Saturday, October 30, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Henri Rousseau
From "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck
The initial question in dealing with Rousseau s work is
thrust upon us: Is he a modern “primitive”?
Primitive' and 'naif' were used very early to describe
his work and found ready acceptance; recent esti-
mations of his work have tended to treat him as a painter
who cannot be separated from the evolution of modern art
by such glib and arbitrary classifications.
It is no slur to call Giotto and Cimabue “primitive”; it is
a means of locating them within two centuries which pre-
pare the formulation of the strict optical conventions of
Renaissance art. Rousseau reveals a comparable primitiv-
ism, for he strove in his conscious thinking about art to
achieve a naturalistic, academic style. He admired Bou-
•uereau and Ger6me and Courtois. Twentieth-century
Western art, however, the disgruntled offspring of a great
naturalistic tradition culminating in impressionism, was
seeking out the methods of primitives from Italv, Africa,
and contemporary Paris. Like Picasso and Braque and
Matisse and Delaunay, Rousseau worked not -with the op-
tical image (a rational transformation of what we see) but
with his personal beholding of things. He stood beside them
without having made the journev of styles which they had
made in their development as artists. He is primitive in
that, occupying the same ground as these men, he never—
teless looked yearningly toward a style they violently re-
jected. Robert Goldwater writes of this paradoxical situa-
tion:
But it is important to realize that the style which he
achieved was but a stopping place upon a road
along which he would have travelled further if he
could, and that the effect which he attains, seen
from the point of view of the mechanics and psy-
chology of its creation, is because of this intention,
even if it is in spite of it from the point of view of the sophisticated observer.
In other words, Rousseau was primitive in performance
but not. in intention. The distinction is accurate yet danger-
ous. What is usually described as his intention was really
his ambition—the desire to show in official Salons.
There remains one last preliminary: the technical prob
lem of dealing with Rousseau s work. First of all, forgeries.
Soon after his death, a profusion of counterfeit Rousseaus
appeared in Paris (and from as far away as Japan) per-
haps because counterfeiters believed a “primitive should
be easy to imitate.
As an artist, Rousseau, followed no steady evolution of
style, nor even a series of outwardly melodramatic reversals
like Picasso's. At his first Salon des Independants in 1886,
The year following his retirement at forty-one, Rousseau hung Un soir de carnaval, one of his masterpieces.
This canvas shows him already in command of his mature style.
In none of these compositions did he explore linear perspective;
we feel space as accumulation.
One stage does not flow logically out of the last, as we usually expect from an
artist . Along with their similarities, the paintings have a
discontinuous quality which suggests that .the order of their
execution is not a profoundly relevant factor. In addition,
uncertain dating of the bulk of Rousseau s canvases
makes chronological classification difficult.
We never find Rousseau isolating human features as a form of pure beauty
or expression. They appear in association with appropriate land-
scape or fragments of ordinary life.There was nothing casual
about the name he gave this type o£ paintings which he
considered his discovery. In 1907, writing the judge in-
structions before his trial, he stated flatly. “I am the in-
ventor of the portrait-landscape;
In the Moi-meme portrait of 1890, Rousseau s figure stands boldly
and masterfully in the middle, except that he had some difficultv about length of leg and making
the feet rest solidly on the ground. As a result—and also because Rousseau's head is just on the
level of the free balloon-—the figure is itself to rise into the bright sky.
Without laboring over physical likeness, he expressed
character in a pose, or repose, of the whole body, in a selec-
tion of significant objects attached to the figure, and in a
meticulously painted background. He portrayed not an appearance but an environment.
Ever since Rembrandt, the intense portrayal of human
character has tended to eliminate the natural world as a
distraction. The face should tell all. Even the romantics
hesitated to paint a formally commissioned portrait out of
doors. Rousseau set his highly formal compositions against
pastoral or semipastoral backgrounds. His
refusal to separate portraiture from landscape and genre painting chara-
acterizes the “primitive” sensibility which sees a person and
le objects that surround him as a single entity. Rousseau treated his canvas as a surface upon
which to combine and relate the material parts of a person s life, rather than as a
means of dramaticallv isolating a face from all incidentals.
La belle epoque
“It all started with a wake and funeral such as Paris had
never staged even for royalty. In May 1885, four months
after an immense state banquet to celebrate his eighty-third
birthday, Victor Hugo died.
His remains lay in state for twenty-four hours on top
of a mammoth urn which filled the Arc de Triomphe and
-was guarded in half-hour shifts by young children in Gre-
cian vestments.
Within a few yards of Hugo's apotheosis.
an endless procession across Paris the next day included
several brass bands, every political and literary figure of
the day, speeches, numerous deaths in the press of the delirious crowd,
and final entombment in the Pantheon.
The church had to be speciallv unconsecrated for the occasion. By this
orgiastic ceremony France unburdened itself of a man, a
literary movement, and a century.
Paris had just had her face lifted.
Baron Haussmann's ambitious plans for opening up the constricted city
had been executed by 1880.
Of all the stages that made up the city, the most for-
malized and demanding was the salon. [The aristocracy
still cultivated the conversation of what were assumed to
be great minds.
As the salon declined for lack of ladies trained to con-
duct one and through disappearance of the basic attitude
of hommage on which the institution rested, the need for
a verbal arena increased. One of the principal changes.of
la belle epoque was that the great performers moved from
the salon into the cafe.
Here anyone could enter, and each
man paid for his drink. As far back as the mid-eighteenth
century artists and writers in Paris had begun to rely in-
creasingly on the stimulus and exchange of the cafe. (They
were served by young boys, whence comes the word garcon
for waiter.) The term boulevardier was now invented
to describe men whose principal accomplishment consisted
in appearing at the proper moment in the proper cafe.
More than the salon, the cafe came to provide a free market-
place of ideas and helped France produce its steady sue-
cession of artistic schools.The Cafe
Guerbois and the Nouvelle Athenes in the sixties and sev-
enties had nurtured the first artistic movement entirely
organized in cafes: impressionism.
In the title of his famous
play, first produced in 1895, Dumas fils brilliantly named
this special world: Le demi-monde.
Fashion influenced every, domain of life, just after 1890
the velocipede had been introduced with little success.
A few years later, the Prince de Sagan, the most prominent
and dashing nobleman in France pedaled through the Bois
on a “little steel fairy" wearing a loud striped suit and
specially designed straw boater. The city was delighted.
And womens' fashions changed immediately to allow them
to ride astride. The bicycle, symbolizing everything demo-
cratic and modern (and supporting two weekly papers and one daily),
led the way to an upsurge of sport which cul—
minated in the revival of the Olympic games in 1894. After
the bicycle, but without public participation, came the air-
plane. 
The Eiffel Tower, raised at the cost of fifteen million uninflated francs in 1889.
This great anomaly of modern engineering
aroused protest from a committee of prominent citizens
and expressed all the aspirations of a period
which set out to surpass its heritage. And it remain-
ed: styleless, functionless, unhistoried- the Eiffel Tower in its truculent stance is the first
monument of modernism.
Graham Greene's Brighton Rock
It was all over. Ida squeezed out with difficulty
a last tear into a handkerchief scented with Californian
Poppy. She liked a funeral—but it was with horror-
as other people like a ghost story. Death shocked her,
life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't
believe in heaven or hell- only in ghosts, Ouija boards,
tables that rapped and little inept voices speaking
plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with
flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as
what came after. But to her death was the end of
everything.
She believed in ghosts, but you couldn't call that thin,
transparent existence life eternal: the squeak of a
board, a piece of ectoplasm in a glass cupboard at the
psychical research headquarters, a voice
she'd heard once at a séance saying ''Everything is very beautiful
on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere.”
Flowers, Ida though scornfully- that wasn't life.
What was the sense of dying if it made you “babble of flowers?
She took life with a deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause
any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in.
To lose your lover—“broken hearts,” she would say, “always
mend” to be maimed or blinded—''lucky” she'd tell
you “to be alive at all.” There was something dan-
gerous and remorseless in her optimism...
She came out of the crematorium-And there from
the twin towers above her head fumed the very last
of Fred... a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens.
People passing up the flowery suburban road looked
-tip and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces.
Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms:
he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
2 new woodcuts from auction
2 pieces by Harry Bonath, Seattle art director from the 1920's till his death in the 70's.
Saturday, October 02, 2010
The birth of modern auctions
From Wesley Towner's "The Elegant Auctioneers"
English auction houses, by tradition and by design, catered then almost exclusively to the trade. Sales of famous art collections sometimes drew the curious as spectators, but private buyers were excluded from the bidding by custom. If they wanted to buy, they placed bids through dealers, who had entree to the sales and charged 5 or 10 percent commission on the purchase price.
The rooms had the atmosphere of a. catchall for derelict possessions. Things were sold just as they came from the consignor—often dirty and in disrepair. The lots were numbered and just put around.
Mediocrities were not readily distinguishable from things of value: Catalogues, unless interpreted by an expert, gave little clue as to which was which. Oil paintings had the dust and grime of years thick upon the glass that preserved the brush strokes of a master or blurred the hand of a copyist or forger. The sales had an air of cut-and-dried professionalism. Porters in green baize aprons held up chairs by one leg or hoisted portraits that may or may not have been painted by Reynolds above the bidders' heads. The auctioneer wore wore the formal dress of a stockbroker and, in. contrast to his surroundings, was a man of similar dignity and consequence. The porters, it was said, did not even wash their necks. The dealers who did the bidding sat around a big table or stood near it, subdued, expressionless, and tense, like seasoned players in a gambling house. They were firmly organized in the Ring,
The Ring, or knockout system, which still prevails at auctions where the bidding is predominantly by the trade-is an age-old conspiracy to control auction prices and keep the “privates” -the dealers' word for nonprofessional bidders—from getting anything of value at less than the going retail price. The dealers in a particular category of art property form a syndicate and agree not to bid against one another, When one member of the combine bids, the others- however much they may want to buy the lot refrain from running up the price.
After the public sale, the Ring holds its own auction, and the members bid on the lots obtained among themselves. If an item is of no interest to other members of the combine, the original bidder may pay for it and keep it. When two or more dealers in the ring compete for it, the difference between its knockdown price and the amount it brings in the Ring auction goes into the profits of the syndicate. An object of exceptional value may remain joint property of the syndicate members until one of the dealers finds a customer for it and submits a bid acceptable to the others. The gravy is then portioned out among the members as usual.
There are many variations and vicissitudes in the operations of the syndicates. Occasionally a rival combine will invade the auction rooms and bid against the regulars with the object of gaining membership in the established gang. Strong and unpleasant measures may have to be taken to restore monopoly. Sometimes syndicates operate within the syndicate, in which case two or more members form a conspiracy not to compete against each other in the Ring auctions. If the Ring-within-the-Ring succeeds in obtaining objects below their market value,its members may hold a third auction to divide the spoils.
For instance, a Chelsea soup tureen may bring £100 in a London auction. If the porcelain syndicate is composed of ten dealers and the soup tureen brings £1,000 in the King auction, each of the ten dealers gets £90 profit. But the £1,000 may have been paid by three dealers united in a Knockout of their own. The soup tureen for—brings say, £4000 in the subsequent auction among the three, regardless of which dealer buys the tureen, each of the three comes out with an additional £iooo profit. Moreover, a syndicate member, whether the mere circumstance that a Chelsea soup tureen has come up at auction nets him £90 or £1,090, would be unlikely to pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains, since the operations of |the ring are illegal in England, and in any case, undercover.
In any event, the “privates” are not to be tolerated at Ring-controlled auctions. A functionary, who used to be given the colorful title King of the Knockout, is delegated to take over the casual intruder who imagines he can buy advantageously for his own account at auction. If, for instance, a gentleman fancies a Georgian silver coffeepot and attempts to bid for it against the silver Ring, the King of the Knockout will run him up to about the retail value of the coffeepot—or higher, if the gentleman appears to be well-heeled and stubborn—and let him have it. The intruder goes home with his prize—for which he may have paid more than it would have cost in a Bond Street silver shop, -pondering on the fact that in the published reports of auction sales similar coffeepots had frequently fallen for the price of crockery.
As a defense against the Ring, English auction houses operate on a system of reserve prices. The consignor is permitted by law to put a secret reserve, or “upset,” price on each lot to be sold. When the bidding fails to reach the upset price the auctioneer knocks the lot down to himself and the would-be seller pays only a reduced commission. Thus the bidder is placed in the position of playing a kind of blindman's buff with, the auctioneer, who alone is supposed to know what the reserve price is.
Secret reserve prices, though not sanctioned by law, certainly prevailed at New York auctions. What was worse, if the auctioneer did not actually own the property he sold, he mixed in derelict objects of his own in order to cash in on the good will emanating from a real consignor's name. moreover, the consignor—if consignor there was—could hardly be said to be in a better position than the bidder faced with all those unidentified competitors. Most auctioneers were shoe-string operators; they delayed payment interminably, juggled the accounts and sometimes absconded with the funds altogether.
During his retirement from the rostrum Kirby had been mulling over the trouble with auctions, and he had come up with some cardinal principles to herald the Art Associations entrance into the field of management. What he proposed to establish, with the Seney sale as a springboard, was a free and unrestricted auction commission market with the private buyer as its main support. In the language of his manifesto this was to be accomplished by “selling without reserve, restriction or protection, never permitting addition to sales of private or estates' collections, prominently advertising and displaying real ownership, mating final payment within thirty days from the date of sale.
These are in essence the principles under which the Parke-Bernet Galleries functioned for many years. If they do not sound particularly cardinal now, they did in 1885.
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