This is Regnault's Salome. I do it a great injustice by reproducing it here on this blog--you can't feel the texture. Please go see it yourself. Again, this is about knowing something is beautiful and not knowing why. It's like I love Coltrane's "Afro-Blue," but I could never really tell you why.
I do know that it's always nice to see an ample, dark-haired woman smiling at you from across the room. Well any woman really, but today this woman. That her blouse is off her shoulder probably helps. When I saw this I actually started smiling myself.
The Met is haunted. Whenever I'm there, I hear voices. Well one voice telling me all this weird stuff--Get rid of your cell-phone, Walk everywhere you go, Only eat food that you've prepared, After you leave here, write for four straight hours, Gather your loved ones and move to Colorado, Disconnect your broadband...
Freaky, I tell you.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
It's the lushness...the bare fleshiness...the sassiness...plus, she looks at home in her body. That's always attractive.
TNC, say more about Colorado... I noticed it's the second time you've mentioned it recently. I grew up there, so I'm curious about your impressions.
It's such beautiful state. I just feel really at home there.
As the duly appointed spokesperson for all Coloradans, we'd love to have you!
Seconded.
But I should add...you're going to have to become a Broncos fan. That's non-negotiable.
TNC:
Where in Colorado have you been save Aspen (I know you were there for the Ideas Festival). Aspen is dope; I was there years ago for the Aspen Music Festival. But honestly, Aspen (or Vale) is not Colorado. Have you been to Denver? Boulder? Where would want to stay?
TNC reported from Denver at the Dem Convention; I think after jogging there was the first that he raved about how great the vibe was.
Heck, I never thought I'd consider Utah, but in breathtaking southern Utah, at Zion, we were all tempted to move. I was even noting Obama stickers on in-state cars.
I've been to Denver. Stayed there for some time. I loved it. Not many black folks. But I didn't care. And I thought I would.
My happiest childhood memories are of family trips to Colorado--Rocky Mountain National Park, a ghost town called Ward where my grandparents had a cabin, the Durango-Silverton Railroad, and so on. I live in San Francisco now, so...not really looking to move anywhere else (unless it's Portland or Seattle)...but Colorado is wonderful.
That said, steer clear of Colorado Springs. There be wingnuts.
I've got to say. I spent 2 years in Colorado Springs. I was a 19-20 yrd old private in the military and I absolutely loved it there. Garden of the Gods wass the ultimate place for a youngster to take a date and, "park". Man such memories...
Ok so I'm a week late and nobody's going to read this, but Utah is way better: all the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, plus the uniqueness of the Red Rock south. Can't be beat.
Amazing painting. From this vantage point it almost looks like a photo.
From this vantage point, it is a photo.
she has 80's glam metal hair
I was thinking more along the lines of Rick James. But yeah.
She's got a bit of a Flashdance-era Jennifer Beals thing going on with black girl-type hair and mostly white girl facial features. The model was Italian, and she probably has some amount of mixed North African ancestry.
At this risk of drawing TNC's ire, I thought this was a photo of Slash from GNR in drag without his hat. There is certainly something haunting about it.
I was about to write the same thing.
LOL! So right!
Since you brought this up, I now feel comfortable admitting that my very first reaction to seeing this beautiful work of art, from the elbows up as it rendered in my browser was, "Eddie Van Halen? WTF?"
I like the layers of textiles. All so different and kind of helterskelter. Adds texture, sensuality, and the feeling of movement. It's like she just sat down for a second to laugh at you for wanting to read or write all the time. What a seductress.
Word. I'm reminded of why I love going to the museum. Damn, if I'm not going to stop by the MFA (finally!) in Boston when I get back to school in the fall.
I can't stop glancing back up the page for another look at her face. There something between playfulness and hunger there. She seems restless. I wish I could see this painting in person, though. The way artists use paint as a substance can sometimes say as much as the image they've created in two dimensions, I think. There's an abstract painting at LACMA here in Los Angeles, I think it's called Diamond No. 1... it's maybe 6 feet tall and 2 wide, and the paint is maybe 2 or three inches thick in the middle. It's so thick it's fallen off at the middle point of the diamond, making crumbly gaps in the heart of the painting.
Yeah, I'm amazed people like it. Frankly, it doesn't look half as good on screen as it does in person. I'm obviously biased. But it says something that, even without seeing it up close, people are still pulled in by it.
Yes, the golds are much more intense in person. But it still looks lovely.
I started smiling as soon as I saw the top of the image when I clicked through to your page. I love this painting, too.
Lush. Your post reminds me of how I felt when I visited the Uffizi in Florence right out of college. Totally fell in love with Titian's Venus of Urbino. This doesn't do it justice -- the texture on that painting is gorgeous also. I know she's not a dark-haired woman though...
http://www.puzzlehouse.com/images/webpage/venusofurbino.jpg
No, but they're both real women with real bodies who look like they know what they're about. I love them...
Yeah I thought about this too. There's a danger in over-reaching, but I really was struck by how much our notions of beauty have changed. I'm no so into making a judgment about that, as trying understand why it's the case.
I think this gal would be a head turner in any century.
I think I know what you mean by 'real women,' but I think it's probably worth noting that Titian probably invented the woman in his painting.
Why? Couldn't Titian afford a model... or know any females?
I didn’t see this question until now, at the risk of this being a genuine call to void, I will give a response:
There’s a common misconception that all art depicting the human form realistically was made using a live model. In fact, if we go back, in certain regions, this was more often the exception than the rule. This was the case in Italy whether it be Florence, Venice, or Rome. This is not to say that Titian did not have ample experience working from life, it’s just that there’s very little that indicates he was regularly using models to populate his large Christian or Classical mythological paintings. In fact, when you look at the paintings themselves, it’s not all that difficult to tell which ones are made through strict observation and which are made through an adherence to a sort of formulaic method designed to mimic what he’d learned from observation. During the Renaissance, pure observation was much more strictly adhered to by the Flemish and Germanic painters of the north than it would have been the Italians who, because they were trained as fresco painters, were quite skilled at the art of invention. Observation in Italy really began to get a foothold with the Caravaggisti and other Baroque movements of the late 16th century (about a hundred years after Titian). Still, there was a lot of formulaic invention going on in that work too. Painters didn’t begin to really openly reject invention until somebody like Courbet started defining the term Realist in the middle 19th Century.
As pleased with life as the Mona Lisa, but much explicit that the delight is from worldly pleasures.
Oh, damn. I thought for a second too long and caught on about which pleasure she had in mind. That platter, with a head on it!
Still, it's easy to see why King Herod thought she was worth the effort.
But that's what makes her smile so wonderful-- it's from anticipation. Check out that knife.
A few years ago when the wonders of Florence came to Memphis I saw a drawing by Michael Angelo. It was the first time I had seen a work that lost that much in reproduction. I had seen this immage many times including in my art apreciation text book. But the impact of seeing the drawing itslef was really powerfull. I missed the rest of the exhibition because I just stood in front of this one drawing until they chased me out. It was an almost religious experience. The only things I have seen that affected me that much were wonders of nature like the northern lights.
I agree about the huge difference between a reproduction, postcard or online, and the real thing. I remember a show of sketches at the Harvard Art Museum, and a couple just stood out, stunning, even though they were simple, a few lines showing a bull for instance. Both were by Rembrandt, but I didn't know that until I had picked out those two to examine in more detail.
And I have a few prints of Chao Shao An's stuff, but sadly he isn't often found in museums here. The real thing is so much more than the T-shirt.
Why we need museums.
(Though I do wish more collections were online so you could easily illustrate a point--the Harvard Museum has a painting of St Sebastian from several hundred years ago that's the only piece I've ever immediately thought "artist is gay and in lust with his model." It's stunningly sensual. But it doesn't seem to exist online.)
Have you tried http://www.artcyclopedia.com/
It is an excelent resource for looking for art by movement or artist.
You what causes the northern lights? Solar wind hitting the magnetic field that surrounds the planet (which is apparently generated by earth's iron core). Apparently, without the magnetic field, solar winds would quickly strip away Earth's atmosphere. Earth has a force field! I bugged out when I found out, all of two years ago.I think this one of the coolest things I ever learned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_borealis#Auroral_mechanism
/nerdiness
I have seen the northern lights come out so beautiful that a battalion movement stopped to watch the show. I have over stayed a guard-shift at 30 below to watch another. It is like that original painting. You can hear all the descriptions in the world and look at all the video and photographs you want but when you experience them filling the heavens you do not just see them you feel them. They are a sight worth freezing ones ass off for.
Sure she's hot now, but wait 'til your head ends up on that platter...
As far as Afro-Blue goes, may I suggest comparing the 1963 "Live at Birdland" version (which I presume you're talking about) to the much more out-there 1966 "Live in Japan" version? Maybe that'll clarify things.
Or for that matter the original by Mongo Santamaria (on Afro Roots). No disrespect to Trane, but that is the tops, IMHO.
I dunno, I'd say Trane's take on "Afro-Blue" has more in common with "My Favorite Things" than with Mongo's original. Mongo's recording has like 9 drummers playing strict Afro-Cuban time, while Trane's got Elvin Jones (or Rashied Ali in 66) pushing and pulling a loose modal groove every which way. Both are great, but they're incommensurable.
But anyway, I bet if TNC or anybody who's curious listens to Mongo's "Afro-Blue," or the same tune by a later Trane group (i.e. "Live in Japan"), or a similar tune by the classic Trane quartet (e.g., "Out of This World" from the "Coltrane" album) -- he'd hear how they're different, and from there it shouldn't be hard to hear what makes each great.
Also: Cal Tjader!
I hear those voices whenever I go here:
http://www.olbrich.org/
Heh, me too. Greetings from a fellow Madisonian! (Correct me if I'm wrong)
Nope, not wrong. :D I think there's something about living here that lends itself to hearing those voices, too...
that voice is the "call of conscience" which Martin Heidegger connected to works of art in his Being&Time and The Origin of the Work of Art. There he argues that Art works (like VanGogh's painting of a peasant's shoes or a Greek temple) call us back into participating in the things that make life matter. Unfortunately he would have been shocked that you, an American and of African descent, are capable of such profound experiences but his prejudices shouldn't wipe out his insights.
Do you think his insights are credible?
TNC:
Do NOT spend time with Heidegger unless you have to--i.e. in a Ph.D. program. It is not worth your time and headache.
there are lots of quite readable commentaries/applications available if anyone is interested.
Invis, how do you read Barthes without Heidegger?
Especially since he was reported to be a boozy beggar who could drink you under the table.
his time serving as the house philosopher for the Nazi party is cause for a serious reconsideration of his work but to dismiss a german thinker because he is a drinker?
his descriptions/interpretations of the kinds of experiences that you are describing here are illuminating, especially in connection to his understanding of our counter-tendencies towards reductionistic thinking and group-think/gossip (not unlike your earlier concern about whether statistics tell the whole story). There is a sense of piety, being called/inspired, by the gifts that we receive through the powers/works of creation that I believe that you labled "spiritual/relgious" in your last sharing about being inspired by art. So many people than read that as you being down or self-deprecating or in need of advice/help but I heard echoes of what you are saying again here. And these poetic themes being haunted by beauty/hearing voices are similar to the Romantic aspects of Emerson on enthusiasm (en-theos filled with the gods/spirit). This kind of philosophy isn't easy to read but one doesn't find these kinds of experiences/values in many other places these days, especially ones that are free of dogma.
Now that is heavy.
In our times we are bombarded with empty images, false idols, but paintings like this can still serve as Icons in the Orthodox sense of being in the presence of a gripping/transcendent beauty. These are goddesses in our midst. This may say nothing about the possibilites of divine being(s) but it says to me that the human soul/psyche is still capable of responding in kind to the better angels and I for one am always thankful for the reminder.
Amen. The woman of this painting is a blithe spirit. And there are few who can honestly be called that. But I think everyone responds to that grace.
....
The soul that lives and breathes and feels shall see
The mind that knows will always be
The spirit which grows inside of thee
Tranported by beauty and made free.
@dmf,
The capitalized Orthodox version of Christianity that honors icons doesn't actually do the goddesses or beauty as an abstract: their reading of icons is about a single God in three persons. I'm not of that tradition, don't see great art through that interpretation, and do agree with you about the transcendent beauty. And yet, I'm uneasy omitting the theology from a concept that's fundamentally theological to other people I respect.
It says so much about this blog that a respectful discussion of Heidegger can break out naturally in the comments.
hey all, thanks for your thoughtful comments and sorry i missed this conversation , we got hit with tornadoes so i was busy taking cover, i'm fine and hope that everyone else in the mid-south is also ok. when considering how severe/old-testament southern theology was never count out the weather as a factor. who knew blogging on the sublime?
TNC:
A long way from Lake Trout, Druid Hill Park, and Mondawmin isn't it?
(Or is it?)
Also, you should ban dmf from comments for referencing Heidegger. (Joking)
Yes to both. Seriously. The funny thing is this I come at all of this from hip-hop. It really was the first art I loved, and that's my lens for so much.
You know, I appreciate you saying "yes" to both questions. There is an absurd tendency among many black intellectuals that there is an equivalent to everything cultural or political in the hood. Yes, you are a black intellectual, so don't trip; but you don't do this. I am reminded of how many of these intellectuals, and I am thinking of the usual suspects, just say whatever they need to get a rise out of their audiences and almost seem to mean it. You are right: the MET is a long way from Mondawmin (and those patters on those suits in Cookie's don't equal Picasso).
Again, I think what I and others love about your blog and your writing is that you, pardon the cliche, "keep it real." Sorry, all.
You know, I am reminded of one of Cornel West's new lines: "I would rather be in a crackhouse than the in White House." I will leave it there, but this is the kind of line that does no good and is emblematic of many of the Afrostocracy intellectuals to valorize things black, even when it is horrible for the community.
Speaking of what ain't the Met, I am visiting my parents in Baltimore and I went down to the O's game last night. Got off the subway at Lexington Market and walked through it. Man, have you been around here? That is depressing. Some of my best memories as a kid was down at the Market; now, simply depressing. You been down there lately?
I was thinking the same thing. Music may be secondary for me in terms of a feeling bordering on spirituality. Few things have filled me with so much emotion, longing for the nostalgia of a time and place of my past than those Echoes of the Crack Age posts. Each one, seemed to parallel a moment of discovery in my life and I would sit in front of my computer and absorb each song, much like I could imagine myself doing if I were lucky enough to stumble in front of this painting or other paintings.
Which brings me to my first love. Something you touched on in a post a couple of days ago. While I did not grow up near the MET, or was lucky enough to have access to the kind of art in a place like the MET. I did have Texas Stadium, Reunion Arena and old Arlington Stadium. Places where I was lucky enough to visit frequently and experienced some great drama, art, beauty that would rival anything that could be found in Carnegie or the MET. It's all in the eye of the beholder right?
You should check out Toledo from Greco. I believe it's in the Met. It's from 1599 but it would work as a Wu-Tang cover.
I heard a few of those voices at the DeCordova last week.
My approach to a museum is to wander and settle in wherever I want to focus for a while, not feeling guilty at passing up other stuff. At MOMA a few years back I was settled in front of Monet's huge water lily picture--some people joined me, some passed on after a glance. One family entered the room, arranged in front of the painting, *snap* with the cell phone, then swept on to snap themselves in front of the next Great Art Piece. It was weird, and sad.
I hate to be the uncultured jerk... but to me that chick looks a little Tom Hanks circa 1980.
When I lived in Manhattan for a year, my wife and I systematically went through the entire Met, roughly chronologically. It is an amazing place. What I remember most was the day we hit the Carvaggios. Suddenly the paintings had a kind of psychological depth (or perhaps just intensity; subtlety often escapes me) unlike anything that came before them.
p.s. it took 18 visits, an hour or two each, spread over 10 months
I've taken Deborah's approach, basically. I try not to think much about where I'm going. I'm dreading the moment when I will know my way around. And dreading still the moment when I know what I actually understand what I'm looking at. I have learned to actually love the "diving in," the ignorance of it all. Understanding brings satisfaction...and then a longing to discover, again.
We'd never done anything like that in a museum before, going through systematically. It was amazing because I got a sense of how different periods and traditions fed into each other, and so I'd see things in individual paintings that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. I'd always looked at artworks as independent things that I'd appreciate (or not) in isolation. Working through the historical progression like that helped me to see them differently. You can see things in an individual painting when you see the tradition it came from or reacted to -- why people think it's significant, and also some of the assumptions behind it. And when you look at a bunch of different painters from the same era together and get a sense of what preoccupied them, you can start to see the paintings as a window into certain aspects of the culture they came from (obviously a skewed one but it's something).
I wouldn't (and couldn't) do this in every museum, but I did find it to be a pretty amazing and lasting experience to do it once, particularly at the Met.
I used to work at the Met, actually, and this was the best perk of that job: the ability to spend my lunch breaks looking at art, and not feel I was in a rush or needed to see everything that day, because it would all still be there the next day. TNC: I wouldn't worry! The moment when you know your way around will not be the end of this experience of discovery, but rather, just another turning point in what is really a lifelong relationship that we are all invited to have with any given repository of cultural treasures. Because then, even if you do, say, move to Denver, you'll know, individual paintings may move around, but in its broad outlines, the Met will always be there, and often as not, the individual painting you loved at one time, will be there too -- but maybe in a new context, or in a new show, or maybe you'll see a sign saying the painting's on loan to a museum in Germany or France or Massachusetts.... and in its place is something new for you to see.
This post is a great argument for buying museum memberships, btw. Feeling like you're rushed, and need to get your money's worth b/c you paid for a ticket that day, is the best way to *not* get your money's worth out of a museum. If you have a membership -- especially at a comprehensive museum like the Met -- you can feel comfortable dropping in and out, whether for 5 minutes, or 5 hours.
But this post is also a great argument for the whole "cosmopolitanism" argument for comprehensive museums.... was a big debate a couple years ago drawing in art folks, but also philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton... asking, to what extent should art stay where it came from, and to what extent is it valuable to collect a lot of different types of art in one place, like the Met? Maybe after the Civil War thing, you can turn to this topic next :-)
haunting, but beautiful.
Is envy an OK emotion to have in this case? Not that I don't share and understand the sentiment, but the comments about seeing the works of artists that I've read about sort of makes me feel like a rube.
I think great art is probably one of those things that has to be experienced in person, like standing up on Ptarmigan tunnel in Glacier Park, or falling in love, the descriptions never quite match the reality.
No, that's true too. When you stand in front of the real thing it's something very different. Dartmouth College has these Assyrian reliefs that are amazing on a computer screen but in person are...
You feel very small and very humble and very young.
This was my argument for going to the Grand Canyon this summer. I had been at around age 19, for a few hours, and no photo does it justice. Photos have edges.
We got up early one day and watched the sunrise. Someone my husband worked with had said that they walked along the rim on their visit and got exhausted because the view didn't change. I disagreed--the way the light changed was remarkable, though I could see that it would make a boring slide show.
A week later, the same applied to Antelope Canyon. You've seen photos--just toss "Antelope Canyon" into google image. But the reality, when you can move around, when the light changes--it's different.
What's not to like about this painting... leopard print, loose hair, confidence, radiant health, seduction, a suggestion of violence and humor, and the depth of black against gold.
I can't wait to see this in person.
What I like about it is the way her feet are restlessly sliding in and out of her slippers.
The first time I saw that painting I was floored -- because that woman is a dead ringer for my friend K.
K was adopted, and I feel pretty confident that her great-great grandmother worked as a model in Rome.
I have a picture of this painting on my camera, waiting to be downloaded. I was just at the Met 2 weekends ago with visiting relatives from Ohio (brother, his wife and their two kids). It was their first time in NY and they were only in for a day. We started in Chinatown, hit Soho, Wash square park, train to the Museum of Natural History, walk through Central Park, then to the Met (yes exhausting). As we walked by this painting at the Met we were stopped in our tracks. She is so alive and vibrant and sassy. Seeing this picture as I opened up your blog also stopped me in my tracks. It seems like a link in our collective conciousness through the virtual community. Brooklyn says hello to Harlem.
All I can say is" Christianne Amanpour".
I love to trace the "ideal woman" body image through history. When women got the vote in 1920, you can see the ideal being slim and flat-chested as women strove to be like men. During the 1940s, you have the manly shoulder pads and suits as women moved into men's spheres. In the 1950s, when the men came home from war, the "womanly" figure came back in style--of course, that's what men missed! In the 1960s, you see the unisex styles (blue jeans, loose-fitting clothes) as youth sought to make a brotherhood of man. By the 1980s, the "man-like" shoulder padded suits were back in style as women sought to climb the corporate ladder. The backlash against women's power is seen in the 1990s as "heroin chic" became the ideal. Strong women were seen as too threatening. The backlash against strong women can also be seen in the "pneumatic" look of say, Pamela Anderson, which reduces women to their breast sizes. It seems like Hollywood is still stuck in that era--actresses and models seem shaped like pre-teen boys, except for their surgically enhanced breasts. Can they get any smaller and weaker looking?
Agreed. I don't know when the prepubescent look came to stay.
Very true. The problem with colorado springs is the heavy military influence. I moved there in '76, expecting to live there forever. But during a summer, my co-workers - I worked at the incredible broadmoor hotel - repeatedly, though inadvertantly, made "nigger jokes" in my presence before they remembered that I was in their presence, and I saw more gratuitous violence than I'd ever seen growing up in the inner city of detroit.
The final straw was some redneck calling me a nigger and literally pointing a shotgun at me from his pickup truck window - a distance of about 2 feet - as I rode home at midnight on my bicycle on a dark side road on cheyenne mountain.
I left within a week, leaving about two grand worth of waterbed and furniture.
Colorado is truly kentucky with the rockies. Plus a few enlightened places like boulder and aspen.
My "very true" above referred to the comment way, way up that noted that there are wignuts in colorado springs. They've been there for a long time. Probably because of the military influence.
Coltrane--see i thought music, too...but I was thinking more along the lines of if I had that dress, oh, the clubs I'd visit...
Ok, now I just showed that picture to each of my sons separately, one 19, one nearly 21. The 21 year-old said she looks like a drag queen in the West Hollywood Christmas parade, (and that is not disparaging, BTW--my son has diverse friends of myriad orientations), and the 19 year-old thought it as Gene Simmons of KISS in a dress made from draperies.
I am deeply worried about this generation coming up, T-NC!
An absolutely lush portait. I really enjoy portraiture. Art museums are truly national treasures.
The Met is one of my all-time favorite places to go. I also like the MoMA. I enjoy and appreciate art exhibits, when I can get to one. I've seen the Ansel Adams retrospective, the Van Gogh retrospective, and the Gaugin retrospective. My Dear Brother and I were so desperate to see the Van Gogh, which was at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, we purchased scalped tickets. LOL!
I did notice at each of the above events the dearth of people of color, and particularly Black people.
You mean attending? I don't know how I'd feel about Gaugin if I were a person of color. Hell, I don't know how I feel about him now. I'm usually pretty good at separating the person from the art, but it's hard to do with him.
I can't speak to the comparative percentages, but I usually see a good mix of people. Two that have stayed with me:
One of the most striking women I've ever seen was at MOMA. Black, short afro with bleached-in polka dots, white blouse, brown swirly leathery looking skirt, substantial but walkable leather sandals. In a city full of people trying to look fashionable, she made it look effortless. That image stays with me in an "if I ever pay more attention to my hair and expand my wardrobe beyond LL Bean, that's how I want the result to come across" way.
And at the Science Museum in Boston, a mom of small toddler twins who was letting them wander the museum at will. I did this with my single children, but overwhelmingly people keep the kids under 4 strapped firmly into strollers. To see a mother with TWO tiny toddlers give them the freedom to explore--again, that's stayed with me.
I understand exactly what you mean about feeling haunted. I feel that way when I go to the beach sometimes, or when I go to art museums and galleries. Even certain street art and graffiti I see on my way to and from work. That feeling you're in the presence of something larger than yourself and that feeling that you're not doing enough with what you've been given. I got that same feeling a few months back after seeing the Robert Frank retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in DC.
I always come out of those situations thinking I need to chuck my TV, stop with the online social networking, and wander around with my camera much more than I do now.
Anyway, I love this painting too. It's so kinetic it is; you can almost see her fidgeting. But yeah, the best way to experience paintings are up close, where you can see the brushstrokes, the textures of the paint, the decisions that the artist made on the canvas.
Argh. I just meant to say "It's so kinetic." Time to sign off.
It's a very nice painting from a French painter whose work has been more or less forgotten for having the misfortune of being produced by an Academic just after the death of the Academy.
TNC, while I'm not surprised by your appreciation of the craft, I'm sort of surprised that you don't call attention to the sort of hazy ethnic and racial subtext of the piece.
Here's a sublimely tragic bit of art history. The piece is from 1870. It hung, and was a great sensation, in the 1870 Salon. Regnault was killed 1871 in the Franco Prussian War. He was 28.
I missed it. But I'd love to hear more.
I just mean from an art historical perspective. These European white guys having a sort of skewed perspective bordering on colonial fetishism when it came to Africa (most notably Picasso), the Near and Far East (too many French Academics to mention), and the Pacific Islands (Gauguin). There's a sort of sometimes hidden, sometimes overt European colonialism to so much of the painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A couple obvious examples:
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which is generally accepted as the 'first cubist painting' is little more than a culturally insensitive, borderline racist, not to mention misogynist depiction of nude European women striking poses in African tribal masks.
It's nearly impossible to look at any of Gauguin's paintings from Tahiti and not think of the countless adolescent island girls to whom he brought the great gift of syphilis.
The Near East fascination, because of its connection to Biblical stories is far more intrinsic to the longer history of Western Art, so that, along with the unmistakeable craft of somebody like Regnault (or Ingres before him) can obscure the realization that these were white Frenchman of the 18th and 19th centuries (in Picasso's case, Spanish and 20th century) depicting a very limited understanding of what it is to not be white and French.
I don't mean at all to take away from the painting, but it is my understanding that the picture was not originally to be of Salome, and was instead to be called something like "The Favorite Slave."
Thanks gonna, push this up some. It's interesting.
You might find this interesting. It's the Met's press release from 1916 when the museum purchased the Regnault.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3254116
It has a little exerpt from a review of the painting when it hung in the Salon. Talks about him being a student who was destined for great things. He was dead a year later.
I get these feelings from music and live theatre more than pictures. The last 2 lines of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" nail it for me.
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
I love this picture, the girl in it looks so sexy and naughty. A few months ago I was at the Met, on a rainy Sunday, when it was packed, and I was looking at the picture. A couple was walking by, and they cast a glance at the picture. The girl said, "who is that?", and the guy replied "I dunno, some French hooker!" Which may or may not be true... but I thought it was funny anyway !
Isn't that Marc Bolan?
"I do know that it's always nice to see an ample, dark-haired woman smiling at you from across the room"
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Thanks! ;) (lol sorry I could not resist the allure of the lol this time around...nor the emoticon)
TNC, your link for Regnault at the beginning is for another painter (I noticed his birth/death dates didn't seem right) ... the one you want is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Regnault
she can't wait...she can't wait to cut his fucking head off.
she can't wait...she can't wait to cut his fucking head off.