OF has featured at least 6 of André Lhote’s students over the past two years (two of whom had birthdays yesterday: Theodore Johnson and Norah McGuinness), so it’s high time to see Lhote’s own work represented here:
André Lhote: Femme Nue Cubiste, 1930
André Lhote, 1962
Philip Evergood - seen twice before on OF - was also a Lhote student for a while:
Phillip Howard Evergood (American, 1901-1973), “Children and Very Giant Squash”, c. 1962 - oil on canvas
Evergood studied in London, and in Paris with André Lhote. He spent a brief time in Spain, and was influenced by the style of Goya and El Greco. (Source)
André Lhote: L’Escale - Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Getting into this Surreal Sunday:
Helen Perdriat: Femme Asiatique, c. 1930
Man Ray’s portrait of Perdriat…
Helen Perdriat: Aube, 1930
Review of Perdriat show in New York in Time Magazine, Jan. 27, 1930:
“Hélène Perdriat has been a painter for seven years. Before that she grew up in the ancient waterfront town of La Rochelle where the talk of sailors, returned from the tropics, filled her mind with interior horizons of palms and soapy waves and yellow beaches unlike all the beaches she had ever seen. At 20, she went to Paris with an idea of writing. She fell in love with a young man who died of consumption. When she, in the proper tradition of such romance, had fallen consequently ill herself, she felt, for the first time in her life, the need to paint.
It has been said that the success of Perdriat resembles that of a cinema actress, in its brevity, its monetary aspect, its exaggerations. Her first painting, a landscape done with her finger nails and bits of cotton, was immediately acquired by the Queen of Norway. The queer Perdriat legend promptly began, a legend fostered by that somewhat anonymous and powerful group, “her friends,” who apparently had been already convinced of her genius and were waiting only for the opportunity to lavish praises on its fruits.
The Perdriat “legend” is supported by certain facts, remote from the facts of her painting. Well off, she lives expensively, smartly at Auteuil. Her servants are tropical Negroes; her parties are dignified by names, as “Une Nuit Créole.” Her pictures sell as fast as she can turn them off her easel. She has never painted a man, only young women with long, equivocal eyes like her own. She had never painted a blonde girl until she visited Norway two years ago and met one she admired. She once sent to the Salon D’Automne a self portrait, nude except for black silk stockings. For all social functions she plasters her face and paints a masque on it, a masque for whatever mood she is feeling. The brunettes in her paintings are nearly always herself. She has never taken a drawing lesson.
In the pictures which hung last week on the walls of the Chambrun gallery, against the imagined landscape of all Perdriat’s paintings there appeared the figures of languid, self-contained and luxurious girls. Most were portraits of Perdriat or her Norwegian friend; a few were groups; one was a scene from some placid and improbable bawdy house, in which five harlots were drinking and playing cards beneath a cloud of afternoon sun.
Hélène Perdriat has never visited the U. S. She may do so next spring. Her pictures, violently collected in Europe, have not been extensively assembled in the U. S. before last week. Twelve are owned by Arthur Taylor Aldis of Chicago.” (Source)
Helen Perdriat: Les DeMoiselle de Fantasie, 1922 - Oil on Canvas (Source: Trigg Ison Fine Arts)
Meret Oppenheim: White Head, Blue Dress, 1935 - Gipsum relief on wood, wood pieces, oil (Kunstmuseum Basel)
Meret Oppenheim: Miss Gardenia, 1962 - plaster in metal frame with metallic paint(Collection SFMOMA)
Meret Oppenheim: Ma Gouvernante, 1967
Remedios Varo: Insomnio, 1948
During her exile in Mexico Varo made a living painting commercials for pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer (Aspirin, folks?) who commissioned her Insomnia master-piece…
Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, 1936-40 - Textiles over plaster and mixed media (Tate Gallery)
“The blindfolded Angel of Anarchy is loosely based on an earlier painted plaster head. Agar stated that with this new work she wanted to create something ‘totally different, more astonishing, powerful … more malign’. It suggests the foreboding and uncertainty that she felt about the future in the late 1930s. Believing that women are the true Surrealists, Agar wrote: ‘the importance of the unconscious in all forms of Literature and Art establishes the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order.’ (From the Tate Gallery display caption July 2008)
Jane Graverol - L’Esprit Saint (The Holy Spirit), 1965
Jane Graverol was a Belgian surrealist artist. She co-founded the magazines Temps mêlés and Les Lèvres Nues.
Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988): Scylla, 1938 - Oil on board (Tate Gallery)
“This is an apparently simple image of a boat seen between rocks. Colquhoun said that the title refers to the female sea-monster who, according to the ancient legend in Homer’s Odyssey, inhabited narrow straits and devoured passing sailors. However, this reference to mythology was provoked by an unexpected recognition of one form in another, as Colquhoun explained: ‘It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath … it is thus a pictorial pun, or double-image.’” (From the display caption August 2004)
Dora Maar: Untitled (Hand & Shell), 1934
Man Ray: Lee Miller, Paris, 1930
(via The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm in Google Books)
Images of Lee Miller as a young girl…
(via The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm in Google Books)
Tableau at the First International Surrealist Exhibition in London 1936.
In image: Diana Brinton-Lee, Salvador Dalí (in diving suit), Rupert Lee, Paul Éluard, Nusch Éluard, ELT Mesens
Dalí had attempted to deliver his lecture Fantomes paranoiaques authentiques, wearign the diving suit but after a few minutes was near asphyxiation and had to be rescued by poet David Gascoyne: “The eminent surrealist caused a furore when he stepped on stage and began to deliver his lecture in a full deep-sea diving suit. Only minutes later, a shocked audience watched with a mixture of horror and disbelief, as he began to suffocate and had to be prised out of the helmet with pliers.” (Source)
”I just wanted to show that I was plunging deeply into the human mind,” Dalí said…
Image by unknown photographer, via The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm in Google Books
A fuller group photo of the organizers of and some of the participants in the International Surrealist Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London, 1936:
Standing left to right: Rupert Lee, Ruthven Todd, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, E.L.T. Mesens, George Reavey and Hugh Sykes Williams. Seated left to right: Diana Brinton Lee, Nusch Eluard, Eileen Agar, Sheila Legge and an unidentified friend of Dalí
Salvador Dali - a poem by David Gascoyne
The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails; the spring’s
First rivers hide among their hair.
Goliath plunges his hand into the poisoned well
And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain.
The children chasing butterflies turn around and see him there
With his hand in the well and my body growing from his head,
And are afraid. They drop their nets and walk into the wall like smoke.
The smooth plain with its mirrors listens to the cliff
Like a basilisk eating flowers.
And the children, lost in the shadows of the catacombs,
Call to the mirrors for help:
‘Strong-bow of salt, cutlass of memory,
Write on my map the name of every river.’
A flock of banners fight their way through the telescoped forest
And fly away like birds towards the sound of roasting meat.
Sand falls into the boiling rivers through the telescopes’ mouths
And forms clear drops of acid with petals of whirling flame.
Heraldic animals wade through the asphyxia of planets,
Butterflies burst from their skins and grow long tongues like plants,
The plants play games with a suit of mail like a cloud.
Mirrors write Goliath’s name upon my forehead,
While the children are killed in the smoke of the catacombs
And lovers float down from the cliffs like rain.
From Interview w. Gascoyne:
‘I met Roland Penrose through Paul Eluard, his long-time friend. Roland had a house in Hampstead and a committee of surrealists met there to plan the International Surrealist Exhibition that was held at the New Burlington Gallery in London. This was in 1936. I remember Dali gave a lecture in a new diving suit, a proper diving suit complete with metal helmet. He had one of those lantern shows that didn’t work very well and it got very hot inside the suit and I remember having to go out and try and find a spanner to get him out of the suit’
—David Gascoyne
Image: David Gascoyne’s notebook - British Library
“David Gascoyne spent the years just before World War II in Paris, where he became friendly with Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Pierre Jean Jouve. His poetry of this period was published in Poems 1937-1942 (1943) with illustrations by the artist Graham Sutherland.
His poem Requiem, dedicated to the future victims of war, was written to be set to music by his friend Priaulx Rainier. Her Requiem was premiered in 1956. She died on Gascoyne’s 70th birthday, 10 October 1986.
He returned to France after the war and lived there on and off until the mid 1960s. His work from the 1950s appeared in A Vagrant and Other Poems (1950), and Night Thoughts (1956). Interestingly, this later work had moved away from surrealism towards a more metaphysical and religious poetry. After suffering a mental breakdown, Gascoyne returned to England and spent the rest of his life on the Isle of Wight. He appears to have written little from that point on. Publication continued due to various ‘rediscoveries’ of his works, with a number of collections and selections of his work from Oxford University Press, Enitharmon and other imprints. Two books of his journals were returned to him after having been lost for some time and were published in two separate hardbacks by Alan Clodd at Enitharmon Press. When a third book was found, a new collection including the additional material was edited by Lucien Jenkins for Skoob Books Publishing. For the latter edition David Gascoyne himself provided what he called a ‘postface’, one of the most extended pieces of writing from his later years.
It was in Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight that Gascoyne met his wife, Judy Lewis, in a remarkable coincidence. Judy explains:
They married in 1975. David Gascoyne died on 25 November 2001 at the age of 85.” (Wiki)
September Sun: 1947
Magnificent strong sun! In these last days
So prodigally generous of pristine light
That’s wasted only man’s sight who will not see
And by self-darkened spirits from whose night
Can rise no longer orison or praise
Let us consume in fire unfed like yours
And may the quickened gold within me come
To mintage in due season, and not be
Transmitted to no better end than dumb
And self-sufficient usury. These days and years
May bring the sudden call to harvesting,
When in the fields man’s labours only yield
Glitter and husks, then with an angrier sun may He
Who first with His gold seed the sightless field
of Chaos planted, all our trash to cinders bring.
(Source)
David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism, 1935…
Journal entry on 23rd April 1939: ‘The essential nature of the experience being Negation. The void, das Nichts, Nada, le Néant. Practically the only image that presents itself at all strongly to me is a black vacuum in (or through) which two eyes are fixedly staring’ and searching for the right tone to write poems about man’s present spiritual crisis.” - David Gascoyne, Collected Journals
Standing Figure, by Graham Sutherland, 1952 - Private Collection
David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937- 1942 (Poetry London Editions 1943) was illustrated by Graham Sutherland…
A quick tour of the birthdays before we return to art:
Irish-born writer Bram Stoker, who lived in London for a great part of his life, managing the Lyceum Theatre, was born on Nov. 8, 1847 (d. 1912)…
Now famous as the author of Dracula, Stoker was better known in his life-time as the personal assistant and biographer of actor Henry Irving. In 1897 Stoker’s now immortal horror novel appeared: The original 529-page manuscript of Dracula, believed to have been lost, was found in a barn in northwestern Pennsylvania during the early 1980s. It included the typed manuscript with many corrections, and “handwritten on the title page was “THE UN-DEAD.” The author’s name was shown at the bottom as Bram Stoker. Author Robert Latham notes, “the most famous horror novel ever published, its title changed at the last minute.” (Wiki)
Photo of Stoker, via Illustrated London News (Source: The History of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Virtual Museum)
Museum caption: “Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, lived at several places in Chelsea including 18 St Leonard Terrace where his blue plaque has been placed. But the most interesting story relates to the time when he lived at 27 Cheyne Walk. Walking along the Embankment he witnessed a man falling into the river. He rushed to the rescue and took the drowning man to his house, laying him out on the kitchen table where he expired. His wife Florence, previously engaged to Oscar Wilde, was not amused and the event led to marital discord.”
Florence Stoker, née Balcombe
Birthday of Martha Gellhorn (Nov. 8, 1908 - 1998), novelist, travel writer, war correspondent and all-round tough cookie - and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway…
Photo of Martha and Ernest dancing at their wedding party in 1940 - Sun Valley, Idaho - by Robert Capa…
Good post with Gellhorn quotes from last year on OF - here’s a favourite: “It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”
Can’t resist slipping in another Robert Capa shot of Papa:
Ernest Hemingway, editing For Whom the Bell Tolls - Sun Valley, Idaho, 1940
Masculinity Studies 101: Write a five page essay explaining how Alain Delon exudes cool masculinity in a non-gay fashion, despite wearing a white blazer with a carnation in his lapel. (Alternate task: Argue why Alain Delon is the perfect gay icon…)
Alain D. is 74 today, and still handsome…
Still from La Piscine, 1969: (L to R) Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, Jane Birkin
Charles Demuth (Nov. 8, 1883 - 1935): Turkish Bath with Self Portrait (1918)
One of many gay themed works by Demuth, perhaps inspired by his own ‘cruising’ of the Lafayette Baths in NYC (which b.t.w. were administered by Ira and George Gershwin around 1916)…
Another explicit work by Charles Demuth:
Three Sailors, 1917
Charles Demuth also did more allegorical work, for instance:
Incense of a New Church, 1921
See also Demuth’s ‘greatest hit’ - last year on OF - I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold
Early Charles Demuth, Cubist/Precisionist:
Bermuda Landscape, 1917 - Watercolor and pencil on paper mounted on cardboard (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden - 8 works)
William Stroud (Nov. 8, 1812 - 1889): Sower’s Book, Stationery and Variety Store, Norristown, Pennsylvania (1/2 pl.), 1853 - Daguerreotype, fully silvered
Earlie Hudnall, Jr. (b. Nov. 8, 1946): Lady with Pup, 1990 - Belize
“Earlie Hudnall, Jr. was born in 1946 and grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He developed an appreciation for personal history through his grandmother, who passed on to him stories of family and community as they sat together on the porch in the summer. Years later, while majoring in art at Texas Southern, he received further encouragement to draw on his own experience from the artist John Biggers, who had founded the university’s art department and urged his students to explore their African-American heritage. As the school yearbook editor, he went out into the community to document the lives of the people in the wards of Houston. The intimacy that he found among neighborhood residents in the predominantly African-American Third Ward area reminded Hudnall of the sense of community he had known as a boy in Hattiesburg. As an artist, Hudnall is widely praised for his ability to capture the emotion in a seemingly mundane moment. Hudnall views his subjects as universal icons, capable of conveying stories about family and community regardless of their race. Hudnall is the university photographer for Texas Southern University in Houston. The Wittliff Gallery is proud to own ten of his images to date.” - SOURCE: Amon Carter Museum website, and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis.
Also:
Flipping Boy, 1983 - gelatin silver print on paper (Smithsonian)
“Hudnall directs us to the boy’s acrobatics in the street as an expression of the beauty found in everyday or humble circumstances. Upside down, the boy takes in Houston’s urban jumble, a phenomenon that is no less confusing to the viewer right side up. Old and new, poor and rich are sharply juxtaposed in a city that makes uneasy neighbors of historically black neighborhoods, such as the Fourth Ward pictured here, and gleaming commercial skyscrapers.” - Smithsonian label
Looking Out, 1991 - gelatin silver print (Smithsonian)
“Hudnall finds inspiration in the beauty and pride in everyday life in African American communities in the South. This youngster’s stare is so direct that he seems to look at and through us, a glance that suggests he is wiser than his age. Completely at ease in his surroundings, his posture, dress, and expression appear spontaneous, but actually the image is carefully composed.” - Smithsonian label
It’s an early nighty-night from OF today - sleep tight with this Nocturne:
Karl Struss (1886–1981): Brooklyn Bridge, Nocturne, ca. 1912–13 - Palladium print
© 1983 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Oops, forgot the goodnight story:
Therefore, the best advice remains to accept everything, to act like a heavy mass even if you feel you are being blown away, to let no unnecessary step to be enticed from you, to regard others with the gaze of an animal, to feel no remorse, in short, to force down any remnants of this ghostly life, that is, to multiply the final quiet of the grave and to let nothing but this remain.
A characteristic motion in such a state is running your little finger over your eyebrows.
From Decisions by Franz Kafka (found in the little 1913 volume entitled Betrachtung - translated by Kevin Blahut as Contemplation, 1996 - Twisted Spoon Press, Prague)
