I just got finished watching Woody Allen’s latest movie “Midnight in Paris” and I loved it. In that movie there are several famous writers and artists that appear in the film. I am doing a series of posts that takes a look at this great writers and artists. There is a scene when Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Man Ray all get to visit with Gil in the film “Midnight and Paris.” He tells them that he traveled through time and they all believed him!!!

Size of this preview: 800 × 523 pixels Salvador Dalí and Man Ray in Paris, on June 16, 1934 making “wild eyes” for photographer Carl Van Vecht

Man Ray (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976), born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career inParis, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is noted for hisphotograms, which he renamed “rayographs” after himself.^[1]

While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.

In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as “his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance artand conceptual art” and saying “Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its ‘pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'”—Man Ray’s stated guiding principles—”unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would.”^[2]

[edit]Life and career

[edit]Background and early life

From the time he began attracting attention as an artist until his death more than sixty years later, Man Ray allowed little of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even refusing to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.^[3]

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA in 1890, the eldest child of recent Russian Jewish immigrants. The family would eventually include another son and two daughters, the youngest born shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray’s brother, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called “Manny” as a nickname, changed his first name to Man at this time, and gradually began to use Man Ray as his combined single name.^[3][4]

Man Ray’s father was a garment factory worker who also ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting his children from an early age. Man Ray’s mother enjoyed making the family’s clothes from her own designs and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric.^[3] Despite Man Ray’s desire to disassociate himself from his family background, this experience left an enduring mark on his art. Tailor’s dummies, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to clothing and sewing appear at every stage of his work and in almost every medium.^[5] Art historians have also noted similarity in his collage and painting techniques to those used in making clothing.^[4]

Mason Klein, curator of an exhibition of Man Ray’s work at the Jewish Museum entitled “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention,” suggests that Man Ray may have been “the first Jewish avant-garde artist.”^[6]

[edit]First artistic endeavors

The Misunderstood (1938). Collection of the Man Ray Estate.

Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical ability from childhood. His education at Boys’ High School from 1904 to 1908 provided him with a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. At the same time, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. After graduation from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead. However much this decision disappointed his parents’ aspirations to upward mobility and assimilation, they nevertheless rearranged the family’s modest living quarters so that Man Ray could use a room as his studio. He stayed for the next four years, working steadily toward being a professional painter, while earning money as a commercial artist and technical illustrator at severalManhattan companies.^[3][4]

From the surviving examples of his work from this period, it appears he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of avant-garde art of the time, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz‘s “291” gallery and works by the Ashcan School, but, with a few exceptions, was not yet able to integrate these new trends into his own work. The art classes he sporadically attended—including stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League—were of little apparent benefit to him, until he enrolled in the Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, thus beginning a period of intense and rapid artistic development.^[4]

[edit]New York

Living in New York City, influenced by what he saw at the 1913 Armory Show and in galleries showing contemporary works from Europe, Man Ray’s early paintings display facets of cubism. Upon befriending Marcel Duchamp who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, his works begin to depict movement of the figures, for example in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916).^[7]

In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918.

A Night at Saint Jean-de- Luz (1929).
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris

Abandoning conventional painting, Man Ray involved himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement, started making objects, and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. For the 1918 version of Rope Dancer he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Again, like Duchamp, he made “readymades“—objects selected by the artist, sometimes modified and presented as art. His Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Another work from this period, Aerograph (1919), was done with airbrush on glass.^[7]

In 1920 Ray helped Duchamp make his first machine and one of the earliest examples of kinetic art, the Rotary Glass Plates composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year Man Ray, Katherine Dreier and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection which in effect was the first museum of modern art in the U.S.

Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish the one issue of New York Dada in 1920. Man Ray expressed that “dada’s experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York, and he wrote “Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival.”^[8] Man Ray moved to Paris in 1921.

Man Ray met his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, in 1913 in New York. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and were formally divorced in 1937.^[9]

[edit]Paris

In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France, and soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artists’ model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Kiki was Man Ray’s companion for most of the 1920s. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images and starred in his experimental films. In 1929 he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.

Salvador Dalí and Man Ray in Paris, on June 16, 1934 making “wild eyes” for photographer Carl Van Vechten

For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray made his mark on the art ofphotography. Significant members of the art world, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Bridget Bate Tichenor,^[10] and Antonin Artaud posed for his camera.

With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealistexhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Works from this period include a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed. Another important work from this part of Man Ray’s life is the Violon d’Ingres,^[11] a stunning photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse,^[12] styled after the painter/musician, Ingres. This work is a popular example of how Man Ray could juxtapose disparate elements in his photography in order to generate meaning.^[13]

In 1934, surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed nude for Man Ray in what became a well-known series of photographs depicting her standing next to a printing press.

Together with Lee Miller, who was his photography assistant and lover, Man Ray reinvented the photographic technique ofsolarization. He also created a technique using photograms he called rayographs, which he described as “pure dadaism”.

Man Ray directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur, such as Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L’Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystères du Château de Dé (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema (1926), and personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger‘s Ballet Mécanique (1924). Man Ray also appeared in René Clair‘s film Entr’acte(1924), in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp.

Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were friends as well as collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.^[14][15]

[edit]Later life

Man Ray portrayed by Lothar Wolleh, Paris, 1975

Later in life, Man Ray returned to the United States, having been forced to leave Paris due to the dislocations of the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles, California from 1940 until 1951. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a first generation American of Rumanian-Jewish lineage; a trained dancer and experienced artists’ model.^[16] They began living together almost immediately, and married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. However, he called Montparnasse home and he returned there.

In 1963 he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, which was republished in 1999 (ISBN 0-8212-2474-3).

He died in Paris on November 18, 1976 of a lung infection, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads:unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.

[edit]Quotations

[edit]By Man Ray

• “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.” (Julien Levy exhibition catalog, April 1945.)

• “There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.” (1948 essay, “To Be Continued, Unnoticed”.)

• “To create is divine, to reproduce is human.” (“Originals Graphic Multiples”, circa 1968; published in Objets de Mon Affection, 1983.)

• “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.” (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)

• “I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor.” (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)

• “An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated by necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.”

• “Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”

• “I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.” ^[8]

[edit]About Man Ray

• “MAN RAY, n.m. synon. de Joie jouer jouir.” (Translation: “MAN RAY, masculine noun, synonymous with joy, to play, to enjoy.”) — Marcel Duchamp, as the opening epigram for Man Ray’s memoir Self-Portrait, 1963.

• “With him you could try anything—there was nothing you were told not to do, except spill the chemicals. With Man Ray, you were free to do what your imagination conjured, and that kind of encouragement was wonderful.” — Artist and photographer, Naomi Savage, Man Ray’s niece and protégée, in a 2000 newspaper interview.

• “Man Ray is a youthful alchemist forever in quest of the painter’s philosopher’s stone. May he never find it, as that would bring an end to his experimentations which are the very condition of living art expression.” — Adolf Wolff, “Art Notes”, International 8, no. 1 (January 1914), p. 21.

• “[Man Ray was] a kind of short man who looked a little like Mr. Peepers, spoke slowly with a slight Brooklynese accent, and talked so you could never tell when he was kidding.” — Brother-in-law Joseph Browner on his first impression of the artist; quoted in the Fresno Bee, August 26, 1990.

[edit]Selected books by Man Ray

• Man Ray and Tristan Tzara (1922). Champs délicieux: album de photographies. Paris: [Société générale d’imprimerie et d’édition].
• Man Ray (1926). Revolving doors, 1916-1917: 10 planches. Paris: Éditions Surrealistes.
• Man Ray (1934). Man Ray: photographs, 1920–1934, Paris. Hartford, CT: James Thrall Soby.
• Éluard, Paul, and Man Ray (1935). Facile. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
• Man Ray and André Breton (1937). La photographie n’est pas l’art. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
• Man Ray and Paul Éluard (1937). Les mains libres: dessins. Paris: Éditions Jeanne Bucher.
• Man Ray (1948). Alphabet for adults. Beverly Hills, CA: Copley Galleries.
• Man Ray (1963). Self portrait. London: Andre Deutsch.
• Man Ray and L. Fritz Gruber (1963). Portraits. Gütersloh, Germany: Sigbert Mohn Verlag.

[edit]

Man Ray portrayed by Lothar Wolleh, Paris, 1975

_____________________________________

The above clip is from the film series by Francis Schaeffer “How should we then live?” Below is an outline of the 8th episode on the Impressionists and the age of Fragmentation. Attention is also given to Surrealism which is what Man Ray was involved in. Also he spent a lot of time working with Marcel Duchamp and Dali who are also mentioned in this film series. 

AGE OF FRAGMENTATION

I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought

A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.

1. Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.

2. Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.

3. Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.

4. Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.

B. Fragmentation.

1. Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.

2. Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.

3. Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.

C. Retreat to absurdity.

1. Dada , and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd. (Dada gave birth to Surrealism).

2. Art followed philosophy but came sooner to logical end.

3. Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.

II. Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.

1. Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.

2. Direction and influence of Debussy.

3. Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.

4. Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.

B. Cage: a case study in confusion.

1. Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.

2. Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.

C. Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.

1. Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.

2. Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.

III. General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.

1. Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon

compared; the drift of general culture.

2. Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.

3. Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.

B. Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.

1. Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.

2. Cinema and the leap into fantasy:

The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits,

The Last Year at Marienbad.

3. Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage):

Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.

IV. Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely

Well, Mr. Allen, it would appear you still have the ability to surprise and delight me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed plenty of your recent movies, particularly the ones with Scarlett Johansson. And it’s not just because I love Scarlett Johansson–though I suspect we have some very similar thoughts on the lady (and not just the obvious ones that most people think; my readers can be so bourgeois!) You’ve had several very good films in the last six years, and a few merely okay ones. Even the good ones, though, are what they are. They hit a certain predictable level, they never took me unaware. Not like Midnight in Paris.

Now, granted, I maybe walked into those movies armed with a little more foreknowledge as to their plot. How I managed to avoid learning what Midnight in Paris was really about is beyond me, particularly given my affinity for some of the details you include in your love letter to the legendary city. I knew it starred Owen Wilson as a man engaged to Rachel McAdams, and that Wilson’s character, Gil Pender, was more romanced by Paris than his fiancée. I also picked up that Michael Sheen represented a kind of threat to this young couple, that he was, shall we say, more intellectual and sophisticated, than his neurotic rival. At the same time, Gil’s head would be turned by more than architecture, and likely, the whole thing would be a criss-crossing examination of commitment and dreams and the reasons couples go together in the first place.

Again, this is Woody Allen territory. No surprise there. You can get that from just a cursory glace at the trailer. Sharp viewers might even be able to figure it out from the poster. That poster also promotes the fact that Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates, and Marion Cotillard are in the film, and had I been pushed to guess, honestly, Marion Cotillard would have to be Owen Wilson’s temptation (and I’d have been right). The funny thing is, those three aren’t in the first fifteen or twenty minutes of Midnight in Paris, which is exactly how long my uninformed impressions of the film held true.

And then…whammo! Here comes the curveball.

I feel like I should say “spoiler alert” here, but that seems kind of silly since I am faking a conversation with the guy who wrote and directed Midnight in Paris, to whom none of what I am about to say should be a surprise. I also have a feeling that later trailers must have given this stuff away. I mean, how long did you keep it a secret that Jeff Daniels steps out of the movie screen in Purple Rose of Cairo? That’s what the movie is about! And given how similar the flights of fancy are between your older movie and this new one, and how this fictional conceit ends up informing the life of the character to whom it happens, comparisons between Purple Rose of Cairo and Midnight in Paris are inevitable. That should be on the poster. “From Woody Allen, the man who brought you Purple Rose of Cairo.”

Regardless, SPOILER!

As it goes, I’m just sitting there watching Owen Wilson be sad because Rachel McAdams wants to hang out with annoying people and fails to see the magic in the rich creative history of Paris–or, for that matter, the creative present of her husband-to-be. Gil is a writer who has wasted his talent on cheap Hollywood screenplays and is now trying to complete his first novel. It’s a book about a man who runs a “nostalgia shop,” named Out of the Past, presumably after the old Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer movie, because that’s just what a guy who sells memorabilia from eras long gone would do. Obviously Gil’s protagonist is just an analogue for Gil, a man who believes he was born in the wrong time, who longs for an idealized past, which is exactly what Gil is thinking about when a classic Peugeot turns the corner and stops in front of him. The people in the car motion Gil over, convince him to jump in, give him champagne, and take him to a party.

And, oh, what a party it is! Cole Porter music, conversation about the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the works. The catch is, that’s really Cole Porter at the piano, and that’s really Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) that Gil is talking to. He has been transported back in time! The rest of the movie is Gil taking full advantage of whatever temporal anomaly he has stumbled into. At midnight, he climbs into the car and goes back in time to meet his idols; in the morning, he returns to his disappointing present. In between, Gil must sort out what is happening to him, relating it to the themes that he is exploring in his novel, and then relating that further to what it means to him as a person. It’s a scenario too good to be true, every one of his literary and artistic heroes turns out to be exactly as he expected them to be–but then, this is his fantasy, isn’t it? You wouldn’t travel back in time to meet Muhammad Ali just to sit on the couch and watch him eat potato chips. You’d want him to talk in rhyme and shadow box right in front of you! Likewise, you’d want Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll for Law & Order: Los Angeles) to talk in clipped prose about bullfighters and give you writing tips.

I mean, that’s what I’d want, Mr. Allen, and that’s what you deliver. Midnight in Paris is a delightful, witty movie. It even gets poignant in its final scenes. Owen Wilson is surprisingly good playing the motormouthed stand-in for yourself, and all of your supporting actors are so perfectly cast. They latch onto these bygone personalities and refuse to let go. All the performers are clearly having fun. Alison Pill is absolutely train-wreck charming as Zelda Fitzgerald–though, the implications of Gil giving her valium are a little weird–and Corey Stoll attacks the Hemingway material like an unstoppable elephant. Maybe the most fun, though, is Adrien Brody, who only has one full scene, but he pretty much steals the whole movie. “Dali!”

Marion Cotillard is also extremely charming and she is easy to buy in the role of the ineffable muse. If I had one complaint, it’s that I wish there had been just a tad more romance here. The scenes with her and Wilson play it safe, and we never get to see her be the volcano she is once described as being. There is no agony in the choice Gil must make, it’s pretty obvious how it’s going to go–that’s the lesson he must learn, after all–and if you learned anything from the writers you are portraying, it’s that the drama comes out of the choice being too difficult. Rachel McAdams is adorable, but let’s be honest, the character she plays is rotten, start to finish.

It’s not enough of a complaint to have ruined the warm glow I had after watching Midnight in Paris. I just don’t want to overdo and pretend it’s a perfect movie–even if it is perfectly wonderful to watch. Like the myths of the city it depicts, Midnight in Paris is its own inscrutable thing. It couldn’t happen anywhere else, and it could happen with anyone but you, Mr. Allen. My hat is doffed in your direction.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

(UPDATE: A reader that used the username “therealchirpy” notes, “Although any affair with Picasso may be fictional, isn’t the ‘Adriana’ referred to in Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ based on Hemingway’s mistress Adriana Ivancich.” I have found some evidence for that. I read a review that draws that same conclusion although some have said that Hemingway just had a crush on her. )

I can’t express how much I have learned during this series on the characters referenced in Woody Allen’s latest movie “Midnight  in Paris.” Today’s is one of my favorites because she allows us to look at all of the women in Picasso’s life and in the process we get to take a closer look at how Picasso’s worldview was expressed in his paintings.

The character Adriana in “Midnight in Paris” is a fictional character but she exposes the fact that Picasso was constantly possessive of his mistresses and hateful at times to the women in his life. Francis Schaeffer in his film series “How should we then live?” has some very insightful commentary on Picasso and the loss of humanity pictured in his paintings. However, Picasso could not be consistent because when it came to painting Olga, Jacqueline and his children, Picasso would use  all of abilities to show them the way God made them and not in a fragmented way.

Artist	Pablo Picasso
Year	1907
Type	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	243.9 cm × 233.7 cm (96 in × 92 in)
Location	Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, New York City[1]

Above is Picasso’s greatest masterpiece, Les Desmoiselles d ’Avignon (1907).

Francis Schaeffer in the episode, “The Age of Fragmentation,” Episode 8 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN  LIVE? noted:

Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley,
Degas were following nature as it has been called in their painting they were
impressionists.They painted only what their eyes brought them. But was there
reality behind the light waves reaching their eyes? After 1885 Monet carried
this to its conclusion and reality tended to become a dream. With impressionism
the door was open for art to become the vehicle for modern thought. As reality
became a dream, impressionism began to fall apart. These men Cezanne, Van Gogh,
Gauguin, Seurat, all great post Impressionists felt the problem, felt the loss
of meaning. They set out to solve the problem, to find the way back to reality,
to the absolute behind the individual things, behind the particulars, ultimately
they failed.

I am not saying that these
painters were always consciously painting their philosophy of life, but rather
in their work as a whole their worldview was often reflected. Cezanne reduced
nature to what he considered its basic geometric forms. In this he was searching
for an universal which would tie all kinds of individual things in nature
together, but this gave a broken fragmented appearance to his pictures.

In his bathers there is much
freshness, much vitality. An absolute wonder in the balance of the picture as a
whole, but he portrayed not only nature but also man himself in fragmented form.
I want to stress that I am not minimizing these men as men. To read van Gogh’s
letters is to weep for the pain of this sensitive man. Nor do I minimize their
talent as painters. Their work often has great beauty indeed. But their art did
become the vehicle of modern man’s view of fractured truth and light. As
philosophy had moved from unity to fragmentation so did painting. In 1912 
Kaczynski wrote an article saying that in so far as the old harmony, that is an
unity of knowledge have been lost, that only two possibilities remained: extreme
abstraction or extreme naturalism, both he said were equal.

With this painting modern art
was born. Picasso painted it in 1907 and called it Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It
unites Cezzanne’s fragmentation with Gauguin’s concept of the nobel savage using
the form of the african mask which was popular with Parisian art circle of that
time. In great art technique is united with worldview and the technique of
fragmentation works well with the worldview of modern man. A view of a
fragmented world and a fragmented man and a complete break with the art of the
Renaissance which was founded on man’s humanist hopes.

Here man is made to be less
than man. Humanity is lost. Speaking of a part of Picasso’s private collection
of his own works David Douglas Duncan says “Of course, not one of these pictures
was actually a portrait, but his prophecy of a ruined world.”

But Picasso himself could not
live  with this loss of the human. When he was in love with Olga and later 
Jacqueline he did not consistently paint them in a fragmented way. At crucial
points of their relationship he painted them as they really were with all his
genius, with all their humanity. When he was painting his own young children he
did not use fragmented techniques and presentation. I want you to understand
that I am not saying that gentleness and humanness is not present in modern art,
but as the techniques of modern art advanced, humanity was increasingly
fragmented.

The opposite of fragmentation
would be unity, and the old philosophic thinkers thought they could bring forth
this unity from  the humanist base and then they gave this up.

How Should We Then Live – Episode 8 – The Age of Fragmentation

__________

Olga Khokhlova and Picasso (1917-1927)

In 1917 ballerina Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955) met Picasso while the artist was designing the ballet “Parade” in Rome, to be performed by the Ballet Russe.

They married in the Russian Orthodox church in Paris in 1918 and lived a life of conflict.

She was of high society and enjoyed formal events while Picasso was more bohemian in his interests and pursuits.

Their son Paulo (Paul) was born in 1921 (and died in 1975), influencing Picasso’s imagery to turn to mother and child themes.  Paul’s three children are Pablito (1949-1973), Marina (born in 1951), and Bernard (1959).  Some of the Picassos in this Saper Galleries exhibition are from Marina and Bernard’s  personal Picasso collection.

Portrait of Paul Picasso as a Child. 1923. Oil on canvas.
Collection of Paul Picasso, Paris, France.

Artist model Fernande Olivier (1881-1966) was Picasso’s first long term relation and subject of many of Picasso’s Rose Period paintings (1905-07).   Picasso met her after settling in Paris in 1904.  Although Fernande was married, she stayed with Picasso for 7 years.  Fernande modeled for other artists between 1900 and 1905 after which she moved in with “the Spanish artist”, Picasso, who then prevented her from modeling for others.  Fernande’s having published selections from the memoirs of her life with Picasso infuriated the artist but eventually, at age 70, Picasso paid the ailing and bedridden Fernande a small pension.  The full memoir was not published until 1988, “Loving Picasso”.  In early 2004 the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. had an exhibition of 60 portraits of Fernande that Picasso painted in a few months of 1909.

Fernande left Picasso in 1912, months after Picasso took an interest in Marcelle Humbert, known as Eva Gouel (1885-1915).  Picasso was devastated by her early death due to tuberculosis or cancer in 1915.   Picasso professed his love to Eva by painting “I Love Eva” in some of his paintings.   Still, during Eva’s sickness Picasso managed a  relationship with Gaby Lespinasse.  (Picasso’s father died in May, 1913 at the time that Eva moved in with him.)

In 1917 ballerina Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955) met Picasso while the artist was designing the ballet “Parade” in Rome, to be performed by the Ballet Russe.  They married in the Russian Orthodox church in Paris in 1918 and lived a life of conflict.  She was of high society and enjoyed formal events while Picasso was more bohemian in his interests and pursuits.  Their son Paulo (Paul) was born in 1921 (and died in 1975), influencing Picasso’s imagery to turn to mother and child themes.  Paul’s three children are Pablito (1949-1973), Marina (born in 1951), and Bernard (1959).  Some of the Picassos in this Saper Galleries exhibition are from Marina and Bernard’s  personal Picasso collection.

In 1927 Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977), a 17 year old who Picasso then lived with in a flat across the street from his marital home (while still married to Olga).  Marie-Thérèse and  Picasso had a daughter, Maya (Maria de la Concepcion) on October 5, 1935.  (Picasso and Olga later separated although they remained married so Olga would not receive half of Picasso’s wealth — until she died in 1955. )   Picasso’s relation with Marie was kept from Olga until Olga was told of Marie’s pregnancy.   Marie understandably became jealous when Picasso started to fall in love with Dora Maar in 1936, a year after Maya was born.  It was Marie-Thérèse who was the inspiration for many of Picasso’s famous Vollard Suite etchings.  Marie-Thérèse died by hanging herself in 1977, four years after Picasso died.  Maya’s son, Olivier Widmaier wrote “Picasso: The Real Family Story” about his artist grandfather, in 2004.

In 1936 54-year old Picasso met Yugoslavian Dora Maar (1907 -1997), the photographer who documented Picasso’s painting of Guernica, the 1937 painting of Picasso’s depiction of the German’s having bombed the Basque city of Guernica, Spain during the Spanish Civil War.   She became Picasso’s constant companion and lover from 1936 through April, 1944.  Maar went back to painting and exhibited in Paris soon after Picasso left her for Françoise.  Picasso referred to Dora as his “private muse”.  In later years she became a recluse, dying poor and alone.

In 1943 Picasso (age 62) then kept company with young art student Françoise Gilot (born in 1921).  Their two children were Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949) who was named for the dove of peace that Picasso painted in support of the peace movement post World War II.  Gilot, frustrated with Picasso’s relationships with other woman and his abusive nature left him in 1953.   Gilot’s book “Life with Picasso” was published 11 years after their separation.  In 1970 she married American physician-researcher Jonas Salk (who later died in 1995).

In 1944 17-year old Genevieve Laporte (born in 1927) interviewed Picasso for a school newspaper.   Years later in May,1951 Picasso began an affair with the then-24 year old.  The relationship started when Laporte visited the 70-year old Picasso at his studio while he was still living with Françoise Gilot.  That summer of 1951 Picasso took Laporte to St Tropez, leaving Françoise behind.  After declining Picasso’s invitation to move in with him in St. Tropez, she left him in 1953 at the same time that Françoise left the artist.

In 1972 she went public with the affair and stored the art that Picasso created of her in a safe.   In 2005, at age 79, the poet Laporte auctioned 20 drawings of her that Picasso created during their secret affair.  Picasso’s time with Laporte has been referred to as Picasso’s “tender period”.

Dejected and alone, in 1953 Picasso met Jacqueline Roque (1926 -1986) at the Madoura Pottery where Picasso created his ceramics.  In 1961 (when Picasso was 79) she became his second wife.   Picasso created more works of art based on Jacqueline than any of his other loves, in one year painting over 70 portraits of her.

When Picasso died on April 8, 1973, Jacqueline, who had been with Picasso for 20 years, prevented Picasso’s children Claude and Paloma from attending his funeral.  Jacqueline died from shooting herself in 1986.

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May 26, 2011

Sex and Salvation according to Picasso

Seeing the huge Picasso exhibit now touring the world reminded me of why Christians should make time for the fine arts.

Karen Swallow Prior

Amid the press of daily demands, most of us think we don’t have time for enjoying the fine arts. A recent visit to a Picasso exhibit reminded me why Christians especially should make time for it.

If Horace’s adage is correct, that good art both “teaches and delights” (a description that certainly applies to the works of the Creator), then Pablo Picasso has rightly earned his reputation as one of the great artists of the modern age.

“Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris,” an exhibit touring worldwide during renovation of its permanent home in Paris, proved Picasso’s ability to delight even before gaining admission to the show. On the day I attended, traffic was gridlocked, the parking garage was full, and those like me with pre-paid reservations for an appointed time found out our tickets granted a place in line with hundreds of other ticket holders. And no wonder: During its three-month run at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (one of only three U.S. stops), a whopping 229,729 people made time for Picasso.

Of course, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. But Picasso really is good. Known for his place in the avant-garde as one of the originators of cubism, Picasso also produced works in the schools of naturalism and classicism. This exhibit of 176 pieces from among those Picasso selected himself for his personal collection featured a breathtaking array of mediums, styles, genres, and techniques: chalk drawings, classical portraits, sculptures, collages, bronze busts, and photographs.

To dismiss Picasso’s more abstract paintings as mere child’s play, as some do, is a great error. This was a serious artist. To prepare for the creation of his greatest masterpiece, Les Desmoiselles d ’Avignon (1907), Picasso produced 1,000 sketches and studies. Although the eleven-room exhibit represented a fraction of the works produced over a lifetime (Picasso began painting as a teenager and didn’t stop until his death in 1973, at age 92) from it, a worldview clearly emerges. So, too, does the reminder that Christians who wish to have significant influence in the culture ignore the arts at their peril.

In How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer explains, “In great art the technique fits the worldview being presented.” On this test alone, Picasso passes with flying colors. Les Desmoiselles d ‘Avignon was shocking both for its content (nude prostitutes) and its form (human figures reduced to geometric angles representing multiple perspectives).

Literature professor Gene Edward Veith describes how Picasso’s efforts to depict reality “as it is” resulted, ironically, in an extreme version of classical formalism that turns in on itself. In the “attempt to pin down objective form,” Picasso “reduces human beings to objects,” mere “grotesque caricatures or mathematical patterns.” Picasso’s work marked a watershed in art history, Veith says, ushering in a kind of art that’s “cut off from ordinary perception and dependent upon theory. The work of art no longer can stand alone; it needs an explanation.”

The worldview expressed by Les Desmoiselles d ‘Avignon and the body of Picasso’s works is one in which the “real” or “nature” exists underneath the surfaces; reality cannot be singularly or finally captured or represented, so is analyzed and dissected beyond recognition. With Les Desmoiselles d ‘Avignon, Schaeffer claims, came the age of modern art, a period characterized by the same experimentation, subjectivity, and rejection of tradition that defines the modern worldview.

Take just one issue, one at the center of the culture wars and the focus of Picassos’ masterpiece: sex. The experimentation, subjectivity, and rejection of tradition that define modern art also describe Picasso’s approach to sex in both his life and his art.

Picasso was married twice and had numerous affairs, mistresses, and girlfriends. He depicted many of these women in his paintings. The various styles, colors, moods, and techniques of these works reveal the fragmentation of his relationships and his skewed perspective on sexual relationships. His depictions of women range from classical to naturalistic to cubist. His most characteristic feature — uneven faces in which one eye is higher than the other — reflects a disjointed worldview based on two ways of seeing the world: the way of nature (the lower) and the way of grace (the higher). Schaeffer describes these realms of grace and nature as those dealing with the things of God, universals, and meaning (grace), and the created order of humanity, particularities, and individual experience (nature). Both realms are evident in the body of Picasso’s works, but are rarely in harmony, tending instead to reflect a dichotomized view of nature and grace at war with one another.

Thus Picasso’s portrayals of sexual liaisons frequently resort to abstraction: discombobulated human figures intertwine, limbs arranged helter-skelter, recognizable as isolated parts but not as organic wholes. One mother who brought her young daughter to the exhibit stood before the surrealist painting Figures at the Seashore (1931), explaining to her child, “See? Here are arms . . . boobs . . . and legs.” When nature and grace are dissevered, so too is everything else. Schaeffer says that in the early modern age when nature was separated from God, nature began to “eat up” grace. One can see this phenomenon at work in Picasso’s paintings and personal life.

One of Picasso’s mistresses, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was only 17 when the then-married 45-year-old first seduced her. She later bore him a daughter but eventually found herself replaced by a new mistress. A few years after Picasso’s death, Marie-Thérèse hanged herself.

Just as Christians can and should critique the worldviews expressed by the world’s great artists, so too is our worldview displayed through our creative works. What worldview does the world see in the artistry of Christians today?

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Sony Pictures

The Bottom Line

Woody’s in good form and Paris looks glorious in this droll time-traveling fantasy.

Venue:

Cannes Film Festival (Opening night, Out of Competition)

Opens:

May 20 (Sony Pictures Classics)

Cast:

Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen

Director-screenwriter:

Woody Allen

Literary giants of the 1920s and Owen Wilson interact in Woody Allen’s love letter to the City of Light.

As beguiling as a stroll around Paris on a warm spring evening — something that Owen Wilson’s character here becomes very fond of himself — Midnight in Paris represents Woody Allen’s companion piece to his The Purple Rose of Cairo, a fanciful time machine that allows him to indulge playfully in the artistic Paris of his, and many other people’s, dreams.  A sure-fire source of gentle amusement to Allen’s core audience but unlikely to connect with those with no knowledge of or feel for the Paris of the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Picasso, this love letter to the City of Light looks to do better-than-average business for the writer-director in the U.S. upon its May 20 release, and expectations in certain foreign territories could be even higher.

Related Topics

•Cannes Film Festival

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As has happened before when Allen has filmed in photogenic foreign locales — London in Match Point, Barcelona in Vicki Cristina Barcelona — the director seems stimulated by discovering the possibilities of a new environment. In fact, Allen has worked in Paris before, as a writer and actor in What’s New Pussycat? 46 years ago and in one section of Everyone Says I Love You, but this is the first time he’s given the city the royal treatment.

Granted, it’s mostly a touristic view of the city, as witness the voluptuously photographed opening montage of famous sites, but that’s entirely acceptable given that the leading characters are well-off Americans on vacation. Playing Allen’s alter ego this time around is Owen Wilson as Gil, a highly successful hack Hollywood screenwriter still young enough to feel pangs over not having seriously tested himself as a novelist.

That things may not be entirely right between Gil and his pushy fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) becomes clear early on, as the couple tours around with Inez’s friends Carol (Nina Arianda) and Paul (Michael Sheen), the latter an insufferable expert on all things cultural (that Inez’s parents are right-wingers also allows Allen to sneak in some Tea Party jokes).  “Nostalgia is denial,” Paul intones to Gil, who is keen to break off on his own to indulge his own reveries of the literary Paris that fuels his creative imagination.

Lo and behold, that night, while wandering through a quiet part of the city, Gil is invited into an elegant old car carrying some inebriated revelers. Arriving at an even more elegant party, Gil shortly finds that he’s in the company of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and that it’s Cole Porter playing the piano. Later, they end up at a bar with Ernest Hemingway, who promises to show Gil’s unfinished novel to Gertrude Stein.

And so begins a flight of fancy that allows Gil to circulate with, and receive a measure of approval from, his lifelong literary heroes, not to mention such other giants as Dali (a vastly amusing Adrien Brody), Picasso, Man Ray, T.S. Eliot and Luis Bunuel, to whom the young American gives the premise of The Exterminating Angel. If not more important, he also meets the beauteous Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the former lover of Braque and Modigliani who’s now involved with Picasso, will shortly go off with Hemingway but is also curiously receptive to Gil, who seems somehow different than everyone else.

After trying but failing to bring the balky Inez along through the midnight portal along with him, Gil keeps returning to the 1920s night after night, getting pertinent advice from Stein about his novel and becoming seriously distracted by Adriana, who herself would prefer to have lived during La Belle Epoque. Although it’s all done glibly in traditional Allen one-liner style, the format nonetheless allows the writer, who has never been shy about honoring his idols in his work, to reflect on the way people have always idealized earlier periods and cultural moments, as if they were automatically superior to whatever exists at the time.  “Surely you don’t think the ‘20s is a Golden Age?” Adriana asks a bewildered Gil, who has always been so certain of it. “It’s the present. It’s dull,” she insists.

For anyone whose historical and cultural fantasies run anywhere near those that Allen toys with here, Midnight in Paris will be a pretty constant delight. As Allen surrogates go, Wilson is a pretty good one, being so different from the author physically and vocally that there’s little possibility of the annoying traces of imitation that have sometimes afflicted other actors in such roles. Cotillard is the perfect object of Gil’s romantic and creative dreams; Kathy Bates, speaking English, French and Spanish, makes Stein into a wonderfully appealing straight-shooter, Sheen has fun with his fatuous walking encyclopedia role and McAdams is a bundle of argumentative energy in a role one is meant to find a bit off-putting. French first lady Carla Bruni is perfectly acceptable in her three scenes as a tour guide at the Rodin Museum, while Corey Stoll very nicely pulls off the trick of both sending up Hemingway’s manly pretentions and honestly conveying his core artistic values.

Darius Khondji’s cinematography evokes to the hilt the gorgeously inviting Paris of so many people’s imaginations (while conveniently ignoring the rest), and the film has the concision and snappy pace of Allen’s best work.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Opening night, Out of Competition)
Opens: May 20 (Sony Pictures Classics)
Production: Mediapro, Versatil Cinema, Gravier Prods., Pontchartrain Prods.)
Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Nina Arianda, Kurt Fuller, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Lea Seydoux, Corey Stoll
Director-screenwriter: Woody Allen
Producers: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Jaume Roures
Executive producers: Javier Mendez
Director of photography: Darius Khondji
Production designer: Anne Seibel
Costume designer: Sonia Grande
Editor: Alisa Lepselter
Rated PG-13, 94 minutes

The British gardener who’s taking care of Monet’s water lilies

By John Lichfield in Paris

PA/ REX FEATURESJames Priest, the new head gardener at Giverny. Monet’s White Water Lilies, 1899, right British gardener is to take over one of the most venerated plots of ground in the world: the garden created more than a century ago by the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet.

Claude Monet: Inventing Impressionism

I have enjoyed going through the artists referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris.” Paul is the snobby expert on impressionist art that talks about Monet at the museum in Paris. Also Gil talks about Monet in the opening scene of the movie when he says he wishes he could move to Paris where Monet painted.

Recently I visited the “Impressionism Art Exhibit” at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock presented by Harriet and Warren Stephens.  It had lots of paintings by Monet and my favorite is the one below:

26”

36”

Enlarge PaintingPainting Name: Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil 1873
Painting Size: 36”inches wide by 26”inches high

By the way, I know that some of you are wondering how many posts I will have before I am finished. Right now I have plans to look at Van Gogh, Picasso, Man Ray, T.S. Elliot and several more.

Impressionists live

From Sacha Guitry’s film Ceux de chez nous 1914-15. Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet painting, Edgar Degas walking.

________________________________________

Take a look at this biography below:

Monet is recognized to be one of the founders of Impressionism, and he was the most constant and convinced of all.Since his beginnings as an artist, he was encouraged to always listen and transmit his perceptions, and all criticisms which he had to undergo never did move him away from this search.Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840 but all his impressions as a child and teenager are related to the city of Le Havre where his family moved in 1845. There his father held a trade of colonial articles .

Self-portrait with a beret 1886 Private Collection

The HEIR to BOUDIN and JONGKIND

Whereas he was still at college, he gained a certain notoriety while drawing caricatures which he showed in a store of drawing supplies with which Eugene Boudin worked at the time. Finally Boudin convinced the young Monet, at first very reticent, to paint with him in the open air. Monet will say later: “by the only example of this artist fond of his art and of his independence, my destiny as a painter had opened”.

His family was not opposed that he became a painter, but his independent ideas, his criticism of academic painting and his refusal to follow a good Art School repeatedly caused arguments within his family. Finally, Monet started to paint in Paris at the Charles Suisse Academy where he will meet Pissarro in 1859, and Cézanne in 1861, before having to carry out his military obligations.

His military service in Algeria (1860-1861) was stopped by a typhoid which brought him back to France, where he started again to work in the summer of 1862 in Le Havre with Boudin and the Dutch landscape-painter Jongkind. He will say speaking of Jongkind : “…by there completing the teaching which I had received from Boudin, he was from this moment my true Master, and it is to him that I owe the final education of my eye”.

The SALON and the BIRTH OF THE IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT

The history of Impressionism cannot be dissociated of that of the Official Salon.

The social, economic and cultural evolution of XIXth century will have as a consequence that, from now on, art works would be created mainly by independent artists (rather than by painters at the service of some prince or corporation).

For these artists, finding possibilities of exhibition was an existential concern. Although art dealers and their galleries were going to take an increasing importance, in France, the most important and impossible to circumvent possibility of exhibition was the Official “Salon of Paris”.

During all this period, these young painters consolidated the links existing between them and developed new relationships, seeking for new inspirations and pictorial means. Except for those who had a comfortable financial situation (Degas, Caillebotte, Bazille), they will face periods of bitter poverty, and especially Monet – whom Bazille helped financially – when he had to assume alone his household. They painted in the open air, in the surroundings of Paris or on the Norman Coast, where the experiment of the optical phenomena of light and color which passioned them was more intense

An important crossroads of the evolution of Monet was when he painted in 1869 with Renoir a series of paintings in a place of leisures and meeting in Bougival called “the Grenouillère”, very appreciated by the Parisian middle-class, with bathing, canoeing and a floating restaurant. The paintings which they made while working with fast and vigorous brushstrokes loaded with pure color, corresponding to the turbulent animation of the small world which pressed there, mark the emergence of a new artistic style dominated by the impression , rather than details, inaugurating what was going five years later to be called “Impressionism”.

LAST WORKS AT GIVERNY

Monet was to live from 1883 until its death in 1926, that is to say more than forty years, in his property in Giverny, of which he will gradually transform the garden in a decorative set.

Monet removes bad grasses and hedges, then digs, sows grass, plants decorative trees and creates series of various flower beds. He also produces a kitchen garden to nourish his family. In the evening, the children often weed and water.

		(Opening scene of “Midnight in Paris”)What was in the beginning only a Norman orchard with only grass and apple trees becomes, with the contribution of all the family, an historical garden . It is a work of patience, which Monet continues with love. Even when the task becomes too bigt so that he cannot assume it alone, he supervises his team of gardeners (1 garden chief and six assistants). Monet buys seeds and plants everywhere he goes, concludes exchanges with other gardeners. It is him who searches the catalogues and places the orders, that they be for seeds, pots, melon bells… In 1893, he begins the installation of his famous “water garden” with the pond with the nymphea. In 1899, Monet studied for the first time the subject of the nymphea (species of water lilies): The nymphea white (1899). The Japanese bridge (1899), Nymphea (1914), (1917), were the principal topics of its last works.
The Japanese bridge over the water-lilies pond at Giverny 1899 Princeton University Art Museum New Jersey

Monet leaves a considerable work as much in quantity (more than 2000 indexed works), as by his impressionist research, expression of which he is the most typical representative. The father of Impressionism will write on this subject little time before his death:

Photo of the japanese bridge over the water-lilies pond at Giverny

“I always had horror of theories… I only had the merit to paint directly in front of nature, trying to translate its most fugitive effects, and I remain sorry to have been the cause of the name given to a group of which the majority did not have anything impressionist“

Photo of the garden and the house of Monet at Giverny

Monet’s estate at Giverny is now opened for public visits. It is maintained by the “Claude Monet Foundation“

Photo of Monet‘s house at Giverny

Monet bequeathed to the State fourteen large paintings of his nymphea, which were placed in 1927, little after his death, in two oval rooms of the Museum of the Orangery in the Tuileries Garden.

Photo of the water-lilies pond at Giverny

Published on Jul 24, 2012

The above clip is from the film series by Francis Schaeffer “How should we then live?” Below is an outline of the 8th episode on the Impressionists and the age of Fragmentation.

AGE OF FRAGMENTATION

I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought

A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.

1. Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.

2. Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.

3. Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.

4. Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.

B. Fragmentation.

1. Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.

2. Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.

3. Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.

C. Retreat to absurdity.

1. Dada , and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd. (Dada gave birth to Surrealism).

2. Art followed philosophy but came sooner to logical end.

3. Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.

II. Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.

1. Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.

2. Direction and influence of Debussy.

3. Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.

4. Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.

B. Cage: a case study in confusion.

1. Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.

2. Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.

C. Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.

1. Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.

2. Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.

III. General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.

1. Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon compared; the drift of general culture.

2. Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.

3. Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.

B. Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.

1. Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.

2. Cinema and the leap into fantasy:

The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits,

The Last Year at Marienbad.

3. Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage):

Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.

IV. Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely

LUNDI 20 JUIN 2011

Artists and bohemians inspired Woody Allen for ‘Midnight in Paris

I love the movie “Midnight in Paris” by Woody Allen and I am going through the whole list of famous writers and artists that he included in the movie. Today we will look at Salvador Dali.  By the way, I know that some of you are wondering how many posts I will have before I am finished. Right now I have plans to look at Rodin,Coco Chanel, Modigliani, Matisse, Luis Bunuel, Josephine Baker, Van Gogh, Picasso, Man Ray, T.S. Elliot and several more.

In this clip below you will see when Picasso first met Dali.

Adrien Brody plays Salvador Dali in “Midnight in Paris.”

Associated Press

Salvador Dalí in 1971

Dalí, Salvador (1904-89): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia’. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one’s mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream’ space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs’ and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).

(My wife and I saw the Alfred Hitchcock film “Spellbound” in 1985 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and we saw this dream that Dali contributed as seen in clip below.)

In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.

Apart from painting, Dalí’s output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films—Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930)—and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dalí’s work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

1904: Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí was born on May, 11th in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain.

1917: He started to visit the School of Art. First paintings.

1918: First small exhibition in the Theatre.

1921-25: Went to Academy of Arts in Madrid. Conflicts with his teachers.

1925: First stand-alone exibition of Dalí at the Galery of Dalmau.

1926-28: Early explorations of the Surrealism. Dalí in Cadaqués 1927

1929: Gala went into his life. Joined the group of Surrealists in 1930 Gala 1927, and Dalí 1929

1934-37: Dalí had his paranoid-critic-epoch. Dalí and Gala in 1937

1941-44: “Avida Dollars” in America.

1945-49: Dalí the Classic. Dalí and his Daddy in Cadaqués 1948

1950-65: His mystic period. He wrote several books (The secret life of Salvador Dalí).

1963-78: Dalí the Divine – Dalí and the Science.

1979-83: Theory of Disaster.

1982: Gala died.

1989: Dalí, Jan. 23th, died.

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The above clip is from the film series by Francis Schaeffer “How should we then live?” Below is an outline of the 8th episode on the Impressionists and the age of Fragmentation.

AGE OF FRAGMENTATION

I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought

A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.

1. Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.

2. Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.

3. Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.

4. Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.

B. Fragmentation.

1. Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.

2. Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.

3. Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.

C. Retreat to absurdity.

1. Dada , and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd. (Dada gave birth to Surrealism).

2. Art followed philosophy but came sooner to logical end.

3. Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.

II. Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.

1. Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.

2. Direction and influence of Debussy.

3. Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.

4. Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.

B. Cage: a case study in confusion.

1. Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.

2. Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.

C. Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.

1. Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.

2. Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.

III. General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.

1. Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon

compared; the drift of general culture.

2. Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.

3. Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.

B. Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.

1. Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.

2. Cinema and the leap into fantasy:

The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits,

The Last Year at Marienbad.

3. Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage):

Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.

IV. Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely

I looked up the definition of Surrealism and here it is:

(1920s-1930s)  Surrealism was both a art and literary movement that stressed the significance of letting one’s imagination rule through the use of the sub-conscious without the hindrances of logic and normal standards.  The anti-rationalist characteristic that stemmed from the Dadaist movement was a part of Surrealism.  However, Surrealism involved more playful and spontaneous in spirit.  Ways of thinking about how a viewer perceives the world around himself helped to shape the movement.  The movement was begun in 1924 in the city Paris by Andre Breton, the author of the ‘Manifeste du surrealisme.’  His writings encouraged the expression of one’s imagination through the use of dreams.  His writings attracted many artists of the Dadaist movement.  The Surrealist movement was helped along in its development during the 1920s and 1930s with the famous artist Salvador Dali.

From left to right: Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, (Hans) Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, Man Ray

Jean Arp (Hans Arp)
Jean Arp is associated with the DADA movement. His collages were of torn pieces of paper dropped and affixed where they would land. His use of chance is intended to create free of human intervention. “Dada,” wrote Arp, “wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order.”

Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance

Random Collage

Torn Paper and Gouache

Dada carried to its logical conclusion the notion of all having come about by chance; the result was the final absurdity of everything, including humanity.

Pictured below: Salvador Dalí (lower center) and Marcel Duchamp (upper left) attending a bullfight.

Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) by Marcel Duchamp

Francis Schaeffer continues: 

The man who perhaps most clearly and consciously showed this understanding of the resulting absurdity fo all things was Marcel Duchamp (1887-1969). He carried the concept of fragmentation further in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), one version of which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art–a painting in which the human disappeared completely. The chance and fragmented concept of what is led to the devaluation and absurdity of all things. All one was left with was a fragmented view of a life which is absurd in all its parts. Duchamp realized that the absurdity of all things includes the absurdity of art itself. His “ready-mades” were any object near at hand, which he simply signed. It could be a bicycle wheel or a urinal. Thus art itself was declared absurd.

_____

(Jackson Pollock pictured below dripping his paint)

Francis Schaeffer in his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? noted on pages 200-203:

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is perhaps the clearest example in the United States of painting deliberately in order to make the statements that all is chance. He placed canvases horizontally on the floor and dripped paint on them from suspended cans swinging over them. Thus, his paintings were a product of chance. But wait a minute! Is there not an order in the lines of paint on his canvases? Yes, because it was not really chance shaping his canvases! The universe is not a random universe; it has order. Therefore, as the dripping paint from the swinging cans moved over the canvases, the lines of paint were following the order of the universe itself. The universe is not what these painters said it is.

(John Cage pictured above)

(Woody Allen, Peter O’Toole and Capucine)

________

(Marcel Duchamp plays white, John Cage plays black, on a chessboard modified to generate tones depending on where the chess pieces are. Toronto, 1968. Teeny Duchamp at far left, camerman in the background.  This was a performance.)

John Cage provides perhaps the clearest example of what is involved in the shift of music. Cage believed the universe is a universe of chance. He tried carrying this out with great consistency. For example, at times he flipped coins to decide what the music should be. At other times he erected a machine that led an orchestra by chance motions so that the orchestra would not know what was coming next. Thus there was no order. Or again, he placed two conductors leading the same orchestra, separated from each other by a partition, so that what resulted was utter confusion. There is a close tie-in again to painting; in 1947 Cage made a composition he called MUSIC FOR MARCEL DUCHAMP. But the sound produced by his music was composed only of silence (interrupted only by random environmental sounds), but as soon as he used his chance methods sheer noise was the outcome.

But Cage also showed that one cannot live on such a base, that the chance concept of the universe does not fit the universe as it is. Cage is an expert in mycology, the science of mushrooms. And he himself said, “I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operation, I would die shortly.” Mushroom picking must be carefully discriminative. His theory of the universe does not fit the universe that exists.

All of this music by chance, which results in noise, makes a strange contrast to the airplanes sitting in our airports or slicing through our skies. An airplane is carefully formed; it is orderly (and many would also think it beautiful). This is in sharp contrast to the intellectualized art which states that the universe is chance. Why is the airplane carefully formed and orderly, and what Cage produced utter noise? Simply because an airplane must fit the orderly flow lines of the universe if it is to fly!

!Midnight in the Paris-best scene of the movie Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Woody Allen

But let me respond further with the words of Francis Schaeffer from his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT (the chapter is entitled, “Is Propositional Revelation Nonsense?”

Of course, if the infinite uncreated Personal communicated to the finite created personal, he would not exhaust himself in his communication; but two things are clear here:

 

1. Even communication between once created person and another is not exhaustive, but that does not mean that for that reason it is not true. 

 

2. If the uncreated Personal really cared for the created personal, it could not be thought unexpected for him to tell the created personal things of a propositional nature;otherwise as a finite being the created personal would have numerous things he could not know if he just began with himself as a limited, finite reference point. In such a case, there is no intrinsic reason why the uncreated Personal could communicate some vaguely true things, but could not communicate propositional truth concerning the world surrounding the created personal – for fun, let’s call that science. Or why he could not communicate propositional truth to the created personal concerning the sequence that followed the uncreated Personal making everything he made – let’s call that history. There is no reason we could think of why he could not tell these two types of propositional things truly. They would not be exhaustive; but could we think of any reason why they would not be true? The above is, of course, what the Bible claims for itself in regard to propositional revelation.

(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

DOES THE BIBLE ERR IN THE AREA OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY? The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Charles Darwin himself longed for evidence to come forward from the area of  Biblical Archaeology  but so much has  advanced  since Darwin wrote these words in the 19th century! Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject and if you like you could just google these subjects: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription.13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.

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Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Below is a review I got off the internet:

Cannes (France), 12 May (EFE).- Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ was chosen to open the 64th Cannes Film Festival, a film partly set in Paris the 1920s, a point in time that fascinated the American director

2011 Sony Pictures Classics.

Paul Walker-Vin Diesel’s FAST FIVE Biggest 2011 Worldwide Blockbuster: Box Office

Woody Allen‘s latest, Midnight in Paris, is doing remarkably well in limited release. Starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates, Léa Seydoux, and Tom Hiddleston, Midnight in Paris collected $599k at six theaters, averaging an outstanding $99,834 per location.

That’s not only the best per-theater average of 2011, but also the best debut-weekend average of a Woody Allen movie since time immemorial, i.e., B.M — or before Manhattan (1979), as that’s where Box Office Mojo’s opening-weekend list ends.

Even adjusting for inflation (using Box Office Mojo’s chart), back in 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo, one of Allen’s best-received efforts, averaged $84,205 at 3 locations. In 1995, Mighty Aphrodite, which would earn Mira Sorvino a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, collected $31,049 per site at 19 locations. Manhattanaveraged $52,450 at 29 locations. (Note: All things being equal, the higher the number of theaters, the lower the per-theater average.)

A few more comparisons: Midnight in Paris earned nearly four times more than You’ll Meet a Tall Dark Stranger‘s $160k — also at six sites — on its debut weekend in September last year. At four theaters, The King’s Speech averaged $88,863 in November last year.

According to Box Office Mojo, Midnight in Paris boasted the 16th highest weekend per-theater average among movies in limited release since 1982. (Most of those on the top-ten list are costlier, special screenings of Disney movies.)

Dreamgirls, Brokeback Mountain, Precious, and Red State (at a single location) are the four non-Disney, non-animated releases ahead of Midnight in Paris. The list, of course, hasn’t been adjusted for inflation.

Other posts with Woody Allen: