THE MUSIC OF YOUR THOUGHT

“Immortality is to live your life doing good things, and leaving your mark behind.” - Brandon Lee

Coming back to the New What's Going On blog this week. I have gone into the woodwork the last few weeks as there have been many things happening to me and around me: Illnesses, a death, some friends leaving Australia, and I have been busy preparing for a couple of art exhibitions that I had committed to some months earlier.

I’m sharing a French song I’ve written with you today. I’ll give you the lyrics and the translation if your French is a little rusty.

This song and all my music you can find in my “Otidorchestre”  channel or listen to it on YouTube,  Spotify,  Amazon, Deezer, Flo, Pandora, and other music sharing sites.

La Musique de Ta Pensée

« De tous les chiffres de l'alphabet,
C’est le cramoisi que j'adore… », dit-elle ;
Et je la regardai, déconcerté,
Amusé aussi par sa propension à colorer
Jusqu’au plus terne des sujets.

« La mer, elle vole si bien, chassant les rochers
Tandis qu'ils s'élèvent vers le fond… »
Je lui ai souri, me prélavant dans le soleil
De ses hyperboles, m'approchant au plus près de son étoile
En ce court instant d'un périhélie hyperbolique.

« De ton toucher, j'aime la musique et le miel, »

Murmura-t-elle, sous un souffle de ciel ;
Et j'ai chanté l'onde de ma main, trace de soie,
Sillon de sucre où mon âme se noie.

« Mes pensées secrètes vivent dans un tiroir fermé à clé dans mon ventre… »
J'acquiesçai, en caressant son nombril,
Voulant ouvrir ses cachettes les plus intimes
Pour m'y perdre tout entier.

« J'apprécie l'honnêteté des pégases
Qui, en période de mue, avouent ne plus savoir voler… »
Remarqua-t-elle pensivement, caressant mon omoplate,
Et à cet instant, je sus... oui, je le sus pertinemment...

« De ton toucher, j'aime la musique et le miel, »
Murmura-t-elle, sous un souffle de ciel ;
Et j'ai chanté l'onde de ma main, trace de soie,
Sillon de sucre où mon âme se noie.

Alors que je me préparais à un aphélie perpétuel,
Que je l'avais perdue, à jamais...
Dernière lettre muette d'un alphabet désormais sans chiffres.

The Music of Your Thought

“Of all the numbers of the alphabet
I adore crimson…”, she said;
And I looked at her bemused,
Amused too, by her propensity to add colour
To even the dullest topic.

“The sea, she flies so well, chasing rocks
As they rise up to the bottom…”
I smiled at her, basking in the sunshine
Of her hyperboles, approaching nearest to her star
In that single moment of a hyperbolic perihelion.

Of all the music of your touch,
I love sweetness…”, she added;
And I sang with my hand,
Leaving a trace of honey, treacly, sticky,
On her smooth skin.

“My secret thoughts live in a locked drawer

In my belly…”
I nodded, as I caressed her navel,
Wanting to open up her innermost
Secret hiding places to lose myself into.

“I appreciate the honesty of pegasi
Who in their moulting season admit they cannot fly…”
She pensively remarked, stroking my shoulder blade,
And at that moment I knew,
As I prepared for a perpetual aphelion,
That I had lost her, evermore.

MUSIC SATURDAY - SATIE

“If you define eccentricity as creativity, then yes, creativity is eccentricity.” - Russell Smith

Erik Satie, original name in full Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (born May 17, 1866, Honfleur, Calvados, France—died July 1, 1925, Paris) French composer whose spare, unconventional, often witty style exerted a major influence on 20th-century music, particularly in France.

Satie studied at the Paris Conservatory, dropped out, and later worked as a café pianist. About 1890 he became associated with the Rosicrucian movement and wrote several works under its influence, notably the Messe des pauvres (composed 1895; Mass of the Poor). In 1893, when he was 27, Satie had a stormy affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon. From 1898 he lived alone in Arcueil, a Paris suburb, cultivating an eccentric mode of life and permitting no one to enter his apartment. Beginning in 1905, he studied at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel for three years. About 1917 the group of young composers known as Les Six adopted him as their patron saint. Later the School of Arcueil, a group including Darius Milhaud, Henri Sauguet, and Roger Désormiere, was formed in his honour.

Satie’s music represents the first definite break with 19th-century French Romanticism; it also stands in opposition to the works of composer Claude Debussy. Closely allied to the Dada and Surrealist movements in art, it refuses to become involved with grandiose sentiment or transcendent significance, disregards traditional forms and tonal structures, and characteristically takes the form of parody, with flippant titles, such as “Trois morceaux en forme de poire” (1903; Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear) and “Embryons Desséchés” (1913; Desiccated Embryos), and directions to the player such as “with much illness” or “light as an egg,” meant to mock works such as Debussy’s preludes. Satie’s flippancy and eccentricity, an intimate part of his musical aesthetic, epitomised the avant-garde ideal of a fusion of art and life into an often startling but unified personality.

He sought to strip pretentiousness and sentimentality from music and thereby reveal an austere essence. This desire is reflected in piano pieces such as “Trois Gnossiennes” (1890), notated without bar lines or key signatures. Other early piano pieces, such as “Trois Sarabandes” (1887) and “Trois Gymnopédies” (1888), use then-novel chords that reveal him as a pioneer in harmony. His ballet Parade (1917; choreographed by Léonide Massine, scenario by Jean Cocteau, stage design and costumes by Pablo Picasso) was scored for typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers, ticker tape, and a lottery wheel and anticipated the use of jazz materials by Igor Stravinsky and others. The word Surrealism was used for the first time in Guillaume Apollinaire’s program notes for Parade. Satie’s masterpiece, “Socrate” for four sopranos and chamber orchestra (1918), is based on the dialogues of Plato. His last, completely serious piano works are the “Five Nocturnes” (1919). Satie’s ballet “Relâche” (1924) contains a Surrealistic film sequence by René Clair; the film score “Entr’acte”, or “Cinéma”, serves as an example of his ideal background, or “furniture,” music.

Satie was dismissed as a charlatan by musicians who misunderstood his irreverence and wit. They also deplored the nonmusical influences in his life—during his last 10 years his best friends were painters, many of whom he had met while a café pianist. Satie was nonetheless deeply admired by composers of the rank of Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, and, in particular, Claude Debussy—of whom he was an intimate friend for close to 30 years. His influence on French composers of the early 20th century and on the later school of Neoclassicism was profound.

The portrait of Erik Satie above (oil on canvas) by Suzanne Valadon, 1892; is in the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris.

Here are some of his most famous piano pieces played by Pascal Rogé:

Gymnopedies N°1; N°2; N°3;

Gnossiennes No°1-6

MOVIE MONDAY - COCTEAU'S ORPHÉE

“Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.” - Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau was a French poet, librettist, novelist, actor, director and artist (born July 5, 1889, Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, France - died October 11, 1963, Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris). Some of his most important works include the poem L’Ange Heurtebise (1925; “The Angel Heurtebise”); the play Orphée (1926; Orpheus); the novels Les Enfants terribles (1929; “The Incorrigible Children”) and La Machine infernale (1934; The Infernal Machine); and his surrealistic motion pictures Le Sang d’un poète (1930; The Blood of a Poet) and La Belle et la bête (1946; Beauty and the Beast).

Cocteau grew up in Paris and always considered himself Parisian by speech, education, ideas, and habits. His family was of the solid Parisian bourgeoisie (cultivated, wealthy, and interested in music, painting, and literature). Cocteau’s earliest memories had to do with the theatre, in popular forms, such as the circus and the ice palace, as well as serious theatre, such as the tragedies performed at the Comédie-Française. At age 19 he published his first volume of poems, La Lampe d’Aladin (“Aladdin’s Lamp”).

Cocteau was the product of the years immediately preceding World War I, years of refined artistic taste that were devoid of political turmoil. His real exploration of the world of the theatre began when he encountered the Ballets Russes, then under the direction of Sergey Diaghilev. When Cocteau expressed a desire to create ballets, Diaghilev challenged him by saying: ‘Étonne-moi’ (“surprise me”). This famous remark seems to have guided the poet not only in his ballets, such as Parade (1917), with music by Erik Satie, and Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920; “The Ox on the Roof”), with music by Darius Milhaud, but also in his other works; and it is sometimes quoted in his plays and films.

During World War I, Cocteau served as an ambulance driver on the Belgian front. The landscape he observed there was later used in his novel Thomas l’imposteur (1923; “Thomas the Imposter”). He became a friend of the aviator Roland Garros and dedicated to him the early poems inspired by aviation, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919; The Cape of Good Hope). At intervals during the years 1916 and 1917, Cocteau entered the world of modern art, then being born in Paris; in the bohemian Montparnasse section of the city, he met painters such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani and writers such as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Soon after the war, Max Jacob introduced Cocteau to the future poet and novelist Raymond Radiguet. The 16-year-old Radiguet, who appeared to be a prodigy, advocated an aesthetic of simplicity and of classical clarity, qualities that would become characteristic of Cocteau’s own work. The example of Radiguet counted tremendously for Cocteau; and when Radiguet died in 1923, at age 21, the older man felt bereft of a friendship that had been based upon a constant interchange of ideas, encouragement, and enthusiasms. An addiction to opium, brought on by Cocteau’s grief over his lover’s death, necessitated a period of cure. Jacques Maritain, a French Thomist philosopher, paid his first visit to Cocteau in the sanatorium. Through Maritain, Cocteau returned briefly to religious practice.

These complex experiences initiated a new period in his life, during which he produced some of his most important works. In the long poem L’Ange Heurtebise the poet engages in a violent combat with an angel that was to reappear continually in his works. His play Orphée, first performed in 1926, was destined to play a part in the resurrection of tragedy in contemporary theatre; in it, Cocteau deepened his interpretation of the nature of the poet. The novel Les Enfants terribles, written in the space of three weeks in March 1929, is the study of the inviolability of the character of two adolescents, the brother and sister Paul and Elisabeth. In 1950 Cocteau prepared the screenplay for a film of this work, and he was also the film’s narrator.

Cocteau had enlarged the scope of his work by the creation of his first film, Le Sang d’un poète, a commentary on his own private mythology; the themes that then seemed obscure or shocking seem today less private and more universal because they have appeared in other works. Also in the early 1930s Cocteau wrote what is usually thought to be his greatest play, La Machine infernale, a treatment of the Oedipus theme that is very much his own. In these two works he moved into closer contact with the great myths of humanity.

In the 1940s Cocteau returned to filmmaking, first as a screenwriter and then also as a director in La Belle et la bête, a fantasy based on the children’s tale, and Orphée (1950), a re-creation of the themes of poetry and death that he had dealt with in his play. Also a visual artist of significance, Cocteau in 1950 decorated the Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and began a series of important graphic works: Frescoes on the City Hall in Menton, the Chapel of Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and the Church of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. His adopted son, the painter Édouard Dermit, who also appears in his later films, continued the decoration of a chapel at Fréjus, a work Cocteau had not completed at his death at age 74.

We recently watched again his 1950 film “Orphée” (Orpheus), starring Jean Marais, François Périer and María Casares. The film appeared as striking and as poetic as the first time I had watched it. While based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Cocteau makes of this an allegorical and magical tale of love, death and the meaning of life. It is a surrealistic masterpiece and one can become immersed in it again and again, becoming lost in its symbols, drawing new meaning with each viewing and enjoying again and again the amazing images.

The film is set in post-war, bomb-damaged France of the late 1940s. Orphée (Marais) is a self-absorbed poet, living in splendid isolation with his beautiful wife Eurydice in. Times are changing and Orphée’s popularity is waning as a new wave of poets is winning the new generation. As a poet he feels slighted and he goes into town with the intention of facing the new age. However, he is snubbed and he becomes enraged. The leader of the new poets, the young Jacques Cegeste, is caught up in a brawl in a bar, which spills out into the street and he is killed by a motorcyclist. Orphée, an innocent bystander, is taken away in a black limousine with the lifeless body of Cegeste by a beautiful and mysterious Princess to a deserted house.

Time runs backwards in this house and the way into the underworld lies through mirrors. Orphée falls in love with the Princess (and so falls in love with his own death). Cegeste’s followers advise the police that Orphée is responsible for the young poet’s death. Ultimately Orphée has to choose between between the Princess and Eurydice, his wife.

Marais was Cocteau’s lover for a time and that’s why he probably landed the role of Orphée. He looks quite like the aesthete poet – self-admiring and narcissistic, obsessed with his reflection in the many mirrors of the film. Maria Casares steals every scene she is in as the Princess/Death, playing her role with aplomb and great gusto. François Périer does a marvellous job as Heurtebise, the Princess’s assistant who “breaks the rules” and falls in love with Orphée’s wife. Juliette Greco plays a small but memorable role, and Maria Dea as Eurydice seems rather insignificant in the film’s main themes – or rather her death is quite the catalyst…

It is an amazing film, the closest poetry comes being filmed. A brilliant masterpiece of a complex and wonderfully creative mind. If you are interested in art, poetry, literature, philosophy, myth and symbolism, you will simply love this film!

MOVIE MONDAY - MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

“Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.” - Salman Rushdie

Director Deepa Mehta’s 2012 film “Midnight’s Children” starring  Rajat Kapoor, Vansh Bhardwaj, Anupam Kher is based on the novel of the same name by Salman Rushdie. The author collaborated with the director to write the screenplay. Generally, if the chemistry between the author and director is good, the results can result in excellent cinema. Unfortunately, this is not always the case…

Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie, FRSL (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. “Midnight’s Children” (1981), his second novel, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilisations. His fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses” (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989, and as a result the author was put under police protection by the British government.

Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Britain’s foremost literary organisation, in 1983. He was appointed Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”, an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over “The Satanic Verses”.

I was a little wary to watch the film as Rushdie’s prose, though lush and quite literary, can also be rather convoluted and sesquipedalian, and in parts turgid. Thus is the writing of most literary authors who try “Write” with a capital “W”. And it is because of this (or perhaps in spite of this?) that their work is recognised by the various organisations that hand out literary prizes. Nevertheless, the film was very watchable and the gorgeous cinematography, grand locations, colourful costumes and beautiful music made it, if nothing else, good eye candy.

The plot commences at the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947, when India declares independence from Great Britain. Two babies born in the same Bombay hospital at midnight are switched at birth by a nurse. And so it is that Saleem Sinai, the illegitimate child of a beggar woman, and Shiva, the only son of a wealthy couple, are fated to live the destinies meant for each other. Over the next three decades, Saleem and Shiva find themselves on opposite sides of many a conflict, whether it be because of class, politics, romantic rivalry, or the constantly shifting borders that are drawn every time neighbours become enemies and decide to split their newborn nation into two, and then three, warring countries. Through it all, the lives of Saleem and Shiva are mysteriously intertwined. There is another mystic link with all other children that are born around midnight on that fateful date, as all these “Midnight Children” have mystical powers. Saleem and Shiva are also inextricably linked to the history of India itself, which takes them on a whirlwind journey full of trials, triumphs and disasters.

The film is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, born with telepathic powers, as well as an enormous and constantly dripping nose with an extremely sensitive sense of smell. The technique of “magical realism” finds liberal expression throughout the novel and is crucial to constructing the parallel to the country’s history.

The film was controversial, primarily because of the way India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was portrayed. The same controversy had dogged the book: In 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi brought an action against the book in the British courts, claiming to have been defamed by a single sentence in chapter 28, penultimate paragraph, in which her son Sanjay Gandhi is said to have had a hold over his mother by his accusing her of contributing to his father’s Feroze Gandhi’s death through her neglect. The case was settled out of court when Salman Rushdie agreed to remove the offending sentence.

The film certainly makes Salman Rushdie’s prose more accessible to the general public that perhaps is not as keen to read the novel. The film is beautiful to look at, has some fine cinematic moments in it and there are some poignant and moving parts in it. However, the screenplay is too indulgent (remember the author was responsible for it) and the direction was perhaps a trifle over-ambitious. What was worrying for me personally was that there was a disconnect between me as a viewer and the characters and action on screen. When there is not a strong emotional connection with the characters on film, it can be disastrous in a movie – especially one as long and as epic as this one. I am glad we watched it, but I can think of other more worthy films to recommend to friends to see. If you get a chance to see it, do so, it is good, but I would not go out of my way to hunt it out and watch it…

ART SUNDAY - JOAN MIRÓ

“My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colours. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.” -  Joan Miró

Joan Miró Ferrà (April 20th, 1893 - December 25th, 1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist. Originally from Barcelona, Joan Miró moved to Paris at an early age, where he began to develop an unconventional style of work. He soon became known in the community as a Surrealist because of his love for automatism and the use of sexual symbols in much of his work.

Joan Miró was very much against the established painting methods of the time, and he is often credited with being the founder of automatic drawing. Automatic drawing is the process of allowing the hand to move randomly on the canvas, leaving the artwork develop by chance. Many Surrealists believed that this form of drawing would reveal something about the subconscious human mind. For Joan Miró, automatic drawing was also a way to breaking free from conventional form.

Miró was very much against bourgeois art, claiming that it was used for propaganda and the promotion of a wealthy culture. Miró referred to his work as the assassination of painting. During the height of his career, Joan Miró experimented with many different types of art form, refusing to commit to any one artistic movement. Later in his career he began experimenting with tapestry. In 1974 he created World Trade Center Tapestry for the newly constructed Twin Towers. This work would later become the most expensive piece of art lost in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th.

Joan Miró also began to delve into other aspects of media, including ceramics and window paintings. Some of his more radical ideas included four-dimensional art, and gas sculptures, though he was never able to put these ideas into practice. Perhaps his most important work of art in the United States is a glass mural titled “Personnages Oiseaux”, which was made for the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas. Joan Miró began this large two-dimensional project at the age of 79, and it was not completely until he was 85 years old. The mural is made up of one million pieces of marble and Venetian glass, mounted on a special type of wood, and was attatched to the concrete wall of the museum. It was the first glass mosaic ever attempted by Miró, and though he wanted to make more, his deteriorating health prevented any future attempts of another project.

At the time of his death, Joan Miró was bedridden from heart disease and respiratory complications. He died at his home in Palma, Mallorca on December 25th, 1983. He is buried in his home town of Barcelona, near a museum that is dedicated entirely to his work. Today, his works are displayed in museums and galleries all over the world, and sell for anywhere between $250,000 and $17 million.

When Miró moved into the studio of Pau Gargallo on the rue Blomet in Paris, he came in contact with the poets and artists belonging to a group that had arisen from Dadaism. In 1924, this became the Surrealist group centred on the poet Andre Breton. Miró was never an orthodox Surrealist. However, the movement legitimised the use of dreams and the subconscious as artistic raw material. It thus offered him the possibility of liberating his own pictorial style by allowing him freely to combine the earthly and the magical elements seen in his “detailist” period. “Harlequin’s Carnival” above is good example of this change.

The world of the imagination and subconscious, rather than being an end in itself, was for Miró a way of giving shape in his paintings to his lived experiences and his memories. In spite of the fact that many of his pictures had been sold, Miró led a hard life in his studio in the Rue Blomet. “I used to come home in he evening without having eaten anything”, he reported later, “and I wrote down my feelings. During that year I spent a lot of time with poets; because I felt it necessary to overcome the ‘plastic’ in order to reach poetry.” After “The Farm”, “Harlequin’s Carnival” was to become Miró’s second striking work. In it, painting and graphic elements that run through the picture seem for the first time to be unified.

ART SUNDAY - LEONORA CARRINGTON

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” - Salvador Dali

The Google Doodle today highlights an artist I was not aware of before now, so I thought it a good idea to find out a little more about her and feature her on Art Sunday here, as well. Leonora Carrington (British, born April 6, 1917–died May 25, 2011) was an artist and author, best known as one of the leading female figures of the Surrealist movement. Carrington was born in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England, to a wealthy textile merchant family, and received much of her early education from tutors and nuns.

After being expelled from several schools due to her rebellious nature, Carrington was sent to Florence, Italy, to attend her first art school, Mrs. Penrose’s Academy of Art. Her education continued at Chelsea School of Art in London for a year, after which she transferred to Ozenfant Academy, London, for the following three years. In 1937, Carrington met Max Ernst, who is recognised as one of the pioneers of the Surrealist movement. Carrington and Ernst formed a strong bond, and lived in Paris and southern France where they supported each other’s artistic talent and vision. This would result in their collaboration on several pieces of art that they used to decorate their home.

After Ernst’s arrest by the Nazis shortly after their occupation of France, Carrington moved to Spain, where she suffered a complete breakdown that resulted in her being institutionalised. This experience would directly influence both her artistic and written works in the coming years. Examples of this influence can be seen in her novel “Down Below” (1972), and her paintings “Portrait of Dr. Morales” (1940) and “Map of Down Below” (1943).

In 1947, Carrington became extremely well known almost overnight after she showcased her work at a Surrealist exhibition held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. As the only professional female painter represented at the exhibition, she quickly made a name for herself as one of the most prominent female painters of the Surrealist movement. In 2010, Carrington’s work was presented during a show entitled “Surreal Friends” at the Pallant House Gallery in West Sussex. Before her death in 2011, Carrington was recognised as one of the last female painters of the Surrealist movement. She also gained recognition when her painting Juggler (1954) set a new record as the most expensive piece ever sold by a living Surrealist painter. Carrington died on May 25, 2011.

The painting above is a “Self Portrait” from 1937/8. The painter has depicted herself in a vacuous room with three animals: A curious hyena, looking like a pygmy-like striped mare, which she seems to hold at bay with an apotropaic gesture; a rocking horse floating above her head and a white, almost unicorn-like horse galloping away in the landscape seen from the open window. Horses symbolise freedom and power. In some cultures, white horses stand for the balance of wisdom and power. In others, like Christianity, the white horse is a symbol of death. The horse is a universal symbol of freedom without restraint, because riding a horse made people feel they could free themselves from their own bindings. Also linked with riding horses, they are symbols of travel, movement, and desire.

Carrington spent her childhood on a country estate surrounded by animals and reading fairy tales and legends. She revisited these memories in her adulthood, creating paintings populated with real and imagined creatures. Here, the white horse, which Carrington used as her symbolic surrogate, gallops freely into the verdant landscape beyond the curtained window. The hyena in front of her is a powerful symbol of femininity and maternity, the breasts full of milk. The tail-less rocking horse is perhaps an allusion to childhood, left behind as the artist gallops into maturity, beyond the shackles of convention.

ART SUNDAY - DALÍ

“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.” - Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí (Born: 1904, May 11, Figueras, Catalonia, Spain Died: 1989, January 23, Figueras, Catalonia, Spain) was the Spanish artist who developed visual surrealism together with Magritte. But being more talented, successful and commercial than the others, Dalì was eventually expelled from the surrealist group, but nevertheless remained the most famous of the surrealist painters. To begin with, the surrealists did not include painters in their group. Surrealism was a cultural movement that began in 1920 with its centre in Paris. The group would meet in cafes and discuss psychology and social revolution. But later, visual arts played an important role in delivering the surrealist message to the public.

Salvador Dalí, being an accomplished painter with an eccentric personality and a genius for marketing himself, became a foreground figure of the surrealist movement. Dalí showed talent for drawing and painting at a very early age, as can be seen from his “Landscape Near Figueras” from 1910. At the age of 18, he began his studies at Academia de San Fernando (School of Fine Arts) in Madrid. He was well-known among his fellow students for his eccentric behaviour and dandy like manners, but even more so for his paintings; he was very gifted. In 1926 he was expelled from the school just before his final examination, after proclaiming that none of the professors were qualified to examine him.

In his work, Salvador Dalí was influenced by Raphael and Velázquez among others. Diego Velázquez inspired him to grow his famous moustache, which became his trademark. For a few years, Dalí was noticeably influenced by Picasso and Miró (Dalí and Picasso met in Paris in 1926). The cubist influence can be seen in Dalí’s painting “Cabaret Scene” from 1922, for example.

In 1929 Dalí joined the surrealists, and together with Magritte he rapidly developed the visual surrealist style. This was also the year he met his wife and muse, Gala. From this time is Dalí’s most famous painting, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), which displays a landscape containing melting watches. Liquid shapes were often used by Dalí in his paintings, as were images of elephants and other animals. Images of the egg also played an important role. Psychology was of the utmost significance to the surrealists.

Surrealists were heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, but did not admit to Freud’s description of the dark side of human nature. Dalí said: “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.” Salvador Dalí accomplished a lot of things outside of painting. He participated in making films, the most famous one being “The Andalusian Dog” that he created together with Buñuel in 1929. He worked with Hitchcock, Disney and photographer Man Ray. He designed jewellery and sceneries for the theatre as well as making contributions to the world of fashion and many other areas. Some well-known examples of his work are The Lobster Telephone, Mae West Lips Sofa and the logo for Chupa Chups.

He often managed to create scandals, thus contributing to the mystic aura surrounding his person. In 1934, at the age of 30, Salvador Dalí was expelled from the Surrealist group. They were outraged by his refusal to take a political stand against fascism and by the commercialsation of Dalí’s work. Dalí said to this: “I myself, am surrealism.” Another citation by Dalí on this matter is: “The only difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist.” Dalí published his autobiography, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí”, in 1942. It was a description of his life and work thus far and it received both praise and criticism. The book contains many accounts of his high opinion of himself, as well as colourful descriptions of his odd character.

The Dalí Theatre and Museum in his home town Figueras houses the single largest collection of Dalí’s work. He started working on the museum in 1960, and it was opened in 1974. The museum is a testament to the fantastic imagination of Salvador Dalí. In the basement of the museum lies Dalí’s crypt engraved with his title Marquis of Púbol, bestowed upon him by King Juan Carlos in 1982.

The painting above, “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire” (1940) depicts a slave market, while a woman at a booth watches some people. A variety of people seem to make up the face of Voltaire, while the face seems to be positioned on an object to form a bust. Dalí describes his work on the painting “to make the abnormal look normal and the normal look abnormal.” The image of Voltaire coming in and out of view in the painting is perhaps telling as Voltaire on the one hand harshly criticised slavery and on the other hand, together with fellow philosophers Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Denis Diderot, and Buffon, he speculated and tried to explain that the different races had separate origins and at times seemed to doubt that black people possessed the same intelligence as white people. He has also been charged as an anti-Semite although most of his critiques are actually directed towards religion as such and the bible, rather than Judaism specifically.

The painting contains a device often used by Dalí, an image which can be interpreted two ways – Voltaire’s face or two nuns. L Bonnarô (2002) in an interesting article states: “The perceptual reversal of ambiguous images has been a source of fascination for psychologists and artists alike, albeit for rather different reasons. For some artists, the allure in introducing ambiguity is to create in the observer an experience that is, explicitly, purely subjective and qualitative. It is a way of emphasising the constructive nature of perception, the observer’s share. For the psychologist, on the other hand, image ambiguity serves as a tool to probe the dynamics of the visual and cognitive system: the retina receives a single image comprising multiple interpretations, yet the visual and cognitive system is constrained so that only one percept is available at a time.”

ART SUNDAY - GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

“My advice to the women of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.” - William Allen White
 

Georgia O’Keeffe was born on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15, 1887. Between 1905 and 1916 she studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Students League of New York, University of Virginia, and Teachers College of Columbia University. Her intention was to become an art teacher, and between 1908 and 1917 she taught studio classes at schools in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina. In 1916, O’Keeffe’s drawings first came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz (the important photographer and influential promoter of modern art), whom she married in 1924. Until his death in 1946, he regularly exhibited O’Keeffe’s paintings and drawings at his New York galleries, which helped establish her reputation as a leading American artist.
 

For more than seventy years O’Keeffe painted prolifically, and almost exclusively, images from nature distilled to their essential colours, shapes, and designs. Prior to 1929 she derived her subjects from her life in New York City (buildings and city views) and from long summers in the country at Lake George, in upstate New York (flowers and landscapes). After 1929, when she made the first of many extended trips to New Mexico, her interest shifted to objects and scenery that characterised the American Southwest (bones and mountains). In 1949 the artist moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she resided until her death at age ninety-eight on March 6, 1986.
 

O’Keeffe’s early pictures were basically imitative, but by the early 1920s her own highly individualistic style of painting had emerged. Frequently her subjects were enlarged views of skulls and other animal bones, flowers and plant organs, shells, rocks, mountains, and other natural forms. O’Keeffe delineated these forms with probing and subtly rhythmic outlines and delicately modulated washes of clear colour. Her mysteriously suggestive images of bones and flowers set against a perspectiveless space inspired a variety of erotic, psychologic, and symbolic interpretations.
 

“Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills” (1935), exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, is a typical painting of O’Keeffe’s highly personal style. This painting features an enlarged ram’s skull and antlers hovering emblematically over landscape and sky; the flower is an addendum that contrasts life with death, softness with sharp hardness. The organic lines and complex orifices of these nearly abstract forms conjure associations both phallic and feminine. Sexuality was a complicated issue for O’Keeffe. She famously denied that her landscapes or flower paintings were allegories of the female form, yet their lineage is obviously physical. In both cases, she asserted her own vision of the female body, camouflaged with protective layers of meaning.
 

In the 1930s, when this painting was executed, artists, musicians, and writers were interested in developing an indigenous American art form. It was an idea strongly supported by Stieglitz and his circle of artists, who sought to develop an American style of painting, rather than depictions of American subjects as produced by the Regionalists and the Social Realists. The painting is symbolic of America as O’Keeffe saw it, represented by the New Mexico desert and its relics.

ART SUNDAY - DE CHIRICO

“Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!” - Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Art Sunday is dedicated today to Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). De Chirico was born in Volos, Greece into the family of an Italian railroad engineer. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After 1919, he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.
 
After studying art in Athens (mainly under the guidance of the influential Greek painter Georgios Roilos), and in Florence, De Chirico moved to Germany in 1906, following his father’s death in 1905. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he read the writings of the philosophers Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger, and studied the works of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger.
 
He returned to Italy in the summer of 1909 and spent six months in Milan. At the beginning of 1910, he moved to Florence where he painted the first of his “Metaphysical Town Square” series. In 1910, de Chirico moved to Paris where he made contact with Picasso and befriended Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), French poet and leader of the avant-garde movement rejecting poetic traditions in outlook, rhythm, and language. In Paris de Chirico began to produce highly troubling dreamlike pictures of deserted cities, e.g. “The Great Tower”, “The Soothsayer’s Recompense”, “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street”. These were paintings with an incogruous combinations of images that carried a charge of mystery. The same haunting shapes tend to appear again and again in poetic combinations.
 
In 1917 in the Ferrara military hospital, de Chirico met a compatriot, also a painter, Carlo Carrà (1881-1966), and together they founded the Metaphysical Painting movement. Although the movement was short-lived, it was perhaps the most original and important movement in Italian art of the 20th century, and the highest point in de Chirico’s painting career. De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings were hugely influential on Surrealist artists, who recognised in them the eloquent expression of the unconscious and nonsensical to which they themselves aspired. “In words and by example, Ernst, Tanguy, Magritte, and Dali, among others, showed a rare unity in acknowledging de Chirico as a forerunner master.” (in “Modern Art” by Sam Hunter et al. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2000).
 
In 1918 de Chirico and Carrà contributed to the periodical “Valori Plastici” which gave a literary aspect to Metaphysical painting. By the 1930s, however, de Chirico had moved to a more conventional form of expression. His great interest in archaeology and history took the form of Neo-Baroque paintings full of horses, still-lives, and portraits. The Surrealists, in particular, condemned his later work. In 1929 de Chirico wrote “Hebdomeros”, a dream novel; but in the 1930s, after he had returned to Italy, he renounced all his previous work and reverted to an academic style, and to his study of the techniques of the old masters. He published his autobiography “Memorie della mia Vita” in 1945.
 
He remained extremely prolific even as he approached his 90th year. In 1974 he was elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. He died in Rome on November 20, 1978. His brother, Andrea de Chirico, who became famous as Alberto Savinio, was also a writer and a painter.
 
The painting above “L’ enigma dell’ arrivo e del pomeriggio” (The Enigma of the Arrival and of the Afternoon) painted in 1911-1912 (oil on canvas, 70 x 86.5 cm in a private collection) is a typical de Chirico work where enigmatic figures move in stage-set like backgrounds reminiscent of a classical world. The yellow-green light and the other-worldly atmosphere immediately causes disquiet and the viewer is transported to a dream landscape where reality becomes irrelevant. The painting could be an illustration of a scene from the Odyssey, de Chirico’s background and influences well within this milieu.

THE ECSTASY OF FAMILIARITY

“When God by circumstances of time and place doth call for moderation of carnal appetite, the transgression is more heinous and offensive unto God.” - David Dickson
 
I have blogged before about the intricate, arresting, surrealist art of Jacek Yerka and it seems that this artist’s canvases brimming with vivid imagery and rich symbolism are a perfect vehicle for Magpie Tales’ creative writing stimulation.
 
Here is my poem that was written after I considered Yerka’s  “Between Heaven and Hell” (1989) that was selected for this week’s artistic springboard for our imagination.
 
The Ecstasy of Familiarity
 
The food of love
Is cooked in the kitchen of familiarity;
Each dish prepared
With consummate carelessness,
Bred by intimacy
That has been carefully cultivated over years.
 
Your flesh warm,
Inviting and desirable, more succulent
Than any carnivorous
Delectation placed upon dinner table
By a skilful chef,
And dressed by an expert saucier.
 
We feast on our carnality,
The kitchen table suitable for our excesses
As kiss upon kiss
Leads to our fusion according to our recipe
Perfected by practice
And by our apposite harmony of spicy mixtures.
 
Once sated to surfeit,
All spent, we gaze out of the windows of our eyes
Seeing both sides of the coin
An Eden and a Gehenna, both prized and reviled;
Our meeting fleeting, but,
Our love eternal, transcending the everyday.
 
The apple more than temptation,
The larder fuller than hunger would dictate,
The heart brimming with expectation,
The desire more searing than the hotplate,
Our cooking preparations more to feed the soul
Than jaded palates with sweetmeat to cajole.

THE MUSIC OF YOUR THOUGHT

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” - Salvador Dalí
 
Surrealism is a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature, which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images. Launched in 1924 by a manifesto of André Breton and having a strong political content, the movement grew out of symbolism and Dada and was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. In the visual arts its most notable exponents were André Masson, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel.
 
Magpie Tales has presented us with a sculptural confection by that master of Surrealism, Salvador Dalí. As a child, Dalí’s first sculpture was a clay copy of the Venus de Milo. He later recalled: “My first experience as a sculptor gave me an unknown and delicious erotic joy.” The original Venus de Milo, now on display at the Louvre Museum, is one of the most famous works of Greek antiquity, a marble sculpture of the goddess of love. This armless figure has become the icon of classical female beauty.
 
The goddess Venus held a great attraction for Dalí, who returned to her throughout his career. She is the focus of his 1939 “Dream of Venus” Pavilion at the World’s Fair, where the viewer is invited to walk through her dreams. In The “Hallucinogenic Toreador” of 1969, shadows across her body become the source for an illusion of a bullfighter’s face. In a 1973 hologram, she appears as musician Alice Cooper’s microphone.
 
For this 1936 Surrealist object, Dalí cuts six drawers into Venus, transforming the Greek goddess into a piece of living furniture, a visual pun on the phrase “chest” of drawers, also known as a bureau. Her simple, white surface, is complemented by elegant fur knobs, a tribute to her beauty and erotic potential. In addition, the drawers are a metaphor for the way Freudian psychoanalysis opens the hidden areas of the unconscious. In Dalí’s words: “Freud discovered the world of the subconscious on the tumid surfaces of ancient bodies, and Dali cut drawers into it.”
 
Here is my contribution to this week’s Magpie.
 
The Music of Your Thought
 
“Of all the numbers of the alphabet
I adore crimson…”, she said;
And I looked at her bemused,
Amused too, by her propensity to add colour
To even the dullest topic.
 
“The sea, she flies so well, chasing rocks
As they rise up to the bottom…”
I smiled at her, basking in the sunshine
Of her hyperboles, approaching nearest to her star
In that single moment of a hyperbolic perihelion.
 
Of all the music of your touch,
I love sweetness…”, she added;
And I sang with my hand,
Leaving a trace of honey, treacly, sticky,
On her smooth skin.
 
“My secret thoughts live in a locked drawer
In my belly…”
I nodded, as I caressed her navel,
Wanting to open up her innermost
Secret hiding places to lose myself into.
 
“I appreciate the honesty of pegasi
Who in their moulting season admit they cannot fly…”
She pensively remarked, stroking my shoulder blade,
And at that moment I knew,
As I prepared for a perpetual aphelion,
That I had lost her, evermore.

ART SUNDAY - JACEK YERKA

“All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.” - Carl Jung
 
Jacek Yerka was born in 1952 in Toruń, Poland. He was born into an artistic family with both his parents graduates from a local Fine Art Academy. His earliest memories were of paints, inks, paper, pencils, erasers and brushes. As a child, Yerka loved to draw and make sculptures. He hated playing outside, and preferred to sit down with a pencil, creating and exploring his own world. This difference between the other children in his primary school led to social problems with his peers and Yerka describes his primary school life as being a “grey, sometimes horrifying reality.” However, Yerka later became “untouchable” in his high school due to his clever sketches of the school’s worst bullies.
 
The artist graduated in 1976 from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń. He specialised in graphic art. During the first few years after graduation he exhibited posters, for example at The Biennial Exhibition of Polish Posters in Katowice in 1977 and 1979, at the international biennial exhibitions in Lahti and Warsaw, among others. Since 1980 he devoted himself completely to painting.
 
Basing on precise painting techniques, taking pattern from former masters like Jan van Eyck or Hieronymus Bosch but mainly on his unlimited imagination he creates surrealistic compositions, particularly admired by enthusiasts of sci-fi in all varieties. He inspired the fantasy writer Harlon Ellison to write 30 short stories, which along with Yerka’s pictures constituted the publication entitled “Mind Fields”. The same American publisher “Morpheus International” released the album “The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka”.
 
In 1995 the artist was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for the best artist. He exhibits in Poland and abroad (in Germany, France and USA among others), being an esteemed representative of the science fiction stream of art. His paintings have recently inspired film-makers. The artist has been invited to cooperate in the production of an American movie “Strawberry Fields” in which his paintings was to be accompanied by the Beatles’ music.
 
The painting above is called “The City is Landing” and shows Yerka’s style to advantage. A meticulously detailed fantastic landscape, painstakingly rendered, well composed and with luscious attention to colour and form. It is a delicious excursion into the land of fantasy and with a meaning that can be extremely personal for each person who views the work.

POETRY TUESDAY - SONG

“When words leave off, music begins.” – Heinrich Heine
 
Man Ray, (born Philadelphia, PA, 25 Aug 1890; died Paris, 18 Nov 1976) was an American photographer and painter. He was brought up in New York, and he adopted the pseudonym Man Ray as early as 1909. He was one of the leading spirits of Dada and Surrealism, and the only American artist to play a prominent role in the launching of those two influential movements. Throughout the 1910s he was involved with avant-garde activities that prefigured the Dada movement. After attending drawing classes supervised by Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Francisco Ferrer Social Center, or Modern School, he lived for a time in the art colony of Ridgefield, NJ, where he designed, illustrated and produced several small press pamphlets, such as the Ridgefield Gazook, published in 1915, and A Book of Diverse Writings.
 
Magpie Tales has chosen a photograph of his for a prompt this week. It is his “Object to be Destroyed” of 1923. The work, that was destroyed in 1957, consisted of a metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to its swinging arm. It was remade in multiple copies in later years, and renamed “Indestructible Object”. It is considered to be a “readymade”, following in the relatively new tradition established by Marcel Duchamp of employing ordinary manufactured objects that usually were modified very little, if at all, in works of art.
 
I have used poetic licence (ahem!) to reimagine this image. Here is what I came up with in response to the prompt:
 
Song
 
How easy it is for you to sing!
Playing the lyre like an angel;
Skipping through trills – rejoicing,
All happy intervals, major scales…
 
Yet these black notes, how mournful on the page,
What agony they hide, what pain, what effort –
They’re black crows, portents of death
Sitting, as they do, on five stretched wires.
 
Each note’s a wound made with sharp knife,
And you run through them without concern,
Lightly skipping up the arpeggios,
Descending effortlessly the glissandos.
 
As the relentless metronome soul-lessly marks time
You pause not to think for a moment
Of the poor composer’s torment
And the shrill cries of his tortured soul.

ART SUNDAY - RENÉ MAGRITTE

“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” - Douglas H. Everett

Tomorrow is the anniversary of René Magritte’s birth so Art Sunday is dedicated to him. René François Ghislain Magritte was born on November 21st, 1898 at Lessines, a province of Hainaut in Belgium. This surrealist artist is renowned and very popular for his thought-provoking images, which sometimes cause amusement, sometimes shock and often wonder and puzzlement.

Magritte started painting at the age of twelve and his father Leopold encouraged him to pursue his artistic endeavours. When Magritte was fourteen, his mother committed suicide due to depression. The young René was greatly affected after seeing her body, with the face covered. This incident in his life is reflected in his early paintings including “Les Amants”, in which the persons depicted have their faces covered with cloth.

In 1914, Magritte enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels to study painting and learn about the various techniques employed by the Symbolist artists. There, he became acquainted with many of the then famous artists including Pierre Bourgeois, E.L.T Mesens and Pierre Flouquet. Although he was interested in the futurist movement and cubism, his real inspiration was the surrealist works of Giorgio De Chirico.

After completing his studies at the Academy, he married his long time lover Georgette Berger in 1922. For the next four years he found employment as assistant designer in a wallpaper factory until 1926, and it was at this time that he created his first surrealistic work, “The Lost Jockey”. Later in 1927, his first painting exhibition at Brussels received quite adverse criticism, which caused the artist to move to Paris. There, he met André Breton, and subsequently became actively involved in the surrealist movement.

The paintings of René Magritte are considered as a melding of the poetic and philosophical, firmly based on the social as well as intellectual developments of the first half of the twentieth century. Magritte’s manner of depicting ordinary items out of context is often referred to as “magic realism” and this dream-like quality makes his art stand apart from other surrealists. René Magritte died at the age of 68 on August 15th 1967, in Brussels of pancreatic cancer.

Magritte in his art, wishes to put an end to our sense of familiarity with the world. Although he depicted ordinary things in his canvases, he modified them with his imagination and presented them in absurd contexts and with such illusory blends and counter-logical associations that very often the viewers are moved to challenge their beliefs and question their frame of reference. Magritte’s work is thought provoking and his canvases present visual enigmas, which are sure to puzzle and challenge the spectators. Many contemporary artists have been influenced by the remarkable works of René Magritte.

Illustrated here is a re-working of the “Lost Jockey”, this canvas completed in 1942, and obviously based on his 1926 work of the same name. The hallmarks of Magritte’s work are evident in this work. The jockey on his racehorse is galloping out of context in a forest of balusters that are sprouting branches. Or it could be a stage, as the drapery on the right implies. Or all of the above! Clearly the jockey is lost, as the title states, but what is the deeper meaning of this work. The spectator is left to resolve the visual riddle on his own without a clue. It could be a statement about the futility of life, or something equally profound, or it could be a prank of the artist… In any case it is a satisfying artwork that bemuses and amuses, challenges and teases, provokes and stimulates!

ART SUNDAY - SURREALISM AT GoMA

“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” - George Bernard Shaw

While in Brisbane I managed to get to the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), which is hosting a major new exhibition of Dali, Magritte, Miró, Picasso, Man Ray and other surrealists in an exhibition titled: “Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams”. This exhibition highlights Europe’s most extensive collection of surrealist works from the Musée National d’ Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The GoMA, which opened in December 2006, is part of the Queensland Art Gallery building and is found at Kurilpa Point only 150 metres from the Queensland Art Gallery building. The GoMA focusses on the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Musée National d’Art Moderne, in Paris’s Centre Pompidou, is one of the world’s best museum collections of modern and contemporary art. Its Surrealism collections are the finest in Europe. It is form here that key surrealist works have been selected to stage the GoMA exhibition which presents more than 180 works by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. The exhibition is an excellent opportunity to see important art works that rarely leave Paris, and gain a fascinating and comprehensive overview of an  important artistic movement.

A historical record of Surrealism is charted by the art in this exhibition, beginning with the Dada experiments in painting, photography and film, through the metaphysical questioning and exploration of the subconscious in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; to the readymade objects of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s photographs. Gaining ascendency in the early 1920s, the movement’s development is recorded by the writings of Surrealism’s founder André Breton and key early works by André Masson. Paintings and sculptures by surrealists Salvador Dalí, Rene Magritte, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Paul Delvaux are all included.

Film and photography are also represented throughout the exhibition, including films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, René Clair and Man Ray. Important photographic works by Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eli Lotar and Jacques-André Boiffard also feature. The exhibition is rounded out with late works that show the breadth of Surrealism’s influence, and includes major works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Joseph Cornell. “Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams” is accompanied by an innovative Children’s Art Centre program, a range of public programs, including talks, discussions and performances, and a full-colour exhibition catalogue.

The Queensland GoMA was closed immediately after the Brisbane floods of January 2011, but reopened in March. In July 2002, Sydney-based company Architectus was commissioned by the Queensland Government following an Architect Selection Competition, to design the Gallery. A main theme of Architectus’s design is a pavilion in the landscape, one which assumes its position as both hub and anchor for this important civic precinct. Critical to this is the building’s response to the site, its natural topography, existing patterns of urban generation, and the river.

The image above is by René Magritte and is titled “Les marches de l’été” (The Steps of Summer) - 1938. It typifies surrealist works, in that incongruous images are superimposed to create a dream-like atmosphere of ambiguous and confronting reality. Magritte’s fascination with fractured mountainous landscapes in which some human elements are placed is shown in this painting, with its cube sky and neatly excavated trench. The female torso on the ledge challenges with its colour and texture. It looks like a classical statue but it its flesh-like upper half and its clay-like bottom half disorient the viewer. Even the title of the work is challenging and mystifies, rather than being explanatory. But such is surrealism: It highlights the creative potential of the unconscious mind by the irrational juxtaposition of often realistically rendered images.

WORLD INTERNET DAY & GEORGE GRIE

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

According to some sources, today is World Internet Day. We depend on the web for communication, entertainment, ease and efficiency of data transfer, for research, recreation and task convenience. Our daily speech has been peppered with numerous neologisms that relate to web-based activities and services it offers. Nowadays, doing business without the internet is inconceivable. Like any other good invention, the net can be used for criminal activities and there are numerous cases relating to internet crime, stealing of personal data and identity, phishing, scamming, illegal activities of all kinds, racism, exploitation, pornography, etc. Use of the internet has made life easier and more pleasant, but also it has created many monsters that threaten us.

As today is also Art Sunday, I shall introduce to those of my readers who do not know of his work, George Grie (1962- ), an internet artist extraordinaire whose digital, neo-surrealist images can be widely accessed on the net. Grie is a Russian-Canadian artist whose classical art training stood him in good stead when he started his career as a professional fine art painter and graphic artist. His work is influenced by the well-known surrealists Dali, Magritte and neosurrealists Zdzisław Beksiński and Wojciech Siudmak.

Has art has strong visual impact and uses confronting images that engage the viewers, making them try to rationalise and question what they see. There is an underlying unstated philosophisation, inner reflection and sense of wonder in the oxymoronic images he produces. Some of his works are a social commentary on contemporary mores, others are playful imaginings, or even clever illustrations based on word play or extension of symbolic meanings into territory not explored. His palette is limited and the images are often rendered in grisaille with only occasional touches of colour. This suits the fantastical and dream-like visions he produces and contributes to the graphical quality of his work.

The image above is Grie's “The Langoliers or Inevitable Entropy”.  The Artist states the following about this work of his:
“ ‘The ultimate purpose of life is to facilitate entropy. We are the langoliers of the present reality.’ - Kurt Vonnegut

Stephen King's “The Langoliers” Book summary:
When a plane passes through a mysterious time warp, several people find themselves utterly alone when the rest of the passengers and all of the crew vanish. The survivors manage to land, where as they discover that time seems to stand still and that they seem to be the only people left on the planet. To complicate matters, mysterious creatures called Langoliers are chasing them. The Langoliers’ work is to erase moments in time that have already passed into history.

Entropy
The concept of entropy has entered the domain of sociology, generally as a metaphor for chaos, disorder or dissipation of energy, rather than as a direct measure of thermodynamic or information entropy. In the nineteenth century, a well-liked scientific notion suggested that entropy was gradually increasing, and therefore the universe was running down and eventually all motion would cease. When people realized that this would not happen for billions of years, if it happened at all, concern about this notion generally disappeared.

Entropy, historically, has often been associated with the amount of order, disorder, and or chaos in a thermodynamic system. The traditional definition of entropy is that it refers to changes in the status quo of the system and is a measure of "molecular disorder" and the amount of wasted energy in a dynamical energy transformation from one state or form to another.”
George Grie, August 2007

ART SUNDAY - DRYSDALE

“Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude.” – Charles Sturt

For Art Sunday today, an Australian artist, Russell Drysdale (1912 - 1981). He was born in England in 1912, and arrived in Australia in 1923. Russell Drysdale is regarded as a pioneer of Australian modern regional painting. Breaking radically with the Heidelberg School’s romanticised and impressionistic view of rural Australia and bourgeois scenes styled on the European traditions, Drysdale used the originality of his artistic style and vision to effectively shape an alternative national identity based on his own honest vision of the harsh nature and distinctiveness of life within the Australian inland.

When Drysdale died in 1981 he was regarded as a national hero, his art was widely known and greatly admired. His images of rural country towns and outback landscapes, often with their inhabitants, were instrumental in defining a national identity at a time of tremendous social change in Australian history. For audiences in Australia and abroad, Drysdale's paintings reflected the essence of Australia and its people. Drysdale's themes, including identity, isolation, the land and its people, multiculturalism and indigenous Australians, are explored in his art.

"The Cricketers" (1948) is perhaps Drysdale’s most famous painting, and one of the most frequently reproduced images in twentieth-century Australian art. The subject of three figures set amid the stark walls of buildings in a deserted town, bathed in unnatural light, is a haunting and extremely original interpretation of a familiar sporting theme.

The painting was a loose commission from the English publisher, Walter Hutchinson. Hutchinson's collection of approximately three thousand paintings opened to the public in February 1949 at Hutchinson House, London, and was known as the National Collection of British Sports and Pastimes. Hutchinson wanted a painting of an Australian cricket match and asked his Melbourne office to arrange a commission from one of Australia's best-known artists. The request was referred to Leonard Voss Smith, a noted collector and dealer who worked for Hutchinson. Voss Smith mentioned the matter to Drysdale, who at the time was occupied with subjects of Hill End.

Drysdale's painting of country boys having an informal game of cricket against a building at Hill End was not what Walter Hutchinson was expecting, and he was shocked when the painting arrived in London. He cabled Melbourne and fired Voss Smith. The next day, having ascertained that Drysdale was indeed a distinguished Australian artist, Hutchinson cabled to reinstate him…