April is....

The cruelest month according to T.S. Eliot, and it's National Poetry Month, and it's also half over -- or there are still two weeks and two days left, depending on your perspective and whether you're a poem-loving pessimist or an optimist. A poet voted Class Pessimist and Greatest Wit in high school was Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961), who has a kind of restless stream of language, thoughts and moments quality to his work. Fearing also wrote a novel called The Big Clock, which was made into a 1948 film noir classic starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton and which is definitely worth seeing. This is a portrait of Kenneth Fearing circa 1935 done by artist Alice Neel (currently at NYC's Museum of Modern Art), and here are some excerpts from Fearing's "Love 20¢ The First Quarter Mile:"

All right. I may have lied to you and about you, and made a few

pronouncements a bit too sweeping, perhaps, and possibly forgotten
to tag the bases here or there,
And damned your extravagence, and maligned your tastes, and libeled
your relatives, and slandered a few of your friends,
O.K.,
Nevertheless, come back....

Because I forgive you, yes, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise,
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive, and pardon you, in short, for being you.

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black, all other hours are cold
and far away, and now, this minute, the stars are very near and bright.

Come back. We will have a celebration to end all celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us, and a couple of
boys from the office, and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane woman who lives
upstairs, and a few reporters, if anything should break.

99 candles

Author Nelson Algren would have been 99 today, and next year Chicago and maybe a few other places on the map will surely celebrate the centennial of his birth and life and work--hopefully in an offbeat and left-of-center manner, to match Algren's personality. This picture was taken by photographer Art Shay in about 1949 and shows Algren looking over a manuscript in his Wicker Park apartment. Shay was a good friend of Algren's and followed him around taking pictures during this time and for several years after, getting a glimpse of Chicago through Nelson's wise and weary eyes. The photos are now compiled into a book called Chicago's Nelson Algren (Seven Stories Press), and you can also see more of them through The Steven Daiter Gallery's on-line exhibit, all fascinating visuals to accompany this great writer's often poignant, often funny, often tragic words.

"An old wino dragging a pair of mottled suspenders to the floor wandered in from somewhere and asked wonderingly: 'You fellows remember me?' When none remembered he repeated the question to himself, with moving lips, as though he himself had nearly forgotten. Yet with each pulse beat his blood demanded to know, once and for all before it went cold for keeps, who remembered him and his mottled suspenders...."

Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm

sunrises and thunder showers

Arthur Dove (1880-1946) was one of America's first abstract painters and a collage artist as well, attempting to convey with his work the purest essence of whatever subject he had chosen. He wasn't greatly popular in his lifetime but has a strong reputation now and can be found in many major museums, and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth even has an umbrella designed with one of his paintings in mind. I know that the commercialization of art on everyday objects like mousepads and coffee mugs or tote bags is a touchy subject, but I'm not so sure that Arthur would have minded his Thunder Shower being turned into an umbrella. Because the umbrella theoretically will be outside in the essence of the rainy atmosphere he was trying to express, making the art umbrella of Arthur almost interactive.

Click here and here to read more about Mr. Dove, who once noted how the beaks of seagulls "look like ivory thrown slowly through space...."

(pictured -- Arthur Dove's Sunrise, 1924 -- now at The Milwaukee Public Museum)

the many moods of joseph

Artist Joseph Stella (June 13, 1877-1946) was born in Italy but came to New York as a young man to study pharmacology and medicine. The medical career was soon overwhelmed by Stella's increasing love of and talent for art, and Stella would eventually become a U.S. citizen and be considered one of America's finest 20th century painters. His interests were diverse and so were the subjects and styles of his works, ranging from realistic sketches and illustrations, Futurist-like portraits of the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island, fruit, flowers and tropical landscapes, the Virgin Mary, and whatever happened to his next phase of fascination. (Sounds like a definite Gemini.) He also liked experimenting with different materials and methods; the Dying Lotus pictured here is part of Dartmouth's Hood Museum collection and was done with pastels, colored crayon, and metalpoint. Stella himself said that from 1921 on he:

complied without any reserve with every genuine appeal to my artistic faculties...trampling those infantile barricades erected by tottering self-appointed dictators infesting the art fields....

That quote is from an article focusing on Joseph Stella's Pittsburgh drawings, which were used to illustrate how unfairly laborers, miners and immigrants were being treated at that time (circa 1908). Like Picasso, Stella went through different artistic periods, making it much more interesting for himself--and for us to follow his life's work and unique versatility.

without a trace

Lew Welch was one of the Beat Generation's West Coast members, starting out studying Literature with other Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen at Reed College. He had a nervous breakdown in Chicago, pieced it together then worked as an advertising copywriter, then left it all to focus on his poetry and leading a truer life. He drove a cab in San Francisco and wrote some fine poems about the experience, and he also drove Jack Kerouac from San Francisco to New York in 1959--a long road trip that involved many stopovers and drinking binges and crazy poetic creations. In Big Sur, Kerouac's novel about his California sojourns, Lew Welch is Dave Wain, a lanky, loquacious, redheaded free spirit who drives a jeep named Willie all over the place. Kerouac (Jack Duluoz in the novel) notes that while Neal Cassady a/k/a Cody a/k/a Dean Moriarty had been the great cross-country driver to inspire On the Road, Cody still had driverly jealousy about his rival Dave's skill behind the wheel:

[Dave] comes blattin down to the bar in his jeepster driving that marvelous way he does (once he was a cab-driver) talking all the time and never making a mistake, in fact as good a driver as Cody altho I cant imagine anybody being that good and asked Cody about it the next day -- But old jealous drivers always point out faults and complain, "Ah well that Dave Wain of yours doesnt take his curves right, he eases up and sometimes even pokes the brake a little instead of just ridin that old curve around on increased power, man you gotta work those curves...."

Towards the end of his life, Lew Welch was starting to come into his own as a poet, but issues with alcohol and depression kept pulling him down into darker places. He disappeared into the California woodlands with a rifle in 1971 at the age of 44; he had left a suicide note, but his body was never found. It's highly unlikely, but since nothing of Lew was ever recovered we can always hope he just felt the need to walk away from a flawed life and didn't pull the trigger. Maybe he even started fresh under the name Dave Wain and he's 81 and living in Costa Rica and/or surfing the Internet right now in a quiet place. Or maybe he just vanished into the proverbial thin air and became part of the landscape he loved so much.

what's in a hopper

This is a great link from The Museum of Fine Arts-Boston to an interactive feature on painter Edward Hopper. People have interesting reactions to Hopper, sometimes loving his work or sometimes finding him a bit hollow and depressing. There's a deliberate emptiness to his style, but just like with any kind of existing space, how it affects you depends upon what you project into it. The painting pictured here, Room in Brooklyn, may seem really spare and like the woman facing the windows might be lonely, but I see it as beautifully uncluttered and an escape from the city, and that she's finally got a chance to sit quietly and clear her mind. Hopper's famous Nighthawks painting is also thought-provoking, making us wonder what's going on with the film noir-ish trio at the counter and how does the clerk kid feel in their presence, but his Office at Night has more tension to me, with the guy at the desk pretending not to notice his shapely most-likely secretary or file clerk Miss Whoever as darkness falls around them....

art and the state

"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."

Robert Henri, 1865-1929

(This Henri painting entitled Landscape, Ireland done circa 1914 is available at NYC's Owen Gallery, if you've got any loose change lying around.)

the other impressionist

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) isn't one of the best-known French Impressionists, but his work is exhibited all over the U.S., most notably at The Art Institute of Chicago (Rainy Day: Paris Street, 1877). He also was the highly admirable and generous type of guy who had money yet shared it with his other artist friends, purchasing their works when they were down and out.

Caillebotte's will left all of his collected "charity" purchases such as paintings by Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, et al., to the French government. He wanted them to be displayed at the Luxembourg and Louvre Museums; the French government wasn't too convinced that the Impressionists were worthy of this honor at the time and only accepted a portion of the paintings. The rest ended up at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, even though the French reconsidered and tried to get those back in the 1920s but Dr. Barnes said sorry, no dice. The ones the French government did accept are now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Because Caillebotte was well-off financially, he had time to develop his various talents and interests at his own pace. Besides painting, he also designed textiles and liked to yacht and sail, and he especially enjoyed gardening. The Human Flower Project has a nice feature on Caillebotte, who apparently died while working in his garden. They note that only a savvy gardener could paint these pictured chrysanthemums in such a way, knowing exactly how the leaves and petals and roots would naturally arrange themselves.

Caillebotte was a great combination of wealth and talent, and a fine example of how money can be used admirably -- instead of on just a self-indulgent, late 19th century champagne, foie gras and women lifestyle. With some absinthe on the side.

jacob's world

Artist Jacob Lawrence grew up in Harlem during the 1920s and 30s and from an early age was fascinated by the sights and scenes around him. His mother was strict about going to church and she was also the primary reason that Jacob attended the free art classes available to children in the area after school.

This combination of an inspiring environment, the fiery Sunday sermons of the preachers, talk heard on street corners and working with color and form led Jacob to create his own style of narrative painting. Not just one picture but as many as sixty in a series, all on panels with accompanying text -- art that told a story, and in particular the stories of his neighbors and family and friends.

Lawrence's The Migration of The Negro series made him famous in 1941, and was immediately purchased by The Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection. The Phillips Collection bought the odd numbered panels (there are 60 total) and they have a great website on Jacob Lawrence's life and career. This later painting (Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis No. 5 - And God created all the fowl of the air and the fishes of the seas) was done in 1989 and you can see how Lawrence still had the brightness of vision and vivid sense of color that he'd had 50 years earlier.

"I didn't think in terms of history...It was like I was doing a portrait of something. If it was a portrait, it was a portrait of myself, a portrait of my family, a portrait of my peers." (Jacob Lawrence, 1917 - 2000)

olga and rufino

I'm always interested in the muse behind the artist, so I was curious about Olga Tamayo, longtime wife of Rufino. This picture shows her literally behind him and almost blurred into an outline, but the following from the Santa Barbara Museum fills in what the photo obscures:

In 1933, Tamayo completed his first successful mural commission, a series of wall paintings in the entry stairwell of the Escuela Nacional de Musíca (National School of Music). It was while painting this mural that he met Olga Flores Rivas, a piano student at the school. Shortly thereafter...he pursued a whirlwind romance with Olga. After a three-month courtship and upon Olga’s proposal, the couple married on February 3, 1934. Although a talented musician with a budding performing career, Olga abandoned her musical pursuits to devote her efforts to promoting Tamayo’s career and managing their finances. For Tamayo, Olga became a lifelong muse—over his seven-decade career, he drew and painted many portraits of her.

The couple moved from Mexico to New York to Paris then back to Mexico, creating artwork, collecting artwork, and no doubt enjoying a very interesting life. Rufino Tamayo died in 1991, while Olga--still a few steps behind--followed him two years later.

happiness is a state of uno chiyo

Whenever I read Uno Chiyo's story "Happiness" I think of the pictured Ukiyo-e tarot card -- and if you like tarot decks, the Ukiyo-e is a really beautiful one that connects with Japanese legend and symbolism as well as elements of nature. The opening of "Happiness" is:

Every time Kazue gets out of the bath, she stands in front of the mirror and examines her naked body for a moment...She thus notes her resemblance to Botticelli's Venus. There is the similarity in the way that she is standing although no sea shell supports her. She also has the same feet and slightly rounded stomach.

As you read on, though, you learn that Kazue is seventy and really not insistent that she resembles Venus at her age -- but she also doesn't seem to care. Kazue's detached, fairly oblivious optimism has served her well through many difficult years. She allows the possibility of still being Venus because of her failing eyesight and because the steam from the bath pleasantly blurs her mirrored view, and she otherwise "collects fragments of happiness one after another, and so lives, spreading them throughout her environment. Even what seems odd to other people, she considers happiness."

Uno Chiyo would have been 110 this week; she almost lived a full century, dying in 1996 at the age of 98. Married many times and fond of falling in love, she certainly did live fully and most likely thought of herself as resembling Venus after her bath even at the age of ninety.

georgia and eugene

This is a portrait of a young Georgia O'Keeffe, done when she was enrolled at New York's Art Student's League, circa 1908. The painter and Georgia's fellow student was Eugene Speicher, who had asked Georgia repeatedly to pose for him; when she kept refusing he noted that she might as well let him do her portrait since he'd probably become famous while she would just end up teaching art to girls someplace. Georgia took that insult quietly and sat for the picture; she looks really cute at that age and her hair is short and curly because she had recently gotten over a case of typhoid so severe that it caused her normally long straight locks to fall out.

So what became of Eugene Speicher? He was a success, particularly as a portrait artist, but I don't think he was honored with a U.S. postage stamp or made it to the White House to be honored by good old Ronnie Reagan. I wonder how he felt even back in the 1920s when O'Keeffe's floral paintings were fetching huge sums of money. Or whether she made sure to send him invitations to her exhibits, and whether he cared to receive them or not.

But you know, to this day there's always a lot of joking around in college and/or art school betweeen the sexes and maybe Speicher was just teasing Georgia. I like his portrait of her, and apparently he painted it rather fast--maybe because he was already quick and skilled with a brush, or maybe because he sensed Georgia really didn't feel like loitering around playing muse to his artistic presence.

united cocktail artists

In the early days of Hollywoodland, Mary Pickford, her swashbuckling husband Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Charlie Chaplin were among the first movie superstars. They drew in crowds, they made big money, and they decided to form United Artists in order to have more creative and financial control over their careers. They also apparently all had cocktails named after them. This post from Cocktailnerd's blog describes his liquid homage to all three, and he rates the results. I also noticed some post dialogue on epicurious.com about absolutely never substituting maraschino cherry juice for maraschino liqueur in your Mary Pickford. Clearly they are not the same. Instead mix, shake and pour out:

· 2 oz light rum
· 1 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
· 1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
· 1 dash of grenadine

I think I'm going to start ordering Mary Pickfords in various places and see if bartenders can handle it -- without consulting a manual.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

So said John Singer Sargent, one of the great portrait artists and artists in general of the late 19th and early 20th century. He reportedly often considered painting portraits of the wealthy or prominent to be tiresome, since you always had to make the subject look appealing in order to keep a decent reputation. Though I doubt he lost this gentleman as a friend, since he made him look quite regal. This is the Portrait of Dr. Pozzi At Home (Hammer Museum), done in 1881. Beautiful red robe and skin tones there.

I read that mega-developer Steve Wynn purchased Sargent's Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife (might have been nice to use her actual name beyond her wifedom, but whatever) and is going to hang it in his new and lavish casino. Vegas seems like a bizarre place for Robert Louis Stevenson, Wife, and John Singer Sargent to end up, but life is bizarre sometimes.

** Blogger has The Sixty Minute Artist listed in their noteworthy blogs this week, and it a) is indeed worthy of note, and b) seems great for both artists and/or the art-inclined. I personally loved the Cherry Pop Tart painting.

giant james

Today was the day in 1955 that James Dean took his final road trip, leaving us with a few great movies and much speculation as to what his acting career would have been like had he lived to grow old. Or at least older. My favorite James Dean role is Jett Rink from Giant, particularly the scene where he has tea with Elizabeth Taylor in his little shack house. Click here to read an interview with Ivan Moffat, one of the writers who adapted Edna Ferber's novel for the screenplay -- he makes some interesting comments about James Dean and the film production itself.

I wrote a suite101 article on Edna Ferber because I was always intrigued by this feisty little woman from Wisconsin tackling such diverse subjects in her fiction. Apparently Edna thought Dean was an excellent choice to play Jett Rink, though I'm not sure if they ever met. And while Edna's portrayal of the Lone Star State angered some of the Texans she'd gotten to know while researching her novel, it seems that James Dean charmed many locals in Marfa, Texas where Giant was filmed. He hung around with them and asked all kinds of questions, as always immersing himself in his ranchhand role in classic Method actor fashion. But then again he'd been raised on an Indiana farm and despite his growing fame at the time, he still seemed to live along the emotional outskirts of life; I can't say Jett Rink came easily because I don't know that anything came easily to such a complex person, but he probably had something to draw on from within.

(image from www.dvdbeaver.com)

mañana plus one

On September 5, 1957, Gilbert Millstein reviewed the new novel On the Road and declared author Jack Kerouac the "principal avatar" of The Beat Generation, and that this cross-country quest for adventure and meaning was a major work. Apparently he was right.

Gilbert Millstein wrote for the New York Times, and a positive or negative Times review in 1957 could make or break a book. There weren't as many public forums of opinion back then, nor did we have the freedom of speech via the internet to protest an overly subjective review. So naturally Kerouac was overwhelmed by the praise. Kerouac was then involved with a young writer named Joyce Johnson, and her memoir Minor Characters describes how she and Jack went out after midnight to a newstand at 66th and Broadway in Manhattan and bought a copy of the Times:

We saw the papers come off the truck. The old man at the stand cut the brown cord with a knife and we bought the one on top of the pile and stood under a streetlamp turning pages until we found "Books of the Times." I felt dizzy reading Millstein's first paragraph--like going up on a Ferris wheel too quickly and dangling out over space, laughing and gasping at the same time. Jack was silent. After he'd read the whole thing, he said, "It's good, isn't it?" "Yes," I said. "It's very, very good."

The Viking 40th anniversary edition of On the Road (1997) includes the full Gilbert Millstein review as it was originally printed, noting even the then $3.95 price of the book. This post title is mañana plus one because it's two days from the 50th anniversary of the publication and review, and also because of Kerouac's love of the word mañana in On the Road.

Guitars tinkled. Terry and I gazed at the stars together and kissed. "Mañana," she said. "Everything'll be all right tomorrow, don't you think, Sal-honey, man?"

...It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard--mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

Well, we know it doesn't really mean heaven but we can understand why it might.

Russian author and critic Nina Berberova (1901-1993) is not particularly famous, but those who do know and read her are great fans of her beautiful prose and stories full of irony and character. This picture is of Nina in 1928 and she was clearly quite the looker.

I had a chance to meet Nina Berberova in Philadelphia right before she died but I opted to do something else that afternoon. It was one of those missed encounters that could have changed my life and I could have been like the granddaughter she'd never had and run errands for her, made sure she had enough tea and lemon, listened to her tales about traveling around the world and escaping Russia after the Revolution. Or she might have just told me to please leave her alone because I was giving her a headache with all my stupid questions, but at least I would have known otherwise.

It is painful. Sometimes we are just really scattered-brained and stupid. We meaning me.

Night passed, and the moon like an hour hand moved along, rising and falling on the celestial dial strewn with stars....

Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine

My mother used to be an English teacher and generally put Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy on her syllabus, so that big fat paperback was always around the house. Eventually I picked it up and read it myself, and more recently I wrote a suite101 article on the crime that inspired Dreiser's novel, just because it's kind of haunting. The novel later became the basis for the 1950s movie A Place in the Sun, although I think A Place in the Sun was too romanticized and essentially a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. The real film version seems yet to be done--something that makes Roberta Alden/Grace Brown less of a harpy and captures more of the 1906 era and upstate New York backdrop.

Another book based on the Grace Brown murder is Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, and she does a very nice job of portraying that particular time and place through the eyes of a girl working at the resort hotel where the death occurred. A Northern Light is put into the category of young adult fiction, but as one reviewer pointed out, it's definitely recommended reading for anyone interested in the case of an ambitious young man and a naive young woman, an unwanted pregnancy and a fateful boat ride....

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, celebrated wife of F. Scott and definite entity in her own right, was born today in Montgomery, Alabama in 1900.

The life of the Fitzgeralds is well-known for its parallel to the 1920s, a decade of wild times and success followed by depression, loss, financial uncertainty. Both glorified and overshadowed by her famously talented husband, Zelda found the passing of youth--which had been so integral to her high spirits and charm--extremely difficult. Things did not end well for her, but that can be read about in an article that I wrote for suite101 or many other fine websites and features devoted to Zelda. I just wanted to show an example of her artwork here and quote her words, and let Zelda be Zelda today. And I was going to include her painting Mad Tea Party, which seems to illustrate her breakdown and failure at a professional ballet career all surrounded by the beautiful but eerie forest and buildings of an asylum, but that's going back to the madness and sadness again.

This Zelda painting is of the Great Smoky Mountains and seems to reflect a quieter time in her mind. More of her paintings, including Mad Tea Party, can be seen at this excellent site.

...she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

Zelda Fitzgerald

day of the hunter

Today would have been the birthday of writer and general iconoclast Hunter Stockton Thompson. Click here for a suite101 link about H.S.T. and his writings and legacy. Otherwise the basic facts are:

Born: July 18, 1937, Louisville, Kentucky

Died: February 20, 2005, Woody Creek, Colorado

Ashes Shot Out of a Cannon Into Eternity: August 20, 2005

A few web sites list him as being born in 1939, but I'm pretty sure 1937 is correct as he noted that he was 67 in his suicide note. He would have been 70 today, but he did not want to be 70 today, so therefore he took himself out of the game.

*********************************************

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

Hunter S. Thompson