My thoughts on how the world works

From the opening pages of The Age of Insight:

In 2006 Ronald Lauder, a collector of Austrian Expressionistic art the the co-founder of the Neue Gallerie, the expressionistic museum in New York City, spent the extraordinary sum of $135 million to purchase a single painting: Gustav Klimt’s captivating gold-encrusted portrait of Alele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese socialite and patroness of the arts.

Klimt’s painting not only rendered Bloch-Bauer’s irresistable beauty and sensuality: its intricate ornamentation and erotic motifs heralded the dawn of Modernity and a culture intent on radically forging a new identity. With this painting, Klimt created a secular icon that would come to serve for the aspirations of a whole generation in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

You can read more here also. Much of the motivation was simple – money, exemplified by all the gold in the drawing.

This was also the age of female hysteria, a serious illness (causing blindness and paralysis) that made Freud successful, which has since disappeared without a trace.

Madame X is the most striking painting of a woman ever painted – in my opinion, of course. It certainly has had plenty of competition – the human obsession with the beauty of young women is almost as strong as their interest in wealth – and this portrait had both. From Wikipedia:

Madame X or Portrait of Madame X is the informal title of a portrait painting by John Singer Sargent of a young socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, wife of Pierre Gautreau. The model was an American expatriate who married a French banker, and became notorious in Parisian high society for her beauty and rumored infidelities. She wore lavender powder and prided herself on her appearance.

I am listening to The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring – and until now, untold – story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.

After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history.

As David McCullough writes, “Not all pioneers went west.”

Nearly all of the Americans profiled here – including Elizabeth Blackwell, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe – whatever their troubles learning French, their spells of homesickness, and their suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris.

Study abroad was especially necessary if one wanted to be an artist. At the time, it was possible to make a decent, or even extravagant, living in America as an artist. Something that is certainly not true now.

The Wikipedia entry on John Singer Sargent is excellent, be sure to click on The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, also painted during this period.

This guy had class.

National Geographic – The Search for Cleopatra
New York Review – Manet: ‘Sensuous Dazzle”

This, for me, is right where I am: in Orosi, Costa Rica. I have a fast Internet connect right into my living room, and every week I take the bus to the nearest large town, about an hours ride, and get my mail, which has been flown in from Miami. I have the advantages of both worlds: must importantly, moderate living costs – I can live on my Social Security income without too much trouble.

However, I must say my situation is unique, because I am unique – or, as most would say: I am strange. I love learning – in stark contrast to most gringos, who are not interested in learning anything – and indeed, are not interested in much of anything – but being exactly like everyone else. I can relate to the song “I got to be me!”

Let me share with you this morning’s learning.

First, the Cleopatra article. “She captivated people with her intelligence, wit, and charisma”. The Greek historian Plutarch said:

Her beauty was not “the sort that would astound those who saw her; interaction with her was captivating, and her appearance, along with her persuasiveness in discussion and her character that accompanied every interchange, was stimulating. Pleasure also came with the tone of her voice, and her tongue was like a many-stringed instrument.”

Egyptian mythology was not for the faint-hearted:

One of the foundational myths of Egyptian religion, the legend tells how Osiris, murdered by his brother Seth, was chopped into pieces and scattered all over Egypt. With power gained by tricking the sun god, Re, into revealing his secret name, Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, was able to resurrect her brother-husband long enough to conceive a son, Horus, who eventually avenged his father’s death by slaughtering uncle Seth.

All in all, an interesting and educational article – with excellent photos, of course.

Now for the article about Manet (not to be confused with Monet). This is art criticism, something entirely missing in my Mid-Western upbringing – and also entirely missing in Costa Rica. But who can resist the paintings? With some excellent local coffee, I settled down to learn about them.

Manet eventually died of syphilis, as did his father before him. This was not uncommon – Churchill’s father, much later, died of this also. But this, as far as art criticism is concerned, is not important.  What he did when he was living was important.

Again and again this exhibition returns you to a simple but hard-to-answer question: When does the act of “painting” become “a painting”? You render something, you put some paint down in response to some object. But your act may not be coextensive with the canvas—which was, quite literally, the chief object of the exercise in nineteenth-century art. The act of painting is good and vital, and so, you feel, are the things you depict. You want to paint many things—everything in the world that interests you in fact—provided that each of these acts of painting can be equally vital. But how far can you extend your attention, and when does this work result in a picture?

The following applies to me, for sure:

 “A lack of any very definite conviction:…an execution that seeks for distinction in a kind of non-committal négligé, and, to that extent, achieves it.”

Flip over that barbed equivocal phrasing, and you arrive at Bob Dylan singing “There’s no success like failure, and…failure’s no success at all”

Now what am I going to do for the rest of the day? The question is rhetorical, really. I will go for a short bicycle ride (I went for a long one yesterday, and my legs are still tired). I will take my dried laundry down off the line. I will make a fruit shake with some exotic tropical fruit. I will listen to my course on Existentialism, and a book about Americans in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (The Greater Journey), and take a nap.

If I feel ambitious I will buy my a pressure cooker to cook beans in. I have developed my own recipe for rice and beans. One thing Costa Rica does not have is fancy food – you have to make do with what is available.