Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili...in dreams...
'Each one was divided at the groin, whereupon her fleshy thighs separated.'
The enigmatic, polyglot Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has fascinated architects and historians since its publication in 1499. Part fictional narrative and part scholarly treatise, richly illustrated with wood engravings, the book is an extreme case of erotic furor, aimed at everything -- especially architecture -- that the protagonist, Poliphilo, encounters in his quest for his beloved, Polia. Among the instances of the book's manifesto-like character is Polia's tirade defending the right of women to express their own sexuality, probably the first sustained argument of this type, which lifts the book's erotic theme from the realm of ribaldry to the more daring one of sexual politics.printed by Aldus Manutius Venice: 1499
Eros and the Metaphor of the Architectural Body
The name Poliphilo means "lover of many things." The name Polia, in turn, means "many things." And to be sure, Poliphilo does love many things besides Polia. ...But he loves architecture most: he loves it as much as he loves Polia, in the same carnal way. One after the other, the buildings in the book become objects of desire, metaphors for Polia’s solido corpo.
Indeed, among the dreamlike features of the buildings is the inordinate feeling of happiness they impart to the beholder. Poliphilo characterizes the marble of the triumphal arch as "virginal," the veinless marble of another surface as "flawless," which is the sma eterm he uses to describe the skin of a certain nymph. Upon seeing the buildings, Poliphilo feels "extreme delight," "incredible joy," "frenetic pleasure and cupidinous frenzy". The buildings fill him with the highest carnal pleasure" and with "burning lust." He loves them not just because they are beautiful to behold, but also because they are fragrant and agreeable to touch. He partakes of their pleasures with all his senses. In front of the frieze of a sleeping nymph, he cannot keep from plcing his hand on her knees and "fondling and squeezing" them, nor can he resist pressing his lips to her breasts and sucking them.
The sexuality of the buildings Poliphilo loves is polymorphic. He approvingly describes the column of a certain temple as "hermaphrodotic," because they combine male and female characteristics. The altar of Bacchus is made of darkly veined marble especially selected to express the virility of that deity, and it is carved with a grat phallus "rigidly regorous." Above the reclining nude body of a sleeping nymph leers a naked satyr with a watchful eye and an erect penis.
This erotization of architecture comes to its logical conclusion. In three cases, Poliphilo manages to locate the appropriate orifice through which he can engage in sexual congress with particular buildings. His response, always described at length and in great detail, is sheer coital ecstacy. In one case, the effect on the building is mutual. Liane Lefaivre
"The Nymph Polia perceiuing well the change of my colour and blood comming in more stranger sort than Tripolion or Teucrion, thrise a day changing the colour of his flowers, and my indeuoring to sende out scalding sighes deeply set from the bottome of my hart, she did temper and mitigate the same with hir sweete and friendly regards, pacifieng the rage of my oppressing passions, so as notwithstanding my burning minde in these continuall flames and sharpe prouocations of loue, I was aduised patiently to hope euen with the bird of Arabia in hir sweet nest of small sprigs, kindled by the heate of the sunne to be renewed."
HYPNEROTOMACHIA
Friday, April 10, 2009
I Am Still the Great Isis! ...
Odilon Redon (1840 - 1916)
Je suis toujours la grande Isis! Nul n'a encore soulevé mon voile! Mon fruit est le soleil! (I Am Still the Great Isis! Nobody Has Ever Yet Lifted My Veil! My Fruit Is the Sun!) from La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) (plate XVI)1896
The majority of Redon's lithographs are found in albums based on thematic or literary subjects. He was greatly inspired by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert, whose unusual sensibilities were well suited to the artist's own. Redon was so moved by Flaubert's 1874 prose poem The Temptation of Saint Anthony that he created three separate projects based on it.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Tadanori Yokoo...
Tadanori Yokoo (born 1936) is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter.
Tadanori Yokoo, (pronounced "yoko-o") born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.
www.tadanoriyokoo.com
Elisabeth Collins...
Woman by the Sea circa 1945
The Man in Half-Armour circa 1945
A Woman Reading in a Pond circa 1945
Elisabeth Collins once explained her somewhat episodic painting career by asserting that ‘living and people come first’. Her marriage to a fellow artist, Cecil Collins, entailed her loving gift to him of much of her time and energy for the 58 years they were together: he acknowledged her as the inspiration of his life and work, the Lady and the Angel in his paintings.
She overcame some family opposition to become a sculpture student at Leeds School of Art before going on to continue her sculpture studies in London. She met Cecil Collins soon after starting at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, and they were married as students in 1931. They moved to the country, first to a simple cottage in Buckinghamshire where Elisabeth fetched their water from a well and Eric Gill was one of their neighbours. Years later she recalled: ‘We only had £5 a week, which was my allowance from my parents. It was enough if you lived in obscurity, and we preferred it that way… Living the way we did had real quality.’
The Collins’ met the American artist Mark Tobey in 1936, and were invited by him to come and live near the idealistic community founded by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst at Dartington. Dartington, like the Cornish School in Seattle, aimed to provide an opportunity for a co-ordinated study of all the arts – music, dance, theatre, drawing and painting. Elisabeth and Cecil made many friends and gradually became more involved with the community. At the outbreak of the War they moved to Dartington itself, where Cecil became director of the Art Studio Workshop after the internment of the German artist and designer Hein Heckroth.
This was a significant and productive period of their lives. For Elisabeth, the communal pooling of domestic chores like cooking and washing released time for her to paint, encouraged by Tobey and his innovative drawing classes. Tobey believed that by making an effort to express their ideas on paper, his students were ‘freeing’ themselves, ‘opening up great powers for living the life of the artist within us all’. Elisabeth responded with an outpouring of magical gouaches and drawings – naïve, yet sophisticated and strangely charming. Her pictures depicted a colourful, dreamlike world, once described as being from ‘the Eastern European fairy-tale province of her imagination’. It was an image in one of Elisabeth’s early drawings, The First Fool, that inspired Cecil Collins’ great series of works on the theme of the Fool – to him a symbol of ‘purity of consciousness’.
In 1943 the Collins’ left Dartington, and moved to Cambridge, where Elisabeth occasionally exhibited some of her gouache paintings under the name ‘Belmont’ as a way of keeping her work independent of Cecil’s growing reputation. His 1944 London exhibition at the LeFevre Gallery had received great acclaim, and his seminal essay The Vision of the Fool, was published in 1947.
In 1951 Cecil Collins was offered a teaching post at the Central School of Art in London, and for many years travelled from Cambridge several days a week. Later he and Elisabeth moved to London, where they shared a house in Chelsea with the writer and poet Kathleen Raine – Elisabeth and Cecil lived in their own top floors of the house for the rest of their lives. Their home became a focus for a wide circle – composers, writers, poets, artists, and Cecil’s students and admirers. Cecil painted in the studio room below, while Elisabeth worked on their dining table, making small drawings and gouaches on scraps and fragments of paper she had saved; and writing letters in her distinctive idiosyncratic handwriting (always in red ink).
After Cecil’s death in 1989, Elisabeth began to use a corner of his studio, keeping her numerous small works in progress hidden under a piece of cloth. Often she would find an early drawing or watercolour and start to work on it again many years later, saying that she now knew what was wrong with it. She would often put a work which she was still thinking about into a frame and hang it on the stairs for a time, ‘to wait and let colours settle… often all sorts of things emerge.’
The years on her own became a period when Elisabeth produced a substantial amount of her small-scale gouache paintings: colourful, poetic fantasies, imbued with a quirky wit. Even in her eighties and nineties, when she had developed a slight tremor, and drew and wrote with an almost quavering ink line, this became part of their charm. She was still able to make a face come alive and express a variety of emotions with a few incisive ink lines over the layers of watercolour and gouache. She said that ‘in each face, you strike what is the chief message or feeling, as you do when you’re talking to people. It’s important to keep clear the channels of understanding.’ She sometimes talked of ‘the kind of painting I feel sympathy for – the wonderful luminous quality of Redon’, and there are some affinities in her work with the Russian folkloric art of Chagall, Larianov and early Kandinsky.
In 1989 Elisabeth had an exhibition at the Albermarle Gallery to coincide with Cecil’s Retrospective at the Tate – a double celebration of their life and work. In 1996 her exhibition at England & Co led to the acquisition of four works by the Tate Gallery, which gave her great pleasure, although she was characteristically modest about it. A memorial exhibition, Elisabeth Collins 1904-2000: Works from the Studio, was held at England & Co in 2002.
Jane England
The Fool circa 1930
Cecil Collins circa 1930
Fool Thinking in a Landscape c1938
Magical Etching c1939
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