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.

Another creepy doll

This one moves.

Creepiest doll ever.

At auction. The bathing suit doesn't help.

2 new woodcuts from auction

2 pieces by Harry Bonath, Seattle art director from the 1920's till his death in the 70's.

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.

From: O Rare Don Marquis

In 1931, Don Marquis' publisher suggested he write his autobiography. He turned down the proposal with these word: "I'm entitled to a better subject".
He did write:
"The name Marquis is not French but Scottish in origin. the first of the name of whom I have any record came to Virginia from the North of Ireland in 1720, and settled near Winchester. They were Calvinists who believed in Infant Damnation, Calomel, and Scotch Whiskey. "

Marquis and his wife moved to Brooklyn in 1909, the year horse-drawn streetcars were abandoned for electrically powered car lines. "...and as more and more ofthese conveyances swung down the streets of Brooklyn, the local citizenry came to be known as trolley dodgers.... eventually shortened to dodgers", which is how the Brooklyn Dodgers acquired its name.

For some years Marquis rattled out his daily stint with his typewriter machine perched on an up-ended packing crate. This box had stenciled on it "1 GROSS TOM CAT" which meant tomato catsup, but became by legend the first suggestion of mehitabel.

Barbara Comyns

From "Sisters By A River", her first novel....


After she had had six babies at eighteen month intervals Mammy suddenly went deaf, perhaps her subconscious mind just couldn't bear the noise of babies crying anymore. Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind all little bits and pieces held together by whisps, now she grew vaguer still and talked with a high floating voice, leaving her sentences half finished. It must have been beastly looking at all those flapping hands all the time.

All our family were very superstitious but Granny was the worst, and she was always seeing spirits about the house. she would say things about the house had a curse on them, even our toys and they were burnt because of that, sometimes I thought maybe she was a witch in rather thin disguise.

Zeena Frome

Shockingly, this appears to be Edith Wharton, minx.
I've reread Ethan Frome (whom I believe bears his fate uncomplainingly as complaining would be churlish at best. After all, he has had nearly everything he desired given him, but, like Victorian children who find a genie, has rashly forgotten to specify the terms.)
After marrying Zeena...

But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of their marriage she developed the “sickliness” which had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.

From the auction

A pewter lidded container with a recumbent fawn knob, marked "Denmark" and unhelpfully accompanied by an indistinguishable maker's insignia.

My hangover Agatha

Funerals Are Fatal.
A half-batty elderly sister attending her brother's funeral, blurts out "Well, it WAS murder wasn't it?" and is subsequently chopped to bits with a hatchet. Her companion is poisoned by a slice of mailed wedding cake- part of which she leaves under her pillow so as to dream of her own wedding. Mustachioed nuns are thrown in as a red herring, and Victorian wax flowers under a bell jar become significant to Poirot. The means and the murderer become glaringly obvious from the wedding cake on, although the motive would be, let's say, unlikely to inspire hatchet murder in many; that motive being to take the money from selling the victim's Vermeer (over which the murderer had painted a seaside scene) and open a tea shoppe.
Of course Aggie sets herself a brilliant problem to solve- what if a murder is not a murder but an opportunity to distract from a planned crime? (Not that the sister hatcheted herself to death.)

Nice cover, though.

The Day of the Locust

Reading Nathaniel West's final novel in a wonderfully lurid pulp edition.(bottom pic) A pocket edition as dry as a pressed flower. It closes like an over-used wallet because its spine has been broken. The two halves of pages are nearly bifurcated at the place where Homer Simpson takes pity on Miss Martin, the lush. Everything after Miss Martin would drift and flitter out one page after the other but for the six tough strings of dried glue that hold it intact. They stretch like spit between lips and are amber, crusted with bits of brown paper- like broken, translucent bug parts.

I have also included the Penguin edition which has the most fitting cover art.

From the bk.:
It was a picture of Faye Greener, a still from a two-reel farce in which she worked as an extra. She had given him the photograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large wild hand, "Affectionately yours, Faye Greener". Faye played one of the dancing girls. She had only one line to speak, "Oh, Mr. Smith" and spoke it badly.

Finally

I had long avoided reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a difficult feat. At the time, the prevalent edition was this one with a bird being annoyed by poky color triangles. I suppose I thought the book was about murderous Graphic Designers. As a child, I couldn't even look at the cover without it upsetting me. I also shunned it because my sister (possibly kindly) warned me if a dog died in anything, a movie, a book or a television show and one, named Tim Johnson, does indeed die- so I deliberately never watched the Gregory Peck film, and may eventually have confused it with Member of the Wedding.
Of course, I loved the novel.

From the bk.....
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Revisiting Muriel Spark

Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors. Half-pint bottles of milk began to be stood at the doorsteps of houses containing single apartments from Hampstead Heath to Greenwich Park, from Wanstead Flats to Putney Heath; but especially in Hampstead, especially in Kensington.
In Queens Gate, Kensington, in Harrington Road, The Boltons.... Chelsea and its backwaters, the bachelors stirred between their sheets, reached for their wound watches, and with waking intelligences noted the time; then remembering it was Saturday morning turned over on their pillows. But soon because it was Saturday, most would be out on the streets shopping for their bacon and eggs.... would set out early, before a quarter past ten, in order to avoid being jostled by the women, the legitimate shoppers.

and

It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others besides ourselves, he thought who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.

From "Hawkins of the Paris Herald"

Sarah Bernhardt, 1879: "It's curious how many idle stories there are about me. My favorite dishes are supposed to be burnt cats, lizards' tails and peacock brains sauteed in monkey butter, whatever that is..."

I saw La Goulue sometime after her retirement from the Moulin Rouge. True to her soubriquet, meaning the glutton, she had ruined her dancing career by overeating, and my glimpse of her was as a lion tamer in a street fair. She later became a wrestler and just before she died in 1921 she could be seen selling oranges outside the Moulin rouge.

"In the early years of the century, the Folies Bergere competed with the Moulin Rouge by producing revues that featured English dancehall girls, because French girls are incapable of learning the precisions required in a chorus line.

Ladies of pleasure had been known under the Second Empire a les biches and les soupeuses. A biche was a small deer. A soupeuse was a beauty of limited virtue available for supper. By the turn of the century, the appellations had gone out of fashion in favor of the simpler 'demimondaine'.

Worst wedding toast ever

John Donne in 1627, from the NYRB:

Where be all the splinters of that Bone,
which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre ?
Where be all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away,
or a Consumption hath breath'd,and exhal'd away from our arms, and other Limbs ?
In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth,
ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnta thousand years since ?
 In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned
in the generall flood ? What coherence, what sympathy, what dependence
maintaines any relation, any correspondence, between that arm that was lost in Europe,
and that legge that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between ?
One humour of our dead body produces worms,
and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries,
 and molders into dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, &
that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions,
and still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies,
in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies.

MURTHER somewhat foul

After a marvelous July 4th with work folk, I spent the afternoon with Agatha. "Murder at Hazelmoor" opened, as always, with a terrific premise. An evening party where the hostesses, suggesting diversions, agree to some table turning. The lights are dimmed and the table raps out, letter by letter, that Captain Trevelyan has just been murdered at the Hazelmoor cottage he was renting. His good friend Burnaby sets off in a snowstorm to investigate. Trevelyan is indeed dead- coshed with a sand-filled sock laid against under door draughts. Since the time of death coincides with the spirit occurance, it is obvious that one of the guests must be the murderer, and as only 4 characters are sketched out in the length of the story, it is of course the one most present in that narrative.

Acquisitions

The 3 latest art purchases at auction- unsigned or illegibly signed. "Landscape" pencil signed " N. Mayer", dated '51. Mid to early 20th century- the two lithographs were from the estate of artist Eugene Pizzuto- in a sheaf of art from many different artists. The bridge is a greater mystery- the artist seems to have also created the frame- there is a two letter monogram in the lower left corner, possibly "K.T.".

Agatha

Left: The face of my hangovers.





When, on the morning following a night out I have no desire to move, I'll reread an Agatha Christie cover to cover until the throbbing ceases. After "The Clocks", I read "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" in which an elderly charwoman was murdered by one of any of her five clients as she had discovered that one of them was related to one of four murderesses featured in a newspaper article. The solution, not very thrillingly, had to do with the fact that "Evelyn CAN also be a MAN'S name!"
Next it was "Ordeal by Innocence" in which a woman is murdered by one of any of 4 adopted children, her husband, secretary or housekeeper. The motive was rather implausible.... (housekeeper infatuated with son, hiding theft of slain mother's money). The reaction of the son when convicted of the murder committed by the housekeeper was inexplicable.
I enjoy having all the Christie paperbacks around to remind me of my days spent in paperback swap shops like The Book Rack, situated next to the waterfall in the University Village shopping center, but I never need read them again, so they are being purged, along with Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Virginia Kelly (Clinton)'s Autobiography and some Brigid Brophy.