could pretty well be a proud self-description of a “moral generation” (+/-60 years) whose early experience of art included Dadaism and whose later cohort is supposed to have chanted “Sous-les pavés, la plage!”, whose dangerous “Danny the Red” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) was so called both because of his supposed revolutionary politics and his fiery red hair.

 

Raymond Hains, “SEITA”. Photo © Ville de Nice

Cohn-Bendit’s political career began with a remark that a 300-page official government report on youth made not a single mention of sex.

In short, the artists of Tous Léger, including Léger himself, who joined the communist party in 1945, were people trying to put distance between themselves and, to navigate a path through,  culture represented as much by the city fathers of Argentan, Orne, Normandy, the cynical Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, the archbishop of Paris, and the not-quite fabulist André Malraux as by themselves, John Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and post-Impressionist painters and sculptors such as Fernand Léger.

 

Fernand Léger, “Visage à la main sur fond rouge”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn - Gérard Blot © Adagp, Paris, 2025

What I come away from Tous Léger thinking is that Fernand Léger is, more than anything else, a vector for an evolving idea of how the individual person, his or her experience and vision, fit together when it comes to art.

When all is said and done, Léger shares with the Tous of Yves Kleins or Niki de Saint Phalles or Ben Vautiers a search for a nouveau réalisme (“new realism”) – not the technical orientations of a “school of painting” but, essentially, a longing for a new, much more lighthearted, even irresponsible and giddy way of looking at the world around.

This is a very broad and discussable statement, but I think that Léger is a pattern of the link between his generation – those who believed in the thing of art – and the generation represented in the exhibition – those who believe in creativity.

 

Keith Haring, “Untitled (n° 2557)”. Photo © Keith Haring Foundation, 2025

So, my post-Tous Léger feeling is that, although he does share broad ideas, Léger does not share with the de Saint Phalles, Kleins, Raysses, Harings, Christos, Armans, Bens, et al., of the exhibition any of the new forms of art and tools and processes for creating art that the latter come up with to practice an art that has become, essentially, a product of individual creativity.

Indeed, with a table called Histoire des Gestes, the curators of Tous Léger have to invent a whole new (at least to me) system of weighing, measuring and considering their work according to the semantic potentialities and critical contexts or narratives of the products of the creativity involved – Assemble! Burn! Accumulate! Wrap! Klein Bleu is about perception not color!

 

Gilbert & George, “Flower Worship”. Photo © Ville de Nice - Muriel Anssens © Gilbert & George, 2025

So, hey, presto! I come away from Tous Léger thinking that getting from Impressionism to the intriguing “bad art” creativity of Keith Haring is about the individual person, the nature of the world around and his or her experience of it – or even shaping a new world – is what “art” has been all about these past 100 years and more.

Ferdinand Léger and others of his generation held a portal open, but it is thanks to the deeds of the generation of these 20 or so artists of Tous Léger that nowadays we don’t talk so much about “art “things as about “creation”.  As Keith Haring put it in his journal in 1979, " … The importance of movement is intensified when a painting becomes a performance. The performance (the act of painting) becomes as important as the resulting painting".

 

Fernand Léger, “Le Tournesol”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn

______

I visited “Tous Légers” on 19 March 2025. The exhibition is curated by Anne Dopffer,
Directrice des musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes in collaboration with Julie Guttierez,
Conservatrice en chef du patrimoine Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot, France and Rébecca François, attachée de conservation du patrimoine
Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice (MAMAC), and runs until 20 July 2025 at Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. Exhibition design by Véronique Dollfus, with graphics by Claire Boitel of Atelier JBL and lighting by Philippe Collet of Abraxas Concepts

______

List of Artists, “Tous Léger! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring...” 

Marcel Alocco, 1937, Nice – lives and works in Nice/ Karel Appel, 1921, Amsterdam – 2006, Zurich/ ARMAN (Armand Fernandez), 1928, Nice – 2005, New York/ BEN (Benjamin Vautier), 1935, Naples – 2024, Nice/ César (César Baldaccini), 1921, Marseilles – 1998, Paris/ Christo & Jeanne Claude: Christo Javacheff, 1935, Gabrovo (Bulgaria) – 2020, New York/Jeanne-Claude, 1935, Casablanca – 2009, New York/ Gilbert & George: Gilbert, 1943, San Martino (Italy)/George, 1942, Plymouth (England) – both live and work in London/ Raymond Hains, 1926, Saint-Brieuc (France) - 2005, Paris/ Keith Haring, 1958, Kunztown, PA (USA) – 1990, New York/ Robert Indiana, 1928, New Castle (USA) – 2018, Vinalhaven, ME (USA)/ Alain Jacquet , 1939, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2008, New York/ Yves Klein, 1928, Nice – 1962, Paris/ Fernand Léger, 1881, Argentan (France) – 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)/ Roy Lichtenstein, 1923, New York – 1997, New York/ Martial Raysse , 1936, Golfe-Juan (France) – lives and works in Issigeac (France)/ Larry Rivers , 1923, New York – 2002, Southampton (USA)/ Niki de Saint Phalle , 1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2002, San Diego/ Daniel Spoerri , 1930, Galati (Kingdom of Romania) – 2024, Vienna/ Jacques Villeglé (Jacques Mahé de La Villeglé), 1926, Quimper (France) – 2022, Paris/ May Wilson, 1905, Baltimore – 1986, New York

Breasts [poem by James Cummins]

William Bailey "N" (Female Nude) c. 1965

Breasts

He never thought breasts antagonistic.
Unreachable, perhaps; unknowable, either
in the Biblical or secular sense. Mythic.
But the glorious revelations that exceeded
what he once would have optimistically

called expectations, more than made up
for the years of staring out windows.
Then to be admitted to the secret mysteries:
girls wanted him to look at their breasts,
to touch their nipples with his trembling

fingers, lips, rough palms—they even
displayed them sometimes, impatiently,
waiting for him to get it, at least a little.
Then comes the good stretch of life—
still tense, but with relaxed outings,

to movies, canoes, campfires. Quilt shows,
as the young couple searches for a flag
they can purchase together that stands
for the small country they’ve become,
& snugly covers their connubial bliss.

Ah, Sunday afternoons in Amish country ...
Smell of hay & manure, roast beef & potatoes,
the tang of fall making way for winter ...
Quilts cover sleep, the metaphor for death.
Quilts proclaim to the world this man,

this knight, is no longer on the quest—
for the Grail Castle, immortality, boobies ...
He just wants to rest in her arms as his wife
watches the gray window for them both;
and to know this place for the first time.

James Cummins' most recent book is Everyday Knowledge. 

“The Overture”: New "Next Line, Please" Prompts [by David Lehman]

 

On April Fool’s Day, which marks the opening of both “the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot) and, since 1996, National Poetry Month, I reviewed the previous week’s Next Line, Please entries with some wonderment. The prompt I’d proposed on March 24— to write a “coded dialogue poem,” in which the words memory, dream, and affair appear in code—was even more difficult than I had anticipated, in no small part because I had not been sufficiently precise in my instructions.

But poetic logic has it that the more difficult the task, the greater the opportunity for a poet to conceive of an ingenious poem—not from a lightning strike of inspiration, but from truly exercising the imagination, solving a puzzle of the sublime.

****

For next time, a new prompt: I call it “the ironic title.” Take the title of an existing work of art, make it your title, and write a poem (or prose poem) that veers as far away as possible from the work of art you are raiding. For example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain may refer to an amusement park north of Los Angeles, and The Magnificent Seven may head a piece about last year’s high-flying tech stocks

Here are some titles that strike me as promising:

• “The Lottery”
• Persuasion
• “The Necklace”
• The Wings of the Dove
• Under the Volcano
• Light in August
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• The Beautiful and Damned

But, of course, feel free to choose one of your own.

Ideally your poem should have nothing to do—except perhaps obliquely—with the work whose title you have appropriated. Incorporate just one formal device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase. If you run out of inspiration, go to a favorite book, open it at random, pick out a phrase, and remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”

Deadline: Ten days from the day this post goes up. Thanks, everyone.

from The American Scholar

Detail of Orpheus and Eurydice by Sir Edward Poynter, 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

“As Above So Below”: Mark Leckey Does a Good Job [By Tracy Danison]

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These days, as, each morning, a body must crouch up and frog run from the Huey Combat Utility Copter of Personal Belief into the unending Battle of The Whips and Scorns, they need metaphysical reassurance. Not an ethical dewicate wittle kissie-wissie, but, as it were, a hearty thumbs-up from a beefy philosophical Sarge or Sarge-equivalent. Mark Leckey, whose installation As Above So Below is at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 20 July, is, in at least one way, that Sarge.

Leckey is an artist who knows reality and transcendence of reality are rooted in more obscure mechanisms and broader cultural beliefs as well as personal experience. So, his work may very well provide an anxious body with that hearty thumbs up. If not, a body will provide themself with a couple or three wry smiles.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Since the late 1990s, Leckey has been exploring culture, technology, music and memory. As he sees it, the current obscure mechanisms and beliefs from above have been here-below since the Renaissance. So, for As Above So Below, thematically, Leckey seamlessly integrates the tradition of the ecstatic vision into the 21st century quotidians of psychic displacements and dissociations, unexpected plague, future shock and louring technology. Artistically, Leckey links the technology, esthetics and media of marketing and advertising with, especially, broadly Renaissance and Baroque religious symbolism.

A large gargoyle-like statue of Job – an All-powerful God’s faithful servant and a vigorous Satan’s whiny plaything – is both at the topographical center of and media command post for the installation and source for an audio feed of mutter and lament. Job’s skin is explosively torn with fist-size and larger holes up and down and back to front of his body. Seemingly from the inside.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

At first, I thought the wounds were versions of corrupt flesh, recalling popped buboes or boils and thought Job might be an ultra-vi or video-game version of Saint Roche, the Baroque plague saint. Radiated out from Job, what amount to “chapels”, or, considering the Job-ean lament in the air, maybe teched-up “stations of the cross”. These use graphic styles from gaming and public-messaging iconography to touch on themes such as fear or the ambiguity of reality. They contain what amount to “relics” (contemplative or holy-looking objects) that are evoked through thematic legends, video-painting, other multimedia or just or objects whose style or intent suggests a different era.

The highly contemporary mediums of the relics integrate such period- or use- symbolic materials-techniques as gold leaf or such period-themed objects as a labyrinth-map or iconography such as a recurring stylized shining sun stamp (as on Baroque-style illuminated maps).

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Though there is of course an implicit narrative in joining together old and new, Leckey’s approach is to let an on-looker’s visual, sound and tactile experience of the installation work out the sense they want to give to it. They are never pressed to understand anything. They can just have fun if that’s all they wanna do. The non-directivity is also true in terms of the approach to technology and technique: transistors, chips, VDTs, brushes, paint and canvas are used as equal tools in putting a piece together. In the end, in this very technology-intensive installation, there is very little or no accent on technology.

______

Elsa Coustou is curator for Mark Leckey’s “As Above So Below” multimedia installation, which I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, on 31 March 2025. “As Above So Below” runs until 20 July 2025.

"Letter to Eve" [by Ruth Homberg]

Letter to Eve

I wanted to make you a
Thesaurus. Feed you words
He defined, and make synonyms
fall from your mouth.

and be options. Remember,
Queen Anne’s Lace was royalty
but now are weeds. On walks
through Eden you would grasp
handfuls and place them in your hair;
as though already you knew
what it was like to be dethroned.

-- Ruth Homberg

 

painting by Masaccio

from the archive; first posted February 10, 2010

The Death of FDR: April 12, 1945

Unfinished portrait of FDR by artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff (1888-1980), April 12, 1945

<< President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. He had been inaugurated on January 20th for his unprecedented fourth term as president. He was 63. He looked like a dying man and suffered from very high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, possibly melanoma. He was weakened by post-polio syndrome and the strain of governing the nation during the Great Depression and leadin the allies to defeat the Germans, the Japanese, and Mussolini's Italy.

FDR succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) while at Warm Springs, Georgia, the polio treatment center he had created in the late 1920s. On his prior visits, he had always come away feeling rejuvenated from the exercise and friendships and warm water. He was at home, the Little White House, while sitting for his portrait and chatting with friends. "I've got a terriifc headache," he said. He never regained consciousness. 

Tom Cassani’s really big trick: Iterations of the small [By Tracy Danison]

“Iterations” by writer, performer and magician Tom Cassani. Photo © Camille Blake Forecast, Skills e.V.

The other day I was trying to focus on Marion Zurbach’s excellent Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”) and one of the many of  the thoughts bedeviling me was that in a reality where everything is supposed to be a story or a part of a story, small plot twists take on an outsize role in determining what this or that lived narrative “is really about”.

There’s of course the American Ur-scold-proverb, “The Kingdom was lost for want of a nail”, designed, efficiently, to both scare light-heartedness out of and promote obsessive compulsion in boys and girls. And though experience has taught adults that “history”, and kingdoms, too, come down to clashes of competing turpitudes and cupidities, there has now got to be a zillion quintillion competing “turning points”, such stuff as key assassinations or decisive battles or crucial votes in Congress or, for God’s sake, some random line in the “Bible”. And all that.

Truth of experience, though, remains truth of experience. Small things don’t determine big things. Mostly, just the opposite. Big things like quantum entanglement, culture, or the aggregate of personal learnings, determine the small things, like turpitudes, cupidities, kingdoms, nails, assassinations, battles and votes in Congress. Then, one AMAZING story or another is shaped out of one or more of these small things. The big things are ignored.

Mark my words, our civilization is now firmly set to croak on click-bait.

With an hour’s worth of amusing patter and theatrical variations on the ordinary disappearing coin trick, Zen magician Tom Cassani managed to pass this clear insight into the iterations (and reiterations) of the small in a big, big world and also keep me delighted and hanging on the edge of my chair, too. Cassani has something of Mephistopheles under his 1984-style black overalls, something of a true Magus. So I guess that’s why. I’ll certainly be on the lookout for his next show if not for the insight, then for the entertainment.

Tom Cassani’s shtick is this:

 

“Iterations”. Photo © Camille Blake Forecast, Skills e.V.

From what one might suppose to be a grimoire, he feigns following instructions for one or another way of presenting the old disappearing coin trick. The sleight of hand stays quite unrevealed, however. Instead, his idea is to focus spectator attention on the disappearance, finding ways to get spectators nearer and nearer to its locale. He even sets up a big video screen so we can all better scrutinize the disappearance and ignore the sleight of hand behind it. Interestingly, Cassani has only one other trick in this shtick: he “enlarges” the coin once, but only enough so that everybody sees that he can do another trick, I expect.

As the show goes along, I realize that the trick works every blessed time not because Cassani is such a clever fellow, but because, like every last person in the room, I am fixated on the disappearance because I’m telling myself that some little thing, a twitching finger, a hitch, a switch will reveal how the trick works. But it won’t. There isn’t really any trick in it at all: my perception doesn’t allow me to see it. All the magician has to do is keep the coin out of sight, as a body does with a treat for a dog and a very common political maneuver.

So Karine and I walked back to the trolley stop for the long ride home. I held that my conclusion is that magic is a science, an excursion to the odorless, tasteless, touchless, soundless and sightless holes that are half of the woof and weave of what biological seeing affords and largely ignored when examining our grasp on the world. Those stories we tell ourselves, I told her, are more like the flashes of silver we might see as a salmon labors upstream than a silvery salmon laboring upstream. Karine, who tends toward the Bishop Berkeley in things, could, nevertheless, find no real stones to kick so I won’t burden the reader.

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I saw “Iterations”, written and performed by writer, performer and magician Tom Cassani, at Théâtre Silvia Monfort as part of the 23d Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne (2025) dance performance program on 21 March 2023. “Iterations” was developed from Cassani’s ‘Expanded Magic’ research project with support from Forecast, Skills e.V. and Florentina Holzinger and in collaboration with Karen Christopher, CJ Mitchell, BOLD!, Augusto Corrieri, Tim Bromage, Hester Stephan Chillingworth and Nik Taylor

“The Nakedness of Woman”: The new "Next Line, Please" post -- new prompts and the best of last month's poems

“The Nakedness of Woman”

By David Lehman | March 21, 2025

Detail of The Soul Hovering Over the Body from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, 1796 (Wikimedia Commons)

By March 5, a day after our deadline, the NLP team had produced 122 responses to our February 21 post (“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”) and its five new prompts, based on five infernal axioms from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.” The new poems surprised and delighted this reader, and the critical exchanges between poets matched an ineffable generosity of spirit with expert analyses.

The poem “Beginning with a Line by William Blake” by the possibly pseudonymous Greg Chaimtov (whose last name combines the Hebrew words for “to life” and “good”) impressed me with its daring use of rhyme. It begins by endorsing Blake’s line (“The nakedness of woman is the work of God”) and follows through, for the next seven lines, on the argument that instinctive desire defeats reason. But then, as if the rhymes drive the content of the poem, images of beauty (“a maple-red dawn, / the first flakes feathering fallen leaves”) ensue before giving way to an inevitable “but.” The poem boldly concludes by rejecting its own initial premise:

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
How else to explain the desire to worship desire?
To drop to your knees as if a power higher
than any you’ve known has fought
its way past the defenses Reason
built for you over those many years
you devoted to getting through one season
to the next without ending in tears
at fireflies kindling lawns, a maple-red dawn,
the first flakes feathering fallen leaves,
or a songbird nestled under the eaves?
But then, when you cannot rise and go on
as you had before, you wonder if, after all,
Blake, mad as he was, was simply wrong.

 

For the rest of the post, and the new prompts, click here.
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-nakedness-of-woman/

The Party (a poem from 1992)

The Party

Everyone started talking about the drama critic

As soon as she left. "Did you see what she

Was wearing?" The Presidents of Harvard, Brown, and Duke

Were quoted deploring recruitment practices current

On their campuses. Would you say that these gentlemen

Are sincere? I would unhesitatingly do so!

I happen to know them and can vouch that each

Is an honorable man, and is married to the mother

Of the eye-turning theater critic whose power

To make or break a play is unparalleled in New York --

Lovely to look at, quick with a quip, easy to love --

Yes, but none of them has the backbone to stand up

To the power-hungry yahoos who want to destroy

The written word in the name of personal liberation!

 

(DL, 1992)

pictures by DL 2023

photo by Elaine Equi

 

 

 

 

The Great Chevalier Tour: trough of inspiration for USA folklore ballet? [By Tracy Danison]

"The Great Chevalier Tour", reaching for the sky for Luxemburg, Le Grand Chevalier. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

As part of the premier of The Great Chevalier Tour, M. Chevalier chose the Vanves, France, City Hall salle du marriage for his historic homage to Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg the iconic Danse du Pigeon, the trembling heart of the legendary ballet’s founders’, sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal’s, signature ballet, Josiane la Paysanne (“Josiane the female Peasant”).

The Danse du Pigeon sequence of Josiane is today recognized as the paradigm of Western folklore ballet, was developed and premiered 50 years ago to the very day and under the very same gaze of the very monumental bust of Marianne mounted on today’s back wall.

 

Detail of panel, “Owl with Minerva”, Vanves City Hall, salle du mariage”. Note the clouds. Photo © Tracy Danison

The Bal sisters are said to have been inspired to the Danse du Pigeon choreographic riff by the symbolic owl in the emblematic Minerva figuring on the marriage salle’s central ceiling vault, painted there by the same 19th century artist who did the original cityscapes still decorating the walls, most of which are recognizable today, the city’s mayor said during his opening allocution. The sisters Bal, while native Luxemburgers to the core, worked in nearby Brussels, Belgium. The Vanves mayor, a strikingly attractive man, said his southwest Paris suburb had welcomed the celebrated sisters when devastating floods had temporarily destroyed their more northerly dance atelier, raising some sympathy among the evening’s spectators.  

Dancer (and remarkable prancer) M. Chevalier, dit “Le Grand Chevalier”, also co-director of the National Ballet Folklorique, performed Danse du pigeon upon the parquet between the salle’s antique oak Magistrate’s Bench and a rapt audience.

Le Grand Chevalier’s aplomb, in addition to the elegant en tête bobbling, sidewise en pointe stepping and abruptefancy flights that characterize the celebrated fortress nation’s most renowned dance, included a dramatic evocation of the history and national plomb of the celebrated dukedom.

 

Position #3.5 from celebrated “Wings high” sequence, Le Grand Chevalier, “Danse du Pigeon”. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

The multi-talented co-director was able, through states of undress, including modestly bare shoulders and breasts, a family-style codpiece, multiple revisions of the Iconic dance’s bobbles, pointes, grand jetés, along with enthusiastic audience participation in the symbolic gestures of skyward national ambition, to well characterize the Luxemburg spirit: “Growing like grass, blooming as buds”, as he might well put it.

In the air of the salle, as that truly throbbing Le Grand Chevalier made his final emotional, deeply personal salute, wrapping himself in a magnificent rug of many horses and thus pointing the many grand Chevaliers or Ritters or Horse Soldiers that have pockmarked the little fortress nation’s history, was a growing feeling, in warmer patriotic hearts, that the USA too must have their own Danse du Pigeon written into their iconic ballet, Winning Karen Winning.

Unfortunately, USA pigeons, are now extinct by necessity as well as national right and nature’s red-toothed law. They became, as historians note, the delicious squab that enabled my ancestors to build the limitless farms, factories and penitentiaries that have so long welcomed the rest.

 

Under Marianne's gaze, Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau, in presence of co-director Simone Mousset, pays homage to sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal, founders of Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Reminded that “squab”, “a nestling tumbling to the ground, fat and flabby, a richly slapping sound” reminds of those iconic offerings emblematic of true American contribution, that are, as Lord Byron has put it, “soft, yet cohesive, neither rashly swift nor insolently slow”:  The Turd.

Thus, as spectators filed pensively out of this salle of homage in Vanves, France, they thought, with love and pride, of course, of production values much bigger and better than diminutive Luxemburg could ever offer, for the USA: Dance of the Turd… With its own historic music, Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives… A modernist composer, yes, but also, and in his actual lifetime, a bigly successful salesman and insurance entrepreneur. 

Simone Mousset, does that eminently American “The” in the English title, The Grand Chevalier Tour, suggest that M. Chevalier himself might be tempted, munificently, as so many others, to perform the sure-to-be-a-classic Great American Dance of the Turd?

___________

Performance Detail

I saw the premier of “The Great Chevalier Tour” – billed as the “Occasion for Monsieur Chevalier to visit all the places which have contributed to the success of the Ballet National Folklorique, with this love letter, tender and intimate, addressed as much to the people of Vanves as to Luxemburg, and danced by one of its most talented prodigal sons” – 7 March 2025 at Mairie de Vanves, in presence of Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau. “The Great Chevalier Tour” is the brainchild of choreographer performer Simone Mousset, written by Lou Cope
with historic music composed and recorded by Maurizio Spiridigliozzi and set plan by Mélanie Planchard in collaboration with Simone Mousset and Lewys Holt.

___________

Festival Artdanthé

Simone Mousset’s “The Grand Chevalier Tour” premiered the 2025 edition of Artdanthé, founded in 1998, a mixed-discipline dance-performance festival featuring, especially, creations by emerging artists. Notable Artdanthé alumni include Boris Charmantz, named director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2022, and Jeanne Candel, whose latest work was discussed in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in September 2024 (Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées”).

Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, Blood Pumps, Flesh Quickens [By Tracy Danison]

“Uncertain Journey”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

How better to attract enormous crowds and dithyrambic media reviews than masses of single red threads stretching from a single point into red clouds floating just under the ceiling? What more likely to attract unruly multitudes than recondite video loops of a 50-something woman from Japan crawling around in dirt among tree roots or shivering under the mud plopping from her shower head? Or, better, what is more likely to invite murmurs of wonder than video clips of said lady’s sets for Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas? And, of course, what more attractive than said lady's showing off her prize collection of scales old window frames? And doll-house bric à brac picked up at an ex-East Berlin flea market?

 

“Connecting Small Memories”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Well, I don’t know if I’d recommend the approach to artist friends, but it does work: the crowds pour in and lookers do genuinely seem to love what the find. Also, from looking myself, I do know that the said 50-something from Japan, the artist Chiharu Shiota, definitely does know something about art and from knowing about art, knowing about appealing to people. The Soul Trembles, her exhibition, the first for the work-in-progress re-opening of the Grand Palais, is a top-of-the-line artistic achievement. “Tremble” here has the sense of “quickening, as ‘a leaf in the wind’” not of “quaking in fear, as ‘a betrayed soldier’".

 

“Inside – Outside”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Shiota’s stated artistic intention is to “enable anybody from anywhere to find an echo of their own emotion in her work”. Her approach to the big wide theme of “presence in absence” in The Soul Trembles seems to anchor less on works presented and more on personal reflection on and personal experience of the vision underpinning the visual experience of the works presented.

 

“Prayer”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

This rather complex distancing and refocusing – visual experience of the work, experience of visual experience, personal reflection, vision to visual experience – has an unexpected effect. A body feels that Shiota just sort of nestles up snug with the looker, shares her bulging photo album; she giggles and mugs, points sublime details with her stubby fingers. There are studies of Shiota's own hands, for example, or videos of short performances such as the mud shower mentioned earlier, whose esthetic value is in the experience they represent for her and through her for the looker, rather than visual esthetic of the physical thing. I expect you can call her approach “meta-art.”

 

“In silence”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

A looker winds up considering or feeling Shiota's take on the work presented as much as on the work or the work's concept just as it is. Also, her works very often take the shape of a simple personal concern: the strands of red yarn represent/are blood in the body, not the symbolism of blood or even the biology of blood, but blood's simple, bloody existence, for instance. Or a work may have the shape of personal experience, for instance, a burnt piano to which a wave of surreal dismay at the fire that destroyed it somehow remains clinging after all these years. Often, a piece is shared common-personal experience: who hasn’t already seen the peeling window frames she’s put on display? The window frames are positioned within the exhibition in a way to remind the looker that a view is, above all, framed.

 

“Accumulation - Searching for the Destination”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Shiota’s meta-art resonates with the public; lookers above all seem to enter into a friendly dialogue with her. As they might with a neighbor grubbing out a back garden, they compliment her efforts, comment to each other on her particular visualizations and visions and those she shares with everybody else. “So, Chiharu”, they seem to say, pointing to a photo, “Ouf, golly, You stretched out all those red threads into a red cloud? Just so we can speak about blood: relations, biology, symbology”? Or, with her at the looker's elbow: “Chiharu? You made the set for emotionally gigantic operas like Gotterdammerung and Siegfried? I see Brunhilde. I see Siegfried. Was it you made the fringe of the curtains or what? It’s hard to tell from this opera video; is your work in itself or part of something else"? And with a smile of contentment, "That puzzle is the point."

 

View of the exhibition "The Soul Trembles", Chiharu Shiota : opera sets. Photo © Grand Palais

When packing the emergency exile bag, don’t forget to make a note of Shiota’s exhibition but also of pianist Keiichiro Shibuya’s March 14 Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost). The cancelled concert ticket will get you in for a night-visit, the last visit, to The Soul Trembles.

The Miroir fantôme concert themes around voice, which is re-imagined as a ghost of the real thing: synthesized sounds and voices in a phantasmagoric ambiance. “The piano of Keiichiro Shibuya, the single human presence in the concert”, the programmers write, “Is a metaphor for a humanity confronted with the feeling of impending apocalypse”.

Sounds like just the thing!

________

I visited Chiharu Shiota’s installation “The Soul Trembles” in company with my partner Karine at the Grand Palais on 6 February 2025. Keiichiro Shibuya’s “Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost)” takes place Friday 14 March 2025 at 21h. The entrance to both concert and exhibition is at Entrée Clarence Dillon, Galeries 10.1. “The Soul Trembles” will be open for post-concert visiting from 22h to 23h30.    

How People Reacted to Jackson Pollock's Paintings [by David Lehman]

Abstract art seemed to fly in the face of good old American horse-sense. The standard response to a reproduction of a Pollock [pictured above] was, "Why, my five-year-old could do that." Or, “It looks like inedible spaghetti.” To this day, the works of the Abstract Expressionists retain their power to disturb if one measure of that power is the still-widespread impulse to mock them. In the movie An Unmarried Woman (1978), Alan Bates playing a famous New York painter tells Jill Clayburgh that when he was six his mother threw a pickled herring at his father. It missed its target and splattered against the wall. “At that moment I became an Abstract Expressionist,” Bates says, to which Clayburgh replies that his work does resemble pickled herring. That occurs in a movie sympathetic to the myth of the Abstract Expressionism. There are less friendly ways of responding. A prizewinning biography of Jackson Pollock maintains that his “drip” paintings originated in the haunting boyhood memory of standing on a flat rock beside his father urinating. Pollock is supposed to have said to himself, “When I grow up, am I ever going to do that!”^[i] Others have tried to put that reductive psychoanalytic theory into practice. At a show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1995, a painter by the name of Keith Boadwee presented fifty pieces of so-called body art that he had produced by giving himself enemas of egg tempura paints and then squatting over canvases. Boadwee had the Abstract Expressionists in mind. "I wanted to prove that I can make just as good a painting as they can, with my butthole," he said.^[ii]

[i]. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Life (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), for an alaborate version of this theory.

[ii]. Above the paintings in the gallery were TV monitors showing videotapes of Boadwee in action, including his squatting nude over canvases. Buzz, August 1995; Art in America, October 1995.

Amore Infinito: On résistance, ideals, the chain of biological being and Sarah Valente [By Tracy Danison]

“The Edge of Choice”, Sarah Valente, 2024, aluminium. Photo : © Allison Borgo

Carnet pour l’exil # ... The exile needs, of course, to compulsively walk around the chosen city.

But they also need ideals. Especially here, in Paris.

Jumping Jesus! Ideals!

A body may believe that, in old, disabused Paris, atavistic Revolutionary zeal or bootless experiments with Fourrierism or Blanquism or too many hours studying Babeuf has muddied the country’s ideals. Indeed, the exile may have noticed parents and officials alike exhorting, even seen placards urging, children and other citizens alike to resister. Often in the image of the Résistants of the last world war.

The exile, still muddled, in spite of Death of a Salesman, by the American cultural belief that winning is everything and aware that Résistants were mostly losers by their resistance, may imagine that parents and officials in this country are encouraging children, and citizens, too, to become drone-savvy partisans of socio-political Luddism. Or worse.

 

“The Accidental Miracle”, Sarah Valente, 2024, bronze, mother of pearl. Photo : © Allison Borgo

But, no. Résistance means “Respect your own ideals”, not “Resistance”, no accent.

So, though an exile might not know it just to look at her, visual artist Sarah Valente is in her way, a “résistant”. But when I walked into the Galérie Romero Paprocki on the rue Saint Claude in the Marais a couple of weeks before Christmas last year, I wanted to have a look at how her exhibition, called Amore Infinito, was dealing with a shared ideal.

She has created a story with esthetic accessories – swords, statuary, offerings, keepsakes –  about people as part of a biological chain of being. We share that ideal: to really understand a human person as an integral part of other big wiggly wormy furry photosynthetic tiny slimy Life, capital “l”.

 

“The Bliss of The Universe”, Sarah Valente, 2024, bronze, mother of pearl, pink tourmaline. Photo : © Allison Borgo

Observing that it is impossible to describe and take in the whole of Life as described – she means all that archaebacteria, eubacteria, protista, fungi, plants, animals and all the dips and curves and controversies and rumbles therein and by – Sarah Valente says people have wound up forgetting altogether that they are part of the chain of Life. People’s inaction is not just puzzling, she says, it seems unnatural. “If somebody has a baby, they take one look at it and want to protect it with their own life. So why do they look at Earth Life and have the urge to tear it up?”

____________

Galérie Romero Paprocki, 8 rue Saint Claude, specializes in contemporary art. Expect a pleasant visit. As a visual artist, Sarah Valente concerns herself with “the hidden sides of the world, the little-known aspects of nature”. Her projects include Jungle Canopy Mapping, The Birds, the Microcosm and The Hive. Galérie Romero Paprocki represents, in addition to Sarah Valente, other such woman artists as Pauline Guerrier, Paola Siri Renard, Deborah Bowmann and Marion Flament. The gallery’s current exhibition, Le cose che non sappiamo (“Things we don’t know”), is a group show​. Follow up your visit by a brisk walk that will justify the last real Tarte Tatin in town in a café not far off the rue Saint Claude.

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

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

"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.