THE FEARLESS READER

Ashokan Reservoir

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:44:00 +0000

The Ashokan Reservoir, located in Ulster County, NY, is now included in the eastern portion of the Catskills State Park. It was originally created as part of the system that supplies the metropolitan New York City area with drinking water.

Zulma Parker Steele (1881-1979) was an artists better known for her pottery than for her painting. This version of Ashokan Reservoir is one of several views that Steele created during her time at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in nearby Woodstock.

The Group Of Five, circa 1875

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:41:00 +0000

“Ah! We were not easy to provide for and the restaurants of Paris no doubt remember us. We often changed our meeting place. Sometimes it was at Adolphe and Pele, behind the Opera; sometimes in the square of the Opera Comique; then at Voisin’s whose cellar could meet any emergency and reconcile all tastes. We were wont to sit down to table at seven o’clock, and at two o’clock we had not finished. Flaubert and Zola dined in their shirtsleeves; Tourgeneff lounged on the divan; the waiters were turned out – a needless precaution since Flaubert’s “roar” could be heard from roof to cellar of the house – and we talked literature…” – Alphonse Daudet

“We kept the best of ourselves for those meetings. One would think to himself: I shall tell them this; or else; I shall read that page and take their advice on it. No truckling, no civility! Neither pupils nor masters, but comrades, respectful to the other men, warming themselves in the reflection of their glory and proving by their choice in our profession there is something else besides money and vanity.” – Alphonse Daudet

You could say there were five of them plus the ghost of a sixth. The five were Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896), Ivan Turgenev(1818-1883), and Emile Zola (1840-1902). The sixth man in the group was the late Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870), brother of Edmond (1822-1896). During their adult lives the Goncourt Brothers were rarely apart, writing books and editing journals together, a unique collaboration that was ended by Jules' death from venereal disease (read: syphilis). Daudet and Flaubert died from the same cause. So did many others, famous and forgotten from the 19th century.

The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881) offers a window into the prevalence of venereal disease and the havoc it brought to families and personal relationships. The very next year Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People, a play devoted to the havoc that daring to write about a common but tabooed subject brought to his life. So there were other ghosts at the table than just one missing brother, though that is another story.

The group first got together on April 14, 1874. They shared a frustration with the state of literature, with the popularity of melodrama. They shared the practice of close observation, of a new naturalism in fiction writing. Critics disdained their writing, finding their characters often contemptible and failing to realize that, particularly in the case of Flaubert, the author shared their estimation of his flawed creatures. Reading their works together is an experiment worth the effort, each one enriching the next. One final ghost in the room is the relative lack of available translations of Edmond de Goncourt's work. I offer these two brief quotes in place of more. "A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

Alphonse Daudet Letters From My Windmill, translated from the French by Geroge Burnham Ives, New York, Putnam’s Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU

Alphonse Daudet Tartine Of The Alps London, Dent-Dutton: 1969 (1880) FIC DAU

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life, translated from the French by Frances Steegmuller, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1993 (1857)FIC FLA

Gustave Flaubert Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, translated from the French by Jacques Barzun New York, New Directions: 1954 (18-? ) 847 FLA

Ivan Turgenev The Torrents Of Spring, translated from the Russian by David Magarshack, London, Hamilton: 1959 (1872) FIC TUR

Emile Zola Therese Raquin translated from the French by Leonard Tancock, New York, Penguin Books: 1962 (1867) FIC ZOL

Image: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot - The Windmill, before 1875, Louvre Museum, Paris.

A Bridge Across The Hudson

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:07:00 +0000

There aren't very many bridges across the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. My guess is that Louis Lozowick's 1940 print Bridge Across the Hudson may be the Bear Mountain Bridge - not far from High Tor. In any case, this comes from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

High Tor: Up The Hudson

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:14:00 +0000

HIGH TOR (in Four Verse Plays)
By Maxwell Anderson New York, Harcourt, Brace & World: 1959 812 AND

High Tor, the place, is just south of Haverstraw on the west bank of the Hudson, where the river is at its widest. Drenched in back story, it was Henry Hudson’s resting place on his way down the rover in 1609, after giving up his dream of finding a Northwest Passage. Here the eponymous traitor Benedict Andre met with Major Andre to plot the betrayal of West Point during the American Revolution. Here the fictional Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years.
“Torr” is an old English word for a rocky peak.

High Tor, a play in verse, dates from 1937. Anderson, who lived nearby, was aware of the renewed interest in American history, as embodied in the national government’s support of writers producing the WPA Guides to the States. From his home on South Mountain Road, he watched as the mountain’s owner, Elmer van Orden, resisted pressure to sell so that it could be quarried for stone, a job creator during the Great Depression. Van Orden died in 1943, and only then did the county step in to purchase High Tor for the Pallisades Interstae Park. In light of our current environmental problems, High Tor, the play, commands our renewed interest.
The Catskill Mountains possess magical properties, usually blue and purple, they attract wispy clouds of vapor even on sunny days. Against this backdrop Anderson created a fantastic comedy in verse. His protagonist is Van van Dorn, the man who owns the mountain that developers covet, and his fiancée Judith, who sees the price for the mountain as their fortune.

“They want to chew the back right off this mountain, the way they did/across the clove there. Leave the old palisades/ sticking up there like billboards, nothing left/ a false front facing the river”, van Orden tells Judith.
In response to Judith’s reminder that $10,000 is being offered, van Dorn says:
“Well, it’s Federal money/ Damn stiff evaporates. Put it in a sock/ along with mothballs, and come back, next year,/ and there’s nothing left but the smell.”
Art Biggs is a double-dealing developer who connives with Judge Skirmerhorn to push the deal through. Van Dorn sees portents of environmental destruction in the storms and the lightening that swirl around the mountain after the judge serves him with a court summons.Complications ensue after a bank robbery in a nearby town, when the robbers take refuge on the mountain and van Dorn is trapped there by a rockslide. A busy night ensues.

A master of the unlikely beginning, after graduating from the University of North Dakota, Anderson (1888-1956), moved to New York City where he wrote for the prestigious New Republic. His first play managed only 12 performances before closing, but Anderson went on to dominate the American theater for more than a quarter of a century with such plays as What Price Glory?, Key Largo, Knickerbocker Holiday, Winterset, Lost In The Stars, and Anne of the Thousand Days (like High Tor, a verse play). From Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, Anderson absorbed the charm of setting your play far from home. For his own home in the Catskills of Rockland County, where he did most of his writing, he installed a sprinkler system on the roof, convinced that he did his best writing to the sound of rain.

Up The River: George Bellows

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:03:00 +0000

“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

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:03:00 +0000

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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

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:48:00 +0000

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.

William de Leftwich Dodge

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:09:00 +0000

Murals by William de Leftwich Dodge (1867-1935) decorate many public buildings: the Onondaga County Court House in Syracuse, NY; City Hall in Buffalo, NY; the State Capitol Building in Albany, NY; and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

After a life of international travel, Dodge and his wife, Francesca, built a home in Setauket on the north shore of Long Island. Their dream house, in the Greek Revival style, they called Villa Francesca. In this painting, along with Francesca Dodge, notice the iris and roses of spring. In the center of the fountain, Pan plays his flute as the gargoyles spray jets of water at his feet. An idyll indeed.

Stepping In the Fountain At Villa Francesca, c. 1916, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Did The Beatles Destroy Rock and Rock?

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:49:00 +0000

HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK ‘N’ ROLL :
An Alternative History of American Popular Music
By Elijah Wald New York, Oxford University Press: 2009 81.64 WAL

Vibe, and Spin are gone: Rolling Stone is in trouble. Say goodbye with no tears. The popular music press, broadly defined, is a story told by men, for other men.

“It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music that is rarely true. The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio. And it is not just historians. The people who choose to write about popular music, even while it is happening, tend to be far from average consumers and party goers and often despise the taste and behavior of their more cheerful and numerous peers.” (Wald)
Some men who make their livings playing music understand this. Bandleader Vincent Lopez, in 1924: “The success of the public ballroom depends on whether it is favor with the women patrons.” And Little Milton in the 1990s: "Basically, for every woman that comes, you can figure that she’s going to have at least three men to follow that one woman." Elijah Wald, man though he is, is also an iconoclastic chronicler of the music scene. His choice of title grabs the reader, but though it is the end point of his tale it is not deceptive. Wald builds an alternativ e narrative of 20th century popular music that is fascinating and persuasive.
The craze for ragtime (a two beat music) arrived shortly after commercial recording, capturing and disseminating a new era in sound. The switch to a four-beat based music and the new respectability of public dancing let a thousand dance bands flower. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (all white) played to the popular prejudice that the new style was the product of untutored inspiration, as did James Reese Europe and “His Superior Colored Musicians.” Eubie Blake: “Europe’s orchestra was filled with readin’ sharks. The popular 1910s dance tea, of Vernon and Irene Castle brought Europe’s band to the concert hall with them.
It was John Philip Sousa who coined the term “canned music”, so great was his frustration at the lack of a system for collecting royalties from the sale of the early cylindrical recordings of his marching band. In general, these early recordings were made by journeymen musicians, not stars and this was accepted as a good thing at a time when sheet music sales were an important source of musical income. If a tune became too closely associated with one performer, others would not need the sheet music to play it and the audience wanted live music (and dancing) as a primary form of entertainment.
Wald is always careful to take account of what audiences were listening )and dancing) to, and what cross-influencing went on among musicians. His book is an antidote to Kierkegaard’s maxim that we live life forward but understand it backwards. This leads him to a reappraisal of the Paul Whiteman Band of the 1920s, that commissioned and premiered Rhapsody In Blue. Wald tells his story forward, not slant.
The rise and fall of the big bands can be understood in terms of economics. During the Great Depression when all work was scarce, musicians banded together and toured widely, working for meager wages and performing constantly. After World War II ended, plentiful jobs and higher wages made big bands less profitable and less attractive.
Mitch Miller, a prolific record producer in the 1950s, made Columbia Records into the top seller of popular hits through an eclectic selection of musical sources, from folk, blues, hillbilly, and Latin and African music, which he then assigned to a very carefully and narrow selection of artists and studio musicians. One amusing bit of information is that “Come On-A My House”, Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 novelty hit was written by Ross Bagdasaran who would go on the create the group Alvin & The Chipmunks
The title is only a small part and the penultimate one at that, but Wald’s larger points, reiterated throughout the decades of changing musical styles are that working bands have always been required to play a range of music to please live crowds than recording artists and that while the Beatles borrowed from black musicians, as Paul Whiteman had four decades earlier, the result was not the same. Where Whiteman’s arrangements led to a greater appreciation of black music in the 1920s, in the 1960s white music became ‘progressive’ and black music was relegated to a narrow corner, known successively as soul, disco, and hip hop. And just before the Beatles took America by storm, girl groups and female songwriters had been achieving unprecedented success. a sign that times were changing.

Notice that How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll is published by Oxford University, also publisher of Dusty: Queen Of The Mods, another recent unconventional and rewarding book on popular music. If these two books represent a trend, it is a welcome one.

Edward Steichen At Lake George

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:08:00 +0000

Photographer Edward Steichen shot The Big White Cloud Over Lake George in 1903. It and numerous other works by Photo-Secessionists are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Turner To Cezanne II: The French 'Paysage'

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:33:00 +0000

FRENCH LANDSCAPE AND THE MODERN VISION by Magdelana Dabrowski New York, Museum of Modern Art: 2000 758.144 DAB

The period of 1880-1920 in France saw familiar landscapes, both urban and rural become a subject of intense scrutiny from painters and photographers (armed with the latest invention - the camera). As more and more people migrated to cities for work and the national government embarked on an aggressive program of road and railroad building, people from the cities were able to vacation in the country. No museum in the United States has a collection better suited to illustrating the relationship between the painted landscape and the photographic one.

THE FAUVE LANDSCAPE by Judi Freeman New York, Abbeville Press: 1990 758.109 FRE

Also the product of a museum exhibition, The Fauve Landscape originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The time period is narrow, about 1904-1908, but the artists ranged widely in search of subject matter, throughout France and Belgium, an invading army -armed with paint brushes instead of weapons. Lush, high-voltage colors applied to canvas with brio, and it was the bright colors and the vehemence of their application that earned these artists their nickname that translates as 'the wild ones.'

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography by Graham Robb

New York, W. W. Norton: 2007 944 ROB

"I was brough up in an age when the French, still more or less ignorant of their own country, had not yet begun to travel." - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954)

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that we live life forward but understand it backward. Graham Robb inverts this notion to reveal how recently the France we think we know came into existence.

In the first millennium the place then known as Gaul was divided in two, between the land of Oc and the land of Oil, depending on how people pronounced the word 'yes', the division corresponded roughly to the influence of the Franks in the north and west and that of the Romans, followed by the Burgundians, in the south. People worked the land differently and raised different crops: in the north there were open fields, in the central area were woods, and in the south people favored a patchwork of fields enclosed by hedges and paths.

Rural France, which was most of it until the 20th century, had two seasons: the season of labor and the season of idleness. The calculus of caloric expenditure determined how people went about their work and moved from place to place. Isolationism proved to be a good strategy for keeping scarce resources, especially precious food, at home, so there was little interest in commerce. During the long winter season people huddled together, even including their animals, doing as little as possible to conserve heat and food - hibernation, Robb calls it. For centuries it was left to pilgrims, peddlers, beggars, and bandits to roam the poorly charted countryside. When Sir Walter Scott published his novel Quentin Durward (1823) his invented descriptions of the charms of the Loire Valley brought tourists there. The well to do lived in the bourgs, or cities. The enterprise of smugglers kept borders porous and spread some small wealth to the countryside as a result.

Families organized themselves around basic necessities in ways that the middle classes found embarrassing and distasteful, explaining the blank spots in official histories. Marriages were only formalized when needed to legitimate children, giving rise to the maxim "A woman gives birth after three months, but only the first time." Youngsters were often dispatched on their own to the city, where they earned their keep as servants, prostitutes or pimps to the rich. When hospitals began to be built during the 19th century, their construction often included a tour d'abandon, a revolving barrel that allowed parents to abandon their babies with no questions asked.

How difficult was it, to get around in the Ancien Regime? Louis XIV, the Sun King and instigator of grand infrastructure programs, including the laying out of royal boulevards, never traveled without his own crew of road-menders. Though the rich traveled by coach, it was not unusual for an unlucky passenger to be thrown from a coach as it hit a bump. The poor traveled by foot or, if they were lucky, might have the use of a dog cart. Pilgrimages were the only tourism that most people got to experience, which explains the revelry and bartering that accompanied the praying, and the attempts of the Church to suppress them.
Like transportation, communication was slow and laborious and contributed to the patchwork of place and identity. Robb dubs novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) his "century's greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial communications" for his theory that gossip traveled cross country at nine miles per hour.

Following the French Revolution, the new central government divided France into 91 administrative departements, small enough so that citizens could travel to their government offices in a single day. It also created the post of national Inspector of historic monuments to foster a sense of national pride. Prosper Merimee (1803-1970), author of Carmen, held the post from 1834 to 1852, spending three full years on the road. Thanks to his efforts, Vezaley, Saint-Denis and Strasbourg Cathedral were saved from the wrecking ball.

Robb is entertaining as he explains the recent origins of 'ancient' traditions. La Cuisine barely existed until economic development invented it to promote local foodstuffs. The Tour de France, a formal event since 1903, merely ratified what amateurs had been doing for decades. Millions had been liberated from the confines of their villages by the invention of this cheap "mechanical horse." If you owned a bicycle, Robb reminds us, you could broaden your search for work or a mate, "which is why the bicycle has been credited with increasing the average height of the French population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations."

The nation's school system, under the Third Republic, sought to eradicate illiteracy. Smarting from a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Germans in the War of 1870, the government also used the schools to force children to give up their local patois and to learn standard French. The draconian program has been called "interior colonization" as humiliation and corporal punishment were routinely used.

Illustrations in order of appearance: Longivy: Le Soir; Le Crachin, Morgat; Le travail aux Champs.

These illustrations and more by Henri de Riviere (1864-1951) are available at the website http://www.henri-riviere.org/

Early Morning In Buffalo

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:28:00 +0000

In 1910 the Photo Secession group founded by Alfred Stieglitz organized an International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at what was then called the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The careful selection of 600+ photographs was Stieglitz's bid for recognition of the medium as an art form.

Image: David Bonnar's Early Morning In Buffalo (1921) @ Project Gutenberg is reprinted from Pictorial Photographs of 1920.

An American Artist In Tokyo

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:21:00 +0000

AN AMERICAN ARTIST IN TOKYO
By Michiyo Morioka Seattle, WA, The Blakemore Foundation-University of Washington Press: 2007 709.2 MOR

Frances (Wismer) Blakemore (1906-1997) was born in Illinois, the daughter of German immigrants. Her mother had been an art teacher, her father ran a successful restaurant business. When George Wismer won eighty acres in a lottery, the family moved to Spokane, Washington. Frances worked her way through the university, so it took her ten years to earn her degree in art, but she also used the time to get commissions for commercial art work that led to her involvement in the Northwest Printmakers Association, gaining exposure for her art. After her graduation in 1935, France surprised her family for marrying a graduate student of literature, Glenn Baker. It was Glenn’s facility in languages that took them to Japan on a ‘honeymoon’ that lasted for five years.
The young couple lived in Tokyo, where the fashion-conscious Frances drank in the beauty of traditional Japanese textiles and ceramics, as well as continuing to explore new ways of print-making. Japanese bath was an elegant version of a traditional custom. Purse-Seiners is a cubist print of fisherman working with their nets, a style she had employed since her school days. The worsening tension between Japan and the United States led Frances to sail for Honolulu in July of 1940. She was still there when the Pearl Harbor attack took place.
During their years in Japan Frances had become fluent in Japanese and immersed herself in the culture. She had seen the political situation from the inside and was torn by her sympathy for the Japanese people, most especially for her close friends. She went to work for the Office of War Information as a result of all these experiences and her propaganda leaflets are not only artistically accomplished they reflect her respect and understanding of the consequences of war for ordinary citizens.
Eager to return to Japan when the war ended, the Blakes were exceptional candidates for the Army of Occupation. Frances was devastated to find that all her Japanese friends had disappeared without a trace. Her art work at the time illustrates the cultural clash: while Jeeper’s Japan attempts to educate the Americans about local customs and practices, it also shows the terrible toll taken on the Japanese people. When players seem a bit off key, They’re absorbing calories vicariously shows a night club scene where Americans dine and dance while the Japanese musicians are gaunt and pale. A sharp observer of the complex social relations between American personnel and their Japanese ‘hosts’, she portrayed awkward Americans encountering the impeccable manners of the Japanese.
Typist At Work is a picture of a second generation Japanese American woman who returned to work on the Allied reconstruction of the country. The cartouche in the upper left corner contains the word ‘Democracy’. The smokestack seen through the window is a sign of new industry,
After marrying her second husband, an American attorney, Thomas Blakemore, in Japan, Blakemore continued to experiment with the various trends in art. For many years then Blakemore was involved in a modern art gallery in Tokyo that became internationally respected. She returned to Seattle, due to her husband's’s ill health, spending her last decade there.

The Fearless Reader Art Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:35:00 +0000

It's a new feature, sort of. You may have noticed that, in recent months, art works with a connection to New York State have appeared here. Now, the complete art gallery is available at a click. Just look at any one of them and click on the ART GALLERY link at the bottom of the post...and all of them will appear, in the order they were posted.

Lake Champlain

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:40:00 +0000

The Frenchman Charles A. Lesueur (1778-1846) painted this watercolor of Lake Champlain on August 17, 1816, while traveling in the northeastern United Sates. Two decades before Alexis de Tocqueville, Lesueur crossed the Atlantic to see how things were going in the former French colony known as the Louisiana Purchase. The Album of Views of the United States from 1817 to 1836 includes scenes from many points up and down and around the greater Mississippi River basin.

Images from the collection of the Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt, France.

Turner To Cezanne: A Guide To The Impressionist Landscape

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:27:00 +0000

Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales will be on display from 9 October 2009 to 3 January 2010 at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. This is the first of a series of articles relating to the art and artists in the exhibition.

A GUIDE TO THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE: Day Trips from Paris to Sites of Great Nineteenth Century Paintings
By Patty Lurie Boston, Little, Brown and Company: 1990 758.144 LUR

It’s not easy to remember from this distance in time that the early French Impressionists were regarded as a bunch of lunatics, unable to paint a subject straight. Painting outdoors, painting quickly, painting the homely scenes of land, water, and sky before them, they produced works that affronted sensibilities accustomed to painstakingly worked visions of literary and historical allusion.
Author Patty Lurie’s inspired idea to follow the trail of these artists from the English Channel, up the Seine and along the Oise and the Loing Rivers, gives the book its organizing principle. Placing works of art next to photographs taken by the author and by Bertrand de Chasuvigny, what is more surprising than signs of modernity encroaching on beloved images is the verisimilitude that the Impressionists achieved with their fracturing of realist technique.
Alfred Sisley’s views of Marly, just northwest of Paris are those of one who lived there, familiar with the movement of light across buildings and down in streets through days and years. He juxtaposed warm and cool colors to admirable effect. Sad then, to realize that these works did not bring the artist commercial success.
For those who are only familiar with Pontoise through the works of Pissarro, Morisot, and Ceanne, it may come as a surprise that the town is a suburb of Paris. Thanks to the Impressionists, Pontoise lives in the imagination as a bucolic retreat saturated in greens. Pontoise was where Berthe Morisot moved away from the Barbizon style toward Impressionism. Next to arrive was Pissarro, who then persuaded Cezanne to visit. Where Morisot painted the light of early morning, Pissarro turned his back on the River Oise to focus on the hillside houses by the old road.
Argenteuil, Monet’s refuge from the Franco-Prussian War became the quintessential Impressionist town. The trains, boats, and bridges of Monet’s Argenteuil paintings hint at the industrial suburb that it became in the 20th century. Monet’s sweeping views of the Seine are now interrupted by office buildings in the distance.
Honfleur and Trouville on the Nomany coast are still the seaside resorts that they were in the 1870s and the ghosts of Monet and Eugene Boudin would not be lost for long if they could return. Lurie even managed to find s group of cows who appeared familiar with Boudin’s Seven Cows In A Meadow, Stormy Sky, c. 1881-1888.
For those fortunate enough to be able to use this volume as a travel guide, Lurie includes maps, directions and walking and transportation information.

Charles Zoller

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:23:00 +0000

Charles Zoller (1854-1934) was a successful furniture dealer from Rochester, NY. home of the Eastman-Kodak Company. He was one of the earliest Americans to use the autochrome color process - 1907 - and an accomplished amateur photographer. Seaside Resort, from the International Center for Photography in Rochester is undated and the location is, as yet, unverified. A perfect summer image.

Morocco

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:16:00 +0000

"Husbands in our country are born with an instinct for betrayal."

If most readers know anything of Morocco, it is the bizarre erotic fantasies of American expatriate Paul Bowles's 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky. In stark contrast is the first novel written by a Moroccan woman (and in Arabic rather than the colonial French) to be translated into English. The Year of the Elephant explores a classic literary theme: the uneasy interplay between local traditions and global modernism. Abouzeid examine this patriarchal society's devaluation of women through themes of work and of the difficulties of male/female relationships. Here and in The Last Chapter, Abouzeid draws parallels between individuals struggling for independence with the forces of prejudice and poverty and the struggles of Morocco to create a place for itelf in a world largely shaped by outside forces. History is always a silent mover in her writing which is spare but not doctrinaire.

Leila Abouzied (b. 1950) is the daughter of an interpreter for Morocco's former colonial government. A university graduate in London, Abouzeid has worked as a radio and television journalist before turning to writing full time in1992.

Dr, Fatema Mernissi (b. 1940) is a sociologist who grew up in the harem of a Moroccan household during the 1940's and early 1950's, a world in which the family employed a doorman to prevent the women from leaving the house without permission from their husbands, a world of extended families living under one roof. Dreams of Trespass is often poetic in its descriptions of this claustrophobic family life, making the reader feel the sensations of light, heat, tart and sweet, that leaven the boredom of daily life. A graduate of the Sorbonne and former consultant to UNESCO, Mernissi currently teaches at Mohammed V University in the Moroccan capital city of Rabat.For a richer appreciation of these literary works, French writer Annette Solyst's book Morocco is an enjoyable and colorful introduction to the history and geography, art and architecture, local foods and customs.

Unlike many of its neighbors, Morocco was never part of the Ottoman Empire, only subjected to Spanish and French incursions late in the 19th century that resulted in a joint Protectorate signed in 1912, that ended the Sultan's resistance movement. The Casablanca Massacre of 1954 re3ignited the independence movement, which Zahra, in The Year of the Elephant, takes part in. Independence came in 1956, with the Moroccan Royal Family participating in the struggle. While the French acted as colonial administrators, they boasted that they were training future leaders for the country, but at the time of independence there were only forty college graduates and none of them were women. Indeed, only six women had secondary school diplomas. For tactical reasons, the French had not encouraged a move away the traditions of the local dynasties. Thus, they built a modern infrastructure of cities and roads, but did not foster an education system.

The multi-colored arabesques of the glazed pottery of Fez, , the souks of Marrakech with its spices and foodstuffs are the products of their unique geography, located on the northwest tip of Africa, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, a land of coastal plains, separated from the Sahara desert by the Atlas Mountains.

THE YEAR OF THE ELEPHANT by Layl Abuzeid, translated by Barbara Parmenter Austin, University of Texas Press: FIC ABU

THE LAST CHAPTER by Leila Abu Zayd, translated by Leila Abuzeid & John Liechety Cairo, American University Press: 2000 FIC ABU

DREAMS OF TRESPASS by Fatema Mernissi Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley: 1994
964.008 MER

MOROCCO b y Annette Solyst New York, Barnes & Noble Books: 2000 916.4 SOL

Leon Dabo: Evening On The Hudson

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:47:00 +0000

Evening on the Hudson by Leon Dabo, 1909, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Putting Parsley Around A Pig

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:49:00 +0000

A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL by Dolores Hayden

New York, W. W. Norton: 2004 307.76 HAY

You are looking at an aerial photograph of a golf course in Palm Desert, California. The 'parsley' is the pink foliage that protects golfers from seeing the ugliness of the surrounding area. "Putting parsley around a pig" is a term used to describe how developers disguise bad projects.

Architect and historian Dolores Hayden's field guide to development run amok, illustrated by Jim Wark's aerial photography makes appalling, and, at the same time, humorous reading - gallows humor, that is. Who knew that urban planners were such a zany bunch? Maybe it's to keep from weeping at the desecration of the landscape, the trash buildings that sprout relentlessly, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning programs and subsidies, all of which Hayden lays out in her useful introduction.

But you will remember what you've read because of the nicknames. Zoomburbs are suburbs that grow even more metatastically than Boomburbs. They are filled with Tract Mansions and Starter Castles and for the less well-to-do there are Snout-Houses (pigs get little respect from planners), those disorienting rows of garages jutting out from the houses that are barely visible behind them. New gated communities are Privatopias and for those who like their money and their homes old, there are Valhallas, charming old towns that attract the new rich, who proceed to engulf what first attracted them with...you guessed it...Tear-Downs and Starter Castles. And for your home away from home, there's the Rural Slammer, should you be unlucky enough to go to one of those new prisons.
Commercial developments have their own terms of art. In this lingo, a Duck is a building that looks like what is being sold within, as in the lemonade stand in the shape of a lemon. Billboards are known as Litter On A Stick. And Ground Cover is not pachysandra but, rather, easily bulldozable large scale buildings like self-storage colonies.

And then there are the acronyms. Most of us are familiar with NIMBY, meaning 'not in my back yard.' Add to that LULU, a locally unwanted land use with consequences unforeseen when it was approved, and TOAD, a temporarily obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site. Anyplace experiencing hard economic times will be home to many TOADs.
If, after reading A Field Guide To Sprawl, you want to find out more, visit http://www.doloreshayden.com/.

Syracuse China

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:34:00 +0000

Magazine advertisement for Syracuse China, 1919.

Happy 400th Birthday, Hudson River

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:15:00 +0000

CHRONICLES OF THE HUDSON: Three Centuries of Travelers' Accounts edited by Roland Van Zandt New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press: 1971 917.473 VAN

From the first visit by a European, Florentine explorer Verrazano in 1524, the 'River of Steep Hills' has awed visitors. Henry Hudson's navigator, Robert Juet, described sailing up its uncharted waters in 1607 as "pleasant with Grasses and Flowers, and Goodly trees." In the 18th century, naturalist Peter Kalm came to stay with Benjamin Franklin for two years, on a mission to collect herbs and tree specimens for the Swedish Royal Academy.After the Revolution, the river became a flowing highway to the west with the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton and the opening of the Erie Canal, connecting the river to the Great Lakes. Making a triumphal return visit from France 1824, war hero General de Lafayette sailed up the river for five glorious days. At West Point the cadets lined up on the shore, as if by magic, to greet him. At Troy the young ladies of the Emma Willard School recited an ode composed for the occasion. In between these events, the general stopped at the country seats of the valley's landed gentry.The new century brought British visitors everywhere in the valley, perhaps drawn by the stinging rejection administered to their amour propre by their former colony. Fanny Kemble's stage career began by accident in 1832 when the stagecoach she was riding in overturned, leaving her stranded with an injured aunt to care for. Kemble earned money by giving readings from Shakespeare as she traveled and writing a wildly successful book about her exploits, Journal of a Residence in America. Social commentator Harriet Martineau got a book out of her trip - Society in America - and the enmity of some of her hosts for her early and outspoken support for the abolition of slavery.A continuing thread in narratives of the river is the search for its source. In 1836, Governor William L. Marcy ordered a geological survey of the state. Surveyor William Redfield recorded his explorations, in the process climbing and naming the highest Adirondack peak as Mount Marcy and discovering the head of the Hudson at Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, a lake in the shape of a teardrop. It was left to a dedicated outdoors man, Charles Fordham, to canoe from that point down the rapids to Glens Falls in 1880.There are dissenters in any crowd. When the French composer Jacques Offenbach toured the valley in 1876 he barely noticed the river, so wrapped up in his own petty travails that he made no mention of the splendors spread before him. The acerbic Henry James, revisiting his home after decades abroad, penned these sour words in The American Scene (1907), in response to the breathtaking train ride up the east side of the Hudson from New York to Albany, "It has taken our ugly era to thrust in the railroad at the foot of the slope."Editor Roland van Zandt has assembled an intriguing anthology, with many period illustrations.

HUDSON RIVER LANDINGSby Charles Wilstach Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill: 1933 974.7W Paul Wilstach (1870-1952) was an avid traveler and researcher, and an exemplary writer, marrying history and geography seamlessly. For many years Wilstach lived as close to the Library of Congress as he could get. An early contributor to National Geographic Magazine, Wilstach also published several books, including an edition of the letters of Thomas Jefferson, as well as several plays that were produced on Broadway. He brought his trademark curiosity to the writing of Hudson River Landings.Human and natural history interweave throughout the story. River tides led the early European explorers to believe they had found a passage to the Orient, thus luring even more boatloads to head west in search of the east. At West Point the revolutionaries blocked British passage up the Hudson, stretching chains across the river that were forged from locally mined iron. The river's restless kinetic energy inspired innovations in transportation and energy that opened up a continent.Wilstach introduces us to the Livingstons. one of the greatest, and most numerous, of the valley's manorial families. The first (of four) Robert Livingstons was granted a patent by England's King George II to 160,000 acres extending from the Massachusetts state line west to the Hudson River in what is now Dutchess County. The year was 1686, the same year that the British settled at Fort Orange (Albany). A refugee from England's 'Glorious Revolution', Livingston had the good fortune to speak Dutch, the language of the upper Hudson's first settlers. This gave him a leg up on the competition that Livingston put to good use, marrying into the wealthy Schuyler family and adding their vast acreage to his own. The next Robert Livingston, a pro-British sympathizer but a prudent patroon, signed the Declaration of Independence. The British responded by sailing an extra forty miles of the Hudson to burn down his home at Clermont, after they finished sacking the city of Kingston.The fingerprints of the Dutch system of land patents and patroonship that Wilstach describes are still evident today. From Van Cortlandt Manor in the lower Hudson, to that of the van Rensselaers in the capital district, their names and the names they gave to things remind us that the valley was Dutch before it was English.

PHANTOMS OF THE HUDSON VALLEY by Monica Randall Woodstock, NY, Overlok Press: 1995 779.474 RAN

Ninety miles north of Manhattan, near the town of Rhinecliff, stands the ruin of a remarkable house. Wyndcliff, the probable inspiration for the catchphrase "keeping up with the Joneses", was built in 1852 for the wealthy Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones. Her niece, Edith Wharton, decsribed it in her autobiography A Backward Glance this way: "I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home."Most people first encounter the Hudson Valley in the pages of Washington Irving's The Headless Horseman Of Sleepy Hollow. Painters and psychics have long been drawn to its otherworldly atmosphere. The rich built homes that evoked the country seats of European royalty, a castle on the Rhine or a chateau on the Loire. In an endless loop of imitation the Vanderbilts at Hyde Park and the Livingstons at Barrytown created new world versions of Versailles that, in turn, became the models for Hollywood producers of costume pictures like Marie Antoinette. Each home has its own personal history and some even have resident ghosts.Villa Lewaro in Dobbs Ferry was built for the first black millionaire in America. Sarah Breedlove was born in Louisiana, the child of former slaves. Married at fourteen, she was widowed at twenty when her first husband was lynched by a white mob. Breedlove became Madame C. J. Walker, marketing her hugely successful line of hair products designed for black women. It was unprecedented for a black person to buy property in Westchester County in 1916 when Walker moved there. While her new home was under construction, Walker took her petition to President Wilson in Washington demanding the end of lynching.On a narrow island by the east shore near Fishkill, a replica of a medieval castle perches, complete with a moat and a drawbridge. Francis Bannerman was a Scottish immigrant; his wife was a psychic who believed she had been Queen Elizabeth I in a previous life. Together, they bought Pollopel Island in 1900 for $1500 and built 'Bannermans' Castle'. Although he collected munitions as a hobby, the quixotic, wealthy Bannerman worked tirelessly for world peace. In 1920 there was a fire and explosion at the castle and it has stood abandoned for decades. Purchased by the New York State Department of Parks & Recreation in 1964, it awaits an uncertain future, a memorable sight if you take the Amtrack Hudson River Line train from Albany to New York.If the romance of the past lives anywhere, it lives here among the crouching gargoyles, crumbling turrets, moldering leather bound books, abandoned gardens and weed-cracked swimming pools. Photographer Monica Randall's sepia-toned pictures capture the lonely decline of its once splendid residences.Visit http://www.hudsonvalleyruins.org/for more information.

Images:

1. James Bard - The Hudson Valley Steamboat Rip Van Winkle, 1854, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2. Unidentified photographer - Wyndcliffe in Better Days, reproduced in Phantoms of the Hudson Valley.

Frederick Edwin Church: Olana in Winter

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:48:00 +0000

2009 is the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that now bears his name. Many commemorative events are planned. To find out more, visit http://www.ny400.org/.

Frederick Edwin Church View from Olana in the Snow, c. 1871, Colby College Art Museum, Maine.

Miss Don't Touch Me

noreply@blogger.com (Jane Librizzi) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:16:00 +0000

If you think graphic novels are poor cousins to the real thing or intended for adolescents, you will be surprised by this first English translation of Hubert (author) and Kerascoet (illustrator). Originally published as two separate works, The Virgin In The Bordello and Blood on Their Hands, this tale of Paris in the 1930s is full of mystery, charm and sophistication.
A faceless murderer, "The Killer of the Dances" is on the loose, preying on the newly minted working girls of the postwar era who frequent dance halls and pleasure palaces with their new found freedom and pocket money. Among them are Blanche, a timid, hardworking orphan and her fun loving friend Agathe, who share a tiny flat as they eke out their living as maids. It is the iconoclastic Agathe who remarks that the Church must be happy to have a killer illustrating their sermons for them.

When Agathe is killed by a stray gunshot from the next flat, a distraught Blanche cannot convince the police or her employer that a crime has been committed. They dismiss it as a suicide and Blanche is fired from her job.

Desperate to find work, Blanche is hired at the Pompadour Hotel, actually a house of prostitution, where she wears the black and white uniform of a maid but is forced to fend off the advances of the customers, including the Chief of Police - hence the nickname Miss 'Don't Touch Me.'
The delicious plot unfolds with realistic touches; the girls are taken in a paddy wagon for mandatory medical tests and the great chanteuse Josephine Baker makes an appearance, helping Blanche on the trail of the killers. At one point, upon discovering a tunnel that leads to an old convent cellar where the killers hide, Josephine touches a drop of blood on the stone floor, commenting, "I'd be surprised if this were the blood of Christ."
The illustrations are witty and knowing about traditions in French art, too. Street scenes evoke the works of Manet and Caillebotte, dramatic moments borrow the palette of the Fauves, and the characters are tart, saucy, and soo familiar looking. Madelene Mommepuy and Sebastien Cosset work together as the illustration team known as Kerascoet. They adopted as their signature the name of Mommepuy's home town in Brittany.

MISS DON’T TOUCH ME by Hubert & Kerascoet, translated from the French by Joe Johnson (originally published in French as La Vierge du Bordel and Du Sang sur les Mains). Paris, Dargaud: 2007 745.1 HUB