Elizabeth Lunday's Blog, page 9

Looking at Art: Otto Dix's The Skat Players

Today is the 120th birthday of German artist Otto Dix and a great opportunity to look at his remarkable–if disturbing–art.

Dix really got kicked in the teeth by history. He was prime military age at the outbreak of World War I and fought at the Battle of the Somme (one of the single bloodiest conflicts in history, with more than a million casualties), on the Russian front and in the German Spring Offensive. He earned the Iron Cross for his service but was wounded and profoundly affected by the war, suffering terrifying nightmares (PTSD, perhaps?). He then endured the dysfunctional culture that was the Weimar Republic. When the Nazis came to power, he was denounced as a degenerate artist and his paintings were burned. He was briefly imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of involvement with a plot against Hitler, and then late in the war was conscripted into the Volkssturm, the militia made up of teenagers and old men intended to be the last-ditch defense of the Reich. He was captured by French troops, held as a POW and wasn't released until February 1946. At least he found some peace in the post-war years, dying in 1969.

Dix is most remembered today for his paintings made between the wars as part of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Neue Sachlichkeit is usually translated as "New Objectivity," and referred to the artists' interest in heightened realism. It called for engagement with the real world and attention to real-world problems. It operated in opposition to German Expressionism, which was interested in internal feelings and reactions, and was strong influenced by Dada, which used art as a form of social protest.

Take this painting, Die Skatspieler (The Skat Players):

Otto Dix, Die Skatspieler (Skat Players), 1920

Disturbing? No question. Powerful? No doubt.

Portrayed are three German officers, all maimed from the water. Two of them miss legs altogether and the one on the left uses his remaining leg to hold his cards, since he's missing a hand. Their prosthetic peg-legs form a jumble at the bottom of the painting along with the chair legs. Two of them have artificial jaws and one is missing an ear, with tube connecting to a listening device on the table. They are all horribly deformed and scarred.

Such figures would have been a common sight in Germany in the 1920s, as they were across Europe. In England, disfigured veterans often wore masks to hide their faces from gawking children and flinching bystanders. No one wanted to see these people, particularly in Germany. They were a reminder of defeat and loss. Something like 2.5 million people died in the war, out of a population of 64.9 million; that means Germany lost nearly 4 percent of its population. Everyone had lost someone. After the war, the entire nation was punished with crippling reparations; the economy went into free fall.

The Weimar Republic was a time of denial–of looking away from realities too painful to bear. But Dix refused to look away. He focused squarely on the horrors around him and painted them. He certainly wasn't a strict realist–that wasn't what Neue Sachlichkeit was about. But he was painting the truth.

His technique incorporated many of the innovations of the early 20th century. He combined oil painting with collage, using real newspapers and playing cards. The artificial jaw of one veteran is embossed with metail foil and the blue jacket of the figure on the right is made of a cheap fabric made out of paper that was produced toward the end of the war as the country wrestled with material shortages.

What makes the work particularly moving to me is the pride to which the three figures cling so desperately. Note the gold cufflink on the leg–now used as an arm–of the figure on the right. Look at the precise collar and tie of the man on the right, his prominently displayed medal, the care that went into arranging his few tufts of hair. These elements point back to the time these men were proud officers, leaders of men. They were upper class and destined for great things. They would have stood resplendent in their spic-and-span uniforms, backs ramrod straight, saluted smartly and marched their men into battle. It was supposed to have been so glorious, not the mire of mud and blood they found in the trenches.

I think Dix despised these former officers who so blindly pointed men to their deaths. But he also pitied them and the lost world they represent.

Most of all, he looked at them–looked long and hard at what his society refused to see. And isn't that one of the highest callings of art?

So happy birthday, Otto Dix. I hope you're at peace now, wherever you are.

Sorta cephalophorism–and a saint who echoes through English history and literature

Whew! I'm back. It's been a rocky few weeks, my friends. I broke my foot at the first of the month–I wish I had an exciting story about how I did it, but what it came down to can be summarized as Stairs + Gravity / My Clutziness = Broken Fourth Metatarsal. The first week was a haze of Vicodin, and God, I needed it. I got back to work the next week, but my energy level was so low it was all I could do to get some pressing corporate work done and then hobble back to bed. Then we hit Thanksgiving week, and honestly I just threw in the towel.

The foot is now mending nicely, I should be able to put weight on it and DRIVE by the end of the week, and the corporate work is wrapped up. So let's bring on the blogging!

I wondered if I could find any fun art that was somehow relevant to broken feet or crutches, and a niggling memory sent me down the rabbit hole in search of a saint whom I vaguely remembered was known for healing. I found even more than I expected.

Enter St. Winifred. Or Winifride. Or Gwenfrewi. Whichever you prefer.

She is probably the most famous Welsh saint, and the influence of her veneration on Medieval and Renaissance England was enormous.

Here's the original story: Around 660, Winifred was a chaste young woman of noble birth who decided to devote her life to God and become a nun. However, the son of a local chief, Caradoc, lusted after her and stalked her unmercilessly. One day while drunk he attacked her at her home, but she fled, desperate, toward the church of her uncle Beuno, a bishop. However, Caradoc caught up with her on a hillside and, in a rage, beheaded her.

Well. That would be the end for most people, but we know the power of saintly heads. Winifred did not, in fact, pick up and carry her own head, which I suppose eliminates her from the cephalophore category, but her uncle quickly reattached her head to her body and she returned to life with only a small scar around her neck (visible in most depictions of the saint). Meanwhile, a holy spring burst from the ground where her body had lain.

Eliminating any loose ends, Beuno then cursed Caradoc, who melted into the ground. The bishop also cursed Caradoc's entire family, who could no longer speak but only bark like dogs. They could only be restored by bathing in the new spring. You do not mess with Beuno.

Winifred went on to become the Abbess of Shrewsbury Abbey and died a natural death at a ripe old age.

The spring became a major pilgrimage site–the Welsh equivalent of Lourdes, although a heck of a lot older. Historians can trace pilgrims arriving at the site as early as the 7th century, and a reliquary known as the Arch Gwenfrewi has been dated to the mid-8th century (I couldn't find a photo of reliquary despite extensive Googling.)

Common people as well as kings and nobles journeyed to Wales, often barefoot, to pray at the well. Richard the Lionheart arrived in 1189 to pray for success on his crusade, and Henry V traveled there in 1416 to give thanks for his victory in France. The handicapped endured great hardship to travel there and bathe in the sacred well. Many who were healed left behind their crutches and canes, and until the 18th century the crypt was said to be stacked high with them. The well even got a mention in the great poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

One of the greatest patrons of the site was Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother King Henry VII, who built part of the chapel above.

Her grandson, however, was less appreciative. Henry VIII started out mad at the pope for not allowing him to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, to marry Anne Boleyn, but as he went along the way he picked up some heady Protestant ideas about saints and pilgrimages and veneration. Protestants believed the whole lot were rubbish, and they convinced Henry to close and even destroy such sites. A wave of iconoclasm swept England; sacred statues were battered and images whitewashed over. I suspect that's why I had a dickens of a time finding any truly old depictions of St. Winifred. The stained glass above is contemporary or perhaps Victorian.

There's this statue, which as best I can tell is on the grounds at Holywell:

Poor thing, she's all banged up. Perhaps they attempted to destroy it? It's hard to make out. The long thing she's holding is probably a palm, which was the symbol of martyrdom. I can't figure out the box-type thing in her other hand at all.

This bit of stained glass is clearly quite old, but I couldn't figure where it's from or the date:

This I love. It's from an illuminated manuscript known as The Hours of William Porter by the Fastolf Master (ca. 1420-25). It was made in Rouen, France, which shows that the story of Winifred had made it across the channel:

This is the dastardly Caradoc pursuing the chaste Winifred. In typical Medieval disregard for sequential narrative, the entire story takes place all at once. Winifred is holding a palm, symbol of her martyrdom, and the well is already visible at the horse's feet. In the upper right corner you can see Beuno reattaching her head.

Of course, the attempt to stamp out Catholicism in England never entirely succeeded. People continued to visit Holywell, although they had to do so in secret. Several leaders of the Gun Powder Plot, devout Catholics all, journeyed there in 1609. After the plot was discovered, Protestant prosecutors charged that the pilgrimage had been a cover-up and the real purpose was to have a conference of conspirators. (Historian Antonia Fraser, in her excellent study of the plot, Faith and Treason, dismisses this charge.)

After Catholic Emancipation in the mid 1800s, pilgrimage to the well became legal again, and pilgrims poured in.

One devout pilgrim was the great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who actually attended the nearby seminary St. Beuno's College, which, yes, is named for Winifred's uncle.

Hopkins worked off and on for years on a poem about Winifred, but died with it unfinished. The fragments that survive have all of Hopkins' brilliant, dense, idiosyncratic use of language. I tried to cut down the excerpt below, but it's all one sentence and refuses to be cut. Take your time and read it–it's worth it:

O now while skies are blue, now while seas are salt,

While rushy rains shall fall or brooks shall fleet from fountains,

While sick men shall cast sighs, of sweet health all despairing,

While blind men's eyes shall thirst after daylight, draughts of daylight,

Or deaf ears shall desire that lipmusic that 's lost upon them,

While cripples are, while lepers, dancers in dismal limb-dance,

Fallers in dreadful frothpits, waterfearers wild,

Stone, palsy, cancer, cough, lung wasting, womb not bearing,

Rupture, running sores, what more? in brief; in burden,

As long as men are mortal and God merciful,

So long to this sweet spot, this leafy lean-over,

This Dry Dene, now no longer dry nor dumb, but moist and musical

With the uproll and the downcarol of day and night delivering

Water, which keeps thy name, (for not in róck wrítten,

But in pale water, frail water, wild rash and reeling water,

That will not wear a print, that will not stain a pen,

Thy venerable record, virgin, is recorded).

Here to this holy well shall pilgrimages be,

And not from purple Wales only nor from elmy England,

But from beyond seas, Erin, France and Flanders, everywhere,

Pilgrims, still pilgrims, móre pílgrims, still more poor pilgrims.

St. Beuno is speaking, post-miracle, about the establishment of the holy well. Isn't Hopkins amazing? The entire first chunk of the verse is just a fancy–and remarkable–way of saying "always."

So that's St. Winifred. I didn't need her intervention, thankfully–my broken foot is a mild annoyance that will be good as new in a few more weeks. People still journey to Winifred's Well and claim to find healing there.

Fortunately, I'm not on crutches but on a miracle invention called a knee scooter (or knee walker–but I refuse to call it that. My grandmother used a walker.) (If you ever break something, you have got to get one of these things–I can get up a fair amount of speed, the basket is a godsend, and, in best American tradition, it even has a cupholder!) I wouldn't leave it behind at Winifred's Well, because it's rented and they have my credit card number. But still–I get the impulse.

Happy birthday, Jan Vermeer!

Today is the 379th birthday of Jan Vermeer–not a round number, but nothing to be sneezed at.

To me one of the most delightful things about Vermeer is the intimacy of his work, an intimacy that arises not only out of his  domestic scenes but also out of the sense of familiarity we come to associate with his interiors. I think one factor in this familiarity arises out of Vermeer's practice of reusing scenes and objects in multiple works.

For example, the window in The Wine Glass

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"The Wine Glass," Jan Vermeer, ca 1660-1661

is the same window as in Young Woman with a Water Pitcher:

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Jan Vermeer, "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher," ca. 1662

The black and white tiled floor in The Concert:

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Jan Vermeer, "The Concert," ca. 1665-1666

is the same as the tiled floor in Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid:

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Jan Vermeer, "Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid," 1670

Which also has the window again.

The red carpet on the table above shows up in every single painting I've featured. (It was Dutch practice at the time to use such carpets on tables rather than floors–they were imported from the East and quite valuable.) It also made an appearance in A Maid Asleep:

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Jan Vermeer, "A Maid Asleep," ca. 1657

Notice the round knob on the painting hanging to the right of the door? It's also in Young Woman with a Water Pitcher and Officer with a Laughing Girl:

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Jan Vermeer, "Officer with a Laughing Girl," 1657

It's part of the frame for the big map, which also appears in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter and Woman with a Lute.

Oh, and the girl's outfit? Look at the dress of Young Woman with a Water Pitcher–it's the same.

You can keep playing this game all day long. The same jewel box shows up multiple times, the same lion finials on a carved wooden chair, the same yellow jacket and blue smock.

There's nothing mysterious about this–Vermeer likely used his house as a studio, and the furnishings of his house became his props. It's conjectured he often used his own family members for models–he had several daughters–so some of the women show up in more than one work as well. It doesn't mean anything in particular.

But doesn't it help create a sense of wholeness within his works?

You can look at any individual Vermeer painting and none of this matters. But I think the repetition of props and settings helps create that special sense of completeness that overlays the entire oeuvre of Vermeer. We sense that we are visiting again and again a quiet house with a black-and-white tiled floor, a red-patterned rug, a big map on the wall, and wooden chairs with carved lion-head finials, all treasured by their owners. In the house live a loving family with lots of girls who like to play music. The mother has a few treasured outfits that she allows her daughters to borrow if they promise faithfully to be careful. And the watery sun reflects off the canal and shines in through the well-polished leaded window.

This is a fantasy, of course.

But it is a fantasy shaped by a great artist. Happy birthday, Jan Vermeer, and thank you for letting us glimpse this wonderful world.

Looking at art: Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"

Happy 130th birthday to Pablo Picasso, who would be so glad we're still talking about him. The size of Picasso's talent was only marginally smaller than the size of his ego.

In honor of Picasso, I wanted to focus on one of his earliest masterpieces–and quite possibly one of the oddest works of Western art:

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"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Pablo Picasso, 1907

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Weird, huh? It's a painting we know a great deal about, including all sorts of fascinating details about how the composition changed over time. Originally, this was to be a fairly stock scene of a client being show the female wares at a brothel. (I know, odd that this was a stock scene–odd even that you would do such a thing, picking out your sexual partner like a piece of fresh fruit.) Over time, Picasso simplified the composition, removed the man, and then got to really messing around with the bodies and faces.

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Starting with the middle figure, she's the most . . . normal? of the group. She's got those trademark Picasso eyes. Her relationship with the background is hard to tease out. Picasso's really playing with ideas of depth and flatness. She seems glued to whatever that whitish surface is supposed to be–a wall?

Now her companion to the side:

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Picasso had become fascinated by Iberian sculpture and African masks, and this figure has the face of one of the masks. The famous oval Picasso eyes become blank holes, as does the mouth. Notice as well how her arms just end at the drapery to both sides. Her breast, that aggressive square, points directly to the development of Cubism in its angularity and the way the shading is reversed from what we would expect. Even the brownish-green coloring is Cubistic.

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Another mask, and some weird treatment of the human body. Put your hand over her face–doesn't it look like we're seeing the woman from behind? There's even a line hinting at her spine. It doesn't seem physically possible for her to be facing forward, although it's also not physically possible for her to rotate her head 180 degrees. Look at the space over her shoulder, how it's all fractured–more proto-Cubism.

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This woman is terrifying.

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This figure is, to me, the most fascinating. She is in some ways the most naturalistic. At least her breasts are rounded, not jagged. But isn't there something off about how she's standing? With her weight on that back leg, wouldn't she topple over?

But wait:

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Work with me here: doesn't the pose make more sense if she's actually lying down, resting her head on her arm?

And here is where Picasso's genius really comes in, because with this one figure he's evoking the entire legacy of Western art. Artists through the centuries have just LOVED painting nude women lying on one side. Let's see, there's Giorgione, way back in 1510:

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"Sleeping Venus," Giorgione, 1510

There's Giorgione's student Titian, from 1538:

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"Venus of Urbino," Titian, 1538

Everyone got into the reclining-nude business–Rubens, Velazquez, Goya. Generally the figure is associated with the goddess of love, Venus, either explicitly or implicitly. In the language of Kenneth Clark, the figure is not naked, she is nude, which is an entirely different matter. Nudes are idealized, the embodiment of beauty and grace.

Edouard Manet turns all these ideas on their heads in 1863 with his take on the theme:

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"Olympia," Edouard Manet, 1863

His Olympia is most definitely naked. She's a high-class prostitute greeting a new client in her bedroom.

And then we turn to Picasso's woman, who confronts us as naked as naked could be.

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So here we have in one work an homage–a shout-out–to one of the greatest Western artistic themes as well as reinvention of ancient African and Spanish traditions and wholly new experiments with space. What are we to make of it?

His friends at the time had no idea. His entourage of Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire were bewildered. Leo and Gertrude Stein, then his most enthusiastic patrons, found it shocking; they declined to purchase it, even though they bought almost anything else Picasso offered them.

I think the best interpretation is that the work marks a transition, a turning point, not only in Picasso's career but also in the history of art. On an individual level, Picasso is beginning the experimentation that would result in Cubism. Critic John Berger called it "the spontaneous and, as always, primitive insurrection out of which, for good historical reasons, the revolution of Cubism developed." On a broader, cultural level, he's taking these varied elements–the bits and bobs of cultural history–and bending them to his will. There's a violence in it. Look at the image as if for the first time and you're struck by how ugly it is. Art in the West had always been about beauty, even in scenes of war or despair. Picasso assaults beauty and rips it to shreds.

In the end, I'm reminded of that other modernist who also ripped apart tradition for his own ends: T.S. Eliot. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," he wrote at the end of The Waste Land. So, too, Picasso.

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Looking at Art: What's up with the flying babies?

One of the oddest elements in Western has got to be the presence of enormous numbers of flying babies.

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"Winged Putti with Garlands" by Paris Bordone, undated (ca. late 16th century)

Seriously. If you were suddenly introduced to the corpus of Western art with no prior knowledge whatsoever, wouldn't you think it odd that infants are floating all over the place?

Art, like anything else, goes through fads, and on two occasions for periods of several centuries, it was the Thing to cram your paintings with adorable, chubby-cheeked toddlers who, unaccountably, can fly.

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"The Cherub Harvesters," Francis Boucher, ca. 1733-34

The sweet-faced tots are usually referred to as "putti," pronounced "poo-tee," which will make the less mature among us giggle. (It's OK–even those not giggling are thinking the same thing.) "Putti" is the plural of "putto," an Italian word for "boy" or "child."

They originated in Roman art, usually in association with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Cupid, Aphrodite's son, is the prototypical putti aiming his arrow of love at unwitting mortals. It's important to remember that in Roman mythology, this was not a good thing. Being struck by Cupid's arrow meant being overcome by sudden, irrational passion–the exact opposite of the restrained, sober, rational existence espoused by Roman culture. Being under the onslaught of love meant you were out of control, and being Roman was all about being in control.

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"Aphrodite and Eros," Fresco from Pompeii, ca. 1st Century AD

Anyway, as well as Cupid, Aphrodite was often accompanied by other Babies of Love. In fact, they were not really babies at all–they weren't human. They were mischievous spirits pulling the strings behind the scenes to promote erotic love. An apt comparison would be to the fairies in Shakespeares' Midsummer's Night's Dream. This is explains why sometimes the babies are oddly–disturbingly–sexual.

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"Bacchanal of Putti," Nicholas Poussin, 1626

With the rediscovery of Greek and Roman art in the High Renaissance, so too came the rediscovery of putti–and immediate confusion with cherubs. Cherubs have a completely different origin–they are angels, described in the Bible as the spiritual beings closest to God. Medieval and early Renaissance art had frequently portrayed angels in and around biblical scenes.

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"The Nativity," Giotto, 1305-1306

(Extra credit fact: the plural of "cherub" is usually "cherubim," however the gamboling babies are known as "cherubs." I have no explanation for this, except to say that "cherubim" usually refers to the angelic host and "cherubs" the painted babies. To call several putti-like figures "cherubim" would sound pretentious and not follow general practice.)

Soon cherubs came to resemble putti and were popping up all over the place. At some point any visual difference between the two disappeared, and the only way to tell a putti from a cherub is by the setting. If you're looking at religious art, the adorable kiddos are cherubs; if a secular scene, they're putti. And really, even that level of differentiation would only matter to the biggest art history sticklers.

Some putti are more successful than others. Sometimes, yes, they're adorable.

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"Musician Angel," Rosso Fiorentino, ca. 1520

Other times? Other times. you have to wonder if the artist had ever SEEN an actual baby. (I'm looking at you, Michelangelo.)

Detail of Putti, Drawings for the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, 1511

Some art historians excuse the odd appearance of putti by claiming the artists were trying to paint tiny spiritual being, not babies, and failed to hit the mark. Maybe. Maybe they had, in fact, never seen a baby.

Putti and cherubs fell out of favor in Western art with the rise of Realism, except in Christmas cards and a particular strain of religious art so sappy it makes your teeth hurt to look at it. It's hard to imagine a revival. We're just too ironic these days for frolicking, winged infants.

But you have to admit–sometimes they're cute.

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Detail from "Sistine Madonna," Raphael, 1513-1514

Howdy, Mental Floss folks! Come sit a spell.

Whew! You point out one groovy word about headless saints and all of a sudden Mental Floss has my site views soaring. I wanted to say thanks for visiting my site and checking out all the cephalophores, God bless 'em.

Please look around while you're here. If you like headless saints, you might also like reading about saints who perform leg-ectomies. Decapitation is also the theme of a post about Renaissance artist Caravaggio. (Now I'm kind of freaking myself out.) Another detached head, although in a the accepted artistic form of a bust, can be read about in this piece about Mount Rushmore artist Gutzon Borglum.

I post a couple of times a week about art, artists, and art-related stuff, so check back soon. You're also welcome to follow me on Twitter if you're the Tweeting type. And look for me in Mental Floss–there's a new story in the works right now.

Finally, if you enjoy the cephalophore story, you'll love this video from They Might Be Giants: the only band in the world to write about the plight of the saint carrying his or her own head. Let me know what you think–and thanks again for visiting!

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