Expressive and Unkosher

Chaim Soutine's The Beef (1925)

Jewish artist of Lithuanian decent, Chaim Soutine, made a splash in Paris with his unique brand of expressionism. Read an interesting book on him last week that discussed his varying receptions as outsider (Eastern European Jew living in Paris fascinated with Catholic ritual and marketplaces hanging raw, bloodied meat), as insider (a successful artist in his own right, though not without hard times), and as prophet of Abstract Expressionism (hence his popularity in the US in the 1940s and 50s).

Before I only knew him as buddy of Modigliani, now I will remember him as painter of gross meats. And other stuff...

More awesome Sonia Delaunay stuff...

She had this Matra car painted in her style for a retrospective in 1967!!


Last bit on her before I move on. A quote:
"I have had three lives: one for Robert, one for my son, and my grand-sons, a shorter one for myself. I have no regrets for not having been more concerned with myself. I really didn't have the time." (Sonia Delaunay, qtd in Baron and Damase, p. 201)

What I want for next trip to Rockaway Beach...

Wearable modernism from Sonia Terk Delaunay - a painter who got into textile designs and fashion after making a patchwork "Cubist" quilt for her newborn son, Charles, out of remnants (that's so sweet I almost threw up in my mouth). Her stuff is pretty amazing, though, and she took on applied arts full-time in order to pay the bills for herself and her painter husband Robert.

Seriously, though, I have new respect for Sonia Delaunay after reading some of Cottington's Cubism and Its Histories and flipping through a well-illustrated biography by Stanley Baron and Jacques Damase. Hope I have time to get my hands on the catalog to the show that recently ended at Cooper Hewitt.

But I must stick to my schedule...

Wild Beasts...

Read (skimmed) two books on the Fauves today - one a the formalist, straightforward chronology by John Elderfield and the other an interesting re-reading of the "Wild Beasts" as being more chez Donatello (and thus tradition) than traditionally believed (though the famous original naming of the fauves was indeed that they were chez rather than parmi or contre the more classicizing sculpture also on display at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. This book, Fauve Painting: the Making of Cultural Politics, was extremely insightful and provocative, looking to cultural notions of gendered possession, tourism, national identity in relation to the Latin past and the primitive "other," and the rise of Picasso. If I ever teach the Fauves at length, this will be on the bibliography for sure.

Basically, they weren't as wild and crazy as everyone mythologizes them to be (though they were still pretty cool... sorta), and were very much in dialogue with the past.

This is awesome, because normally my reaction to the Fauves was "yada yada, bright colors, Green Line..." then the gesture of the center-left figure below:




Andre Derain, The Dance, 1906

Today's Previously Unknown (to me) Work of Art

Umberto Boccioni's Beata solitudo (1908). Pen on paper, 64x33cm.

Detachment from desire in the top register with all order of human desire/lust/love in the lower (all of which inevitably end in DEATH). Yikes. And I thought The City Rises (1910-11) was creepy...

Guest Blogger...

I got to do a post for tonight's Nationals-Cubs game over at Sharkadina, [Nats centerfielder] Roger Bernadina's Unofficial Blog. Check it out!

More on orals coming soon...