Odd exchanges at artistic events: part one

A few days ago, I mentioned in passing a small Chagall exhibit I recently visited at the National Gallery of Canada. It was a collection of Marc Chagall's (1887-1985) illustrations of the story of Daphnis and Chloe - two rather clueless youngsters who take a year to figure out the mechanics of sex. They spend rather a lot of that year naked, although they do wear clothes in the winter and at their wedding ceremony, thank goodness.

Both begin life being suckled by wild animals. The security guard leant towards me confidentially as I checked back on some notes posted at the entrance of the exhibit.

"Do you think that's possible?" She nodded towards the drawings. "Could a baby really be nursed by a sheep or goat?"

I thought for a second.

"Well, the animal would have to lie down, and the baby would need to have a strong suck…"

She nodded appreciatively.

Taken by surprise

New Forest

A few weeks ago, I nipped into the National Gallery to see a small Chagall exhibit. And it was okay.

However, because it was small (which, because it was in the National Gallery, meant it was pretty big), there was another exhibit slipped in beside it. It was the work of an English photographer of whom I'd never heard: one Frederick H. Evans (1853-1943).

I ended up enjoying this exhibit more than the Chagall one -- although the Chagall was perfectly fine. I guess it was the pleasant surprise.

Gloucester Cathedral: Alabaster Effigy

This was one of my favourites, probably taken in the last decade of the 19th century. I love the layers seen through the arches.

A Sea of Steps

This is one of his most famous photos, taken at Wells Cathedral in 1904.

Afterwards, I went to have a quiet lunch at Memories which used to be a rather funky restaurant on Clarence, but the ancient building it was in was declared dangerous, so it's now a rather posh place tucked in behind the corner of St Patrick and Sussex Drive. The food is still good, though, and they were playing a song by Sting that I'd completely forgotten about.

Last week, when younger daughter got lost and my mind was full of a tune by Paul Simon, I looked up the song on YouTube and up came this recent performance by Paul Simon and Sting which dovetails "Mother and Child Reunion" with "Love is the Seventh Wave".

And that too, was a pleasant surprise.

Nose dive

Kingfisher 1983

When I first came to Hades almost exactly fifteen years ago, one of my first stops was the National Gallery of Canada. Back then, you could stroll through the permanent galleries for free; you only paid for special exhibitions. I had been familiar with the almost photographic and slightly unsettling pictures of Alex Colville - nude people standing around refrigerators at night drinking milk and the like.

My gallery technique is to hurry through a display, then return to the ones that call to me. I got a very strange call from Colville's Kingfisher. It's very tall and thin, and when you get close, there's a sinister gleam in the bird's eye.

Moon and Cow 1963

One of the things I do to take the sting out of having to leave Victoria to come back and live in Hades is saving treats for myself. This year, I resisted going to the Alex Colville retrospective until a couple of days before it closed. (Alex Colville died two years ago, preceded by a few months by his wife and muse Rhoda Wright.)

Seven Crows 1980

This meant I had younger daughter along with me. This is usually not a problem. The art gallery tires her quickly, but she says she enjoys it.

The problem this summer was that she had taken to walking around with her eyes closed, a development that started at school last spring and slopped over into our home life as the summer began. I wondered how on earth she would manage an art exhibit.

Dog, Boy and School Bus 1960

She managed it by setting herself up in a corner near this painting. I pointed it out to her, but she turned her head and told me to go away. I went to the other side of the room and examined the other paintings, watching her surreptitiously. She remained standing in the corner, and I mean facing the corner. I got her to move from room to room by telling her where I was going then moving ahead, praying she would follow.

Dog, Boy, and St John River 1958

When we were walking to the bus stop, I asked her which painting she liked the best, expecting it to be "Dog, Boy and School Bus".
"I liked 'Dog, Boy, and St John River'", she said. I had to look it up when we got home. Clearly, she had been paying attention.

She also liked the Alex Colville movie connections. Apparently the art direction of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is based on Colville's work, and about four of his paintings are hanging in the background of scenes in The Shining.
"That's the movie where Jack Nicholson says 'Heeeere's Johnny!", younger daughter informed me.
"Have you seen that movie?" I've never had the nerve, myself, but they've shown films like Psycho at her school.
"No!" she scoffed. She's a great scoffer.
"It's a very famous movie, Mom!"

Horse and Church 1964

The paintings that stuck with me? Well, this one is haunting. Colville painted it after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A black horse bolting in blind panic from a windowless chapel. It feels a bit like my life lately.

Mr. Wood in April 1960

However, this one kept calling me back. It's a painting in springtime. The bleak early spring of eastern and central Canada. I like the truthfulness of it.

My kingfisher favourite was not a part of this retrospective.

No beginning and no end

Still Life and Street - a 1937 woodcut

It's the third day of what desperate Ottawans are calling "spring". Filthy piles of snow are melting into filthy puddles, and the buses and sidewalks are suddenly full of people pushing walkers, or in motorized wheelchairs. You don't see much of the elderly or disabled in the winter months; this isn't the ideal city for them.

I thought about this as I followed the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter down Sussex Drive toward the National Gallery. Last March, I struggled to keep up with them and had to stop for rests every time my knees gave out. Today, I gave thanks for being able to walk and stand. Evidently, I've been given a respite, but I'm grimly aware that last year was probably a preview of my own eventual decrepitude. Rather like winter, which always comes back, and is forecast to close in again this weekend.

Best to rejoice in what is. Among the exhibits currently at the gallery is a retrospective of the mind-bending images of MC Escher. It's a small exhibit by the Gallery's standards, only taking up three large showrooms, but with Escher, that's probably ample enough brainwork for one afternoon.

For those -- like me -- who are only familiar with posters of creatures seeming to crawl out of two-dimensional designs, or stairs that keep flipping over, it's something else to see Escher's early work: woodcut scenes from Italy created out of delicate crosshatching or hundreds of vertical strokes. In the centre of the first hall is a display table showing a sketch of a scene, the block with the woodcut for the same scene, and finally the print made from the woodcut. I found myself rather preferring the block with an image that wasn't a negative, exactly, but the city-scape at night which seemed to be emitting its own light.

Above is one of the prints that made me stop, go back and gaze. It's an early example of Escher playing tricks with a view out the window -- with no window. The street simply grows out of the desk and the books blend into the walls of the buildings. It's subtler than his more famous stuff. Go take a good look.

Below is a work from twenty years later which is more recognizable as Escher. I saw the devils before I found the angels. Is it a judgment?

Circle Limit IV - a 1960 woodcut

When I got home, I went up into the bedroom and wondered at an unfamiliar but not unpleasant odour. I realized the Resident Fan Boy had opened the window for the first time in five months.

He'll have closed it by the weekend.

Even more Doré

Can't resist adding a couple more items about Gustave Doré as a result of searching around the web for things to illustrate yesterday's post.

As I mentioned, there were three or four screens dotted around the galleries, showing works by Doré followed by film clips showing his influence.  One particularly surprising one were these engravings from The Divine Comedy

 followed by a fairy scene from the 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

There were also several links with various film versions of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.  However, while I was looking up images last night, I came across this

and was immediately reminded of this scene from 1951's Scrooge, my very favourite rendition of A Christmas Carol.

I also searched high and low for excerpts from the documentary shown at the National Gallery of Canada with English subtitles, but all I could find  (aside from the usual slightly tedious promotional video from the National Gallery) was an overview of the exhibit from the Musée d'Orsay which features many of the same speakers (though not Tomi Ungerer, alas). Although I recognize much of what is glimpsed in this video, I'm left with the impression that the show at the Musée d'Orsay was considerably bigger. On the other hand, as I observed in yesterday's post, I'm pretty sure I didn't see everything, even in two visits.

Adoring Doré

Saute-Mouton (Leap Frog), a small sculpture by Doré which might have been inspired by a tale by 16th Century writer François Rabelais

I've been trying to balm myself (as opposed to embalming myself) with things I've saved for after our return to Hades in late August.  One of those things is the Gustave Doré exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada.
Actually, when I first got wind of the exhibit last spring, it was all I could do to keep myself from running down to the National Gallery right away.  I've mentioned my teen obsession with Doré's wood engravings of Dante's Inferno before.  Last week, I took younger daughter to the exhibit, and she enjoyed the various screens showing clips illustrating how Doré's art influenced film in the twentieth and twenty-first century.  (She particularly enjoyed the links to Shrek II and Oliver!)  However, she has her limits, so I cast quick glances at what I could, and made a mental note to return when she was back in school.

That day was today and I am so glad I did!  The exhibit is so rich and dense, I could probably go back a couple of times more and still make discoveries.  (But I won't.)

I had a little more time, but really not that much more staying power than younger daughter, so I made a bee-line for the end of the exhibit and worked my way backward - which is also a great way to see some works without crowds, as people tend to cluster in the first few rooms.  I remembered what I'd already seen and zeroed in on what I'd skipped, sitting down on the very low benches and dialling in the requisite numbers on my audio-guide.

For example, this painting -- Doré sketched, sculpted, and painted in oils and water-colours -- was one featured in most advertisements for the exhibit.

It's a strange, dark, and disturbing scene (like rather a lot of the pictures in this exhibit) of a devastated battlefield.  It's difficult to see in this small example - most of Doré's paintings are huge, and I think you can click on it to enlarge it - but there are bodies, including that of a mother and child, piled in the foreground, and the Winged Victory, representing France, has thrown her arms around the neck of a Sphinx who gazes back into her eyes impassively.  The painting is called Enigma and it's on the wall with two other allegorical paintings with the Winged Victory in similarly desperate situations: The Black Eagle of Prussia and The Defence of Paris.  I learned from the audio guide that these three paintings formed a triptych as part of Doré's response to the Franco-Prussian War, and that they have not been seen together since 1885, two years after the artist's death.

I moved through the galleries and focussed with a purpose on wild Scottish landscapes (Doré was an avid climber), book illustrations, and paintings ranging from the disturbing to the sentimental.

This watercolour is entitled Christmas Eve and shows the German Christkind who delivers the gifts in Germany.

I also spent a chunk of my limited time looking at wood engravings of scenes of London, from Doré's collaboration with Blanchard Jerrold entitled London: A Pilgrimage.  There were a limited selection of what had been scores of wood engravings portraying the destitute and the wealthy of London around 1870.  (The book was published in 1872.)

Apparently, Doré did hundreds of surreptitious sketches and incorporated them into scenes in streets, parks, theatres, and even opium dens.  For someone who had ancestors living in London in the 1860s and 1870s, it's quite an eyeful.  As the film presentations around the galleries demonstrated, pretty well every film version of a novel by Charles Dickens has scenes lifted almost directly from these pictures -- although Dickens himself passed away in 1870.

This engraving was featured at the exhibit and is entitled Asleep Under the Stars. 

Finally,  I couldn't resist entering one of the screening theatres to see a fairly lengthy but utterly delightful French documentary on Doré, which began with a series of his drawings from ages five to eleven (prodigious, of course) and ended with even more film parallels (with rather a lot of scenes from various editions of King Kong.  The interviews included Tomi Ungerer, whose books formed a weird and wonderful part of my daughters' childhoods.  He described the drawings he remembered best from Gustave Doré's works.

It explained a lot.

Once in a blue moon

So I had one chance, and one chance only, to see the "Van Gogh Up Close" exhibit which is having its one Canadian stop at the National Gallery. I booked tickets for the first group of the day and used my time-honoured art gallery strategy which works particularly well at popular showings: I strode past all the people bunching up at the first pictures at the beginning of the exhibit, and made my way past small gatherings of slightly suspicious security staff to the very last room and started working my way backwards. This way, I had nearly two rooms to myself.

I also don't go to every single painting; I scan the walls and go to those that call to me. The first one that drew me in was the one you see above. It's called "Tree Trunks in the Grass", and it was painted some time during the last six months of Van Gogh's life.

As I "listened" for other paintings (and about half a dozen kept pulling me back), I remembered the first (and only other) Van Gogh exhibit I saw some years ago in Toronto. I used my strategy then and got hypnotised by a contemporary of Van Gogh's named Louis Anquetin. See if you agree:
Oh, and there really is a blue moon tonight.

Eureka!

In the midst of a miserable week full of crying jags, rage, injustice, and possibly even cruelty (I've been trying to pluck up the courage to blog about it, but who the hell would want to read it?), I have this small triumph.

Google Images has a new feature called "Search by Image" which allows you to drag-and-drop, or upload an image into the search field. Remember a little while back, I was ruminating on my eleven-year bedazzlement and befuddlement on the origins of this photo which I see every time we have lunch in the Elgin Street Diner? Well, I uploaded the image and the one, single match took me to a French site which informed me that the photographer was Sam Tata, born in China in 1911. From there, all I had to do was "google" Sam Tata and among the many hits was this link:
Coolie Woman, Monsoon, Bombay, India

....to the National Gallery of Canada. It turns out that the gallery has an 1987 print of the 1948 photo, and that Sam Tata died a mere six years ago --- in Sooke, British Columbia. Sooke is 39 kilometres (24 miles) west of Victoria!

Tonight, when the troubles looming on Monday fly in my face like gnats, I'll conjure up this image and hold it against the dark...