“Today in the art world, anything goes but almost nothing happens.” — Roger Kimball
By all means, read the whole essay.
Category: Culture
Art, music, literature and thespianism
Fresh Wallpaper
I’ve been in a Ferrari State Of Mind recently — no idea why, it’s just there — so for the past two weeks my laptop’s wallpaper has been this one:
Yup, it’s Alan Fearnley again.
Anyway, I decided to make change, but the Scuderia thing was still strong, so:
“Why do you keep me waiting, cara mia?”
“Just two more minutes, I promise.”
I love this picture.
The Sweetness Of Doing Nothing
…or Il Dolce Far Niente, as the Italians would have it — and why not? it’s about as Italian an attitude as one can get, where there’s an alternative to being busy.
I consider myself something of an expert on the activity, because for example nothing spells “vacation” better than lying on one’s back, emptying the mind of, well, everything and just looking at the sky. I can and have done that many times in my life, and only some vestigial Protestant work-ethic guilt keeps me at all busy.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
Instead, I want to point you to English artist John William Godward, who exemplifies to me the late-Victorian art movement that bypassed the strict Puritanism of the era, simply by virtue of the fact that one could show the naked or semi-naked female form without censure, provided that it was couched, so to speak, in some kind of Classical allegory. (“Venus In The Mirror”, for example, has been used as an artistic fig leaf for centuries.)
Well, Godward’s family didn’t much care for this attitude, and when he went to live in Italy with one of his models, they pretty much erased all memory of him out of their lives (literally; they cut him out of all family photographs; and as such, there are apparently no photos of him in existence). Anyway, they wanted him gone out of their lives, and he granted their wish by committing suicide at age 61.
Godward is famous for his painting entitled Il Dolce Far Niente, and in fact used it as a theme for a great many of his later works. Here’s the first:
And a few other examples in the same vein:
I love that he captures the feeling of dreamy indolence of a summer’s day in Italy — note the classical clothing and setting of each — along with a subtle underplay of eroticism. (In turn-of-the-century Britain, by the way, there would have been nothing at all “subtle” about it, hence the scandal.)
Of course, he didn’t stop there. Still in that disguise of Classicism, here are a couple more daring visions:
And of course, there were those works which threw away all pretense at Classicism (and clothing too):
To modern eyes, Godward’s style might seem stilted and unrealistic, perhaps. But at the time he painted them, that’s about as “modern” as they got.
I like just about every work he ever created.
Wallpaper
Normally, I change the wallpaper on my laptop about every week. This one, from Alan Fearnley, has been there for nearly two because I find the whole tableau incredibly appealing: restful, old-fashioned, a beautiful car and a pretty lady… what more could one ask for?
Right-click to embiggen.
Inspiration
I can’t remember whether I’ve ever told the story behind my first (published) novel, Vienna Days.
Here goes.
I’ve always been fascinated by how people’s lives are shaped and/or changed by massive societal change. Back in the early 1990s, this fascination was focused on the Secession Movement of the late 18th century in Vienna, and I wondered just how it would have felt to be someone who was a typical bourgeois, but over time got subverted by the changing times.
Of course, I’d done a lot of reading about 1880s Vienna (which is what sparked the whole thing) and the first thing that struck me was the fact that the suicide rate among young people in Vienna during this period was the highest ever recorded, and the highest in Europe as a whole. So naturally, that became the first sentence of the novel.
The second thing to strike me was that when Crown Prince Rudolph, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had committed suicide, his funeral procession was attended by tens of thousands of people because, as the story goes, nobody likes a good funeral more than the Viennese. So of course that became the first scene of the novel.
A story idea then began to assert itself. Imagine that a bourgeois young man became seduced by the non-conformist Secession movement, and in secret began to do something that, if discovered, would spell ruin for his career — but he did it anyway, because the allure of this new movement was irresistible. But what could that be?
Luckily, I imagined that he would have considerable artistic talent, hitherto unrealized because of his studies, and that led him to secretly draw pornographic pictures. But pictures of whom?
I had already put this protagonist into a coffee bar where he became involved with a group of ne’er-do-well artists, and one of the people involved with the group was a mysterious and beautiful young woman named Astrid.
I was rather stuck at that point, so I stopped writing to read about pornography of that period, in Erotica (Charlotte Hill and William Wallace).
There I discovered the works of an anonymous Austrian artist, who had drawn his images in charcoal and cryptically signed his work “A1”. Wait… “A” for someone named “Astrid”? Why not? All I had to do was change the time period of the art, from the 1930s back to the 1880s — easy-peasy.
So I wrote the rest of the thing in about two months (I still had an actual job at the time, which took out my writing time, damn it).
And here’s a sample of the “A1” charcoals:
Twisted Bodies
I don’t know when I developed my fascination for the human form when it’s been contorted or twisted, for whatever reason or by whatever force.
Maybe it was at the Rodin Museum on an icy late-December day in Paris, where I saw this:
It depicts the fate of Ugolino the Count of Gherardesca, who while immured in Pisa’s Muda Tower, was driven mad by hunger and ended up eating his own children to survive. I remember standing there, frozen to the bone, but unable to escape the tragedy. (Nice story, but pure fiction. When Ugolino’s bones were exhumed and examined for DNA traces of cannibalism, none were found.) Of the Burghers Of Calais, we will not speak:
In warmer climes (Vienna, also in December but indoors), I saw a couple of paintings by Austrian Egon Schiele, who after WWI was unable to see any kind of future for mankind, and his artistic vision was distorted thereby in his depictions of people:
That’s The Lovers’ Embrace, and one has to have pity on them — which was his intention. Even his own wife Edith wasn’t spared:
…nor his mistress, Wally [sic] :
And so to the modern day, where others — perhaps sharing Schiele’s attitude, or maybe just having their own mordant view of the human form, have produced works such as this:
I don’t know who the artists are, but their work fascinates me still.