Watermelon

A watermelon is a curious thing. Botanists classify it as an herb, but it is weighty, watery, and has a tough rind - not what you expect to find alongside the green and leafy herbs of Provence in your kitchen. Its first documented appearance was in Africa. but today China grows more watermelons than any other county. Japanese farmers, heirs to a long tradition of elegant packaging, discovered that watermelons, grown in cubical glass boxes, take the shape of their containers for easier wrapping and stacking.
The watermelon shown at left was painted by an artist of the Qing Dynasty in China, sometime between 1644 and 1911.

Farniente

It sounds like the name of a foreign country - farniente. Fare niente comes from the Italian, meaning to do nothing. To savor idleness, to disengage from physical activity, to let the mind wander, all without boredom.
The renowned French belletrist, Marie de Rabutin, marquise de Sevgne (1626-1696), who wrote more than 1,000 letters to her daughter over a period of thirty years, understood the concept, perhaps better than she practiced it.

"Don't worry at all about my stay here; I feel perfectly well; I live here in my own fashion; I stroll frequently; I read, I have nothing to do, and, although in no way lazy by occupation, no one is more affected than me by the farniente of the Italians." - Madame de Sévigné, from a letter to her daughter Francoise, Madame de Grignan, 16 September 1676

The early 20th century painters known collectively as the Divisionists, with their strong political concerns for the overworked and undernourished peasants of the Italian countryside, might seem an odd choice to illustrate this idea, but I think there are intimations of fare niente in thse pictures.

Vincenzo Irolli's The Lighted Dining Room is an image of unalloyed tranquility, giving equal weight to the warmth of the house and the shadowy coolness of the patio.

Prairie in Flower by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpdeo is a late example of Divisionism, a movement that took its name from the painterly technique of absolute color separations, but with very different results from their contemporaries, the Pointillists. Part of a series on the relationship between humans and nature, the children are captured in a moment of equipoise, surely intentional, as Pellizza usually painted people going about their daily activities as ineluctably as the sheep grazing nearby.

Angelo Morbelli's S'Avanza, an image often interpreted as one of sadness or abandonment, could also serve as illustration of self-abandonment or pleasant indifference. The dangling arm, the dropped book, the fallen flowers, taken together form a tiny still life of indolence. The nearby hills are freshly plowed, a promising sign, and the cloud, sometimes interpreted as a skeleton, is a rosy pink. Whatever actions the scene implies are, for a moment, unimportant.

Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs

On July 22, Christie's Ltd. of New York will auction a complete set of lithographs, called Rotoreliefs by their creator, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Possibly the auction will include a demonstration of how the Japanese Koi fish can be made to spin around and even levitate off the surface of the print.

By the time of the scandal of his Nude Descending A Staircase at the New York Armory Show in 1913, the French-born Duchamp was beginning to chafe at the limitations of easel painting. Withdrawing from the art world to work in a library, Duchamp studied the rapidly changing subjects of mathematics of physics.

Having moved rapidly himself through several art movements, Duchamp's playful side led him, during the 1920s and 1930s, to create a series of kinetic works that he conceived as optical toys. Making apparent the deceptions that visual perceptions play on our minds fascinated Duchamp.

Beginning as a series of lithographs, The Rotoreliefs work as a series of gyrating discs that the artist dubbed an "Anemic Cinema." When the discs are spun on a turntable, they appear as three-dimensional objects, making visual symphonies that also parody traditional art.

Sailor Girl

When this photograph of the young Mme Colette Willy was taken, c. 1896, it was illegal for a woman to appear publicly in men's clothing in France without an official government cross-dressing permit (to be renewed every six months). Exceptions could be granted to performers but, in general, the permit did not include public gatherings. Before Colette's time, the writer and noblewoman George Sand (born Auruore Dudevant) had flouted the law, often passing for a man to gain access to places barred to women. The artist Rosa Bonheur kept her permit for decades, claiming she needed comfortable garb when she visited horse fairs and slaughterhouses to make sketches.

Image credit: Unidentified photographer, reprinted in Secrets of the Flesh by Judith Thurman, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1999.

Seraphine: A Film

Seraphine, the film, debuted last year before the global economic turmoil became apparent; now as it arrives on American movie screens, its story of an artist whose life and career are crushed by the privations of the Great Depression is that much more poignant.
Seraphine Louis (1864-1942), from the Oise region of northern France, was orphaned at the age of seven. Cared for by relatives until she could begin to earn money as a shepherdess, it was while working as a maid in 1912 that Seraphine met Wilhem Uhde, the "discoverer" of Pablo Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau. Astounded by the self-taught artist's fully realized paintings, Uhde helped her to find an audience but with the onset of the war, the German art collector was forced to flee from France.
When Uhde returned to Senlis in 1927, he stage- managed a great success for Seraphine's work. She reveled in a new freedom in her life and in art, but her inner emotional turbulence

Without oversimplification or condescension, Seraphine allows us to understand something of the alchemy of visual perception, sensuality, and psychological dynamics at work in the life of this artist. Yolande Moreau, who won a Cesar Award (the French equivalent of the Oscar) for her performance as Seraphine, makes the film a revelation, worthy company for such films as Camille Claudel and Pollock.

The paintings speak boldly for themselves, careful observation of natural phenomena filtered through an earthy pantheistic/ Christian spirit, speaking of wild nature as surely as the ancient mythological goddess Diana could. Tendrils vibrate almost audibly, their asymmetry somehow coheres into a satisfying whole.

Toujours France

On the occasion of Bastille Day, an image from the Musee de l'Armee in Paris.
And in a timely radio note, NPR's Morning Edition commemorates Bastille Day with some food-related French idioms at http://www.npr.org/.

Franz Rontag: Art Of The Bromoil

Like the autochrome, often featured here, the bromoil was an early photographic process that became outmoded as newer, more reliable methods of taking pictures were developed. Essentially, the bromoil was an oil based print that allowed talented practitioners to make painterly photographs. A major drawback was the inability make enlargements from the original image.
Again, like the autochrome, the bromoil process attracts new photographers even today because of the beauty of the imagery the process makes possible. It was also a favorite technique of the Pictorialsts of the 1910s and 1920s.

Franz Rontag (1897-1980) was an amateur photographer from Austria. Rontag's aims were different than those of the Pictorialists; he did not manipulate images or try to create effects but only wanted to make the most faithful and pleasing color pictures he could. The images shown here were made in the 1930s and are from http://de.geocities.com/heinrich_kreissl/
Is there a nostalgic quality inherent in these pictures or does the process create the aura? We know that the middle European world depicted here was changed irrevocably by the ugliness of war, that was already inherent in events not captured in artful photographs of daily life. But looking at recent bromoils by Jill Skupin Burkholder (on The Errant Aesthete website) makes me think that the process itself is conducive to a distanced way of seeing things.

Rabbits And Radish

Among the many European artists who emigrated to the United States during the 1930s, was Joseph Binder (1898-1972). Binder won prizes for his student work at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, and founded the Vienna Graphic Arts Studio in 1924. Binder had many successes in his adopted country, winning yet more prizes from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is remembered for his poster for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Blue In Green

It's unclear exactly when Paul Burty-Haviland (188-1950) took his well-known photograph but it was definitely before Henri Matisse painted his Woman Before An Aquarium (c. 1923, collection of the Art Institute of Chicago). Patricia Hampl's poem of the same name (1978), inspired by Matisse, evokes the underwater world of blue and green of these disparate images. Just as Aillaud's The Penguins makes us look twice, Hampl's poem makes us think twice about who is looking at whom through the glass.

1. Paul Burty-Haviland - Girl Before a Goldfish Bowl, c. 1898-1916, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.2. Gilles Aillaud - The Penguins from Eight Definitions of the Real, 1974, Pompidou Center, Paris.3. Jean Carlu - Aquarium de Monaco, 1925, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.4. Hermann Kosel - Aquarium de Monaco, 1944, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

Lost Art Of The Travel Poster

Someone pointed out to me recently that travel agents are a diminishing breed, their services replaced by doing it yourself online and hard economic times. This leads me to the thought that the travel poster may be an endangered art form.
The posters shown here date from the years between the First and Second World Wars. Catastrophe was brewing beyond those horizons, but you would never guess it from these specimens. Sailing, swimming, and tennis beneath cloudless skies lull the mind as much as they refresh the body. What kind of person would waste their summer plotting to assassinate an Archduke or invade a sleepy little country like Poland? There are no clues here. Stylistically, the posters are of their time but a bird flying low over the Mediterranean today might notice little significant change.

Images from the collection of the Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.

Sonia Delaunay At The Italian Institute Of Graphic Arts

"About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings." -(Paris,1911)
The "we" in question is artist Sonia Terk Delauanay (1885-1979) and her husband Robert Delauanay. Two years after that, their friend the

poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the "Orphism" for what the Delaunays were doing. As you can see, Sonia Delaunay's work is a form of geometric abstraction, sometimes called Cubist Simultaneity, in reference to contemporary theories of color and number and rhythm.
I first encountered Sonia Delaunay's work at a retrospective mounted by the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the year after Delaunay died. That show contained a full array of the media that Delaunay worked in from painting and graphic arts to textiles, fashion designs and even playing cards. Sonia Delaunay was the first woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Louvre in 1964.

The recently concluded exhibition of her work at Italy's National Institute of Graphic Arts in Rome is one more step away from the shadow of her expatriate circle in Paris. Marrying a fellow artist might seem a good idea from the point of view of mutual interests but, as is often the case, critics apply the "one per household" rule to artistic couples and the one is usually male.

The featured graphic works from the collection of the Marconi Foundation, Milan, have not been seen often in recent decades. Alternating experiments in primary and complementary colors and with geometric and curvilinear shapes invite the viewer to ponder the intricacies of visual perception with enjoyment.

While New York Sleeps

Estelle Taylor and Earl Metcalfe starred in the 1920 film While New York Sleeps, directed by Charles Brabin for 20th Century Fox. The picture was promoted as being "true to life" but was an eight reel melodrama. In New York, we don't have to choose between the two. Just a bit of political commentary regarding our state legislature.

Play House For A Queen

On the grounds of Versailles sits the ultimate summer place, modeled on an imaginary Normandy village. Designed by Richard Mique (1728-1794), favorite architect of Queen Marie Antoinette in 1783, it was known as Le Hameau de la Reine, or the Queen's Hamlet. Model farms were a favorite plaything among the old French aristocracy. Here they could play a grown-up version of dress-up, wearing the outfits of shepherdesses (as seen in paintings by Jean-Honore Fragonard and others), disporting themselves as milkmaids with the creme des vaches.
Rustic on the outside, luxurious on the inside, these little buildings allowed royalty to enjoy pleasures difficult to experience in their grand salons - informality and intimacy. Marie Antoinette reigned supreme at Le Hameau; it was the one place in his kingdom where Louis XVI was required to wait for an invitation before making a visit. A wife could while away her summer days in near monastic solitude.
Images: c.1910, from the collection of the Chateau de Versailles.

Surprise!

Blanco y Negro was an independent Spanish magazine, founded in 1891. Known for the high quality of its articles and illustrations, it was the first Spanish periodical to publish color photography in 1912.

D. Ramon Estrella, whose Jack-in-the-Box cover appeared during the 1920s, remains a mystery.

With Strings

These colorful marionettes come from the island of Java. In southeast Asia, for many centuries touring troupes of marionettes and their human makers were maintained by royalty for ceremonial and educational purposes, as well as for entertainment.

Homer, Plato and Aristotle all mention the existence of marionettes in ancient Greece and sometimes when a child died, its marionette was buried with it.

In 18th century France, we see a marionette play in Fragonard's aristocratic

Garden Party at Saint-Cloud.

The marionettes pictured in Daniele Adam's photograph Wheel of Marionettes (1974- from the collection of the Museum of European & Mediterranean Civilization in Paris) are characters in the Commedia dell'Arte that dates from the Italian Renaissance.

A marionette is, by definition, a puppet controlled by strings. So it is unsurprising that much humor, some gentle, and some extremely pointed makes use of that fact.

Their origins may be somewhat obscure, but one likes to think that the pleasure that marionette shows bring to their viewers is reason enough to celebrate them.

Feed Me, Please

This 19th century painting depicting visitors relaxing in the garden, At the Mortizhof Inn, Berlin by Adolf F. E. von Menzel, is a reminder of the pastoral aspect of urban living. A hungry little four-footed neighbor is about to join the ladies at their lunch.

French Perfume

“Odors…possess the power of infinite things.” – excerpted from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard..

A floral map of the world would highlight Damascus (home of the Damask rose) as well as Bulgaria and Turkey, Italy, Tunisia and India as home to the tuberose, Provence for lavender. Calabria for bitter orange and lemon, Madagascar for vanilla, Tuscany for iris, the Comoro Islands for ylang-ylang, Mayotte for cinnamon, Mysore for sandalwood, Indonesia for patchouli, the Balkans and the Massif Centrale for oak moss, geraniums from France, and of course bergamot from Bergamo, Italy.

Sexual dimorphism is reified in the notion that flowers are said to be gentle and “feminine”., while animal essences such as civet, musk and ambergris express the depth of “masculinity.”

Grasse, in eastern Provence, where the first perfumers’ guild was founded in 1582, is often called ‘the cradle of perfumery.” Perfumes came in handy to m ask the smell of the area’s tanning factories. The 17th century was a time of planting: oranges, carnations, jasmine and violets. The local abundance of flora is still prized by great perfumers.

Eau de cologne is a mixture of lemon, orange, bergamot, rosemary, and neroli. The classic 4711 appeared by 1792, made by the Muhlens family of Germany, although its exact origins are unclear.

In Paris, Madame du Barry, Marie Antoinette, and Napoleon’s Empress Josephine became clients of the city’s first perfumier, Jean-Francois Houbigant.

Pierre-Francois Guerlain opened his shop in 1828 on the Rue de Rivoli. Guerlain perfumes are identifiable by their disturbing fascination. Their first masterpiece, Jicky, a blend of flowers and civet supposedly named for an English girl who broke Aime Guerlain’s heart, was created in 1889, the year of the Eiffel Tower. About L’Heure Bleue (1912), composed of roses, iris, musk, and vanilla, Jacques Guerlain wrote: “The sun has set but the night hasn’t yet fallen. A moment suspended in time. The hour when a man is at last in harmony with the world and with light.” Mitsouko (1919), the Japanese word for mystery, was a favorite of Serge Diaghilev. Shalimar was introduced in 1925 to coincide with the International Exposition of Decorative Arts. (Jean Patou introduced Amour Amour that same year.) The name was intended to evoke the gardens of the Taj Mahal. Guerlinade is the word coined to encapsulate the special qualities of the company's confectionary aromas.

Paul Poiret was the first fashion designer to commission a fragrance, with a letterhead designed by Georges Lepape in 1911. Chanel No. 5 was named for its launch date, 5 May 1921. When asked what she wore to bed, Marilyn Monroe replied, “Chanel No. 5.” A young apprentice milliner, Jeanne Lanvin, was nicknamed the “Omnibus Kid” after she ran her bus to save the car fare. After she made her fortune in fashion, she brought out Arpege in 1927, inspired by her daughter’s piano practice. She also created the sulphurous My Sin, a fragrance that contained more than sixty different floral notes.

Perfume also has a place in the sacred as well as profane worlds. It is customary for a lotus flower to be placed at the feet of the Buddha and, for the ancient Egyptians, its fragrance was a presentment of divine life. Today, Greeks still strew sheaves of laurel and myrtle on church floors each morning.

The Greek glass perfume bottles pictured at right are in the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Note: The red and black Art Deco "Pierrot" perfume bottle was designed and produced by the Bernardaud Manufacterers of Limoges in 1930 and dedicated "A la Reine d'Angleterre." Musee Andre Dubouche, Limoges.

Bon Voyage!

A vacation of fantasy, luxury and, who knows, even romance, has long been the allure of the sea cruise. Ocean liners like Holland-America's Volendam and Nieuw Amsterdam set a standard
of sophistication, their Art Deco interiors more streamlined, more subtly hued than those of the competition, their passenger lists studded with the most glamorous guests. (Yes, that was Katherine Hepburn striding along the deck in smartly cut slacks.)
These posters, designed for the Holland-America line during the middle third of the 20th century by Dutch illustrator J. F. Lavies needed to make no pretense of realism. On Ladies' Night, all women would be princesses. Drinks were served by trained seals, to be followed by a flaming dessert, perhaps "Strawberries Romanov" . Romance awaited in the moonlight and international good will prevailed.

There's more at http://cruiselinehistory.com
Image credits: J. F. Lavies at http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/, Memory of the Netherlands.

Nothing Will Be As It Was...Tomorrow

“Got my feet on the road just to see you,
In my head got a taste of the dawn.
I know nothing will be as it was…tomorrow.

Tell me when will I hear from my people?
Tell me when will I hear from my friends?
Breathing fire deep down in my heart,
Nothing ever will keep us apart,

Holding onto a teardrop of sun in the mouth of the night.

Any day, any time, any hour,
You can hear our new song in the air.
I know nothing will be as it was…tomorrow.

Tell me what will I say to my people?

Tell what will I say to my friends?

Now that we've got our feet on the road,

Now that we've had a taste of the dawn,

Holding onto a teardrop of sun in the mouth of the night."

- English lyrics by Renee Vincent to Nada Sera Como Antes by Ronaldo Bastos Ribeiro, music by Milton Nascimento.

Thank you to all my listeners. It's been my pleasure.

School Of Fish

"Hawking, hunting, and heraldry" do not a bestseller make these days, but in the late 15th century when the printing press was the new thing, The Book of St. Albans was wildly popular. Dame Juliana Berners (there are several variants of her name and no reliable dates for her life) is said to have written the section on hunting, if not the entire volume. Treatise on Fishing (1496) is also credited to the pen of this shadowy woman, believed to have been well-born and a Prioress or, as some men have speculated, not to have existed at all.

These days, The Book of St. Albans is remembered for containing the first printed collection of "terms of venery", or collective nouns. Ever since then, making up collective nouns has been a favorite game of words, spawning most recently James Lipton's 1968 bestseller An Exaltation of Larks. A glint of goldfish, a scuttle of crabs, a school of fish (term number 132 in the Book of St. Albans), you get the idea.

We are fascinated by our fellow vertebrates floating effortlessly in their watery environment; perhaps we did so once as well. Fish have sustained us as nourishment, a task they did not volunteer for, but they have also nourished our imaginations. The images here span at least a thousand years, yet they share a wonderment at the aquatic life, an implicit belief that a fish is a marvelous creature. Christians know the parable of the loaves and the fishes, and in Japanese lore the goldfish (koi) symbolizes perseverance in the face of adversity. That may help to explain why we want to imagine ourselves into the picture, whether it be Edward Weston's 1917 photograph of Yvonne Verlaine, titled The Goldfish, or the 1920s Life magazine cover that captures a mermaid in conversation with fish.

From faithful representation and decoration to the surrealism of Max Ernst and the "thought in things" of contemporary artist Kiff Slemmons, there is a fish to feed every (aesthetic) hunger.

1. Life magazine, cover, 1920s. 2. Japanese Carp, 18th century, Musee Guimet, Paris. 3. Chinese silk fragment with goldfish, Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Musee Guimet, Paris. 4. Maghreb Fish tile, Musee de Quai Branly, Paris. 5. South Korea, Carp Jumping out of the Water, Yi Ou Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) , Musee Guimet, Paris. 6. Ernest Chaplet, Vase with Fish Jumping, c. 1883-1885, Musee D'Orsay, Paris. 7. Koloman Moser, Fish Marbled Paper, c.1904, Leopold Museum Archive, Munich. 8. H. Verstijnen, Design for Fish Cup, Ceramics Museum, Netherlands. 9. Edward Weston, The Goldfish, 1917, Getty Archive, Los Angeles. 10. Hans Reichel, Violet Fish, 1925, Pompidou Center, Paris. 11. James McConnell Anderson (1907-1998) , Fish, Shearwater Pottery, Mississippi. 12. Gabriel Argy-Rousseau, Angel Fish, 1925, Christie's Ltd., NYC. 13. Max Ernst, Les Poissons Noctambules, 1972, Pompidou center, Paris. 14. Kiff Slemmons, Fish Dream brooch, 1993, Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The Curious Frog

There he is, the little frog scrambling to peer over the edge, like the bear who went over the mountain to see what he could see. He has his special place here, an example of Colette's invitation: "Regarde!"

"serene and still

the mountain viewing
frog"
So wrote Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), Japanese poet who wrung from a life filled with struggle and sorrow poems full of wisdom and joy.


Image: Kato Shun'u - Tea ceremony stand, Seto Ware, Edo period, Freer Gallery, Washington, DC.

Lazy Afternoon

"It's a lazy afternoon/ And the beetle bugs are zooming/ And the tulip trees are blooming/ And there's not another human in view,/ But us two./ It's a lazy afternoon/ And the farmer leaves his reaping/ And the meadow cows are sleeping/ And the speckled trouts stop leaping up stream/ As we dream./ A far pink cloud hangs over the hill/ Unfolding like a rose/ If you hold my hand and sit real still,/ You can hear the grass as it grows./ It's a hazy afternoon/ And I know a place that's quiet,/ except for daisies running riot/ And there's no one passing by it/ to see/ Come spend this lazy afternoon with me." - John Latouche (?1914-1956?)

Lyricist John Latouche worked with Vernon Duke and George Balanchine on the first all-black Broadway musical, the 1940 production of Cabin In The Sky. In 1954 he collaborated with Jerome Moross on the musical The Golden Apples that included the song Lazy Afternoon. Latouche wrote the libretto for Douglas Moore's 1956 opera The Ballad of Baby Doe.

Image credits:

1. Albert Marquet - Island of the Swans, 1919, Pompidou Center, Paris.

2. Aristide Maillol - By the Seine, Museum of Fine Arts, Valenciennes, France.

Cappiello's Caricatures

Remembered today for his poster art, so strikingly modern when compared to the work of the late 19th century master Jules Cheret, Leonetto Cappiello (1875-1942) began his career as a caricaturist for Le Rire, and other Parisian magazines, in 1896. Born in Livorno, Italy, Cappiello moved to Paris where he made the acquaintance of Le tout Paris, at least the artsy bohemian part that became his best subject.
Comparing the young bride and fledgling author, Mme Colette Willy, with that of her brilliant, wily older husband, the writer and rake, Henry Gauthier Villars ("Willy"), it is easy to see where Cappiello's sympathies lay. Whether Cappiello knew that Willy took credit for his wife's literary output before the rest of the world found out, I don't know, but his snake-like, pinched M. Willy was not intended to evoke admiration.
Willy made his name as a music critic and musicians and music-hall performers were also a staple of the Cappiello gallery. The Giacomo Puccini seated at the piano was in the midst of a creative outburst any composer woudl envy - the debuts of La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madame Butterfly (1904).Another well known couple who attracted Cappiello's attention included the young Colette's close friend, Margeurite Moreno (1871-1948) . Moreno's long career theater and film was just beginning at the turn of the century when her performances charmed audiences at the Comedie Francaise.
Moreno was the mistress of Catulle Mendes (1841-1909), best described by the old-fashioned term "man of letters." At the same time, Mendes was married to Judith Gauthier, daughter of the writer Theophile Gauthier (Mademoiselle de Maupin - 1835). Presumably, Moreno tired of the nondevelopmental state of their relationship, as she married another writer, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) in London in 1900. Schwob died in 1905 from the effects of syphilis. Mendes also came to a melancholy end - his body was discovered one morning in the train tunnel near Saint Germain. Investigators guessed that Mendes mistakenly stepped off the train into thin air, believing he was at the station.

For all its inventiveness, Cappiello's later works cannot match his caricatures for their sense of verissimo.

Images from the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Alice Munro

"Meaning is what you're after, resonance, some strange beauty" - Alice Munro speaking at Trinity College, Dublin, on 25 June 2009 as she accepted the International Man Booker Prize.

How to write about Alice Munro, one of the greatest living writers and one of the greatest of all short story writers? A writer who can be compared to Anton Chekhov without exaggerating (Cynthia Ozick did it), Munro adds lustre to any prize she receives and stature to her chosen metier by practicing it.

I have often thought of Alice Munro together with Joyce Carol Oates, a fellow nominee for this year's Prize. Munro was born in southwestern Ontario (1931), and Oates was born in western New York State (1938), only a few hundred miles and a few years apart. In one respect they embody the stereotypes of their respective nations: Munro writes with measured understatement while Oates employs a heightened sense of drama. Between them they have created a panoramic witness to almost a half century. Their work shares a movement out from the self to explore the world. Today, I wish I could remember which philosopher said that some people look out at the world and can see only reflections of themselves, while others look into themselves and find the world.

Alice Munro's new book of stories, Too Much Happiness, will be published in the fall of 2009.

Images are woodblock prints by Walter J. Phillips, Canadian artist, from the website http://www.sharecom.ca/phillips.

Up, Up And Away

The French call them montgolfieres in honor of the brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, who invented the hot air balloon in 1783. Or, so the accepted story goes. Others claim the honor belongs to a Portuguese priest named Bartolomeu de Gusmao by several decades. What is certain is that by the second half of the 19th century, the French were balloon-mad. The skies over Paris were dotted with colorful flying globes bobbing and swaying in the wind. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, balloons functioned as couriers, ferrying people and messages in and out of the besieged city of Paris.

Puvis de Chavannes painted The Balloon in 1870, so we may interpret the waving woman as embodying hope at a difficult moment. Victor Navlet's panorama dates from 1855; the red balloon floats above a hazy Parisian landscape. All is calm.

At The Shore

"No sweetie, we don't go to the beach. We're from New Jersey - we go to the shore." - Christopher Weyant, caption for a cartoon from The New Yorker 18 August 2003.

So the father explains to his little girl who listens wide-eyed, sand pail and shovel in hand, as the two stand on the beach. And so it has been since the mid 19th century as millions have flocked to seaside resorts each summer. For anyone lucky enough to grow up near an ocean, sand, salt, and a guide to the ebb and flow of the tides are the necessary accouterments of a real beach.
My mother's bright red beach bag spent the summer at the ready in the truck of the car, striped beach blanket, sunglasses, lotions, inflatable beach ball, and paperback books neatly packed. All that we needed to go was our bathing suits and the large thermos to be filled with lemonade, topped by three nesting cups - "Mama cup, Daddy cup, and Baby cup."
Just look at Winslow Homer's Eagle Head and imagine the sound of the waves. You can hear them and the gulls and smell the salt before you reach the shore. No view is quite so thrilling as that first glimpse of the horizon in Jacques Durand-Henriot's Beach Cabins at Saint-Valery.
You can observe the evolution of the beach costume from Fernande Mathey at the Beach in her ruffled pink dress through Louis Valtat's black-clad Bicyclette to the tanned group in the Jantzen ad. Beach cabins from Europe to Japan allowed bathers to change clothes modestly when they reached their destination. (Read Dr. Kathryn Ferry's history of beach huts at http://www.beach-huts.com/ .)

The intertidal delight children experience at the shore is made visible in the magical underwater swimming of Babar and baby. The littoral zone, between high and low tides, a place that appears and disappears and reappears, is the ideal summer place.

A Quiet Life

The humble still life, presenting the simple objects of daily living, is an occasion for contemplation, aesthetic and otherwise. Almost six centuries separate Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1399 - 1464) and Heinrich Kuhn (1866-1944), yet their works are comprehensible together.
The amazing clarity of the carafe on the fireplace ledge is a bit of a cheat - it is a detail from van der Weyden's Annunciation (15th century), but it can stand alone as a vignette, the pleasing roundness of the carafe mirrored in the onion and the orange.

Thanks to the vagaries of early 20th century photographic processes, the oranges in Henrich Kuhn's photograph present a different aspect, their deeply saturated hue is perhaps an objective correlative of their intense flavor. Here the carafe - and glasses - appear placed as part of a deliberate composition offered to us, whereas in van der Weyden we have a found moment, discovered by the viewer.

The Romance Of The Hotel

Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has been gone now for almost as long as it existed (1923-1968), yet it looms large in Wrightian mythology. Finished just in time to weather the great Kanto earthquake, waters from the reflecting pool enabled firefighters to douse the fires that threatened it as a result of the quake. Wright encouraged the notion that his building was unscathed; in truth, his floating foundation was a conductor for seismic tremors that caused interior buckling.

The undated photograph of Wright, sitting in the hotel's lobby, shows a man whose confidence at least equaled his talents. A major collector of Japanese art, when Wright came to design a hotel funded by the Imperial family of Japan, he chose a style that could be described as Mayan Revival. Romantic, to be sure, but there is something subversively romantic in the very notion of a hotel, the mixing of an ever-changing cast of transients, meeting promiscuously, observed only by the group of strangers that constitute the hotel's staff.
If there is not, somewhere, a book about the hotel as novel, it is merely an oversight. The Edwardian novelist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) wrote two novels, Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) and Imperial Hotel (1930), that are thought to be based on London's prestigious Savoy Hotel where Bennett often stayed after he became a successful writer and where an omelette named for him is still on the menu. Austrian novelist Vicki Baum (1888-1860) became one of the earliest of international bestselling novelists based on her 1929 Menschen im Hotel, which in turn became the film Grand Hotel (1932) starring John Barrymore and Greta Garbo. It is Garbo's character, the ballerina Grusinskaya, who utters the words often attributed to Garbo herself: "I want to be alone."

A good hotel novel is like a banquet, offering an array of stories to feast on and the genre is cross-cultural. The Bengali writer Mani Shankar Mukherjee's delightful 1962 novel Chowringee, only recently published in English, revolves around Shankar, a young man working at the reception desk of Calcutta's Hotel Shahajahan. A servant knows more about the masters than the masters know about the servants, as Shankar understands. "When I had checked in here, it was filled with known and familiar faces. Some left after breakfast; a few disappeared after lunch; others went away after tea. Now it was time for dinner, and no one was left ... I, the patriarch, seemed to have sat down at an empty table."
At one point, Shankar assures the reader, "At least a dozen novels about hotels are written in this country every year." Who knows? There may be one about Wright's Imperial Hotel.

Images are from the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with the exception of the frontispiece, from the Getty Archive.