In honor of All Saints/All Souls Day, and the thirty first anniversary of the death of my father. Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, Paradise Panel from the Ghent Altarpiece. Saints and sinners adoring the lamb. This is the innermost central, bottom panel of the 1432 hinged polyptych altarpiece in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. The whole altar is 11'6" x 15"1". Though parts of it are missing, It's still a massive, complex complex.

The "Adoration of the lamb" is a slightly odd, literal invention, with four groups of souls, heavenly and earthly, saints and sinners, all worshiping the bleeding lamb at the center on the altar. It's drawn from the book of John's Revelation, a vast elaboration of the phrase "Worthy is the lamb." The rest of the panels of the altar are really an elaboration of this theme and they'd be opened and closed, creating an elaborate configuration of iconic narratives coordinated with the church year.

The Altarpiece is the largest extant work of the Van Eyck brothers by far. It was intended for its present location, unlike all off their other work on a much smaller scale which were domestic and private. Painted in oil--an innovation at the time, and tempera (paint with an egg yolk vehicle--the fluid that carries the pigment or color)--on panels.

The altar of the lamb hovers over the well of the water of life on the central axis in a garden setting tight the skyline of Ghent in the distance, the whole panel intensely symmetrical, almost diagrammatic.

Dad died as there result of a bypass surgery that went wrong. I was in Maryland in my second fall teaching at the University, and hadn't gone up to Massachusetts because they assured me that bypass was routine. I cried on the plane on All Souls Day.

Hallowe'en

Happy Hallowe'en

It's October 31st,  Hallowe'en. (I keep wanting to put an okina instead of an apostrophe, so habitual has become my habit of trying two spell Hawai ‘an properly). It's the anniversary of my father's death, in 1986.  He died when I was thirty three, thirty one years ago. He's been gone for almost half my life--dying when I was the age Jesus was when he died. This holiday used to bring me childish pleasure, now it ushers in the season of death.  Our big accident, mom's and mine, happened Thanksgiving week end. She died from the injuries she sustained in it on Christmas Eve of 2009, eight years ago. So much for the autumnal holidays. Autumnal is right. This holiday calls up demons. This holiday melds the mask to the face.

This time of year I often feel my anger, such as it is, burbling up, asphalt through mud and water.  Anger on my parents' behalf. Anger at myself for my imagined disappointing them. Anger at myself for disappointing myself.  It comes up from underneath the guilt of failure, the shame of disappointment and frustration not mastered.  It's the depression of the beginning of the end of the year, even here in Hawaii where seasonal change is much more subtle. It's hard to peel the mask off.

James Ensor, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1889, 170" x 200", The Getty, Los Angeles

The masked masses of Brussels conduct a mardi gras parade led by death and Bishop Santa Claus.  Jesus is all but lost in the middle background, haloed and on an ass, flooded in the midst of a sea of caricatures and clowns under the banner "Vive La Sociale", all bearing down on the viewer, threatening to overtake her.  The huge painting was rejected by Les Vingt, an alternative arts organization which Ensor helped to found.  Though it had prominent place in his home and studio, it was never again exhibited publicly until 1929.  Just the same it became, in its impastos smeared with a palette knife, jarring chromatic contrasts, and harsh caricatures of the artist's public, foundation for European Expressionism in the twentieth century.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, oil on panel, 58x46cm

⁸The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.^a

⁹Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

¹⁰The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

¹¹Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.

The painting is not an illustration of the text, but inspired by it, creating visual tropes for Jeremiah's internal state. The Old Testament reading from the daily lectionary (in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (and yes, part of my spiritual practice is to pray in the morning over the daily lectionary readings--the Psalms in {very halting} Latin, the Old Testament and New Testament readings in the King James version {because that's the version with which I grew up, and I still find it's language lovely, beautiful, even, pointing to the holy, redirecting my attention from the quotidian language of my every day life}, and the gospel readings in French. Paintings often become a point of meditation for me in this process.) But the Lamentations express in the repetitive, psalm-like ejaculations of grief, Jeremiah's agony over the realization that his prophecies have actually come to fruition.  I can't escape the parallel with the current state of our country, though I'm conscious to resist the presumptuous parallels that the Puritans--and more recent politicians--drew between Israel and Jerusalem and the North American English speakers who became the United States of America. The fall of Judah (Israel had already split off and was suffering its own fate) came as no surprise to Jeremiah.  It was only shocking to his hostile audience, his fellow citizens. 

The painting is small, a little over two feet high, one that I found on my own while wandering in the gleaming forest of the Rijksmuseum's collection in 1973.  Like the portrait of his son, Titus, as a monk, that I've talked about here before, it's an intimate history painting.  A single figure, no action, with the spectacular destruction of the city in flames on the left--just glimpsed in the distance--reclines on, on what? we aren't really shown a furnishing.  Rembrandt only provides diagonal bands of light and dark in his characteristic, dramatic chiaroscuro (contrasting clear/obscure, light and shadow) spotlighting the bald crown of the prophet's head and his hand, limp in impotent despair. He can't resist the gleam on the temple vessels as on the prophet's pate.

I'm sympathetic to arresting grief.  And I love Rembrandt's explorations of internal states in the simplest of dramatic, but often not melodramatic turns, and the subtle moments of emotional transition. My first unschooled responses to the painting, my sympathy and admiration, were enhanced by my undergraduate teacher Ann Millstein, a recent Harvard Ph.D. at the time, who provided me an intellectual and historical foundation for the uninformed meanderings and responses from the year before during my year in Holland and my subsequent years in Boston.  The painting is from Rembrandt's earlyish period.  He's still fascinated by minute representations of texture and narrative (all the more minute in this small size).  But his spiritual penetration and sensitivity is patent early on. 

The Tempietto, Donato d'Angelo Bramante, in the Courtyard of St. Pietro in Montorio, on the Janiculum  in Rome, 1502 ff.

This is one of my favorite buildings of all time.  It's little, and a little out of the way, up a short flight of stairs from the street on the Janiculum, one of the hills which rise to startling vantages on the outskirts of the core of the ancient city and the Vatican.  I first heard of it, and saw it in the book of an undergraduate mentor, the architectural historian, Bates Lowry.  I was enthralled by the building and by his analysis.  I'd never heard of architecture spoken of in this way:  

It's a centrally planned building, a radically simplified and spare fever dream of Bramante's proposal for the evolving rebuilding of the new St. Peter's around the fourth century St. Peter's Basicilica in the Vatican. In plan it's a perfect circle inside a larger perfect circular Doric peristyle (colonnade) capped by a balustrade (row of balusters--like elongated, inverted amphorae).  In elevation (the face--or façade of the building) it's a cylinder of columns, screening a taller internal cylinder capped by a dome.  The circle was a desideratum of particularly church architecture in the high renaissance--the years around 1500 in Italy, say.

The Tempietto's function is a commemorative mausoleum, an ancient form for tombs, with its focus on the middle. It stands in t cramped, undistinguished courtyard beside the church.  I first saw it in person with Yvonne Mazurek, the art historian from SYA in Viterbo (a little over an hour north of Rome), and other friends, when I was speaking there.  I've seen it and photographed it a couple of times since (though my own photographs, are presently unavailable--long story, one I'm working very hard on).

Perhaps even because of it's small size, it was able to be built readily of load-bearing stone masonry--one of the purist expressions of an "ideal" renaissance architecture vision.

Mission Santa Cruz, 1791, Santa Cruz, CA. 



Yesterday morning Ian drove me over to his gym, about two miles from hereat the base of the foothills, on the other side of what's now central Santa Cruz. I decided it would be a good walk back and wound through that neighborhood, over a pedestrian overpass that crosses Route 1, and came out onto the bluff that overlooks downtown. At the top of that hillstands the now iconic 1891 Holy Cross Church. The steeple is one of the first signals that Highway 17 south from San Jose has reached town after the passage over of the redwood crowned Santa Cruz mountains. Calvin just told me, "When I see that church I just know I'm almost home." Anyway, after climbing and descending the spiral ramp of the footbridge, I came out onto the little park plaza with the tiered fountain in front of Holy Cross. The church dominates the south side of the park and diagonally across is a small adobe mission church that looks a lot like the one in the illustration. It was built in 1930s at one third scale and backs onto the Santa Cruz Mission State Park, a small plaza framed by adobe building, some of which date back to the eighteenth century. I still haven't been in there.

Its strange how much you miss even in towns you frequently visit. Ian's lived here in Santa Cruz for almost fifteen years and I stilled haven't visited the Mystery Sport. It's still completely mystery to me. It wasn't until three or four years ago that I visited the Villa Branciforte, the house at the center of the Spanish land grant of the Branciforte family. There are signs for the exit on every highway coming into town. But it's not there. The house-and the land grant--are long gone. Just a plaque. Such is the case with the Mission Santa Cruz. In the state park, some of the outer buildings of the Mission remain, including the loggia inside the plaza. But of the original mission church, some of the foundation is still there behind the nineteenth century church. But that's it.

The thing about adobe is it has to be constantly maintained. It's mud and clay and hay, and sometimes dung. It can be made into bricks, and in California, that was the usual method for taller buildings like church. In New Mexico, the adobe was stacked in narrower and narrower stacks to create towers. But rain eroded it, and the battered walls (outward sloping0 were indeed battered. Once the California mission churches were secularized, they were generally neglected, and mostly just melted away.

Polykleitos, Doryphoros, Roman marble copy of a 5th century bronze, Archaeological Museum of Naples

Like most of the free-standing sculptures that remain from the classical world, what we have handed down to us are Roman marble copies of Greek bronze originals.  The  Doryphorous is no exception.  Sometimes called the "Canon," in the ancient world as now, he was sometimes taken as the most authoritative expression of the human ideal from classical Athens. ("Canon" refers to an exemplary standard, as in the "canonical books of the Bible", or the "canon of English literature").

"Classical," in this and the most basic sense refers to fifth century BCE Greece. He has all the features that came to be thought of human perfection: He's, well, male. He's publicly nude, as an athlete would be at the time and uncircumcised, with an athletic and youthful (as opposed to more mature, more massive) body.  His stance is weight-shifted, what art historians and artists call, in deference to typically Italian nomenclature, "contrapposto"--counter-posture. He shifts his weight onto his right foot, rextending his left leg, which throws his body into a relaxed "S" curve (in this view a backwards "S") in a sinuous line from his slightly turned head through the midline of his torso, tipped hips, and out his left leg.

"Doryphoros" means "spear-bearer": his left hand originally held a bronze spear.  The spear, and the Greek bronze sculpture by Polykleitos, is lost; bronze was frequently seized to be melted down for weapons or vessels.  Purely utilitarian and opportunistic "re-purposing." The post bracing his wrist from his hip, and the truncated stump supporting his leg were necessary in free-standing marble sculptures as they would not have been in bronze.  When you stop to think about it, the standing human body--the represented nude human body, that is--is supported by its thinnest part in the vertical line from the head to the feet, the ankles.  The whole mass of the body tips on that narrow base.  It's not a good  engineering plan, especially for marble with its high compressive strength but low tensile (flexible) strength--the opposite of bronze.  This is of course why the small, narrow projections are frequently broken off from ancient sculpture--noses, feet, hands, penises--even heads at the neck and whole bodies at the ankles.

While he's fit, he's not "cut" in the modern sense.  His body's planes are articulated in relatively simple, continuous, horizontal lines: from his arm pits under his pectorals, from his inguinal muscles (very important to the ancient world's conception of male body structure) to his groin, and across his knees. Mostly his body is smooth rounded shapes and clear, continuous outline, except for those three horizontal divisions.

 

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Annunciation, 1898, Philadelphia Museum of Art.


Henry O. Tanner was, with Robert Duncanson, one of the most accomplished and professionally successful artists of African American heritage after the Civil War and before World War I. From Pittsburgh originally, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Eakins, and later, as still a young man, moved to Paris to study and later to work. Like the younger Beaufort Delaney, he worked for much of his career in Paris.

This painting was an astonishment to me when I first saw it. It was the first modern re-envisioning of the Annuncation, when the angel Gabriel came to Mary to announce the conception of Jesus, I'd seen. Tanner's almost dead-pan "realism" butts up against the contemporary styles of Post-Impressionism (mainly because it comes after "Impressionism"), the "realism" of his American mentor, Thomas Eakins, elements of the art nouveau of his contemporaries in Paris. He also exploits some of the incipient super-realism--"surrealism"--of other contemporaries, Elihu Vedder among others.

Henry Fuseli, The Despair of the Artist Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins, 1778-80, pen and ink, Kunsthaus, Zurich.

These ruins, in the Belvedere Palace Collection of the Vatican date from the era of Constantine. Fuseli, the Swiss arch-romantic, spent much of his career teaching at the Royal Academy in London. He's famous for imaginatively juxtaposing the human figure with the more or less monstrous, exploiting the contrasts of scale or reality, even, to approximate the newly re-codified aesthetic category of the "sublime." More on that another time. But Fuseli here carefully composes the image with an oddly, half-dressed artist, embracing the foot of Constantine and holding his head in ambiguous grief.

The ruins themselves are a partial collection of fragments of a monumental sculpture of the Emperor Constantine himself, slightly reconfigured for the artist's purposes. He chooses only the reversed hand and the foot, emphasizing scale, not personality.

I took this picture in 2003 while on a trip to Tabasco with my friend, Louise Hose​, and company to explore the Cueva de la Villa Luz (the Cave of the House of Lights) near Tapijulapa. It caught my eye, and I've since discovered it's iconic for Palenque sculpture. The trip, the people, the cave (and who can escape the poetry of the name--the Cave of the House of Lights?) all were iconic for me.

The rodent jaguar is at the base of a pilaster (an attached, non-supportive column or pier) is expressive of the Mayan's innate ability to somehow combine naturalism and fantasy, zoology with the monstrous.  Certainly it's an unsettling greeting at the top of a climb up a funerary temple platform.  Like their hieroglyph writing, Mayan forms emphasized and kind of fluid geometry with rich, rounded forms with very few sharp edges (say in it's right cheek bone), and no angles.

This was my first trip to Mexico as an adult and, I'm afraid, it spoiled me. Palenque is only partially carved out of the forest--there's still much to be excavated--at the point where the mountains meet the coastal plains near the border of Chiapas and Tabasco states.  It's exposure is eastward, towards the dawn and towards the Olmec territory, a civilization that preceded the Mayan civilization by a millennium. Compared to other, similar sites,  it's relatively unvisited, undeveloped, and the rules of exploration very lax.  You could still climb the pyramids, enter the palaces, sit and ponder--as I did with the college students who accompanied me.



Pilaster base, Temple Of Inspcriptions, 7th century , at Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Photo by JRPC

Jan Van Goyen, Dunes with Travelers, 1628, recently sold at auction in Prague (for a surprisingly small amount of money).



When I went to L'Abri in Eck-en-Wiel, in the Betuwe of central Holland (the "land between the rivers"), in the autumn of 1973, I traveled all over the country; it's not very big. I'd only heard of a few big names in Dutch painting, and was only beginning to understand my own preoccupation with landscapes. Van Goyen struck me even more profoundly than the other Dutch landscapists like Ruisdael, Hobbema, or even Vermeer and Rembrandt, who struck me profoundly enough. Every one of Van Goyen's skies was different. And every one was, somehow, right. The color of the Dutch sky--which I watched from my the window of my unheated garret's window on the third floor of the big farm house in the orchard by the canal--changes like screen saver. What struck me for the first time in my life was that those skies were big, like Montana's, wet like Massachusetts's, and never simply white and blue and gray.


The infinite palette and textures of the sky are remarkable in Northern Europe. There's not much relief in the landscape to distract. And Van Goyen tracked every one of them. And it was something of a revelation after traveling to the cities of the country--Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft, Haarlem--to come to the North Sea in Zandvoort and fine dunes, just like home on Cape Cod. Van Goyen picks up on that, too. Sand like mashed potatoes, as here. But Van Goyen's skies and landscape run the whole gamut of what Holland offers. And they offer a naturalism that anticipates Constables, two centuries before. Still, like the other seventeenth century landscapists in France, and Italy, he finds a way to compose using coulisse devices


Holland was a wonderful experience for me. Art was a central part of it, but so was the rural and urban countryside in the deepening fall. And the skies. I read the complete works of Robert Frost to feed my New English nostalgia.

If you have the chance--and if there are still tickets available-- try to see Romeo and Juliet at The ARTS at Marks Garage this week end through 23 July.  It's a great, intimate production with terrific performances across the board, especially the leads, my friend, Ari Dalbert as Romeo and Alisa Boland as Juliet.  

                           http://www.HawaiiShakes.org


From the leads through the whole ensemble, the cast works beautifully together to refresh an overly familiar play. ( I team-wrote a brilliant satire on Shakespeare's tragedy in sixth grade. A three hour, pre-pubescent satire.) Since then I've seen multiple productions  on screen and stage, from the restrained to the gimmicky. Ho Hum. A few strategic cuts make the play a comfortable just-over-two-hours, and, though costumed in generically modern dress, the production is remarkably faithful, the staging and lighting spare, flexible and expressive.

In this production the first half is a delightful comedy full of physical pratfall, adolescent gasps and shrieks.  The second half is compelling tragedy.  The direction and performances are remarkable pitting adolescent irrationality against adult irrationality.  Everyone loses. The youth of the leads makes the play all the more believable.  And, staged in three quarter round, the Shakespearean language was completely audible for these failing ears.

Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur Breakfast, Fur Covered Cup) 1936, MOMA.






This is by way of experiment to see exactly how much text fits in before the "see more" option cuts it off. My plan is, for the moment, to write on Facebook only what text will show up above that line before I insert a link for my blog for more detailed text.....So, it appears it's about five lines, and I'll try to work with that. I'll start on Facebook with what's most personal in my response, and then go on the the blog for information. Well it's more than seven lines. And I've always loved this piece which feels to me like the polar antithesis of the period's art deco. Don't tell PETA, but I really like fur, and am infatuated with it's textures against form, or against other, contrasting textures like Ruben's portrait of Helena Fourment that I posted earlier.....OK. I'm confused because it appears that I can write more lines than I thought at first before the break... I'm enraptured by how cozy the object is, how soft, and how disgusting it is (literally dis-gusting) if you think of the etymology of the word. The texture of the spoon (wrapped in fur) against the texture of the tongue, the texture of the cup against the liquid it would ordinarily contain...Oppenheim was a Swiss artist who had associations, especially conceptually, with the dada movement of the early 20th century.