Art – Letters from Athens

An afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay

A few days ago I went to Paris to visit a friend, who lives right next to the Musée d’Orsay, in a bustling neighbourhood on the Left Bank. After a delicious lunch that she had prepared for me, we wandered over to the museum, which has always been a great favourite.

A conversion of the Gare d’Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built in the late 19th century, the building itself is amazingly beautiful, with stunning views of Paris out of every window. Regular readers will know I visit as often as I can, and have written about exhibitions by Picasso, Caillebotte and others (for those interested, putting “Musée d’Orsay” in the finder will lead you to them).

The permanent collection is full of treasures, and every time I go I discover something new amongst the old favourites. My friend and I walked around, admiring the Gaugin paintings some of which I had read about in Sue Prideaux’s biography,Wild Thing (reviewed in a recent post).

*The Meal, also known as The Bananas. 1891*

Another lovely painting, the portrait, by Odilon Redon, of Baronne Robert de Domecy

This time the temporary exhibition was of the previously unknown to me sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy (1866-1938).

Troubetzkoy, who was an iconic figure of his time, was the illegitimate child of a Russian diplomat and an American singer and pianist. He was acknowledged by his father at the age of five, trained in Milan and started his career in Moscow and St Petersburg, where he was well received by the local elite, despite speaking virtually no Russian. Having a wonderful facility of capturing people’s likeness in clay (which he then cast in bronze) he sculpted numerous portraits of the aristocracy, but his masterpiece of that period was the portrait of Tolstoy, a vegetarian who made a profound impression upon him (and converted him to the cause).

In 1906, when Russia was racked by the first throes of revolutionary unrest, Troubetzkoy left for Paris, where he quickly won over Parisian society. Bohemian and eccentric, he walked his domesticated wolves in the Bois de Boulogne, and hobnobbed with the city’s cosmopolitan elite, earning numerous portrait commissions. He perfected the genre of portrait statuettes that would make him famous—Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, Auguste Rodin, Baroness de Rothschild and Roland Garros were amongst those who posed for him.

*In his studio, with wolves and statuettes*

He also loved to depict children and animals. His passion for the latter was the reason he became a vegetarian.

He suffered unbearable tragedy when his only son, Pierre died at the age of two and a half—just after he had sculpted a moving portrait of him with his mother, Paul’s wife Elin.

Troubetzkoy also had much success in America, where he travelled three times between 1911 and 1912, then stayed for almost seven years (1914-1920), again attracting numerous commissions.

*Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1911, commissioned by his godmother when he was elected senator of the state of New York.*

Here he is sculpting the actress Mary Pickford. Amazing how he works in a waistcoat, shirt and tie! He also had a magnificent comb-over…

And the finished portrait.

I adored this lovely statuette of an Arabian horse.

Troubetzkoy returned to Europe in 1920, where he settled in France and stayed until his death in 1938 at the age of 72, travelling often to Italy and continuing to sculpt portraits of political figures and representatives of cosmopolitan high society in both countries.

Art on a rainy afternoon

Josepha, the young woman who runs the art studio I attend on Mondays and (when possible) Tuesdays, has set up a Saturday afternoon painting session she calls apéro peinture. The idea is to attract outsiders who are beginners and just want to try painting, but this has had mixed results. Attendance varies. So, a group of the usual suspects decided to take over yesterday, to while away a rainy afternoon.

The idea is not to take ourselves seriously, but interpret the subject as the fancy takes us. We all sit around a table set with small easels, boards and acrylic paints and we all paint from the same model, provided by Josepha. We are fuelled by apple cider, wine and tidbits.

Yesterday the inspiration was a work by Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), a French painter who in 1894 became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo. The painting is of a, shall we say, corpulent woman lying on a couch, smoking.

What is always interesting in such situations, is how differently people interpret the same subject. In barely two hours we were supposed to finish a small painting (acrylics dry fast), and this was accomplished amid a lot of banter. We always mock each other mercilessly and have to defend our choices.

*Note the birthday cake. With candles* 🎂

Christophe and I decided to omit the cigarette, on the pretext that smoking is unhealthy and Non-PC; Philippe on the contrary gave the woman a spliff and drew her levitating above the couch, with three balloons hovering above; and Nathalie actually put her in a bathtub!

Josepha was accompanied by her baby, Garance, her mother (to look after Garance who has just learned to walk), her dog Odin (who is a frequent visitor to the studio) and her partner Tommy who is a journalist and does not draw of paint. His first effort was quite creditable.

Needless to say, a merry afternoon was had by all. However, the artistic benefits are not to be understated, as this type of exercise allows one to let go of rules like perspective and colour values and give free rein to one’s imagination.

My finished version. Cigarette apart, I did not stray too far from the original.

Wild Thing—a book review

Wild thing is a life of the artist Paul Gaugin. Sue Prideaux does her subject proud—she is a sympathetic and judicious biographer who writes like a novelist and has researched her subject from different angles.

The biography contains information which was new to me. Gaugin had an extremely varied and interesting life, knowing both riches and poverty.

I will not reveal too much detail because it is a book well worth reading. But did you know that Gauguin:

-Spent the first seven years of his life in Peru, which left indelible impressions of colour, heat and life in him? To my mind, this explains a lot about his palette and use of colour.

-That he then led a very bourgeois existence, working at the Bourse in Paris and becoming extremely wealthy? Even as he started painting and married, he lived luxuriously, spending without a thought for the future.

Then the Bourse failed in 1882 and for the rest of his life he was poor, living a hand to mouth existence, begging and borrowing from friends. He often did not have enough to eat.

-That he had a very complicated and close relationship with Vincent Van Gogh, which continued up to his death. Read the book to find out details of the famous ear-cutting episode.

-That Vincent’s brother, Theo Van Gogh, was Gauguin’s agent.

-That he was deeply affected by attending a public execution in Paris: the death by guillotine of a mysterious murderer.

-That he was greatly inspired by the colonial exhibits at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower, built for the celebration, soared heavenward, lit by electric light. Round its feet sprang recreations of the colonies and their treasures, from which he borrowed elements and incorporated them into his art. For this Camille Pissarro called him a bricoleur, a cobbler-together of second-hand ideas.

The book details his marriage and relationship to his children, and his friendships and dealings with prominent men of his world, such as André Gide, Pierre Loti, August Strindberg, Frederick Delius and others. One of his main supporters in hours of need was Edgar Degas. The biography is full of delicious anecdotes of this crowd of supremely talented men.

Finally we get an account of his latter years in Tahiti, where he ended up almost by chance. Gaugin’s life is one of the richest in the history of wester art, and Sue Prideaux does it full justice.

*Les ancêtres de Tehamana, 1893 (portrait of* *Tehura).*

Highly recommended.

Preaching to fish

Noted by his contemporaries for his powerful preaching, expert knowledge of scripture, and undying love and devotion to the poor and the sick, Saint Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) was one of the most quickly canonized saints in church history, being canonized less than a year after his death.

Born in Portugal of wealthy and noble parents, Anthony joined the Church early on and ended up in Italy after his ship was blown off course on a return journey from Morocco.

Although he died at 35, Anthony led a busy and varied life, preached in many places in Italy and France and performed many miracles. One can easily read about his life (there is a lengthy Wikipedia entry) but the reason I am writing about him is that I came, entirely by chance, upon this weird and wonderful detail of a mural in the Basilica di Sant’Antonio da Padova, of him preaching to a bunch of fish.

*Just look at the expressions on those fish faces. Priceless*

The story of Anthony “preaching to the fish” originated in Rimini, where he had gone to preach. When the Cathar heretics there treated him with contempt, Anthony was said to have gone to the shoreline, where he began to preach at the water’s edge until a great crowd of fish was seen gathered before him. The people of the town and even heretics flocked to see this marvelous thing and were moved to listen to Anthony’s preaching.

There are other paintings of this event, but this one has a special flavour to it.

An artsy picnic

Some days ago I was happy to be invited to a picnic organised by a Paris art gallery, the Galerie Jocelyn Wolf, at a manor house in deepest Normandy. This was a very old building, renovated over the course of a few years by the gallery owner, Jocelyn, in order to provide a venue for artist residencies and a framework for exhibiting artworks, including outdoor sculptures.

After passing the Pont de Normandie, always a treat as driving over it is the next best thing to flying, I took a road winding through beautiful countryside and arrived literally in the middle of nowhere, where thankfully a small sign with PARKING on it gave a hint I was in the right place (to outward appearances, a rustic farm with various agricultural implements scattered around).

A gravel road led to the house itself, fronted by an orchard where I came upon a group of people sitting on the grass under the beautiful, ancient apple trees.

I joined them and someone thoughtfully provided me with a glass. Each group of three or four people shared a wicker basket of the most delicious local food: a loaf of fresh country bread, a variety of cured meats and cheeses, small radishes, a jar of rillettes, a brioche, punnets of berries—washed down with cool cider. Dogs and kids ran about.

As we were finishing, a few drops of rain (it being Normandy, after all) made us gather up the remains and congregate for coffee in the kitchen, after which I went to explore the house. This has been left in a very primal state, with beautiful old doors renovated but unpainted, stone and brick exposed, and gallery-style electrics installed on wire tracks.

Windows on every side open on pristine, unspoilt countryside and there is a huge open space attic. The whole thing is in impeccable taste and a fitting framework for all sorts of art.

The rain having stopped, I went for a tour of the garden to see the sculptures installed there, some actually in the pond behind the house.

The afternoon concluded with a performance by two artists represented by the gallery, Prinz Gholam, who struck poses taken from famous sculptures while wearing a series of fascinating masks.

Down memory lane: the art comp

When I was fourteen, my school entered one of my paintings in a competition in India, The Shankar’s International Children’s Competition. How my—very inspiring—art teacher, Mrs Orfanou, came upon this competition, I have no idea.

I won a ‘gold medal’ in my category, for my painting of racehorses. I think it was done in gouache.

I don’t remember having actually received a real gold medal, but I must have had some kind of certificate and also a copy of the book the organisers published each year.

There are 17000 entries from 83 countries! There are twelve pages of photographs of the gold medalists, for every category. Along with the paintings, there are also short stories and poems.

Look how old-fashioned some of the suggested subjects are—I wonder if kids today even know what a pedlar or a hawker is.

Interestingly, I googled the competition, and it continued until 2019! Having been set up in 1949 for children in India, the next year it was opened to kids from all over the world. Sadly, I could not find anything more recent than 2019, so I assume it is no more.

In an unexpected turn of events, via the competition I acquired an Indian penpal named, if memory serves me right, Rajesh Malhotra, with whom I corresponded for a number of years. No idea what we wrote about, I suppose school and hobbies etc. We also practiced our English! (This was before the internet, and Facebook, obviously—people actually wrote letters.)

Footnote: When you decide to sort out the bookcases, the unexpected might turn up.

Peter Doig at The Courtauld

Peter Doig is an exciting artist—in fact, he is one of the most celebrated and important figurative painters working today. Born in Scotland in 1959, he moved with his family to Trinidad, then Canada, and later studied in London. In 2000 he was invited to return to Trinidad with his friend, artist Chris Ofili, and was so inspired he moved there permanently with his wife and children, until relocating recently to London.

His paintings focus on both landscapes and the human figure, melding them into evocative and often haunting compositions which are painterly and almost abstract. “I’m not trying to make paintings look like photos,” he has said of his process. “I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.”

Painting on an Island. The setting is the prison island of Carrera, off the coast of Trinidad. Learning that some of the inmates were painters, Doig helped organise an annual exhibition of their work in Port of Spain.

I went to see his newest work, which is exhibited at The Courtauld in London. These are paintings that have evolved over a number of years, as he explores a rich variety of places, people, memories and ways of painting. Perhaps they are not his best work, but there is still that haunting quality, stark imagery and wonderfully strong palette to admire.

House of Music (Soca boat) Based on a photo of fishermen holding up their catch, Doig painted the men as musicians.

Their location at The Courtauld is also interesting because the permanent collection contains wonderful works that have been important inspiration for the artist, by artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh. It was interesting to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of these masterpieces.

This painting was started in the Alps, but is inspired by Doig’s time in Canada

The Courtauld is also showcasing the artist’s work as a printmaker with a display that unveils for the first time a series of prints Doig made in response to the poetry of his friend and collaborator, the late Derek Walcott (1930-2017).

As a footnote, I will add that Doig’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others. In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby’s for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist.

The Morgan Stanley Exhibition at The Courtauld is on until May 29

Drawings

Despite the lockdown we’ve been having quite a busy time what with one thing and another, and I’ve found it difficult in the last few weeks to work on any larger paintings. Especially since my studio is in the kitchen, and larger paintings have to go on the kitchen table, then the lot must be cleared away before meals if we are to be more than two using it. Is it any wonder that I work with water-based media? Oils would be impossible, what with the smell of turpentine and the permanent drips everywhere.

I’m not complaining, though, because I do love to work on paper. Often I just make a series of drawings.

Can you see the lovely deckled edges?

I treated myself to a bunch of sheets of handmade paper from Nepal, Bhutan and India. I found it on Etsy, at a marvelous shop called TornEdgePaper, which has a huge selection at very reasonable prices, should anyone be interested. They’re all different shades, and thicknesses and surfaces, and, although some are so thin and delicate as to be almost transparent, they are impressively strong.

I’ve been using ink, pencil, graphite, gesso, watercolor and collage.

Trying out different effects.

The one below is a floral study on tinted paper, using aquarelle pencils. Irises make such weird and wonderful shapes.

An ink drawing, this time on normal watercolor paper, featuring a raven with a gold leaf background.

Last but not least, a pencil drawing with origami paper collage. It’s titled ‘Boy on horse with birds’, and I imagined him as a kind of young samouraï.

The horses of Susan Rothenberg

I don’t want this blog to be fielding a constant stream of obituaries, but I was sad to learn of the passing of Susan Rothenberg, an artist who’s been a great inspiration to me.

Born in 1945 in Buffalo, New York, Susan Rothenberg was a pioneer, in that her figurative paintings of the ‘70s were in direct opposition to the Minimalist abstract art that was in vogue in the New York art world at the time.

The paintings she mostly became known for were those featuring horses. Rothenberg depicted equine forms in a pared down style, against monochrome, vacant backgrounds. Sometimes, the horses were bisected; at others, they were contained within uneven geometrical forms. They usually appear alone, or in pairs. “The horse was a way of not doing people, yet it was a symbol of people, a self-portrait, really,” Rothenberg once said.

After the horses, Rothenberg moved on to painting disembodied heads and hands, and various objects.

At times, the images border on the surrealist, such as her improbable 1985 portrait of Piet Mondrian dancing in diffuse golden light, below.

In 1989, Rothenberg married conceptual artist Bruce Nauman and moved with him to a 750-acre ranch in Galisteo, New Mexico, near where Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin also lived and worked. They spent a lot of time in non-art-related activities, like horseback riding, walking the dogs, feeding the chickens, and were refreshingly uninterested in what was going on in the art world.

Rothemberg, in her own words: “I just don’t think there’s much stuff going on of the kind that I’m interested in, which is really just about painting. It’s not about issues, it’s not about politics, it’s not about process, it’s not about technology. I’m just a painter.”
Her recent work featured subjects including the inside of her studio and the natural surroundings by her home, using “dirtied-down” colors and thick, gestural painted surfaces to reflect the topography of the region.

Here’s a short video for those interested.

Staying home

It’s difficult to know how to describe the situation we find ourselves in. A mini-apocalypse? A plague? A warning for the future?
It’s been hard accepting how dangerous the virus is, and how contagious. Most of us, if in good health, kept up normal activities for a while, thinking it was just a bad kind of flu. Some are still not taking it seriously enough, obliging governments to impose confinement, curfews and fines.
In retrospect, it was a disaster waiting to happen, given the global amount of traveling that goes on, with no health checks whatsoever. The proof has been the rapidity with which the virus has spread worldwide.

However, this too shall pass, as have all previous epidemics: the object now being to limit the devastation it will leave in its wake, both in terms of deaths and financial.

I made this happy painting using natural powdered pigments, and loads of pink!

It’s interesting, and sometimes weird, to see how people are reacting. I still have friends who are on holiday, blithely ignoring the fact that they might be blocked from going home, maybe for months. Thousands of travelers, of all nationalities, are stuck abroad as we speak.

As with all extreme situations, this has brought out the best and the worst in people. Every day we witness incredible scenes—some of outrageous selfishness, some of great kindness.

Indisputably, we must come to terms with the new reality facing us for weeks, maybe for months to come.

I find myself back in confinement after the weeks when I could put no weight on my broken ankle—but this time without a cast! Bliss. I can now cook, and, as everyone knows, food is a great lifter of spirits. Improvising with what we have in the fridge, freezer and store cupboard. And I’ve been doing some foraging. There’s a little stream nearby, and its banks are full of wild garlic and nettles. Good for pesto, and soup, perhaps. There was a little yellow frog hopping about, and for a minute I thought ‘Frog legs!’, but then, Noo. No way 🙂

Another of my powdered pigment experiments

I feel so thankful and privileged to be able to go out in the garden. It’s such an escape from feeling like murdering the loved ones. I think of people stuck with small kids in tiny appartments. People worried about losing their jobs or going bankrupt. The refugees, piled in camps with no hygiene. People stuck in prison. The elderly who cannot see their families because they risk being contaminated. Africans who have no access to clean water with which to wash their hands. The list goes on.

I also have so much respect for the people with no choice but to continue working in very uncertain conditions. Nurses, doctors, policemen, firefighters, couriers, pharmacists, cashiers and many more.

Apart from cooking, and reading, I’ve been drawing and painting, color being another spirit booster. Amazing how many ways there are of describing one cheerful vase of daffodils.

And let’s not forget that laughter is the best medicine. People’s sense of humor is flourishing, I’m pleased to report, with a spate of jokes, memes and caricatures flooding the web and my social media.