Up The River: George Bellows

As part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's journey up the Hudson River, here is a painting by George Bellows, known for his gritty portrayals of urban scenes, made in 1908 to commemorate the 300th anniversary: Up the Hudson, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Turner To Cezanne IV: Claude Debussy

“However real one’s sufferings are, they look rather quaint and dramatic on paper. Anyway the best thing is not to take all these hardships too seriously. They support what I might call the Cult of Desire. And when all’s said and done, desire is what counts.

The composer whose music is associated with ‘Impressionism’, a term borrowed from the visual arts, was a man who preferred the Symbolist style of painting. Also confounding our expectations, though we now find sublime beauty in his compositions, Debussy strove for modernism, for a new way in music.
Achille Claude Debussy (1852-1918) was one of five children, born in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to a family that lived upstairs over the family china shop. At one point, financial difficulties led to three of the siblings being parceled out to relatives, creating a distance that was never entirely bridged in later life.
Achille, as the boy was then called, began piano lessons by accident but displayed sufficient talent that he enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris at age ten. He would back into the prestigious Prix de Rome the same way at eighteen. By then, the young man was wrapped up in his first love affair with a wealthy married woman, fourteen years his senior, and he had no desire to leave Paris for two years study in Rome. “Here there is no tomorrow; everything falls asleep” Franz Liszt had opined a few decades earlier, and Claude agreed.
The resulting prize composition, La Damoiselle elue (text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) with its innovative harmonies appealed to a large audience but the young composer chose to turn his back on professional success, living in poverty and relying on the kindness of his friends.
Now Debussy perfected his literary style, frequently and compellingly quoted by Roberts, using letters to wring financial support from the well-to-do. To his Roman benefactor, he wrote: “First of all please forgive me for taking so long to send news of your poor little musician. The first reason is a cold, an Italian one which became French, but whichever, the mother of all colds.” And to his friend Rene Peter (1893): “When you come on Sunday try to be extremely rich, because if I don’t pay my rent, people (or something resembling them) will hang furiously on my doorbell!”
Given Debussy’s love of words, it is understandable that his early works include exquisite songs, setting the works of several of France’s finest poets including Pierre Louys (Chansons de Bilitis) and Paul Verlaine (Fetes galantes). However the 1890s were a time devoted to perfecting his opera Pelleas et Melisande, not performed until 1902, when it received a lukewarm reception from critics and a public not yet ready for vocal lines that soared independently of the melodies.
In contrast, his tone poem La Mer (1905) was an immediate and immense success. “The sea has been very good to me, and has shown me all of her moods, “he exulted. At the same time, Debussy’s ill-conceived marriage to the naïve and gentle young Lily Texier disintegrated under the combined weight of his moods, his infidelities, and the couple’s financial struggles. It is then, perhaps to be expected that the most stable liaison of Debussy’s life was with Emma Bardac, a woman of means with whom he became parent to his adored daughter Claude-Emma (nicknamed Chouchou), born in 1905, before her parents were freed from their other entanglements. It was typical of Debussy’s self-justifying way that he broke the news of their separation to Lily in a letter, telling her he wanted to be alone when he was already with Emma. “An artist is in the main a detestable interior kind of man, and perhaps also a deplorable husband,” he wrote.
A taciturn man who could be extremely charming when he extended himself, his irony was hard to miss. A sensualist who often lacked the material means to gratification, he used words to manipulate others to get what he wanted. Debussy’s letters are sui generis and while Roberts includes lengthy excerpts, their literary quality and interest does nothing to impede the narrative flow. The book is a model of musical biography, blending the life and the music without making unwarranted connections between the two. And at a mannerly two hundred and some pages, there is no resemblance between a biography and a doorstop.
Debussy died of cancer at fifty-six, only months before the Great War ended. He was spared what might have been the greatest blow: Claude-Emma died in a diphtheria epidemic the next year, at fourteen.

Paul Roberts is a British pianist who has made several recordings of Debussy’s piano music and is also author of the book Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy

CLAUDE DEBUSSY by Paul Roberts London, Phaidon Press: 2008 BIO DEB

And listen to the music:

Nancy Allen, harp, et al: Music of Ravel and Debussy, Angel EMI Classics, GS ALL MRD A78 CD
Dawn Upshaw, vocal, et al: Music of Light, Nonesuch D UPSH VL U12 CD
Veronique Gens, vocal, etal: Chansons de Bilitis, Virgin Classics V GENS NE G21 CD

Georg Solti, conductor, Chicago Symphony: Prelude A L'Apres-midi d"un Faune, La Mer, Trois Nocturnes, London Records EA DEBU NOC S82 CD

Charles Dutoit, conductor, L'Orchestre symphonic de Montreale: Pelleas et Melisande, London Records,

Charles Dutoit, conductor, L'Orchestre de symphonie de Montreale: Pelleas et Melisande, London Records, B DEBU PM A22 CD

Henriette Henriot

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Just in time for the opening at the Everson Museum of Art of Turner to Cezanne: Masterpeiecs from the Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales (9 October 2009 - 3 January 2010), here is another of the dozen paintings of the actress Henriette Henriot made by Pierre-Auguste Renoir during the years 1874-1876. This is titled simply The Actress. It is the mostly obviously Impressionist of Renoir's portraits of Mlle. Henriot.

Turner To Cezanne III: La France Profonde

They call it La France Profonde, that intense emotional bond of its people with the land that is France. For Americans, the song America the Beautiful provides a useful analogy. Several impressive French landscapes from the collection of the Davies Sisters, Gwendolyn and Margaret, are included in Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales, a special exhibition that opens at the Everson Museum on 9 October.

Recommended Fiction:

The Wanderer - (Le Grand Meaulnes) – Alain Fournier, translated from the French by Lowell Bair, with an afterword by John Fowles, New York, New American Library, 1953 (1913)

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, Chelsea Green Publishers, White River Junction, VT: (2005) 1953 843.912 GIO
Letters From My Windmill – Alphonse Daudet, in Alphonse Daudet, translated from the French by George Burnham Ives, New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU

Alain-Fournier wrote his incomparable novel of growing up in the countryside just one year before he was killed in the fighting of World War II.

Jean Giono's fable-like story of a lonely shepherd who plants trees in his abandoned valley, turning it into an Edenic garden, prefigures the ideas that the ecological movement would embrace decades later.

Alphonse Daudet's Letters are the work of a man who moves from Paris as he recounts his explorations in the provinces to his Parisian friend. Originally published as a series of articles in the newspaper Le Figaro.

Recommended Films:

The Gleaners And I – Agnes Varda FRE 309.894 GLE
Jean de Floret FRE 791.43 JEA
Manon of The Spring FRE 791.43 MAN

Both Jean de Floret and Manon of the Spring are based on novels by Marcel Pagnol; the films were directed by Claude Berri. Bothe films are set in Provence, after the end of World War I, and the plots deal with the hardships of making a living in the visually beautiful French countryside.

A modern essay on the same theme, in The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda creates a visual essay on gleaning, an ancient agricultural practice, by taking to the road with a camcorder. Varda has said that through filming she came to feel a kinship between her creative process and the work of the people she met. Most people only know of gleaners from Millett's iconic painting The Gleaners (1857). Peasants in rural France have long followed the path of the fall harvest, surviving on the remains of crops that were too small to be swept up by farmers. Varda found many who still practice this humble task, whether digging up potatoes near Lyon or picking apples in Provence.
Through Varda's lens we can imagine contemporary gleaners as critics of consumption and waste in an affluent society. We see a chef who salvages food for his elegant restaurant, a homeless biologist who teaches literature for free, and a man who has lived off trash for ten years. And in a redeeming moment of pure delight, Varda unearths a heart-shaped potato.