Delirium: a man, a dog, a girl, opera, food poisoning, and me

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

We will start this recitative with a link to “Wysteria” (Dan Fogelberg) sung by singer-songwriter Joshua Payne, my houseguest this past week, because the word “delirium” is going through my head to the tune of his “Wysteria.” It occupies my mind so thoroughly that other words fling around it like confetti. I am recovering from food poisoning. Calamari.

I told Joshua at the time, “These aren’t as good as usual.” I weigh five pounds less than I did three days ago. I will try to write clearly if not coherently.

He and I continued our intense discussion over that fated dinner – at a favorite restaurant, alas – about the musical (opera, perhaps?) he is writing and that we had worked on together throughout the day. He called our conversation “sparring.” I felt it as a battle of voices trying to trump one another where I was the guaranteed loser – he is a trained opera baritone. I tried to convince myself that I might learn a new skill in counterpoint to the “deep listening” we advocated at the non-profit I founded. I didn’t succeed in either convincing myself or gaining the skill though the final result of my internal debate remains to be seen. I can imagine situations where sheer timbre force could have value.

When the conversation changed direction – a maneuver of mine – he quoted Bible verses from Corinthians and Samuels about, yes, the Jews were promised Israel, but God reversed that because the Jews weren’t being good enough. So the promise of land had been valid only for a certain time. Joshua would supply me with as many verses as I wanted.

However, the mere mention of Corinthians made my stomach start to turn and I asked him to stop. He looked baffled.

Finally I took his hand and said, “Really, you must stop now,” which he did with a surprised look while I launched into the closest thing to a rant I’ve done in years. It was on how much I dislike religions – ALL religions – and Bible-driven mentalities, and the damage done by people who think they are superior and chosen and right, and how religion stopped people from thinking clearly about reality and goodness and humanity right in front of them in real time. I had no idea I felt quite that strongly about it.

Joshua was brought up under fundamentalist Christianity, brutal and violent on the one hand and redemptive and beautiful on the other. He is the child of pastors (albeit musical ones) in Arkansas and has come to some kind of terms with it, even really likes the Old Testament.

I, however, when trying to initiate upchucking around 2:00 am, only had to think “Corinthians” for the “upchuck” button to be pushed.

[Please continue to listen to “delirium” sung so sweetly in the way Joshua sings “Wysteria.”]

My anti-religion rant wasn’t my first outburst. Mid-week, exhausted and taut, I snapped at the person dearest to me, shocking us both. I snapped about something I had planned for years to explain gently, carefully, as a trait that hurt me. So much for gentleness! (We have worked our way through this and she is stocking me with Gingerale and some godawful thing called “vitamin water” that comes in magenta and cobalt blue.)

I also contacted a former lover about seeing him finally, but reneged it perfunctorily and abruptly a day or two later in a flash of hurt and pique.

Yup, it’s been quite a week. The cost of being surrounded by genius and beauty and harshness? The cost of having my lovely controlled life disturbed? Disturbed?!! Hell!!

It began with my dog Phoenix, a standard poodle. In addition to having an opera-trained voice of a baritone angel, Joshua is a dog whisperer – though I never actually saw him whisper – and Phoenix needed training.

Phoenix jumped on people, Phoenix went ballistic over deliverymen and trucks driven by deliverymen or garbagemen, Phoenix became crazed around leaf blowers, Phoenix barked at other dogs, and in my neighborhood there are a lot of deliveries, a lot of dogs, and a lot of leaf blowers.

Besides, Joshua was charming when I met him in NYC six weeks ago, so I invited him to my home to take care of the dog situation and we would work on his musical in the process. (I was once a playwright. Joshua likes my work.) What could go wrong?

Well, first off, Joshua couldn’t figure out the deal with Phoenix, couldn’t decode him. Why wasn’t he packing with us/him/me? It is one thing to know your dog is disobedient. It is another to know he prefers other people to you and that what affection he has for you is as a free agent. We now know Phoenix’s chosen pack – his hierarchical ranking, and affection, order – is 1) the man he stays with when I’m away, 2) the man who did construction in my house the first two years of his life, 3) my 4-year-old granddaughter, and then probably me. Joshua came to occupy a unique separate place.

Before we finished, eight different people were here for training with “my” dog and Joshua had to “take down” Phoenix twice. The first time wasn’t too bad and I saw it. (On the second day of training, Phoenix skulked under the piano and growled and showed teeth when I tried to get him out.)

Joshua said from the beginning there would be a rebellion around day 4, and there was. This second and final “take down,” which I luckily did not see, was the real deal and ended with the two bonded as spent fighters in each other’s clutches on the grass in nearby woods. After that, my dog began to sleep with Joshua who called him “my warrior brother” and wanted to take him back to Nashville with him.

Phoenix no longer jumps on people and does not bark at deliverymen, their trucks, other dogs, or leaf blowers. He walks in perfect “heel” and “stays” where he is supposed to, though he cheats a little on “stay” with me. We’re working on it.

My dog, who prefers others more than me (yes, I’m still adjusting to this truth I already knew, hence the repetition), seems both relieved of his self-imposed job description of Protector Against All Things, i.e. some things are our friends – and bored from the new quiet in the house. (I am grieved and guilty at not being strong enough to walk him and so wish Joshua were still here for him. The sight of Joshua walking long-haired and barefoot through my fancy area of DC with Phoenix on a loose leash prancing at his side was a sight to behold. He even walked in peace between two leaf blowers like they were playing a duet just for him.)

So, in a week’s time I faced the truth of my dog’s allegiance, had a non-stop revolving door of people and training, affronted people I love, was sleep deprived, drank too much wine, offered food continuously, and had a musical genius either caressing me 24/7 with his music (piano, guitar, voice) and/or poetry, or challenging me front on, or embracing with glee (and our mutual goosebumps) my ideas for his musical – or regaling me with his childhood which reinforced any stereotype I’ve ever had about the South. In sum, I lost control of my life as I gained control of my dog. And then I got food poisoning.

Just one snippet: Past midnight once again. Mucho wine. I’m immobile, and can only watch as he meticulously cleans up the dinner dishes, scrubs my stove, triple-wipes the countertops with Windex while telling me how the junior high school principal broke his vertebrae with a canoe (?) paddle for chewing gum in school. What does one do with this?

My 4 1/2-year-old granddaughter in all her sweetness was the contretemps, determined to learn how to control Phoenix through simple commands and hugs. He wants to obey her. You see his heart expand. You see him listen and wait.

When Joshua left two days ago, Phoenix was reluctant to watch. But it’s important as part of the pack to explain to your animal that you are leaving but that you will return. You can’t just disappear.

So Joshua spoke to Phoenix, and then he spoke to Josie. I watched, sick and in pajamas, knowing that I too was part of the pack, even if not the preferred leader.

After Joshua left, Josie sat with Phoenix for a long time, petting him and explaining that Joshua would be back. When a visitor came later, Phoenix did not jump on her. Well, he considered it and I gave the “NIE” command and he sat and waited to be petted. If not his #1, I did get his willing cooperation.

I wouldn’t have missed this week for anything, . . .

. . . and now the musical includes a key character based on Josie’s great great great (more?) grandfather, sheriff of Dodge City. How good is this?

Re-seeing Masterpieces: Chicago Art Institute

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

On my first day to the Art Institute of Chicago last week I was waylaid and overwhelmed by the talking heads in their great Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Byzantium rooms. We had great conversations. They had much to say. (See blog “The Eyes Have It” from six days ago.)

On my second visit, I focused on paintings by the greatest in more recent history, and I formed two tenets.

Durer’s Eve knees

Tenet #1 is on beauty: paintings that are masterpieces can be apportioned into sections of themselves that are small masterpieces that retain the ability to wow your socks off. The strokes, colors, and lines that make up the whole can be “reframed,” say by a camera, into miniatures that are in themselves transcending.

I am not sure this applies to minimalist paintings but I have convinced myself that it applies to representational and abstract paintings. It certainly held true for the best works of Durer, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, and – interestingly – Georgia O’Keefe and Arthur Dove. Are there any works by Durer or Cezanne that are not “best works”? Surely, the artists among my readers can add more painters who never fail.

Eve’s leaves

Tenet #2 is on how to best navigate galleries not filled with masterpieces: when in a room of paintings that are not masterpieces you have two ways to bring more life and joy to the experience – study the evolution of a painter, marveling that they too could have a bad day, OR find sections of, ah, “lesser” paintings that are nonetheless thrilling. It’s usually in there somewhere.

Best is to look through your camera so that you see only what the camera sees, move it about, and wait for that moment when you feel a little brain “ping.” That’s it! You will have participated in the creative process by framing (finding) the marvelous something that exists inside the larger something that is less than transcending. You have become your own artist. (Think of it as a form of “cut and paste.”)

Below are moments, dim sum of pleasure, facets that I captured. To identify them all is tedious on WordPress, and really I just want you to look, to see, to feel without thinking about the where and when and by whom they were painted. Some you will recognize. Others perhaps not. Relish!

The Eyes Have It: Chicago’s Art Institute

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

First time in Chicago in four decades. It was too cold and windy to land in after graduation, so I went further east, suitcase and borrowed money in hand, to Washington, DC. The first days there, in what I mistakenly thought would be an international city but was still a sleepy southern town when I was 21, I went to the National Gallery of Art and gawked. Yesterday, having just arrived, I went to the the Art Institute of Chicago. I was not alone.

You would have thought I was alone but I was not, and it wasn’t because of pods of high school students or tourists with museum maps. I was surrounded by 1500- to 2500-year-old people who overwhelmed me by their humanity – Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Tibetans. Statesmen, philosophers, fighters, conquerors, ordinary people, and gods. Mostly male, some female.

Why now so strongly? It’s not that I’ve never seen a marble bust before, I’ve seen plenty. It’s that I’ve never “felt” a marble bust – or stone or terra cotta or cast bust or bas relief or, yes, Carrara torso – so alive. They were cold, they were separate before.

Now they told me their story, how they carried themselves in the agora, their sense of responsibility or defeat, their innocent inability to explain that they didn’t know they were still innocent, their bafflement, their serenity inside the temple.

They told me through the turn of their head or the jut of their jaw, but they told me mainly through their eyes. We held conversations of a phrase here and a phrase there. My job was to listen, just that.

There was a painting of a man taken from his (Egyptian) tomb that I’d first seen in a compendium of art in a book I bought with that borrowed money so many years ago. I was struck by it then for its realism, I was almost mowed down yesterday by its eyes. This was a human being! He lived! He walked, talked, wore a wreath at least for his funeral but surely for other occasions also. Bet he was married and had children, maybe a business, or . . . what? What, dear human male, did you do when you had a viable body and mind? You had, I believe, a sense of wonder tempered by caution. I saw it in your eyes.

Why now? Perhaps because I am of an age where more people are dying around me than are being born. Of an age when people who have died are still real to me. Of an age where I not only understand the shortness of life but the aliveness of life. Of an age where nothing, nothing, nothing matters so much as caring and loving and holding, and beauty. Beauty as both treasure and key to treasure. Of an age where callousness is fatal.

It was not only the people who revealed themselves to me, but the sculptors, unknown and nameless, who created each work, and I use the word “work” here as a precious thing, for the physicality of stone, marble, and paint require muscle in the duty of message and transference. It also requires intelligence of execution (training and skill) and emotional elasticity and, ultimately, wisdom.

One cannot expose the eyes of resignation of the philosopher without understanding that understanding being human is to know resignation.

One cannot make the eyes of a fallen warrior “dead” without knowing what leaves the body at the moment of death.

One cannot reveal innocence without knowing innocence in relationship to experience.

So the people revealed, and their revealing artists, surrounded me on the Chicago Art Institute and it was crowded, not by people with museum maps but by tangible presences that had navigated vast distances to say “I am because I was. Feel me, companion.”

Returned: one angel’s wing

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

[This blog, be forewarned, speaks of hope. It was written, unabashedly, in the face of the harm, cruelty, and violence humans do to each other.]

Five and a half years ago I lost an angel’s wing. I also lost a husband, a house, and my trust in the bulk of humanity.

I stopped grieving the husband two or three years after he told me of his separate parallel life.

The house I never missed. It was a McMansion that fought back hard against my attempts to make it human-friendly. A truckload of furniture would arrive – soft sofas, curved wood rockers, Afghan rugs – and, once they were unloaded, I’d look around to find in which room they had disappeared.

We originally called the house “The Stage,” recognizing it as a phase my husband seemed to need to go through. He never got through it, he loved that house.

As for my trust in humans, it will never return to fuzzy-edged naiveté. I live by: I could be betrayed, heart-broken, forgotten, and cheated on at any moment, but that’s not an adequate reason not to love and embrace joy.

In any case, any bitterness has been replaced by a manageable sadness, patience, and loving acceptance. The book of humans could be titled “Varieties of Foibles.” We don’t even treat ourselves, let alone others, as we would like to be treated.

And poignancy is an okay quality to live with. Its merging of joy and pain is spot on with the truth of life.

While the house was an obdurate beast, the garden we designed together was breathtaking – pockets of restfulness, a (recycling) creek with two dams, koi fish, water lilies, lotus, Siberian irises, a mediation house 9 feet off the ground with glass walls and a steeple of copper, and the green grass circle where we were married standing on rose petals.

The angel’s wing (Carrara marble) was in the garden. When I had the opportunity to claim some furniture and art from the house, I didn’t have the presence of mind to remember the garden. It was a hit and run mission (legal and with written permission) – and it was unbearable to point my finger at items I wanted and needed (I had nothing) while his financial manager took photos and made a list.

Last week, five years overdue, the wing returned to me. The house is being sold. I wrote and asked for the wing. He didn’t say “yes” directly, but copied me on the email asking a friend to pick it up and deliver it to me.

The wing sits close to a statue of a seated woman titled “Waiting for an Angel.” I did manage to get her five years ago. She has waited all this time. Some things meant to be yours return.

They are together in my garden and today my first iris bloomed – an old-fashioned purple bearded iris of the kind my mother grew. It is among allium, and peonies that will bloom soon, and a lilac bush that bloomed two weeks ago.

The foibles of humans make good things more tender than they might otherwise be. Life wants to be wonderful. Or maybe the return of the wing and the hope it embodies – angels do visit earth – is making me a little drunk.

Foggy Sunday at MoMA

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

The plan on this foggy day in NYC was to go to MoMA to see the Gauguin and Jasper Johns exhibitions, both new, both nice, both somewhat intellectual. No photography allowed, which was fine with me. I respected both exhibitions but was not hit behind the knees, my criterion for OMG art.

Then I joined the throng of foggy-Sunday people in the galleries of MoMA’s permanent collection, the paintings you see on postcards, calendars, and posters with good reason.

Before we proceed, however, I want to draw your attention to a little Odilon Redon still life hanging quietly in the corner.

See in this photo of “Wildflowers in a Long Necked Vase” (1912) how no one is looking? Redon may be the best kept open secret in the art world. There used to be a small room devoted to his paintings tucked into the lowest level of Musee d’Orsay in Paris where we few Redonophiles gathered in silence, excepting an occasional gasp or swoon.

Redon is my drug of choice, discovered when I was 21, unemployed, and newly arrived with one suitcase to Washington, DC. For two days I stood in front of his paintings at the National Gallery of Art instead of looking for a job.

I can spot a Redon across a crowded room. He was a real deal mystic not a William Blake angel-oriented one. He contained the ecstasy of mystical vision inside the “real” world of fear and monsters. His prints, unlike his painting, are seriously scary. But that’s what I think it’s like for mystics on earth.

And, living in this world, we are best to keep our eyes open, and embrace it all. I had a great time being infused with art, and embracing the Sunday crowd.

See redhead in front of Frida Kahlo.

See blue haired girl in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” just as the guide told her charges that Van Gogh’s stint in the south of France hadn’t gone so well, and he cut his ear off.

See little Asian girl almost touching a George Seurat before a panicked guard rushed over.

See couple in front of “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth (discreetly next to the elevators) as the young man asked his young women,”Does it remind you of when you were a girl on the farm in Russia?”

See man in a plaid shirt in front of a minimalist Miro.

See hair-flippity girl next to flippity red Matisse.

See Max Ernst’s “The Blind Swimmer (1934),” and think how explicit is that! Cited as having a subconscious association, it’s perhaps not so subconscious as it once was.

See that humans can transcend, given colors, forms, and lines with which to re-pattern ourselves and to answer questions for which we have no words, subconscious or conscious.

Porcelain Terrors: art reflecting us

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Who knew porcelain bleeds and ceramic can be sliced? Reader Alert: this post contains gore.

The recent exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (NYC at Columbus Circle) was titled “Body and Soul: new international ceramics.” I call it “Porcelain Terrors.”

Three life-size children, shiny white, greeted me. A boy and a girl appeared to be begging on their knees in front of another girl. Was it a game, a new form of “Mother, May I”? Then I walked around the standing girl and saw the gun she held behind her back.

The show, which closed a week ago, was a Hall of Mirrors made personal by human figures martyred to cultural violence, anxiety, and fears. The 25 artists show, once again, that art with meaning reveals us to ourselves.

Also, that beauty can be an exquisite door to ugly truths. That’s why I, for one, need it. It is a conversation of deeper measure than politics as usual, reality shows, casual flirtations, fast foods, and implanted prejudices. It talks to me where I live, fret, and need answers.

An artist told me decades ago, if a painting doesn’t come off the wall and hit you behind the knees, it’s not good enough. My definition is gentler: good art either has to hit you behind the knees or play your heart like a stringed instrument. Audible gasps are good.

In the show porcelain heads were chopped off and ceramic hearts and intestines pulled out. Such fine materials, such lamentations.

China skulls were sliced by fine china plates. Lust and gluttony were glazed. Much piercing was done. See “The Volunteer” (below) for surgical procedures.

The volunteer

Another exhibition was on view, and will be until June 1. “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” shows objects of various materials made by 3-D printers. To me, the objects lacked heart and soul not to mention blood and guts. They felt like next-generation decoration, furniture, and clothing, which, in fact, they were. Harbingers of our future.

Not incidentally, 3-D printers already manufacture real guns that look like the one behind the girl’s back.

That is, the first show showed the violent subset of our propensities while the second supports our propensities for pretty things and/or power. That said, a friend of mine adored the 3-D show, and you may, too.

(More 3-D pieces, besides this lace chair, are shown below. Note the black lace dress especially.)

The thrill, or shiver, for me, however, was “Body and Soul” because it showed who we are, how we kill each other, how we use each other, and how we consume each other, and how we want to be consumed. I was not printed by a 3-D printer. I am flesh.

Titled “Broken,” a collection of delicate English women with names like “Claire,” once exquisitely dressed and coiffed as figurines, held up their slit wrists, offered viewers their heart or head or guts – all with sweet smiles. Always in petticoats, sometimes with hats.

Claire

Lust and Gluttony

A dinner party turned into a bacchanal of sex, food, lust, gluttony. Louis XIV, or your neighbors? A reality show, or secret fantasies? More than indigestion is at stake here.

A woman of indeterminate age stood naked and vulnerable with pumped-up lips slavered in lipstick, turning innocent self-conscious beauty into something sexually grotesque, and common place.

One skull was sliced by fine china plates, another woven through the eye sockets by a cheap oversized bead necklace. We live, we decorate, we die.

The ceramics of men touched me immensely, wounded as they were, strong men, warriors, fighters made of fragile materials that, like them, could be broken easily. A man hauled his idealized sleeping woman on his back, a boxer was cut, St. Sebastian in a hoodie was tied to a chair surrounded by flattened porcelain penises, a man with a mirror in his face burst his heart.

Drop the bust on the floor and it’s over.

Why is this mesmerizing? Literally, you see, it is beautiful. Exquisite surfaces, delicate colors. And you see through it to what we see on television and in our media of what we do to each other, our collective and individual stupidities that result in inner and outer devastations.

Yet, there are artists in every culture who turn that into something so poignant that our humanity is restored. They return us to feeling and caring. Their art gives us hope by making us honest, by not letting us get away with it.

Three-D pieces below. I’m sure we’ll see more of them. I’m waiting for them to hit me behind the knees or play my heart like a stringed instrument.

LACES OF REMBRANDT

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

Some things are perfect in themselves, require no explanations. Flower petals, for example, are not metaphors for other things, they are wholly themselves, unexplainable, irreducible. Bird song, the same.

Rembrandt

Laces painted by Rembrandt require no explanations, they are irreducible, they are their own reality, larger somehow than what they represent. (All images in the blog can be enlarged for better viewing.)

The paint of them, the white of them, the brush strokes step outside of time and history and reference, the way feathers are timeless, the way whispers are forever, the way intrigue and make-believe and dress-up travel through time.

Rembrandt, lace

That’s sort of the way with Rembrandt, though the humanity in his self-portraits shocks you into knowing the man behind the painting, the real human of complexity who understood white and lace, especially against black.

Last Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) the laces stopped me on my way to see the Vermeer paintings a few galleries further on. Surrounded by hundreds of masterpieces, the laces are stunning in their confidence of what they are.

Rembrandt, lace

STENDHAL SYNDROME with KANDINSKY: at the Neue Galerie

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

STENDHAL SYNDROME or Florence syndrome: a psychosomatic disorder, a sort of attack, named after the 19th century French author Stendhal who was taken over by it on an 1817 visit to Florence. He wrote that when he visited the Basilica of Santa Croce he saw Giotto’s frescoes for the first time and went into “… a sort of ecstasy, … absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … where one encounters celestial sensations …. Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. I had palpitations of the heart. I walked with the fear of falling.” Named in 1979 by an Italian psychiatrist who observed more than 100 cases among visitors to Florence, the illness includes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to particularly beautiful art or a large amount of art in a single place, such as what would happen at the Uffizi.

Today it happened to me. At the Neue Galerie in NYC. With Vasily Kandinsky. Direct transfusion from the canvas to my sensory receptors. Lights popping. Knees weak. And why not? If not today, when?

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VASILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944): first artist to formulate concepts of an art, and create art, of abstraction that would generate emotions without needing or using specific subject matter.

It’s mostly about the colors being “just there,” hanging out, having conversations with each other. “Black Form” can be dissected into about ten different sections, each a marvel of jewel tones nudging each other or shooting across one another. Then you put it all together and … become speechless.

Black Form (1923)
Click to enlarge

It’s not that I suddenly discovered Kandinsky. He’s had a special file in my brain for decades. What is it about these Russians? I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov in the play “Man with a Case,” based on two Chekhov stories, at the Shakespeare Theater last week and the effect was about the same.

No, I’ve always know about Kandinsky, I’ve just never seen so many of his paintings in one place, and there are 80 separate works at the Neue Galerie at 5thAvenue and 86th Street, New York.

The mansion was completed in 1914 and lived in by industrialist William Starr Miller and later by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III before being purchased by Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsy in 1994 to become an art museum. The Neue is home to several famous Gustav Klimt paintings, and has a charming Viennese café specializing in savory krauts and decadent desserts. I had the Linzer Torte.

Back to Kandinsky and colors: a week ago I wrote about sensuality v. sexuality and how sensuality incorporates the entire body’s responses to touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell. His paintings enter through your sight, of course, but he was greatly influenced by his love of music, especially of Arnold Schoenberg’s compositions that broke from having a central motif and are referred to as “pantonal,” though more familiarly known as “atonal.” Also he was intrigued by the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art that combines art, music, and theater. Further, he experienced color as sound and sound as color, which had to have been a handy gift.

White Sound (1908)
Click to enlarge

SYNESTHETE: one of the very rare people, including Kandinsky and other brilliant people such as Nabokov, Liszt, and Richard Feyman, who saw colors when other senses were stimulated. (For Feyman, it was his physics equations.) For Kandinsky, he saw the colors for his paintings when hearing music. Here for your viewing, and perhaps listening, pleasure is “White Sound.” While it may take a moment to absorb the first onslaught of color, once you have, it turns into something amazing.

This overlay of art forms captivated him. Perhaps because it is how he experienced the meshing of his senses, i.e. his sensual life. He compared painting to composing music, saying “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” He called this devotion to inner beauty and intensity of spirit and spiritual desire as an “inner necessity.” His book “Concerning the Spirituality in Art” was published in 1910.

Improvisation 31 (1913).
Click to enlarge.

In the largest exhibit room were several of Kandinsky’s most famous and beautiful works, including a personal favorite, “Improvisation 31, Sea Battle.”

I know if you look for them, you will see figures and things in his work. Particularly in “Picture with an Archer.” And that is charming and all. Some evidently refer to Russian or German villages and folktales. A bit of Chagall-esque stuff, but to me it’s irrelevant. Remember I’m in Stendhal syndrome. It’s about pure sensation, not story lines.

Archer (1909)

The abstraction is the color. You can touch and taste it. And somehow the man mastered paintings that are visually 2 – 4 feet deep. They are neither 2-dimensionally “flat” on the canvas nor give the viewer a long depth of field. It’s as though you could reach in behind the surface and rearrange the parts if you wished, but only for a couple feet of depth.

In 1914 he painted four panels for the villa of Edwin R. Campbell, co-founder of the Chevrolet Motor Car Company. At that time a Chevy looked like this:

This should give you perspective on Kandinsky’s breakthrough genius. He was doing these gliding, flying, succulent beauties, these first abstract paintings, when cars were tin buggies.

The Campbell panels are below. The exhibition is open until February 10, 2014. Stendhal syndrome, too, can be yours!

PARIS NOTES #5 – “The Hare with Amber Eyes” or Anti-Semitism in the Neighborhood

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

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It is not the first thing you see when standing across from 81 rue Monceau, but you see it soon enough – the two faces of the Theater of Life, the tragic and the happy, in stone, mid-way up the elegant 5-story façade. Look more closely and you’ll see that Happiness is younger, innocent perhaps, while Tragedy is older, watchful, wary.

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The house was the mansion of the Ephrussi family. Like the Rothschilds and other fabulously wealthy Jewish families, they had equally wealthy powerful brothers, cousins, uncles, and aunts, in Vienna and London from the end of the 1800’s up to World War II.

Rue Monceau was central to the neighborhood of the newly wealthy Parisian Jews. Well, newly wealthy in European capitals anyway. The Ephrussi were doing very well indeed in St. Petersburg and Odessa from where they had a virtual monopoly on Russian grain trade.

The Camondo family, in an even larger mansion at 63 rue Monceau, arrived massively rich as bankers from outside of Istanbul since the Ottoman Empire. Yesterday I visited this mansion, now the Musee Nissim de Camondo. (More below on that, with photos.)

And the Rothschilds had everything needed for the five sons to branch across Europe with funds from the patriarch Mayer, banker to the royal court of Free Frankfurt. The Ephrussi followed suit, establishing their own banks. Each family collected art. Charles Ephrussi, the youngest son of Leon, the first Ephrussi to come to Paris (1871), was exempt from working in banking or anywhere else that made money. It was always clear he was the arty one.

It was Charles who bought the 264 Japanese netsuke central to “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” written by Edmund De Waal, grandson of Elizabeth Ephrussi of the Vienna branch and inheritor of this exquisite collection that bizarrely survived the ravages of war and anti-Semitism. Charles was primary source-material for Charles Swann in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Charles, an eminent art historian and critic, also collected vast numbers of paintings and supported Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other Impressionists. The family benefitted from this mode of assimilation in a culture where anti-Semitism, like a virus, was biding its time. Even our favorite Impressionists could turn. Renoir, who painted Charles into “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (the man in the back in the top hat), said, given a slight grudge, that Charles collected “only Jew art,” meaning it had gold highlights in it. So much for his soft edges and round women.

The book left me emotionally bruised by anti-Semitism in a way I have not experienced in some time. I am not Jewish, but I have married and loved Jews consistently, and my daughter and grandchildren are Jewish.

What has more formed my current feelings, however, are my connections of the past 12 years in Israel and in Palestine as the founder of Peace X Peace and editor-photographer of the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian women,” which has gone to every UN ambassador, every US Congressperson, and thousands more people working for healthy peaceful cultures.

Over time my frustration with the Israeli government and policies has grown into anger.

It is difficult not to be angry if you check your facts and believe in truth. But this book brought me back viscerally to how it feels when no matter what good you do or how wealthy or powerful you are, or how long you have been in a place, and how assimilated you feel you are that some people will continue to think of you and condemn you as a scourge, as dirty, as vile, as rapacious.

And it showed me, with the blow-by-blow devastation of the Ephrussi family in Vienna, how monsters can evade your house almost overnight and leave you only with the clothes on your back. How your treasures can be inventoried and carried away, how the only fight you have left is figuring out how to get out of your chosen nation before you, like the treasures, are shipped away.

The book is exquisite, it is terrifying. I recommend it.

Yesterday I saw the faces of Tragedy and Happiness on the face of a mansion. I think, despite the family’s assimilation, wealth, and titles, they knew their history well.

For now I will spare you my thoughts on the current effects and wounds of that history.

Just to acknowledge its truth and burden is enough for one day.

. . .

Yesterday I also spent hours inside the Musee Nissim de Camondo. This sumptuous mansion was built by Moise Camondo in 1911. When his only son Nissim died in 1917 as an aviator on World War I, Moise decided to bequest the mansion and magnificent art, furniture, silver, and china to Les Arts Decoratifs of Paris.

The photos do not show the mansion in its full magnificence as the Impressionist paintings, most well known, are in the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, and elsewhere.

Moise died in 1935. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren died in concentration camps.

PARIS NOTES #4: The Male Nude or An Exhibition of Muscle

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

You’re not allowed to take photographs inside Musee d’Orsay, my favorite museum in Paris. Yes, other people, more sophisticated perhaps, may go to smaller specialized museums, the Guimet Museum of Asian Art, the Rodin, or La Musee Nissim de Camondo, for example. And the Louvre is filled with tourists and the occasional connoisseur checking out this masterpiece or that red on black vase depicting a chariot race from 400 BC.

But for me, it’s the d’Orsay, and today was my first return in three years. The catalyst was the grand exhibition of male nudes now on view, specifically “The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day.” And there he was!

Strange how muscle-bound males are not all that exciting. Neither are the perils of barely clad saints such as Sebastian, a favorite subject with those arrows stuck in his chest and buttocks. Just what angle were the archers shooting from?

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Achilles, with or without an arrow in his ankle, wassimilarly a model of muscular repose, and Prometheus, even with the vulture eating his kidney, seemed to have the world under control. Why not with those abs and biceps?

Hiding behind a half-wall, I snapped the portrait of Prometheus (1868) by Gustave Moreau before the guard caught me. (Moreau has his own little museum to be visited in the next few days as I hear he shocked his peers by hallucinatory. Let’s see.)

Hermes was slightly more charming, youth that he is with that cute little hat, as was John the Baptist as a boy, radiating faith. It made me think about how people believe the religion they are taught until they are old enough to accept that not only do their parents lie but maybe their culture also, and maybe the story is too large for only one version.

It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that naked men could be portrayed as what I’m used to, skinnier and prone to listing this way or that. It happened with the advent of photography and self portraits. And people such as Francis Bacon who threw red and yellow paint around like wounds of existential angst.

Yet, the heroic vision of the male body as muscle remained. Think of the photos of Mapplethope for one.

So there I was, a woman trying to find the men within the bodies. It was difficult to do. I think it is sometimes difficult for men also.

Leaving I saw a young man, fully clothed, kissing a young woman. I whipped out my iphone and took a photo before the guard charged. He did, but I had seen love unmuscle-bound, and I liked it, and I understood it, and I got the photo.

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