What I Assume

After dinner Friday night the six of us packed ourselves back into the car: John Krutsch, Marc Hugentobler, Scott Leslie, David Lloyd, Chris Lott, and myself (in the hatchback). On route I gorged myself on a conversation of writers and books with Chris and Scott, all the while cramped in the absolute rear of the car. When next I breathed fresh air we were at the Phoenix Art Museum, an excellent surprise courtesy Marc’s wise planning! Chris, Scott, and myself headed up to the European and American wings, where I made the following notes and observations (assisted by Chris and Scott’s own insight and experience):

• William Merrit Chase’s vivid and sensual beauties, including The White Rose, where the woman seems to float above the ground on an eerily dark background. This portrait surprised Scott and I as it was nearly life-size, but done in pastel.
• Picasso’s fearful symmetry.
• Thomas Wilmer Dewey’s Iris.
• Jean Baptiste Camillle-Carot’s Souvenir de Ville d’Avray.
• Delpy grabs industry’s subtle invasion.
• 

  Jean Leon Gerome’s famous Pollice Verso (Thumbs down), featuring a faceless, gold-masked gladiator victorious over his still-struggling opponent. Scott and I spent some time observing the differing classes in the audience and their responses to the scenario, which included bloodlust, pity, apathy, condescension, and horror. I noted the gold splendor in the hardness of metal of the victor contrasting with the softness of his now relaxed flesh. His opponent is not relaxed, however, yet his flesh remains pink and active compared to the still and observably gray skin of his fallen colleagues. Even the color of the metal armor of the victor against the fallen seems contrasting, from a clear and bright gold to a dulling and simple copper.

• Antonio Rizzi captures sensuality and the frustrating and inescapable power of woman to control distance in A Woman Reading.
• What is the story behind William Hamilton’s The Wolves Descending from the Alps? The comatose belle? The anthropomorphic lupines? The monstrous, feral expression of the hero? The purely frightened, entrapped horse? Does this refer to “Winter” from The Seasons by James Thomson?

Corzas’s La Familia

The most significant work for me in the museum was Francisco Corzas’s La Familia (1964).

Though this photograph doesn’t convey the strong sensation that the actual painting does, it can convey how this overtly spectral portrait of a family invokes ancestry and death. The family members all are translucent, suggesting their own transient state and invoking their interminable connections to the past. I made some guesses as to the roles of the family members:

• In the center is a father who has no pupils. His lips turn to teeth as one distances one’s self from the work. Scott suggested there may be a face emerging from his torso.
• The father’s role is central, but to the left is an elderly figure, a grandmother who looks on with wisdom and experience, perhaps even judgement.
• To the father’s right is a woman, probably the mother, who’s eyes look heavenward–an expression that struck me as being as helpless as it was hopeful.
• The child on the left is clearly frightened as the father’s hand rests on his shoulder. His small shape seems to grow larger at a distance, even gaining a halo. His figure is dark and brackish, and Chris suggested his expression and pose is like an evil cherub.
• The child on the right looks off the canvas, perhaps to the future. His bright colors suggest hope, yet the mule he rids on is braying, almost as if he senses the phantasmagoria that pervades the painting.
• Indeed, with perhaps an exception for the father’s vacant eyes the mule most suggests death, as his snout quickly becomes skeletal.

The title La Familia describes those painted, but it also indicates the connection to life and death and ancestry that the family provides. But it also reminds me of the noun “familiar“, referring to an animal-like demon or spirit that accompanies one throughout one’s life, even serving as an assistant or an aid. Like such a familiar our family so imprints itself on our psyches that even when absent it is present, looking over our shoulders, scrutinizing, or praising, or wishing us the best.

While in Phoenix, Arizona this week we stumbled upon a local Southwestern restaurant and were herded into a side room wherein I was struck by a series of achromatic linocuts that adorned the walls. I asked the proprietor who the artist was and he said they were Andy Chuka prints, but noted that though Chuka had been a Phoenix native there was no available information on his woodcuts to be found. The prints were irresistible, and so I snapped off some photos to archive here:

I spent some time this morning searching the web for info on Chuka and found nearly nothing that was verifiable. I began a stub on Wikipedia anyway until I can get to the library to continue the research. In the meantime, if anyone knows more about Andy Chuka or his works, please comment here.

I had nearly a full day open following the MoodleMoot SFo, and with @kenwoodward claiming the rental car, I decided to visit one of my favorite museum’s at The Palace of the Legion of Honor.

I arrived just before the museum opened, giving me time to stroll the grounds and observe a number of bouncing, velveteen birds amongst the lawns and flowers. After 9:30 I hobbled down to the cafe, where I spun out a couple sudoku puzzles under a hot mug of tea and apple strudel. Then it was on to the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities before heading upstairs to the main galleries.

On the main floor, the first piece that I took notice of was one I’d been curious about before, but never contemplated beyond it’s surface: Gaspere Traversi’s The Fortune Teller, ca. 1760. I’ve not had any training in art history, but offer a short critique with an amateur’s interest:

mharrsch through Creative Commons licensing

Traversi’s The Fortune Teller shows a mirror of two women, one old, the other ostensibly young, but with subtle signs of oncoming age. Though the subjects are distinctly client and reader, wealthy and poor, the women are reflections of each other. One tells what the other wants to hear, and like many psychics, through simple tricks of confidence, they are of one mind; they wear the same greedy smile; and, as we see just below the palm, they posess a common purse.

Traversi has portrayed them in inverted postures, like two sides of the same coin: their heads leaning in together, touching near the crown present a near identical physical arrangement. And though one is rich and the other poor, their clothing shares similar visual connections: the fortune teller’s blue head scarf matches her client’s blue hair ribbons; as the younger woman’s white sleeves press out from beneath her dress, so do the sleeves of the fortune teller, though with less pomp and whiteness, recalling age and use. Similarly, the gray hair of the old woman can find it’s roots in the graying roots of the younger. Finally, curiously, both women wear pearl earrings.

The reflective quality of these women is not so much dichotomous to me as it is foreboding; like a still-life, these women of singular mind incarnate aging and superficiality, and through this I feel a moral warning. Perhaps it is through irony, for as the young woman looks to the future, she looks only to fantasy; whereas the reality of her future is apparent not in her own palm, but in the face, hair, dress, and posture of her counterpart

The old man peering over the fortune teller’s shoulder is something of a mystery, clutching the eerily-eyed bird-head of his cane, but I think this to tells something of the narrative: we might assume he is the fortune teller’s husband, and at the risk of being corrected by other details I’ve overlooked, we might infer that the younger woman is unmarried, and seeking counsel on her prospects for taking a husband. His presence is a conspicuous disparity to what otherwise stands as a strongly symmetrical composition, and so an absence of a “reflection” on the younger woman’s side of the canvas is notable.

Though presumed to be of separate lineage, the women in The Fortune Teller are connected intergenerationally. I see a similar pattern in Traversi’s The Merry Company, where the old, somewhat disheveled man in the foreground grins his gums and lifts his hat, while in the background a younger verdion of the man grins with a younger set of teeth, but the same cheery and hopeful eyes.

Other works of notable impact on this visit:

• Chihuly’s Sea Blue and Green Tower
• Rodin’s The Sculptor and His Muse
• Magical Stele (Egyptian)
• Dandre-Bardon’s Diana and Endymion
• Gerard’s La Comtesse del Morel-Vinde and Her Daughter
• Lear’s Masada on the Dead Sea
• Bazzani’s Temple of Saturn
• Redin’s illustrations for Flaubert’s La tentation de Sainte-Antoine
• Picasso’s illustration (not the etching) Peintre et modèle tricotant
• van Noordt’s Susanna and the Elders
• And, as always, any portrait by Raeburn

Though my visit was cut a bit short by the arrival of my colleague, it was one of my most satisfying visits to this museum, and on several instances I found myself whispering that I’d gladly live another and another lifetime wrapped in the alternating mixture of discipline, reverence, and decadence as a painter.

Girding

Where water is turned to coffee we are coaxed
to celebrate alone or in our pairs:
This spacious café,
the shameless embraces of its painted prostitute walls;
the burps and bleats as solo someone paces
its hard wood floors; the barista with dreadlocks pours,
splashes brown spots on her Fair Trade shirt
made elsewhere, in sweat shops.

Across the way there sits a man with close-cropped gray,
drafting landscape for his flip.
I'd say he's fine to be around; you'd guess
he's quiet and suppressed, except
his shorts, like daisy dukes, show his wintered thighs;
he's kept them toned in the gym--
a lifetime member, rich from real estate.

The mad Marxist with his
poetry masturbatory
telling how (immune from work) on Monday
They protested with patent slogan signs
and Orwellian chants.  He surely will rebel
in the quiet safety of the voting booth,
rejecting the benign oligarchy
that conservatives and capitalists also reject.

I can't see her but I hear her, the performance artist
explains her argument to the nodding of "I knows"
knows nothing of war, or it's dichotomous power
instead she shows mere fancies
of some black blooded nightmare,
nascent only by the dram she needs to dream.

Passive friends (and any ghosts
who have in passing heard these thoughts),
if you've grown strong off angst as I have,
do not let me rise from this chair;
for I am the Samson who has cut his locks
and woven them to cords, casting out
the poetasters and dilettantes from coffee houses and book stores.
I shall lay my hand on these who thieve and hoard
what they would have inherited from their fathers--
noble warriors who served the Nine,
men who would not confuse maidenheads with madames.

These children take, they do not yield
but in their own interest.
Only if I hold a mirror may we exchange
that which God intended to be given
freely for all, no service for the self:
Aesthetics, imagination, invention--
weapons that must liberate all men to be
artists of themselves.

I will not be content to sit and see
myself apart from these who's space I share, so
say, spirits, if I should go
out the door or to the bar where homage is paid
to a whore, a brass machine, a golden tenth,
a muse-like plastic mannequin,
for whose blank attention these selling souls compete?

Ignore the tempting scents, forget the noise:
you may whisper;
I listen.