Odd Nerdrum

Among of the books I bought in Malmö last month was a monograph on the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. I had seen a number of this artist’s works on-line, and was keen to find out more.

Nerdrum is renowned for his emulation of old-master techniques and textures: there are in his paintings many echoes of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, in particular. Beyond that, his devotion to the depiction of flesh brings the work of Lucian Freud to mind; whereas certain of his pictures have, to my eye, unexpected likenesses to canvases by Dalí, or Ferdinand Hodler.

A great many of Nerdrum’s paintings of the ’80s and ’90s share a common setting: a bleak, post-apocalyptic locale where crudely-clothed or naked figures adopt contorted poses, or perform acts of violence, or enact bizarre rituals: like hallucinated variations on themes suggested by the Mad Max movies.

Nerdrum’s staunch use of traditional techniques, and of figurative subjects, has drawn its share of criticism and derision. Part of his response has been to claim that he is not an artist, but rather a ‘kitsch painter’, further claiming that ‘the kitsch painter is committed to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise’ and ‘because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the saviour of talent and devotion.’

Kitsch is the opposite of the public space, of the public conversation, of the demand for objectivity and functionality. Kitsch is the intimate space, our selves, our love and our congeniality, our yearnings and our hopes, and our tears, joys and passion. Kitsch comes from the creative person’s private space, and speaks to other private spaces. Kitsch deals therefore with giving intimacy dignity - Odd Nerdrum, ArtNews, April 2000.

Are you a real kitsch-person? Try the questionnaire: page 1; page 2.

Click on the details above to see the full pictures from which they were excerpted - note that the full images are quite large (150 Kb or more): these I scanned from my copy of Odd Nerdrum - Malarier by Jan-Erik Ebbestad, Aschehoug, Oslo, 1995. As Nerdrum’s œuvre from 1979 onwards is well-documented at Trond Hjorteland’s site (see the first of the above links), I have chosen some of the artist’s earlier pictures to display here. These are Copyright © Odd Nerdrum 1972-1978.

Free Books at Christmas

What better time than at Christmas, I thought, for the fourth of my free book giveaways. Alas, overfed lethargy has prevailed hereabouts, so this post is three days later than I had at first planned. Below then, is the latest selection of ten books that I’m letting go. To claim one of them, leave a comment on this entry that includes your e-mail address, and that states which of the books you’d like. Then, send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. Based on a general first-come, first-served principle, with a restriction per offer of one-book-per-recipient, I will allocate who gets what, and will dispatch the books before the year’s end, if at all possible. As before, I’ll pay all postage costs. Happy reading! Happy New Year!

1. Atomised, aka The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (the French title was Les Particules Élémentaires). This is the UK edition in hardcover. It was published by Heinemann, 320pp; ISBN: 0434007935.

2. Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov. This is my latest, and perhaps my last attempt at giving Nabokov’s works a chance. I don’t know what it is about his writing, but I have a strong and instinctive aversion to it. I have tried reading four or five of his books at various times, and have yet to clear a few dozen pages of any of them. This copy is of the first UK edition, and is in hardcover with a dustjacket in passably good condition. It was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 589pp; SBN: 297179357.

3. Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown, a novel translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas - previously discussed here, it’s the story of one man and his troll… The book is a paperback, and was published by Peter Owen, 220 pp; ISBN: 0720611717.

4. Passions, and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by several hands. I picked up this volume at a local antikvariat, forgetting that I had already read these stories in a collected edition a few years before. This is the first UK edition, in hardcover complete with dustjacket. It was published by Jonathan Cape in 1976, 312pp; ISBN: 0224012495.

5. Gods, Mongerels and Demons: 101 Brief but Essential Lives by Angus Calder. This compilation of thumbnail biographies of sundry eccentrics both real-life and fictional, ‘from Billy the Kid and Billie Holiday, to the more obscure personages such as Saint Wilgefortis and Iannis Xenakis’, caught my eye in a Malmö bookstore a few months back. When I came to read the book, however, it struck me as a fine idea, uninspiringly executed. It is a hardcover, published by Bloomsbury, 384 pp; ISBN: 0747560501.

6. Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun. This is one of Murakami’s slighter novels, but still well worth reading. It was translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. This copy is a paperback, from a UK edition published by The Harvill Press in 2000, 188pp; ISBN: 1860467172.

7. Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Several of Dinesen’s stories have stuck vividly in my mind since I first read them, but not this one, which I read relatively recently, but which I can barely recall at all. I daresay it was still a pleasant enough read, though. This is a Penguin paperback, 128pp; ISBN: 0140180745.

8. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of my favourite books, ever. While I was living in Italy, I picked up a copy of an Italian paperback edition of Le Città Invisibili, in the hope that my Italian would one day be good enough that I could read the original, however haltingly. Seven years on, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen… This book is a reprint of a 1993 Mondadori edition, 164pp; ISBN: 8804411112.

9. I wrote a little about Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver here. Since then, I’ve given up on the book: it occurred to me that I’d much rather read some good histories of the period and the personalities in question, rather than wade through Stephenson’s fictionalisation of them. This is the UK hardcover edition, published by Heinemann, 926 pp; ISBN: 0434008176.

10. Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Laurence Weschler’s absorbing account of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and of its founder, the eponymous Mr Wilson. This is a paperback published by Vintage, 168pp; ISBN: 0679764895.

Nicely Spicely

A couple of months ago we bought a cookbook called Indian Every Day, from which we have tried five or so recipes thus far, all of which have turned out deliciously well. Browsing through the book, we were struck that several of the recipes called for spices or herbs that were more-or-less unfamilar to us, so, when we noticed that the author had taken the trouble to list a few on-line suppliers for some of the harder-to-find ingredients, we made our way to one of these sites (‘the Spice of Life’ ) and placed an order there which eventually ran to a couple of dozen items…

Among the spices that were mentioned in the book, we ordered carom seeds (also called ajwan or ajwain seeds), apparently much used in lentil and bean dishes, and asfoetida, an extremely pungent spice also mentioned in connection with pulses, as both a flavouring with an oniony or garlicky flavour, and as an antiflatulent aid to digestion. We also bought some nigella seeds and some black cardamom pods (we had only ever tried the green variety before), and a couple of souring agents that neither one of us had previously experimented with: mango powder and tamarind. Dried curry leaves were also on our list, though I have since read that these are of little culinary value, as not much of the leaves’ flavour apparently survives the drying process.

Straying away from Indian spices, we picked up a pack of caraway seeds, and one of juniper berries while we were there, although doubtless these are readily available here in Sweden, too. Likewise mace is almost certainly stocked in our local supermarket, but, as we’ve yet to think to look up the Swedish name for it, we opted to just add some of that to our list. We bought sumac, which is something I’d heard of, but had never knowingly cooked with, and we ordered a couple of ready-blended spice mixes too: some Jamaican jerk seasoning, and some garam masala. Besides that we also ordered a few stuffs just for the sake of it, because we’d never heard of them and they sounded interesting, so now we have some annato seeds, some cassia bark and some zedoary root, all ready for us to find a recipe that needs them.

The present images are taken from an on-line exhibition entitled Spices, Exotic Flavors and Medicines, hosted by the UCLA’s library, which I found by way of link posted at mysterium a few months ago.

Tivoli

Three Decembers ago, an hour or two after our very first arrival into Copenhagen, my wife, tired by the drive, drowsed away into a nap in our hotel-room. I, at a loose end, ventured out into the unfamiliar streets and walked and walked, following the bright lights and the flow of the crowds as far as the main entrance to Tivoli, Europe’s oldest amusement park…

I have seldom been more enchanted: the place was festooned with a million white lights, its centrepiece a stately weeping-willow beside an ornamental lake whose every tiny twig had been strung with brilliant lights, making for a spectacular cascade of illumination whose reflection shimmered in the calm water below.

Squealing kids rode the rollercoasters, couples skated on the rink, families neatly bundled in coats and scarves and gloves went from stall to stall in the Christmas market, from which were peddled all manner of seasonal toys and trinkets, and sweet confections, and cups of hot gløgg. I stopped for a drink of julpunsch topped off with a warming shot of slivovica. It was a crisply frosty evening, and it seemed that ten thousand thrilled exhalations were clouding the clear, cold air all at once. I felt within me a wide-eyed childlike excitement of a kind I’d hardly felt in years.

When I returned there two evenings later with my wife, and our friends Mr T_____ and Mrs M______, it was still beautiful, of course, but it seemed as though some of the magic had evaporated - this latter evening was overcast, for one thing, and it was nearer closing-time, so there were fewer visitors, and, consequently, the atmosphere was rather more subdued.

We were back in Copenhagen last Thursday, although, sadly, it was just for a few hours which were almost wholly taken up with a shopping-frenzy at the stores along Strøget. Our taxi-ride into the centre of the city did, however, take us close by one of the entrances to Tivoli, but the brief glimpse I caught of the white lights brought with it only a weak and indistinct echo of the joy of three years before.

Note that I copied the photographs above from the official Tivoli web-site and that they are Copyright © Tivoli A/S. Clicking on the images will open larger versions of the same.

Bernini’s Elephant

I happened to see a photograph last week - on a weblog somewhere, but I don’t remember whose - of the obelisk in Piazza di Minerva in Rome, and of Bernini’s elephant-statue at its base. This reminded me of the fascinating sketches reproduced in Franco Borsi’s book about Bernini which show some of the architect’s preliminary ideas about the project…

Although I very much like the audacious plans at bottom centre and right, with the obelisk seeming to be either manhandled into place, or stolen away from it, there is something very satisfying about the design that was eventually realized.

Below is a photograph, lifted from this page, which shows the elephant as it looks today. Clicking on this and the other images will open larger versions of the same.

*

Added much later: I’m much obliged to Sig. Bonacci for the link in his comment below which mentions that the inspiration for Bernini’s design was very likely the above image, one of the woodcuts in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Also, I never knew that the statue was familiarly known as il pulcino della Minerva, where ’pulcino’, rather bizarrely, means ‘chick’ (as in baby chicken) - apparently, as the text in the linked page explains, this is a corruption of porcino, in Roman dialect, purcino, meaning, I think, ‘piggy’.

Precocious Piggy, etc.

There are some delightful images scanned from old children’s books belonging to the University of Wales in Aberyswyth’s Horton Collection on display here. I snipped out a few which caught my eye: these follow below.

From The Headlong Career and Woful Ending of Precocious Piggy by the late Thomas Hood, illustrated by his son; London: Griffith and Farran, 1859. Here we see that Piggy’s ‘wo’ is, at least in part, due to his intemperate drinking.

From The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast by ‘Comus’ [Robert Michael Ballantyne]; London, Thomas Nelson and sons, 1857.

From Dame Wiggins of Lee and her Seven Wonderful Cats : a Humorous Tale, written principally by ‘a lady of ninety’, edited with additional verses by John Ruskin, illustrated by Kate Greenaway; London, George Allen, 1902.

And, lastly, we move from the charming to the rather alarming, as we contemplate the Death and Burial of the Three Little Kittens, London: Dean & son, [n.d.] Seeing as how the death part is dealt with so brusquely, one can only assume that the burial is described in greater detail.

Sinister Santas

We put up the first of our christmastide decorations a few days ago, lagging days behind the rest of the town, which was fully lit up in good time for the first day of Advent. Sadly, the municipal decorations took a bit of a battering during the storm that passed by Friday night through Saturday morning, toppling the fifty-foot julgran (christmastree) that stood in the town square. In the storm’s wake came the season’s first flurries of snow.

Sweden has only partly embraced and assimilated the standard North American version of a North-Pole-based Santa Claus. The equivalent figure here is jultomten, the christmas gnome. Tomte was, traditionally, a little fellow who dwelt under the floorboards in a homestead’s barn, a guardian spirit who looked after the farm’s people and their livestock. All he asked in return was that a bowl of porridge be left out for him at Christmas. In the latter part of the 19th century, tomte began to take on, in the popular imagination, some of the attributes of St. Nicholas, coming to be associated with the bringing of gifts, a rôle previously carried out by the Christmas goat.

Even bearing all this in mind, it’s hard for those of us here carrying Anglo-American cultural baggage not to look at some of the tomtar on display in the shop windows, and think, with a faint shiver, those are some creepy-looking Santas…

The fellow above with the leering grin, for example, stands in a side-window of the store where I bought my last three pairs of shoes. In the front of the same shop stands this chap:

…the entirety of whose misshapen weirdness this picture cannot quite capture. My favourite sinister Santas, however, can be found in a store just across the street, which sells horse-riding accessories and other pet-related paraphenalia. Here is perhaps the very creepiest of the three on display:

Merry Christmas!

Jakob von Gunten

One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys in the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is to say, we shall all be something very small and subordinate in later life…

It is thus that we are introduced to the narrative voice of Jakob von Gunten, the eponymous protagonist of Robert Walser’s 1909 novel. This is a short book, but a resonant one, which is cast in the form of a journal, and which records Jakob’s fluctuating moods, and his experiences as a boarder at a decidedly peculiar school for domestic servants.

Walser traces Jakob’s character by way of a tangle of conflicting desires and contradictory impulses. On one hand, he repeatedly states his wish to minimise the extent of his ambition: he actively wants his life to be of little or no account, and to this end yearns to better submit to the discpline of the school and its lessons, and to ‘learn to know suffering, and how to endure loss’. On the other hand, he boasts of petty insubordinations and impertinences, and he hankers after little luxuries and the money he needs to obtain them, and he savours such pleasures of the big-city life as he can afford. These vacillations are disconcerting. Whilst there is a good deal of irony in all his talk of self-effacement, there are traces too, I suspect, of some heartfelt wish for obscurity and oblivion. Jakob is also prone to occasional flights of fancy, most strikingly in a section of the book which relates an allegorical vision of the Institute’s ‘inner chambers’, through which he is guided by Fräulein Benjamenta, his instructress:

A door appeared and we went, she in front and me close behind, through the opening, into the glorious fire of the light. Never had I seen anything so radiant and promising, so I was really quite stunned. The Fräulein spoke with a smile, in an even more friendly voice: ‘Does the light dazzle you? Then make every effort to endure it. It means joy and one must know how to feel and endure it. You can also think, if you like, that it means your future happiness, but look what’s happening? It’s disappearing. The light is falling to pieces. So, Jakob, you’ll have no long-enduring happiness...’

After a spell in a dismal cellar, meant, we are told, to symbolize poverty and deprivation, and an encounter with ‘the wall of worries,’ von Gunten and his guide emerge once more above ground:

…we found ourselves on a smooth, spacious but narrow track of ice or glass. We floated along it, as if on marvellous skates, and we were dancing too, for like a wave the track rose and fell beneath us. It was delightful. I had never seen anything like it and I shouted for joy, ‘How glorious!’ And overhead the stars were shimmering, in a sky that was strangely all pale blue and yet dark, and the moon with its unearthly light was shining down on us skaters. ‘This is freedom,’ said the instructress, ‘it’s something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…’

Jakob’s opinion of his fellow-boarders is likewise often full of contradiction and caprice, most especially with regard to the stolid Kraus, the teachers’ pet and a model of the perfect servant-to-be, whom von Gunten enviously admires one moment, and is contemptuous of the next.

It is a puzzling book, but one whose mystery seems slightly lessened when one learns the outline of Walser’s life. For many years Walser struggled to support himself with his writing: producing stories, poems and novels when he was able, with sporadic financial help from family and friends, but meanwhile trying his hand at a number of trades, including, in the winter of 1905, a spell at a school for butlers in Berlin. My guess is that the novel reflects Walser’s unsuccessful attempts to reconcile the demands of his art with those of his mundane survival in the grotesque theatre of workaday life. In 1933, suffering from depression, Walser was admitted to the first of two asylums, where he was to spend the remainder of his life, apparently misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. When asked by a visitor there whether he was still writing, he is supposed to have replied I am not here to write, but to be mad.

The images above are stills from a film adaptation of the novel (which I’ve not seen), directed by the oft-namedropped Brothers Quay, which was released under the title Institute Benjamenta in 1995.

Jealous Zebras

We were strolling along Kalendegatan in Malmö four Saturdays ago, in the general direction of our hotel, when I caught sight of a painting through a shopfront window: a square painting of two zebras on a bright red background. I pointed it out to my wife, who, like me, took an immediate shine to this canvas. She suggested we take a closer look. Once inside the shop - whose main business seemed to be in leather-upholstered sofas and chairs - we observed that the painting was for sale, and was, moreover, affordably priced. There were other red-grounded paintings too, featuring other African fauna such as giraffes, but the pair of zebras remained our favourite. When we asked the man at the desk at the back of the store if we could buy the painting, he said that we could, but only if we waited a couple of weeks until he had obtained another canvas from the same artist, with whom he had an on-going arrangement, so that he could keep that same wall-space occupied. We knew that we would soon be returning to Malmö, so it was no trouble for us to agree to the shop-owner’s condition. As we left, the man mentioned to me in passing that the painting was entitled Jealous Zebras.

On our next visit, then, two Fridays ago, we returned to the shop to pick up the jealous twosome. The man from before wasn’t there, but, in his place, there was an elegantly-dressed and bejewelled woman in her late fifties or early sixties who took the canvas off the wall and then attempted to wrap it for us in thick brown paper and a flattened IKEA cardboard box. As she struggled with this task, she first apologised that her English was not so good, before explaining that I am the mother: this is my son’s business and then, at length, exhibiting a sound enough grasp of English idiom, when, frustrated by a length of tape’s refusal to stick, she exclaimed this sucks! We brought the painting home the next day, and hung it in what we thought would be the ideal spot, above the loveseat in the downstairs lounge.

All I know about the artist is that she is a woman - the shop-owner never mentioned a name but used female pronouns when referring to her. Nor do I know what her zebras are jealous about. My theory is that, although they are looking away in the same direction, that they are secretly and obsessively jealous of each other…

Update: 01/02/05—I’m happy to say that the artist of Jealous Zebras has been in touch: her name is Eira Fogelberg and she lives in Helsingborg, here in Sweden. And she has a web-site: click here to see it.