---what---
Museums are garbage dumps. They are a little better organized than the rubbish pits beloved of archaeologists...
Of course the claim is made that they contain the best that remains of bygone eras... an assertion rather than the total truth.
A modern art museum is of course an absurdity and always to be avoided.
If anything, a museum is supposed to contain the distant past otherwise I find it hard to distinguish between The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, The Guggenheim and a department store like Macy's or K-Mart.
Of course, how dare you?
Am I the only one to remember that the Guggenheim gave itself over to displaying the work of that "great" modern artist Georgio Armani?
---what---
The only modern art museum I think that can be defended as such was the overcoat that Jacques Rigaut wore when he came to New York in the 1920s. In the pockets of that coat he had match-boxes and inside each of them were the art he declared to be the best modern art.
Rigaut was a poet and prose writer who wrote "Lord Patchogue." He, myself, Henry David Thoreau are the only major writers to have been in Patchogue and to have written about it.
Rigaut is the subject for Louis Malle's film THE FIRE WITHIN based on the novel by one the third, fourth--- but who is counting?--- most important French writers of the 20th Century, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.
Drieu came to a sad end in 1944 along with Robert Brasillach but both Paul Morand and Louis Ferdinand Celine escaped.
All that is another story.
One can only hope that someday their antagonist that dreary little toad Jean Paul Sartre--- clinging all the the time to his Aryan certification---, will have truly disappeared. Vladimir Nabokov, as you might remember, joins me in loathing every aspect of this stool.
---what---
I had gone up to the Met to see the Poussin show. I had gone with the hopes of seeing his "Landscape with Travellers Resting." I have always looked at that painting in the National Gallery in London in January. Having gone to Arizona, south of Tombstone, this January I did not see that picture. It was not in New York. I got a lesson in how to read an art show catalogue. Under the details of the picture's size in small type, Bilbao... the painting was there in another version of the show but is not in New York.
The Met tries to be all things to all people but I do go there because one can easily avoid the modern rubbish, all that stuff from after the French Revolution.
These temporary shows of course are probably a mistake. A museum is supposed to have some aspect of permanence to it. These shows undermine that... this constant shipping around of the merchandise--- and you tell me these museums are not like department stores?
---what---
Eugene Lambe who is now mostly no longer remembered beyond appearing in my book ST PATRICK'S DAY, DUBLIN 1974 and as a dedicatee of a poem by Derek Mahon used to always tell people from his attic apartment in Longacre in London that when going to an art museum to always know ahead of time what you are going to look at.
There is no way that something once seen can then be erased from the mind. You have to be careful what you look at.
Eugene well understood that it probably did no harm to people who toured through the museums, as if they were cattle being prodded on by minders and their own need to see everything because they remembered nothing of what they saw. These tours prepared people to go to department stores where everything was for sale unlike museums that still placed some things above sale, temporarily.
One of Eugene's favorite books was a book that described all the so-called works of art that were destroyed during World War One and Two. On a dull day it was the only book that could lift Eugene's spirits. The language of regret in which the book was written could make a sane man laugh out loud, Eugene maintained.
I will write more about Eugene Lambe but for now I can well imagine from beyond there in the grave, he would have been merciless with me, if I had recounted my visit to the Met last Friday. Of course you prepared yourself correctly: to see that one painting and of course it would not be there and I am sure you have found another painting that you did see and please, I don't want to hear about it unless it is the one with that wonderful inscription that Dr. Johnson got wrong, Et in Arcadia Ego.
Showing posts with label NICOLAS POUSSIN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NICOLAS POUSSIN. Show all posts
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
NICOLAS POUSSIN, ERWIN PANOFSKY , MARY ENGELBREIT and E.M. CIORAN
--WHY--
Around noon on Sunday I was reading Erwin Panofsky's ET IN ARCADIA EGO: Poussin and The Elegiac Tradition because I am going up to see the Poussin exhibit at the Metropolitan next Friday.
In the essay Panofsky traces the way that Latin phrase has been translated down through the years. He begins with Sir Joshua Reynolds showing a new painting to his friend Dr Johnson in which the Latin phrase appears inscribed on a tombstone. Johnson thinks it is nonsensical: "I am in Arcadia." However,Reynolds tells him that it is far from nonsensical and King George III who had seen the painting the day before said, "ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia."
AN ASIDE: those of us who were in Dublin in the early 1960s learned to always understand Dr. Johnson, with Patrick Kavanagh's dismissal, "that English bore."
Panofsky's essay could serve as a wonderful outline for a course of readings... and I will not belabor that or any other aspect of it.
I was taken by the way that Panofsky in clear crisp sentences takes his reader through an understanding of the word Arcady and how this place, "in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born--- a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is."
Eventually, Panofsky will get to the two paintings by Poussin that include this inscription. At the Met only the first of these will be on exhibit as the latter one was too fragile to travel from Paris.
In the painting at the Met we will be reminded as Panofsky writes, "The phrase Et in Arcadia ego can still be understood to be voiced by Death personified, and can still be translated as "even in Arcady I, Death hold sway," without being out of harmony with what is visible in the painting itself."
But, when next in Paris there will be the chance to see the second painting and there see the truth embodied in a very beautiful paragraph by Panofsky, "Thus Poussin himself, while making no verbal change in the inscription, invites, almost compels, the beholder to mis-translate it by relating the ego to a dead person instead of to the tomb, by connecting the et with ego instead of with Arcadia, and by supplying the missing verb in the form of a vixi or fui instead of a sum. The development of his pictorial vision had outgrown the significance of the literary formula, and we may say that those who under the impact of the Louvre picture, decided to render the phrase Et in Arcadia ego as "I, too, lived in Arcady," rather than as "Even in Arcady, there am I," did violence to Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition."
And the result, "Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment."
Panofsky it should also be mentioned will sweep the reader through Waugh, Fragonard, Diderot, Goethe...
--WHY--
The one painting I am looking forward to seeing is LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING which is usually in the National Gallery in London and which I look at every January. It depicts three men on a road: one walking, one resting and another fixing his sandal.
For more than a year I have been writing about those three men. It is the only thing that still holds my interest in European things. I can not imagine such a painting taking place in Arizona, say, south of Tombstone. I have not discovered how to make vivid a tall dark man striding at the end of day towards Tombstone by the side of the road dressed in shredded rags because I can not stop him to pause to adjust the rope that binds his waist.
--WHY--
Later on Sunday, I was waiting in a Walgreen parking lot and read Mary Engelbreit's editorial in MARY ENGELBREIT'S HOME COMPANION magazine. On the cover readers were invited to: HEARTFELT & HANDMADE 47 Ways to put a little love in your rooms
and WOW! our annual artist's studios tour.
The editorial was occasioned by those artist tours, "It's always been one of my favorite quotes: "I don't believe in art," avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp once said. "I believe in artists."
So do we. The idea of "art" itself can all too easily turn into a frozen, abstract, past-tense concept. Art with a capital "A," a fossil that's now safely on ice in a museum, viewed maybe once a year by a bus load of school kids.
Art is kind of like marriage. It loses its zing without a steady infusion of fresh renewable energy from everyone involved. It's energy, supplied by the audience as much as the artist, that can keep a work of art alive long after the museums have crumbled to dust. And it's this energy that we pay tribute to in our annual artists' studios issue."
--WHY--
Yesterday, today, tomorrow--- these are servants' categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom, every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation and monotonous in its persistence.
from A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY by E. M. Cioran
Around noon on Sunday I was reading Erwin Panofsky's ET IN ARCADIA EGO: Poussin and The Elegiac Tradition because I am going up to see the Poussin exhibit at the Metropolitan next Friday.
In the essay Panofsky traces the way that Latin phrase has been translated down through the years. He begins with Sir Joshua Reynolds showing a new painting to his friend Dr Johnson in which the Latin phrase appears inscribed on a tombstone. Johnson thinks it is nonsensical: "I am in Arcadia." However,Reynolds tells him that it is far from nonsensical and King George III who had seen the painting the day before said, "ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia."
AN ASIDE: those of us who were in Dublin in the early 1960s learned to always understand Dr. Johnson, with Patrick Kavanagh's dismissal, "that English bore."
Panofsky's essay could serve as a wonderful outline for a course of readings... and I will not belabor that or any other aspect of it.
I was taken by the way that Panofsky in clear crisp sentences takes his reader through an understanding of the word Arcady and how this place, "in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born--- a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is."
Eventually, Panofsky will get to the two paintings by Poussin that include this inscription. At the Met only the first of these will be on exhibit as the latter one was too fragile to travel from Paris.
In the painting at the Met we will be reminded as Panofsky writes, "The phrase Et in Arcadia ego can still be understood to be voiced by Death personified, and can still be translated as "even in Arcady I, Death hold sway," without being out of harmony with what is visible in the painting itself."
But, when next in Paris there will be the chance to see the second painting and there see the truth embodied in a very beautiful paragraph by Panofsky, "Thus Poussin himself, while making no verbal change in the inscription, invites, almost compels, the beholder to mis-translate it by relating the ego to a dead person instead of to the tomb, by connecting the et with ego instead of with Arcadia, and by supplying the missing verb in the form of a vixi or fui instead of a sum. The development of his pictorial vision had outgrown the significance of the literary formula, and we may say that those who under the impact of the Louvre picture, decided to render the phrase Et in Arcadia ego as "I, too, lived in Arcady," rather than as "Even in Arcady, there am I," did violence to Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition."
And the result, "Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment."
Panofsky it should also be mentioned will sweep the reader through Waugh, Fragonard, Diderot, Goethe...
--WHY--
The one painting I am looking forward to seeing is LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING which is usually in the National Gallery in London and which I look at every January. It depicts three men on a road: one walking, one resting and another fixing his sandal.
For more than a year I have been writing about those three men. It is the only thing that still holds my interest in European things. I can not imagine such a painting taking place in Arizona, say, south of Tombstone. I have not discovered how to make vivid a tall dark man striding at the end of day towards Tombstone by the side of the road dressed in shredded rags because I can not stop him to pause to adjust the rope that binds his waist.
--WHY--
Later on Sunday, I was waiting in a Walgreen parking lot and read Mary Engelbreit's editorial in MARY ENGELBREIT'S HOME COMPANION magazine. On the cover readers were invited to: HEARTFELT & HANDMADE 47 Ways to put a little love in your rooms
and WOW! our annual artist's studios tour.
The editorial was occasioned by those artist tours, "It's always been one of my favorite quotes: "I don't believe in art," avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp once said. "I believe in artists."
So do we. The idea of "art" itself can all too easily turn into a frozen, abstract, past-tense concept. Art with a capital "A," a fossil that's now safely on ice in a museum, viewed maybe once a year by a bus load of school kids.
Art is kind of like marriage. It loses its zing without a steady infusion of fresh renewable energy from everyone involved. It's energy, supplied by the audience as much as the artist, that can keep a work of art alive long after the museums have crumbled to dust. And it's this energy that we pay tribute to in our annual artists' studios issue."
--WHY--
Yesterday, today, tomorrow--- these are servants' categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom, every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation and monotonous in its persistence.
from A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY by E. M. Cioran
Saturday, February 16, 2008
MY FAUST by PAUL VALERY, HARALD WEINRICH, NICOLAS POUSSIN, FERNANDO PESSOA
another
"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.
And another
Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.
Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.
but another
If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.
In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers
and another
I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."
to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world
while another
"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)
"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)
"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.
And another
Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.
Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.
but another
If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.
In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers
and another
I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."
to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world
while another
"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)
"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)
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