Gran & Granddad

Emerging weakly from the fug of post-Christmas idleness, I present here a pair of lovely pictures sent to me by my mother of Gladys & Bert, her parents, my Gran & Granddad…

Bert died a few years ago & is much missed. He & Gladys had been married for over sixty years. Click on the pictures to see them enlarged.

Circulus

Earlier today I found my way to an interesting on-line exhibition entitled Der Welt Lauf, hosted at the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut’s website at the Ruhr-Universität, Bochum. The physical exhibition was staged as long ago as the summer of ’98 (and even then had been transferred to Bochum after an earlier stay in Stuttgart), so I should be grateful the site’s been kept on-line this long. The exhibition is devoted to sequences of allegorical, Mannerist engravings. I’ve picked out one such series, Circulus Vicissitudinis Rerum Humanarum, engraved after designs by the painter Maarten de Vos (1532-1603), for re-display here.

This sequence comprises a title-page, followed by six other engravings: the first, Divitiæ, Wealth, is succeeded by a splendid Superbia (Pride, the second engraving). Pride, in turn, provokes Bellum (War, the third engraving), whose consequence is Pauperies (Poverty, the fourth engraving). Out of poverty, however, comes Humilis Animus (Humility of the Soul, I guess - engraving no. five), which in turn brings Pax (Peace, the final engraving). The Circulus in the series’ title implies, of course, that out of peace will come wealth, and so on…

I was surprised that I couldn’t recall having heard of de Vos before: he seems to be a fascinating artist. He studied under Tintoretto in Venice, and collaborated with Brueghel in Rome before returning to his native Antwerp, eventually becoming that city’s ‘leading Italianate artist’. ‘The altarpieces that make up the bulk of his output are typically Mannerist in their strained, slender elegance’ says a very brief on-line biographical sketch, an assessment which strikes me as a little dismissive.

Der Welt Lauf features other graphic series after designs by de Vos, including depictions of the seven planets, and of the four temperaments and the four elements. The present images are slightly reduced copies of those on the Bochum site: click to see them enlarged.

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More Belgian Art

Presented below are some more images from the book Impressionism to Symbolism: the Belgian Avant-Garde 1880-1900, edited by MaryAnne Stevens and Robert Hoozee, (previously mentioned two entries ago). All of the images are details: click on them to see the pictures in full. The first is a drawing by Jean Delville (1867-1953), who began his career as a realist painter, but who was soon drawn towards symbolism and all things esoteric & occult. To my mind, his major paintings suffer from bombast & humourlessness, but this drawing, apparently done in Florence, is quite charming.

Above and below are works in pastel by William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935), a scion of an ancient, noble French family, largely self-taught as an artist, who produced a number of marvellously atmospheric works during the course of the 1890s. He is supposed to have said ‘To make a painting, all you need to do is to take some paints, draw some lines, and fill the rest up with feelings.’

Above is a painting by Alfred ‘Willy’ Finch (1854-1930), a friend of James Ensor’s from Ostend, who, by the way, is the man depicted in Ensor’s painting Russian Music, below. Finch’s work was strongly influenced by his exposure to Monet’s impressionism (in 1886), and by Seurat’s pointillism the following year. Finch worked almost exclusively on landscapes, and the picture above, entitled Box at the Theatre, is an elaborately-worked and enigmatic exception to this rule. Below is a drawing by Xavier Mellery (1845-1921), several of whose quietly meditative works attempted to depict l‘âme des choses, ‘the soul of things’. Mellery’s work exerted a strong influence on the young Fernand Khnopff.

Georges Le Brun (1873-1914) produced tranquilly ‘intimist’ interior scenes (such as the one above) not unlike those of Mellery. Like Mellery, his signature style was, in part, a product of a period spent living and working in a small, isolated community, in Le Brun’s case, a tiny village in the Ardennes called Xhoffrais. Below is an impressionistic, and wonderfully chilly scene by Félicien Rops (1833-1898). Rops is best-remembered for his satiric and erotic graphic works, but he was also, apparently, a prolific landscape painter.

The watercolour above, Robbery and Prostitution Dominate the World, is more characteristic of Rops’ graphic style. Also typical is its portrayal of ‘Woman’ as irresistably venal, perverse and destructive. The piece was developed from a series of illustrations Rops made for Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s book Les Diaboliques. Below is a striking self-portrait by the self-taught Ostend artist Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946).

Lastly, above is a nocturnal scene of Spilliaert’s that I have posted once before. I probably wouldn’t have bothered putting together an entry on this subject at all if it weren’t for the (relatively) recent closure of the excellent ArtMagick site, which, for years, had comprehensive coverage of the Belgian symbolists (and much else besides), backed up with a very good selection of images. It’s very sad that they’ve had to close…

Brief Reflections on Spam

Keeping a weblog like this, one is faced with a near-continuous, and, it seems, ever-increasing flow of comment-spam. It can be dispiriting, and on occasion I feel like a beleaguered citizen of that underground city in the Matrix movies, only without the assurance of having Keanu Reeves on my side, desperately contending with a mechanised yet seemingly intelligent spambot assault with only a sketchy knowledge of the relevant technical whatnots to help me. On the other hand, I also sometimes admire the spammers’ resourcefulness and cunning. Alert and tireless as mosquitoes in a dark room in which we are trying to sleep, they buzz annoyingly past our ears and effortlessly evade our clumsy attempts to swat them. Of course, it is easier to admire the marvel of a parasite’s specialised physiology when it is not biting us, so I have very belatedly taken a few first steps to spamguard this site.

To my mind the most impressive (and, at the same time, the most repulsive) manifestation of this phenomenon are the cascades of porno-spam that intermittently swamp the comments here, that, if they were real SPAM®, of the kind that comes in a can, would be an unnaturally bright shade of pink, and would smell decidedly ‘off’. These comments’ unnerving titles and descriptions allude to interests and practices that vary from the impossibly specialized to the downright illegal. These are texts that bring to mind both the combinatorial methods of the OuLiPo and the compulsion-to-shock of a young Apollinaire or Bataille. From the latest such accumulation to fall on these pages, the commenter-name ‘Hovercraft Scat’ stood out as being exemplary in this regard: pseudo-random combinatorializing with a truly surreal effect. I’m not at all sure, though, that I feel grateful for such thoughts & mental images as these that never would have occurred to me otherwise.

I’d prefer to maintain at least the illusion of a dialogue here, and would be unhappy if the spam problem ever became bad enough that I would feel obliged to disable comments, as many have already done, or even to impede them by way of some kind of registration or approval mechanism. Thinking about it, I would say that it is even in the spammers’ best interests to moderate their actions, as a healthy and sustainable population of comment-friendly ‘host’ weblogs is their best guarantee of sustaining their own parasitic activities. I’d say that we should be worried if ever these bloodsuckers stop trying to bite us.

I must not omit to mention that these unsolicited comments are in no way connected with the fine food products pictured: I lifted the images from this page at the Hormel Foods site, and beg that company’s pardon for discussing unsolicited comments in proximity with images of their excellent canned meats.

Ensor vs Khnopff

In Brussels, in 1886, at the third annual exhibition organised by Les XX (‘the twenty’), a society of (mostly) progressive artists established in opposition to the state-sponsored salon system that had previously monopolised the exposure of new artists’ work, two young painters exhibited canvases with vaguely similar subject-matter: James Ensor’s Russian Music and Fernand Khnopff’s Listening to Schumann. Details from the two pictures follow: click on the details to see the images in full.

Of the two works, Khnopff’s received much more attention and acclaim. The poet Emile Verhaeren wrote essays about it in the review L’Art Moderne. Ensor was furious, and suspected plagiarism: he’d painted Russian Music in 1881, when it had been exhibited (under another title) in the official Brussels salon. Ensor changed the title after a series of concerts in January 1885 had introduced Belgian audiences to the music of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff for the first time. Listening to Schumann dated from 1883. Ensor wrote a letter of protest to the secretary of Les XX, Octave Maus, but was evidently placated, as both he and Khnopff continued to participate in the group’s exhibitions until its dissolution in 1893.

Ensor’s complaint seems absurd, to my eyes at least, owing to the many dissimilarities between the two works. This, perhaps, is only so obvious with hindsight, given the divergent trajectories of the two painters’ subsequent careers. The quickest of glances at the remaining pairs of details shown here should, I think, bring to mind chalk juxtaposed with cheese. Ensor is rough where Khnopff is smooth; Khnopff is subdued, dreamy, melancholy, where Ensor is garish, abrasive, satiric. Both artists were innovators, but Ensor, being perhaps further ahead of his time, had to struggle longer and harder for reward and acclaim.

From 1900, Khnopff painted less and less, devoting most of his energy into the house in Brussels, built according to his own plans, and decorated following to strict rules such that white, blue and gold were the only colours permitted inside the building, whereeas the external doors, windowframes, etc., were all painted black (compare this with the colour-scheme in the last of the present images, below). He died in 1921: Ensor outlived him by twenty-eight years, and continued painting well into his eighties. In 1929, his tranition from outsider to recognised public figure was complete, when he was granted the title of Baron.

I took most of the information repeated above, and all of the present images from my copy of a 1994 book entitled Impressionism to Symbolism: The Belgian Avant-Garde 1880-1900, which also served as the catalogue to an exhibition staged that year at the Royal Academy.

‘A Sunday at the Pool’, etc.

I began reading Gil Courtemanche’s novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (translated from the French by Patricia Claxton) back in September. I picked it up from the Hamrelius bookshop in Malmö, not long before it moved from the Hansa centre to its new location on Stora Nygatan. The book recounts the experiences of Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian film-maker on assignment in Rwanda, ostensibly to work for the barely-functioning state-run TV station, but meanwhile attempting to splice together a film about AIDS. Valcourt is a guest at the Hôtel des Mille-Collines in Kigali, a bubble of luxury in a decidedly third-world city. He observes the obnoxious behaviour of his fellow-expatriates, laments the self-interested attitude of many of the diplomats and aid-workers he meets, makes a few friends among the local (mostly Tutsi) élite, and falls in love with a waitress at the hotel, Gentille, who looks like a Tutsi, but has Hutu blood. These events are played out in an atmosphere of thickening fear and hatred, as Rwanda skids towards the April ‘94 genocide. The book is a fictionalised memoir drawn from its author’s own experiences in Rwanda, and this doubtless serves to intensify its urgency and descriptive power. As a novel, it’s far from perfect, but the appalling, underlying story is told well enough to provide ample distraction from its defects. Despite his grisly subject matter, Courtemanche takes pains to point out, and to celebrate the ferocious, joyous lust-for-life in the Rwandans he knew and loved, and their insistence on living well in the face of poverty, disease and violent death. While I’d hesitate to claim that any book is necessary reading, A Sunday at the Pool merits such a description more than most. It is certainly a strong and a purposeful book.

By way of sharp contrast, there is nothing obviously necessary about Michael Cisco’s novel, The Tyrant, which I started reading at about the same time as A Sunday at the Pool. Indeed it is a splendidly superfluous book, a kind of lavish, unwanted gift. Where A Sunday at the Pool affirms Life in the jaws of death, The Tyrant glorifies Death in spite of life. It is defiantly morbid, and marvellously written in a peculiarly ornate, richly adjectival style that I found very much to my liking. The story concerns a fifteen-year-old girl named Ella, crippled by polio but academically and mediumistically gifted, who is invited to join an unorthodox research program run by the enigmatic Dr Belhoria. This program has as its subject an almost-catatonic patient who nevertheless posseses intensely powerful psychic abilities. The plot is rather weak, but the book is sustained more than anything by a persistent atmosphere of weird unease, skilfully maintained by its author, that unfolds like a succession of interconnected bad dreams. This is a ripe work of dark, literary fantasy that I would warmly recommend to any of you with a taste for this kind of thing.

Most recently, I read the latest of Haruki Murakami’s novels to appear in English, Kafka on the Shore (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel). Well, it won’t officially appear until January, but I was impatient to read the book, and bought an advance proof-copy of it (through abebooks), from a vendor able to overlook the Not for resale blurb on the front cover. The first of the novel’s two converging storylines introduces us to Kafka Temura, a 15-year-old boy who runs away from his home in Tokyo to a seaside town in southern Japan. The second storyline follows the adventures of Nakata, a man in his sixties, who, since a mysterious incident in his childhood, has been a simpleton (albeit a good-natured one). Alas, having gone to such trouble to obtain this book, and having paid a little over the odds for it, I was rather disappointed by it. The usual complement of fascinating weirdness introduced by Murakami’s deployment of supernatural incidents and individuals, is shadowed by a more awkward, and perhaps unintentional strangeness - the story’s flow seems forced in places, and the main narrative voice, Kafka’s, sounds a little too much like a man in his fifties unsuccessfully re-imagining life from a teenager’s point-of-view. The book has a discordant tone about it that I don’t recall sensing in any other of Murakami’s novels. Despite this off-key feel, it’s still an involving and readable tale, but I for one enjoyed it much less than I did Sputnik Sweetheart, say, or the stories in the collection After The Quake.