Addendum VI

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895): When Every Season Was Spring

Hide and Seek, 1873

Butterfly Hunt, 1874

In a Park, 1874

In the Garden at Maurecourt, ca. 1884

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

Berthe Morisot

Verso XIII

Sarah Lucas (b. 1962): Sarah, Sarah, Quite Contrary

Self-Portrait With Fried Eggs, 1996

Sarah Lucas may not be the most talked about of the Young British Artists but she has always been one of the most important. At the beginning of the 90s, while women were trading shoulder pads for Wonderbras and cocktails for pints of lager, Sarah Lucas swapped feminist theory for Page Three.

Lucas challenged the street slang used to describe women by turning it into physical forms. She replaced anger and embarrassment with humour, portraying breasts as melons or fried eggs, catching public attention with hard-hitting sculpture and spreads from The Sun. In making physical representations of sexual slang and celebrating stories about rampant dwarves she moved the discussion further along then any amount of protest art.

From the BBC Collective website, which recently folded.

Bonus Track: What's Inside a Girl? - The Cramps (from A Date With Elvis)

Notre Folie

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) - Cabaret (plus details), c. 1875-7

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.

Put down the knitting,
The book and the broom.
Time for a holiday.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.

Come taste the wine,
Come hear the band.
Come blow your horn,
Start celebrating;
Right this way,
Your table's waiting

No use permitting
some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away.
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret!

I used to have a girlfriend
known as Elsie
With whom I shared
Four sordid rooms in Chelsea

She wasn't what you'd call
A blushing flower . . .
As a matter of fact
She rented by the hour.

The day she died the neighbors
came to snicker:
"Well, that's what comes
from to much pills and liquor."

But when I saw her laid out like a Queen
She was the happiest . . . corpse
I'd ever seen.

I think of Elsie to this very day.
I'd remember how'd she turn to me and say:
"What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret."

And as for me,
I made up my mind back in Chelsea,
When I go, I'm going like Elsie.

Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
Isn't that long a stay.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Only a Cabaret, old chum,
And I love a Cabaret!

Cabaret (lyrics) by Fred Ebb

Musique du Jour: Ute Lemper, Padam . . . Padam . . .

Padam . . . Padam . . .

Cet air qui m'obsède jour et nuit
Cet air n'est pas né d'aujourd'hui
Il vient d'aussi loin que je viens
Traîné par cent mille musiciens
Un jour cet air me rendra folle
Cent fois j'ai voulu dire pourquoi
Mais il m'a coupé la parole
Il parle toujours avant moi
Et sa voix couvre ma voix

Padam . . . padam . . . padam . . .
Il arrive en courant derrière moi
Padam . . . padam . . . padam . . .
Il me fait le coup du "souviens-toi"
Padam . . . padam . . . padam . . .
C'est un air qui me montre du doigt
Et je traîne après moi comme un drole d'erreur
Cet air qui sait tout par cœur

Il dit: Rappelle-toi tes amours
Rappelle-toi puisque c'est ton tour
'y a pas d'raison pour qu'tu n'pleures pas
Avec tes souvenirs sur les bras . . .
Et moi je revois ceux qui restent
Mes vingt ans font battre tambour
Je vois s'entrebattre des gestes
Toute la comédie des amours
Sur cet air qui va toujours

Padam . . . padam . . . padam . . .
Des "je t'aime" de quatorze-juillet
Padam . . . padam . . . padam . . .
Des "toujours" qu'on achète au rabais
Padam . . . padam . . . padam . . .
Des "veux-tu" en voilà par paquets
Et tout ca pour tomber juste au coin d'la rue
Sur l'air qui m'a reconnue

Écoutez le chahut qu'il me fait

Comme si tout mon passé défilait

Faut garder du chagrin pour après
J'en ai tout un solfège sur cet air qui bat . . .
Qui bat comme un cœur de bois . . .

Lyrics by Henri Contet and music by Norbert Glanzberg

Addendum XV

Edgar Degas (1834-1917): Three Canaries of the Café-Concerts

Café-Concert, Les Ambassadeurs, 1876-77

Café-Concert, La Chanson du chien, c. 1875-7

Café Singer, 1878

Coda V

Édith Piaf (1915-1963): Madame "Padam"

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition XII

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944): Primarily an Abstractionist

Composition A, Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue, 1920

Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921

Composition blanc, rouge et jaune, 1936

Composition No. 8, 1939-42

Composition No. 10, 1939-1942

New York City, 1941-42

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means we are only line and color.

In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort.

The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore the object must be eliminated from the picture.

Curves are so emotional.

Everything is expressed through relationships.

Intellect confuses intuition.

Nature or, that which I see, inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation, still just an external foundation, of things . . .

Reality manifests itself as constant and objective - independent of us, but as changeable in space and time. Consequently, its reflection in us contains both properties. Mixed up in our mind, these properties are confused and we do not have a proper image of reality.

The purer the artist's "mirror" is, the more true reality reflects in it. Overseeing the historical culture of art, we must conclude that the mirror only slowly is purified. Time producing this purifying shows a gradual, more constant and objective image of reality.

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.

Piet Mondrian

Musique du Jour: Born Ruffians, Red, Yellow and Blue

Addendum XIV

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968): Primarily A Conceptualist

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - Concetto spaziale, attese, 1960

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - Concetto spaziale, attese, 1963

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - Concetto spaziale, attese, 1968

Color . . . thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

Charles Baudelaire

Coda V

Fernand Léger (1881-1955): Primarily a Neo-Cubist

The Bargeman, 1918

Three Women, 1921

The Four Cyclists, 1943-48

The Great Parade, 1954

Trapeze Artists, 1954

Two Women Holding Flowers, 1954

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

Every canvas, even if non-representational, that depends upon harmonious relationships of the three forces - color, volume and line - is a work of art.

Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

Even a part of an object has value. A whole new realism resides in the way one envisages an object or one of its parts.

The realistic value of a work is completely independent of its properties in terms of content.

Et Tu, Roy?

Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923) - Kiss V, 1964

Pre(face)

To The City Inside Me From The City I'm In

Me, today, greeting my PDP pals in Paris (and elsewhere around the globe)

In the springtime . . . In the fall . . . In the summer when it sizzles . . . In the winter when it drizzles . . . Every moment . . . Every moment of the year . . .

Cole Porter (I Love Paris)

Musique du Jour: Yann Tierson, Amelie (Soundtrack)

Charlie And The Kindness Of Madame Panckoucke

Etienne Carjat - Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)


I remember very clearly that the lady was dressed in velvet and fur. After a while, she said: 'Here's a little boy I want to give something so he'll remember me.' She took me by the hand, and we passed through several rooms. Then she opened the door of a chamber in which an extraordinary and magical sight presented itself to the eye. The walls were so covered in toys that they could not be seen. The ceiling had disappeared under a flowering of playthings which hung like miraculous stalactites. The floor scarcely offered a narrow path on which to place one's feet. It was a whole world of toys of every sort, from the most expensive to the humblest, from the simplest to the most complex.

'Here,' she said, 'is the children's treasure-trove. I have a small allowance to spend on them, and when a nice little boy comes to see me, I bring him here so that when he leaves he can take away some memory of me. Choose one.'

With that wonderful, clear-sighted spontaneity characteristic of children, in whom desire, thought and deed might be said to form part of one and the same function, by which they distinguish themselves from degenerate men, who, by contrast, find nearly all their time devoured by deliberation, I immediately took hold of the finest, dearest, brightest, newest, and most bizarre of all the toys. My Mother exclaimed at my indiscretion, and obstinately opposed my taking it away with me. She wanted me to be happy with an infinitely inferior object. But I could not agree, and, in order to settle everything, I resigned myself to a juste-milieu.

I have often conceived a desire to know all the 'nice little boys' who, having lived now through a large part of this cruel life, have long been handling other things than toys, and who once in carefree childhood drew a souvenir from Mme Panckoucke's treasure-trove.

Charles Baudelaire

Pentimento I

Loretta Lux (b. 1969) - The Drummer, 2004

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

R. D. Laing

Replay IV

The Ghosts of Innocence

Loretta Lux (b. 1969) - Girl with Marbles, 2005


I use children as a metaphor for a lost paradise.

Loretta Lux

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Ambrose Bierce

I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.

Lewis Carroll

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections in the next.

Cesare Pavese

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

George Eliot

Addendum XIII

When I Was One

Me, 1963

My mother loved children. She would have given anything if I had been one.

Groucho Marx

Coda IV

Always the Villain

Me as the chief "baddie" in our junior school play, 1970

The Sinking Of Neoclassicism

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) - The Raft of the Medusa (early drawing)

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) - The Raft of the Medusa, 1816 (1st sketch)

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) - The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19

At the beginning of the 19th century, the theme of the shipwreck, so masterfully illustrated by Géricault, was not an entirely new one in Europe. J.M.W. Turner had treated it before in his 1805 Shipwreck, and would return to it again and again, developing it throughout his career.

One name, however, was to be enduringly associated with the appearance of Romanticism on the scene in 1819: that of the "Medusa." Bound for Senegal in 1816, this ship had been given the fateful name of one of the three Gorgons, the dreaded sisters of Greek mythology.

The frigate "Medusa," accompanied by the corvette "Echo," the sloop "La Loire" and the brig "Argus," was part of a small convoy transporting the Governor of Senegal and other colonial administrators. Aboard the "Medusa" were four hundred passengers and crew members. The ship had been placed under the command of Hugues Duroy du Chaumareys, an émigré and an inexperienced naval officer who had not sailed in twenty-five years. In the early afternoon of July 2, the vessel foundered one hundred and twenty kilometers off Cape Blanc on the coast of Senegal. The lifeboats were pressed into service and a makeshift raft was constructed to carry one hundred and fifty people, mostly military personnel. The raft should have been towed by the lifeboats, but the cables were cut and the hapless craft was cast adrift on the open sea. In a romantic drama fit for the tabloids, nature suddenly turned into a deadly foe, unleashing in the men their lowest instincts.

The tragedy that ensued on this frail stage measuring only seven by twenty meters lasted thirteen days and was of both the most ferocious and the most ordinary kind.

Almost immediately, prodded by hunger, thirst and alcohol the struggle between the men began, and within only a few days, half of the original hundred and fifty survivors were dead. The others slowly wasted away, decaying both physically and morally, only to be devoured by their own shipmates, half-crazed with hunger. By the 11th of July, all that remained were fifteen haggard shadows, hovering between life and death. Class and age differences had been abolished in a community of nakedness, suffering, filth, disease and murder. A state of complete equality had been achieved, yet only those with a deep faith and a strong cultural base could face their fates with dignity and maintain a spark of hope. On July 17, with morale at its lowest level ever, a sail was spotted on the horizon, heaving into and out of sight. What the rescuers from the "Argus" finally found on this improbable floating morgue were fifteen men in an unimaginable state of depravity.

The captain of the "Medusa" was tried by a court of justice in Rochefort and sentenced to loss of rank and three years' imprisonment. The trial quickly took a political turn as the liberal opposition transformed the "Medusa" tragedy into a symbol of Monarchic incompetence and Royalist decay. In that same year, two survivors, the engineer Corréard and the surgeon Savigny, published their personal accounts of the disaster. Their tale became an inspiration for Theodore Géricault, a young, unknown painter just back from a journey to Italy and Rome.

Seven years older than Delacroix and a former pupil of Guérin, Géricault sensed in this human drama the seeds of a new epic; a historical backdrop for a great pictorial "machine" that would stage the dynamic and varied dimensions of death, human otherness, and the responses - ranging from madness to stoicism - displayed by men suddenly at odds with nature and their destiny.

The first question was: which moment of this atavistic saga to depict? From his sketches, we see that the artist long hesitated between the rescue - which he considered too descriptive - the mutiny of the soldiers - considered too fierce - and the acts of cannibalism that would have dramatized the depths of savagery to which they had stooped.

He was very thorough in his research, interviewed Corréard, Savigny and other survivors, and built a scale model of the raft. In the autumn of 1818, feeling the need to withdraw from the rush of his Parisian social life, he secluded himself in a house in the Faubourg du Roule. He believed that solitude and a monastic-like existence would create the moral conditions necessary for him to relate to the event and develop a new aesthetic of cold horror.

Working on a scale as vast as his subject, he slowly put the protagonists of this modern tragedy into place. He used his friends as models, Eugéne Delacroix among them, and also Corréard, Savigny, the negro Joseph, and former soldiers of Napoleon's army. Still not satisfied, Géricault went on to compose uncanny still-lives of actual human remains salvaged from the Beaujon Hospital nearby. For the sake of absolute realism, he even brought dead bodies into his studio and posed them.

The moment he finally chose was the climax of this symphonie funèbre: when the ghoulish survivors finally catch a glimpse of hope in the form of the brig "Argus," rising providentially above the horizon like a star. This peak moment was intended to be a metaphor for the precarity of the human condition. Although under full sail, the "Argus" appears impossibly small in the distance, at the apex of despair, the only grace note in this drama.

The composition is Neoclassical in its language, but modern in its message. In the foreground is the lozenge-shaped raft, a makeshift construction of beams and planks. The pictorial space is spanned by an imaginary diagonal rising from left to right, creating a moral axis ranging from despair to hope. The result is two human pyramids, with the one on the right culminating in the figure of a negro waving a white and red cloth. The theme of hope was linked, in Géricault's mind, with the struggle against slavery. The sea is full of looming, wind-lashed waves, under a lowering sky brimming with the threat of storms to come. The craft groups nineteen figures, both living and dead.

In moral terms, the pyramid on the right represents life, the upward surge of life, reinforced by the view of the "Argus" in the distance, however minute. Next to the mast, with outstretched arm, Corréard indicates the horizon to the surgeon Savigny. The left side of the composition is the realm of death; sitting among the corpses is the stoic figure of an old man, a quotation from Marcus Sextus by Géricault's teacher, Guérin.

The poses and muscular bodies are fully in keeping with the "academies" of the Beaux-Arts curriculum, while the chiaroscuro treatment derives from the tradition of Caravaggio. Nonetheless, the artist performed the amazing feat of raising a sensational current event to the same level as the great historical compositions of Gros, who celebrated the Napoleonic epic. But there are no enemy camps here, for the battle is against fate and a forbidding nature. The details may be realistic enough, but the artist suffused the scene with an emotional, heroic, almost abstract energy. In this way the obsession with death is transfigured into a symbol of fate assumed, the struggle to regain human dignity.

The critics were anything but subdued by this unusual "pictorial machine" when it was presented at the Salon of 1819, and their comments ranged from anathema to cautious praise. This may have been a momentary setback for the nascent Romantics, but it was a triumph for the painter, who was suddenly the focus of public sensation and aesthetic attention. In any event, this pivotal composition marked the true demise of Neoclassicism and formed the necessary foundation for the innovative approach of Eugéne Delacroix.

Charles Sala

Musique du Jour: John Corigliano, Altered States (Soundtrack)

Addendum XII

A Bloody Bicentenary

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) - The Third of May, 1808

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1868–69

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) - Massacre in Korea, 1951

Yue Minjun (b. 1962) - Execution, 1995

A Room On One's Own

Edward Hopper - Hotel Room, 1931

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

Carl Gustav Jung

Musique du Jour: Pink Martini, Everywhere

The Bricklayers Of Eternity

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) - Prayer on the Housetops, 1865


pray, v. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Musique du Jour: Djivan Gasparyan, Apricots From Eden

Addendum XI

Paul Klee (1879-1940) - Hammamet with Its Mosque, 1914


Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke.

The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture.

The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

Becoming is superior to being.

Paul Klee