Street Scene, Christmas Morn -- Childe Hassam, 1892 (Smith College Museum of Art)

the curious mind of f. scott fitzgerald

On this day back in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack and left us too early at the age of 44. His last years were troubled and decades of heavy drinking had taken a toll on his health; he was also receiving very low earnings on book royalties, despite the successes of his youth. Fitzgerald would probably be thrilled to see how his 1922 short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is now a movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and even appears to be a critically acclaimed and well-made movie at that.

Benjamin Button is a man born not as a baby, but a seventy-year old, and his life progresses backward as he becomes younger instead of aging. There were times when Fitzgerald was most likely churning out stories to sell to magazines and pay for the cost of his high living with Zelda, but among those many other tales of flappers and gin were some true gems. Ernest Hemingway complained that Fitzgerald tended to write stories that depended on "magic," and I figure he might have also been referring to the time tricks with Benjamin Button. But then that was Hemingway and he just seemed to have issues with Fitzgerald for reasons of lifestyle, temperament, choice of spouse, who had been in actual combat in World War I (Hemingway) and who hadn't (Fitzgerald), and so on.

Click here to read the original Benjamin Button on-line, from Tales of the Jazz Age. It does of course depend on "magic" and suspension of disbelief, but it's still an interesting twist for someone writing a story at the age of 25/26 in 1922 to have come up with. And I hope the movie lives up to its Oscar murmurs, not only for the actors and director, screenplay author and crew involved, but to give Fitzgerald a fresh wave of attention and some worthwhile recognition.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. -- Edgar Degas, 1834-1917

pictured: The Singer with The Glove -- Edgar Degas, 1878 (Fogg Museum of Art)

painting of the month

Cedar -- Emily Carr, 1942 (Vancouver Art Gallery)

portrait of a president

Artist Elaine de Kooning at work on one of the many studies she did for her final portrait of then-President John F. Kennedy. De Kooning was connected to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism (and married to abstract kingpin Willem de Kooning), but she veered away from their non-figurative principles to create portraits that were more intuitive than abstract. Because JFK was generally too busy to pose, EDK would often just observe him on the sidelines. She was of course greatly upset by his assassination 45 years ago to this day, but her depiction of Kennedy remains one of the most vivid and unique presidential portraits ever done. The 1962 photo of her working is from the Smithsonian Museum Archives, and the portrait itself can be found at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

movieland

"[Tod] was determined to learn much more. They were the people he felt he must paint. He would never again do a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy Nantucket fisherman...neither Winslow Homer nor Thomas Ryder could be his masters and he turned to Goya and Daumier."

That excerpt is from Nathanael West's 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, and describes the new creative focus of Tod Hackett, a Yale School of Fine Arts grad hired by a major movie studio to design sets and costumes. The novel takes place during the 1930s and gives a strange and seamy view of Hollywood and California at the time. Tod's East Coast friends fear that he's selling out and wasting his talent just to create a fake Movieland world, but Tod knows that this specific fake world and its weird, twisted, sometimes hapless, sometimes cruel inhabitants are exactly what he needs to paint to fulfill his artistic vision. The painting pictured here from The Whitney Museum -- The Twenty Cent Movie (1936) -- is by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), who liked to celebrate the bawdier side of American life and seems like an artist of the Tod Hackett-type. However, since Tod's great planned masterwork in The Day of the Locust is called "The Burning of Los Angeles," his visions are a bit more violent than Marsh's. Click here to read more about Nathanael West, and here for more info on Reginald Marsh.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist

once we grow up.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso

(October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973)

[Picasso's 1905 Family of Saltimbanques from The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC]

painting of the month

Apple Tree with Red Fruit -- Paul Ranson (1864-1909)

buffalo bill and edward estlin

Today's birthday belongs (or belonged) to poet and general free-spirit-at-large Edward Estlin Cummings, better known as e.e. He was born on October 14, 1894 and died in 1962; he was a Harvard boy, then spent time driving an ambulance during World War I. Cummings was also held in a French detention camp during WWI for three months, this experience bringing about his novel The Enormous Room. Cummings was a gifted artist as well and quite skilled at painting and drawing, and of course he was one of the first poets to deliberately ignore things like capitalization and putting spaces between words. One of my favorite stories about EEC is how he was a neighbor of writer Djuna Barnes in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, and while he respected Djuna's reclusive tendencies, he also wanted to make sure she was okay and would yell "Are you still alive, Djuna?" out the window every now and then. This is one of my favorite Cummings poems, but since he liked to play around with line placement, it's difficult to blog-format it exactly as it should be:

Portrait

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

painting of the month

Carnival Evening (1886) -- Henri Rousseau, Philadelphia Museum of Art

one more goyo

Japanese artist Hashiguchi Goyo (1880-1921) was trained to be a painter but became an expert printmaker instead, specializing in the field of bijin-ga or "beautiful women." His work fused classical style with newer European influences, including use of fully nude female figures instead of just traditional suggestions of nudity like bared shoulders or napes of necks. He also showed women with their hair completely undone, which represented another cultural breakthrough. Before this point in time, Japanese women in art had generally been shown only with hair gathered up in traditional buns; Goyo showed them in relaxed, personal moments with their hair loosely flowing, creating more of a sensual individuality.

Unfortunately, Goyo died at age forty-one of meningitis and many of his original woodblock templates were destroyed in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. He was also quite fussy about the quality of his prints, so he didn't produce many during his lifetime. The ones that remain are beautifully vivid in color, and many of his female portraits remind me of the women in Junichiro Tanizaki's novels. Particularly this featured 1920 Woman Holding Lipstick, which makes me think of Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. Click here to view Goyo's images; actual Goyo prints are rare and therefore highly sought after -- and they're also reportedly forged quite often, so if you're ever lucky enough to possibly come across one, be careful.

basho-goyo

in my new robe

this morning

someone else

(Haiku by Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694)(Kamisuki print by Hashiguchi Goyo, 1880-1921)

rrose in her stylish hat

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968): Artist, Dadaist, Surrealist, icon, observer, and pictured here in 1921 as Rrose Selavy, one of his other creative personas. As R. Mutt he exhibited a urinal as a fountain; he also turned other various everyday objects into artistic arrangements; within his lifetime the nude descended the staircase, the sad young man rode a train, and many games of chess were played -- until the ultimate checkmate.

wombat love

Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was quite the character -- charismatic and full of life in his younger days, founder of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artistic movement, racing after beautiful red or golden-haired women he saw on the street to ask them to pose for his latest work, and lover of exotic animals like peacocks and wombats. He even managed to procure his own pet wombats, and apparently they had the run of the house. Rossetti was also brother of poet Christina Rossetti, whom he painted as the Virgin Mary, and a good friend of British Arts & Crafts genius William Morris for quite some time.

Rossetti had strong feelings of guilt after the possible suicide of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and that combined with his generally intense nature and sensitivity toward critics and criticism most likely drove him to drink and become addicted to chloral hydrate. He was something of a recluse by the time he died and troubled by paranoia and self-doubts, but he clearly is remembered as both a fine poet and artist. Oliver Reed played Rossetti in Ken Russell's curious 1967 film Dante's Inferno, and Oliver did a great job in Oliver's way, but I think Robert Downey Jr. would make an excellent Rossetti if any new bio-pics happen to be in the works -- and if Robert ever wants to take a break from being Ironman and share some scenes with a wombat or two.

(d.g. rossetti self-portrait from theotherpages.org; snowy wombat courtesy of wikimedia commons)

The Fourth of July, 1916 - Childe Hassam (1859-1935)

self and not-self

"I don’t express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self." Artist Mark Rothko, 1903-1970 (pictured: Mark Rothko Self-Portrait, 1936)

forget your theories

American Impressionist and painter of beautiful landscapes, Willard Metcalf spent most of his time in New England but also captured scenes in other lands. Additionally, as a young man he hung around the Zuni Indian tribe to observe them and illustrate a series of magazine articles, going along on an ethnological expedition with anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. There's an interesting article in Antiques & the Arts magazine about Metcalf and this self-portrait done in 1890, noting how the half-shadowed look to it indicates that he wasn't quite sure about his artistic future. It might also seem like there was a darker, troubled side beyond Metcalf's lovely style that he subconsciously or consciously was showing us--an inner restlessness and tendency to drink a bit more than he should have--ironically all part of a man who painted such calmly inviting scenes.

"Go out and paint what you see and forget your theories." Willard Metcalf (1858-1925)

being beatrice

Over and over I'm on the point of giving it up. (Beatrice Wood)

Well, obviously she didn't give it up and always managed to find a fresh spark of enthusiasm somewhere--or at least she didn't give it up for some time. Potter, artist, muse, actress, writer, The "Mama of Dada" and lover of chocolate and men, Beatrice Wood was still casting her spell even toward the end of her life when she became the inspiration for the character of Rose in the 1997 film Titanic. Beatrice never saw Titanic, because she knew how sad the ending would be, and she died in March of 1998, just about a week after her 105th birthday.

(Pictured: Artists Beatrice Wood, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in 1917)

little inventions

The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors. (Emile Nolde)

Artist Emil Nolde is called a German Expressionist but in keeping with the above quote, his art was pretty much his own. He was known for his intense use of color and occasionally unusual themes, although sometimes he just painted lovely flowers like these red dahlias. Many of the flower watercolors were done during the Nazi years when Nolde had been forbidden to produce artwork by the Hitler regime. He painted anyway, in secret, and though the Nazis had labelled him and his art "degenerate," after World War II Nolde saw his reputation restored and the secret paintings -- or "Unpainted Pictures" as he called them -- were made public. He died in 1956 at the age of 88, and his former home in Seebul, Germany is now a museum centered around his art and life.

nelson and edward

Edward Hopper's exhibit ended its stay at The Art Institute of Chicago this weekend, but not before the Chicago Tribune ran an article about a feature they did back in 1972, of then-living author Nelson Algren's impressions of several of Hopper's paintings. The Tribune Magazine editor noted how they thought that Algren and Hopper would be a perfect match, like "light and shadow," but Hopper's art proved to be too void of feeling for Algren. As he described in this excerpt:

Hopper worked from the outside in, his concern being with illumination, horizontals and verticals. In short, Hopper was a designer; one who never permitted his own emotion to divert him from the plan on his drawing board. Thus his women are formed less of flesh than by luminosity, shadow and angle.

It seems like while Hopper's urban backdrops and isolated figures paralleled Nelson's own writing, he also needed more personal character or to have the people within the works define the scenes, and not be so mute and faceless. The full article can be found here -- although no matter what Algren wrote, his fiction and Hopper's pictures will probably still be linked together as examples of lost souls of 20th century America, living on society's fringes or caught up in dark thoughts, never quite sure what the morning will bring or whether it will come at all.

(Pictured above: Detail from Edward Hopper's Automat, 1927 - Des Moines Art Center)

lively model

One of the many good things about National Poetry Month--which is now chronologically over--is that it really doesn't have to be over on April 30th and can just create more of a heightened focus on poetry that might even last all year. Also, it brings "lesser-known" poets out of the shadows as they share their 30 days with tax returns and confused spring weather. One poet I really enjoyed being introduced to through Knopf's poem-a-day e-mails was Marie Ponsot, with this poem in particular:

Live Model

Who wouldn't rather paint than pose—
Modeling, you're an itch the artist
Doesn't want to scratch, at least
Not directly, and not yet.
You think, "At last, a man who knows
How bodies are metaphors!" (You're wrong.)
First time I posed for him he made
A gilded throne to sit me on
Crowned open-armed in a blue halfgown.
I sat his way, which was not one of mine
But stiff & breakable as glass,
Palestill, as if
With a rosetree up my spine.
We had to be speechless too,
Gut tight in a sacring thermal
Hush of love & art;
Even songs & poems
Were too mundane for me to quote
To ease our grand feelings
So I sat mute, as if
With a rosetree down my throat.
Now I breathe deep, I sit slack,
I've thrown the glass out, spit,
Evacuated bushels of roses.
I’ve got my old quick walk
& my big dirty voice back.
Why do I still sometimes sit
On what is unmistakably like a throne?
Why not. Bodies are metaphors
And this one's my own.

Also thanks to Knopf's daily poetry e-mail, you can hear Marie reading her poem in her "big dirty voice" by clicking this link.