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Monday, May 02, 2016

Zygmunt Bauman: The Refugee Crisis Is The Humanity Crisis

Pablo Picasso: Cat Eating A Bird, 1939
(source: NY Times)
no copyright infringement intended


Zygmunt Bauman (his latest book, “Strangers at Our Door” is published with Polity Press): Those people who are forced to flee intolerable conditions are not considered to be “bearers of rights,” even those supposedly considered inalienable to humanity. Forced to depend for their survival on the people on whose doors they knock, refugees are in a way thrown outside the realm of “humanity,” as far as it is meant to confer the rights they aren’t afforded. There is currently a pronounced tendency —- among the settled populations as well as the politicians they elect to state offices — to transfer the “issue of refugees” from the area of universal human rights into that of internal security. Being tough on foreigners in the name of safety from potential terrorists is evidently generating more political currency than appealing for benevolence and compassion for people in distress.


Read in Bauman's position in today's NY Times



(Zoon Politikon)

(Zygmunt Bauman)

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Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Cesare Pavese: Il Vino Triste



La fatica è sedersi senza farsi notare.
Tutto il resto poi viene da sé. Tre sorsate
e ritorna la voglia di pensarci da solo.
Si spalanca uno sfondo di lontani ronzii,
ogni cosa si sperde, e diventa un miracolo
esser nato e guardare il bicchiere. Il lavoro
(l'uomo solo non può non pensare al lavoro)
ridiventa l'antico destino che è bello soffrire
per poterci pensare. Poi gli occhi si fissano
a mezz'aria, dolenti, come fossero ciechi.

e quest'uomo si rialza e va a casa a dormire,
pare un cieco che ha perso la strada. Chiunque
può sbucare da un angolo e pestarlo di colpi.
Può sbucare una donna e distendersi in strada,
bella e giovane, sotto un altr'uomo, gemendo
come un tempo una donna gemeva con lui.
Ma quest'uomo non vede. Va a casa a dormire
e la vita non è che un ronzio di silenzio.

A spogliarlo, quest'uomo, si trovano membra sfinite
e del pelo brutale, qua e là. Chi direbbe
che in quest'uomo trascorrono tiepide vene
dove un tempo la vita bruciava? Nessuno
crederebbe che un tempo una donna abbia fatto carezze
su quel corpo e baciato quel corpo, che trema,
e bagnato di lacrime, adesso che l'uomo
giunto a casa a dormire, non riesce, ma geme.



una poesia di Cesare Pavese - interpretata di Chantango
(video by Art Poétique)
Gianluigi Cavaliere (voce)
Gabriele Bellu (violino)
Fabio Rossato (accordéon)
Marco Porcu (chitarra)
Ivan Tibolla (pianoforte)
Romeo Pegoraro (contrabbasso)


Le plus dur c’est de s’asseoir sans se faire remarquer.
Le reste vient tout seul. Trois gorgées
et puis l’envie renaît de penser solitaire.
Un décor de lointains qui bourdonnent se découvre
soudain,
chaque chose se perd, et être né et regarder son verre,
ça devient un miracle. Le travail
(l’homme seul ne peut pas s’empêcher de penser au travail)
redevient le destin trés ancien qu’il est beau de souffrir
pour pouvoir y penser. Puis, douloureux, les yeux
se fixent dans le vide, comme ceux d’un aveugle.

Si cet homme se lève et qu’il rentre pour dormir,
il a l’air d’un aveugle qui a perdu son chemin.
N’importe qui pourrait déboucher d’une rue
et le rouer de coups.
Une femme pourrait déboucher et s’étendre dans la rue,
jeune et belle, couchée sous un autre homme, gémissante
comme jadis une femme gémissait avec lui.
Mais cet homme ne voit rien. Il rentre pour dormir
et la vie n’est qu’un silence qui bourdonne.

A le déshabiller cet homme, on ne voit que des membres épuisés,
et un peu de poil brutal, ça et là. Dirait-on
que des veines où jadis la vie était ardente
courent tièdes en cet homme ?
Personne ne croirait que jadis une femme
ait caressé ce corps et embrassé ce corps, qui frissonne,
et l’ait baigné de larmes,
maintenant que rentré pour dormir,
l’homme n’y parvient pas mais gémit.

----

The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed.
Everything else will come easy. Three sips
and the impulse returns to sit thinking alone.
Against the buzzing backdrop of noise
everything fades, and it’s suddenly a miracle
to be born and to stare at the glass. And work
(a man who’s alone can’t not think of work)
becomes again the old fate that suffering’s good
for focusing thought. And soon the eyes fix
on nothing particular, grieved, as if blind.

If this man gets up and goes home to sleep,
he’ll look like a blind man that’s lost. Anyone
could jump out of nowhere to brutally beat him.
A woman—beautiful, young—might appear,
and lie under a man in the street, and moan,
the way a woman once moaned under him.
But this man doesn’t see. He heads home to sleep
and life becomes nothing but the buzzing of silence.

Undressing this man you’d find a body that’s wasted
and, here and there, patches of fur. Who’d think,
to look at this man, that life once burned
in his lukewarm veins? No one would guess
that there was a woman, once, who gently touched
that body, who kissed that body, which shakes,
and wet it with tears, now that the man,
having come home to sleep, can’t sleep, only moan.

(rendered in English by Geoffrey Brock)



(Cesaro Pavese)

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Friday, May 21, 2010

Five Masterpieces Stolen in Paris

Picasso, Léger, Modigliani, Matisse, Braque: five masterpieces were stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It is a sad day for all modern art lovers, for all Paris lovers.



Le Pigeon aux Petit Pois (Pablo Picasso, 1911)


Nature Morte au Chandelier (Fernand Léger, 1922)


La Femme à l'Éventail (Amedeo Modigliani, 1919)


Pastorale, Nymphe et Faune (Henri Matisse, 1906)


L'Olivier près de l'Estaque (Georges Braque, 1906)

(Blogosphere)

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Wednesday, May 05, 2010

A Picasso Sold At $106.5 Million

Pablo Picasso - Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932
Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York, via Christie's
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/05/arts/design/05auction_2.html


It was created in one day, in March 1932: the reclining nude is Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist's mistress and model between 1927 and 1935 (when Dora Maar would come into picture).

The canvas was sold for $106.5 Million. It happened on Tuesday night and it sets a new auction record. You should read the details of the bid in today's NY Times.

(Avangarda 20)

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A Video Made at Galerie Lareuse



Picasso, Miró, Calder, Matisse, Chagall, Kandinsky, Dufy, all together in the cozy room of Galerie Lareuse, in Georgetown, on the M Street. Kreg Kelley is the curator of the gallery. He is young, enthusiastic and very capable.

Each visit at the gallery is an exciting adventure: you'll discover each time lithographs you didn't know they were there.

I discovered on the web another gallery of prints and lithographs, this time in England, it's Idbury Prints, and it's managed by Neil Philip, a poet, a folklorist, and a great art lover. Each time I am on the web on one of the two galleries, I also dream at the other. Each one is a fabulous place.

(Galerie Lareuse)

(Joan Miró)

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Sunday, September 06, 2009

Picasso: The Artist and His Model, 1964

Picasso - The Artist and His Model, 1964
oil on canvas


It is 1964: Picasso in front of a nude female, the subject he so much loved. He is now old, all that he sees is pure carnality, a chaotic pile of anatomic parts, all he has any more are his eyes and his paintbrushes: his desire remained intact, all he can do is voyeurism and imagination. Dirty old man, poor old man, the poignant depiction of the tragedy of decay.

(Paint Made Flesh)

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Sunday, May 10, 2009

Galerie Lareuse: PIcasso, Chagall

Pablo Picasso - Le Vieux Roi, c. 1959
lithograph
signature: Blue Crayon I.I.
edition: artist's proof


Marc Chagall - L'Homme au Cochon, 1928-29
lithograph, edition 35

(Galerie Lareuse)

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Sunday, May 03, 2009

Picasso: Picador

Pablo Picasso - Picador


(Galerie Lareuse)

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Monday, March 16, 2009

Cézanne and Beyond: Picasso

Paul Cézanne - Mont Sainte Victoire


Pablo Picasso - Nudes in a Forest


Pablo Picasso may have been the single most important and faithful Cézannist, ever. Cubism's kaleidoscopic fracturing of things is just an extension of the breakage already begun by Cézanne. The feathered brush strokes that define each of the many surfaces we see in a cubist picture are the same strokes that Cézanne used to pull apart his art. But the relationship goes much deeper than these surface similarities. Cézanne discovered that a modern artist could play at dreaming up new languages for describing reality, without feeling obliged to supply a key to understanding them. Looking at a Cézanne, you feel as though you're witnessing an orderly translation of objects into paint, but you never come away with a clear sense of the objects in question. Picasso ran with that method: he created the strong impression that cubism had a grammar and vocabulary that worked (think of all the attempts that wall texts make to explain it as a set of rational procedures) while allowing it to speak in tongues (think of how unconvincing all those explanations end up being). And it was thanks to Cézanne that modern art became a matter of the most radical, ongoing experimentation, rejecting established precedents or newly fashionable theories or any consistency of style. As art historian John Elderfield puts it in the exhibition's massive catalogue, Picasso saw the extremism in Cézanne's art and made it his own (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).

See also the Press Room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(Blogosphere)

(Cézanne)

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Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Picasso et les Maîtres



Picasso et les Maîtres: a face-off on view in Paris, at Grand Palais. Here's a chronicle by Michael Kimmelman, in today's NY Times:

No show in Europe at the moment bids to be more spectacular, or ends up being more exasperating, than Picasso and the Masters, sprawling here through the Grand Palais. If there’s good news to the financial meltdown, it’s that maybe bloated blockbusters like this one should become harder to organize.

Not that anyone in Paris seems discontent with the exhibition. From morning to night, long lines inch through the front doors to pay obeisance to this endlessly popular Spaniard, who was ahead of his time not least in churning out so many works to satisfy what has become the cultural industrial complex of the early 21st century.

Next door, a fine show of Emil Nolde hardly attracts a soul, sadly. FIAC, the art fair that shared quarters in the Grand Palais these last several days, was populated by shell-shocked dealers murmuring worriedly amongst themselves about the bygone customers whom not so long ago they had blithely turned away or gave five minutes to decide whether to buy a picture.

Picasso, in such straitened times, remains at least a reliable brand for exhibition organizers, who especially seem to love these compare-and-contrast affairs because they guarantee boffo box office. Just a couple of years ago, Madrid had a pair of such shows, the Guggenheim in New York yet another.

The Grand Palais, never mind the accompanying displays at Orsay (Picasso and Manet) and the Louvre (Picasso and Delacroix), trumps those events, gathering together hundreds of Picassos along with far-flung trophies that inspired or ostensibly inspired him: pictures by Cranach and Titian, Poussin and Ribera, Chardin and Zurbaran, El Greco and Courbet, Degas and Le Douanier Rousseau. The list goes on.

I lingered in the last room, watching visitors stumble a bit bleary-eyed from the earlier galleries to find Manet’s Olympia, Rembrandt’s painting of Hendrickje Stoffels bathing in a brook, Ingres’s grisaille Odalisque and Goya’s Naked Maja vying with a slew of late, mostly slapdash nudes by the great matador of Modernism. The whole ensemble of pictures was dazzling and fatuous. Overkill doesn’t adequately describe the effect.

Let it first be said that Picasso, having taken on history as if fated to do so from childhood, embraced such extravagant comparisons — which isn’t to say he survives the competition altogether intact. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, he once said, but what instinct and the brain imagine quite apart from the canon.

The canon, in other words, remained his starting point but increasingly became his crutch. His achievements were Promethean and unparalleled in the last century, but having said that, as the show proves almost despite itself, Picasso ended up often mired in vain, backward-looking riffs on grander achievements.

Perhaps it’s as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once put it, talking about Picasso’s failure to appreciate Bonnard. Picasso had no heart, he said. That’s pretty harsh.

On the other hand, there are his copies of Velazquez’s Méninas. From the 1950s, they tinker with variations on his familiar devices — the fractured, faux-childish faces; the swift, sketchy brushwork; the primary colors set often against black; the clattery scaffolding of faceted planes and accordion space — to produce what looks clever but finally cartoonish when considered against the grave dignity and humanity of the original. Granted, comparing anything with Las Méninas is unfair, but then, Picasso invited the comparison, and from it one gets Cartier-Bresson’s point.

Even that remark about the canon, as it happens, recalls what a century before one of Picasso’s canonical heroes, Delacroix, wrote: That great art derives both from humility before the past and a conviction that what has already been said is not enough.

Picasso’s later career, you might say, was a one-man wrestling match with the limits of his own enormous genius in relation to history, and his failures were, humanly speaking, as compelling as his accomplishments, but that interpretation requires from an exhibition not blind hero worship but, as Delacroix had it, a little humility. The show here lacks this altogether, substituting swagger for judgment, bluster for nuance, and in art, as in politics and finance, we’ve had enough of that approach already.

It is as if the traveling of priceless art from far-flung places and the clout that made it happen were enough — that we are supposed to feel grateful for what’s over-the-top about Picasso and the Masters — whereas the show’s excess is exactly what gets in the way of our standing peaceably and intimately before a picture.

The best blockbusters make you forget their blockbuster-ness. The Louvre happens to have an Andrea Mantegna show that’s big and marvelous and includes other artists on whom Mantegna depended or whom he influenced, some of them mediocre, some great. Crowds look closely and slowly. The show promotes that. The art rewards it.

At one point at the Grand Palais, I braved the throng and plunged as if into a strong headwind, anchoring myself before a late Picasso portrait. Against a bright orange and red backdrop, a bearded figure with large, hooded, almond eyes and what looks like a long blond wig, returned my gaze. He’s the picture of a proud, weary man with a slight identity crisis. The work appears to have been done in a flash. The date was July 31, 1974. It’s catchy, electric.

But something was missing. It will become clear, I thought, with a little more time, before a tsunami of fellow visitors swept clean the gallery.

We tend to judge exhibitions as we do one another, according to their regard for individuals. We’re awed by flash and fame. But we’re really looking to make some deeper connection, even just one, beyond the bluster and hype, that feels lasting and true.

It was those almond eyes, I realized later on the street outside, thinking back on that portrait. They were hollow.




(Avangarda 20)

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Monday, October 20, 2008

Picasso: La Nana



(Galerie Lareuse)

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Monday, September 15, 2008

Ceramic by Picasso - Visage, c. 1955



(Galerie Lareuse)

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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection

Rothko Chapel and the Broken Obelisk of Barnett Newman, Houston, Texas
Houston, Texas: the Rothko Chapel, and in front of it the Broken Obelisk created by Barnett Newman to honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King.


Rothko Chapel, Interior, Houston, Texas
I saw the works of Rothko and Newman at the Washington National Gallery of Art - and there is a small Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection.
Hopefully I will have the possibility to see the Rothko Chapel during my brief staying in Houston.
And here three paintings from the Menil Collection, nearby the chapel. Picasso, a Still Life with Skull, then an astoundingly beautiful Magritte, La Clef de Verre, and a delicate Black Leaf on Green Background, painted by Matisse.
I leave you with them, I will be back at the end of next week.

Picasso, Nature Morte au Crâne, 1945, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
Magritte, La Clef de Verre, 1959, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
Matisse, Black Leaf on Green Background, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas




(René Magritte)

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Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Renoir, Picasso, Van Dongen - Le Moulin de la Galette

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

PARIS ...
Time is of groups. Friends. New Ones. We go to a place together. We are never left. Big roaring gangs in cafes with the midst of other roaring gangs. Godard films it all as if combined, mirrored into a single side angle
.

Clark Coolidge

Le Moulin de la Galette. The beauty of Renoir's painting resides in the rendering of the happiness of so many people. Look at the foreground: each one is so well personalized.


Picasso, Le Moulin de la galette, Guggenheim Museum, New York
Le Moulin de la Galette viewed by Picasso: patrons and prostitutes gathered together in an atmosphere of lust and glamour. The work of Picasso is a replica to Renoir, a provocative antithesis. All women here share the same sensual look, les femmes fatales de Picasso. He was 19 - and he already had the force to tell the world his vision and to impose his replica.


Van Dongen, Moulin de la Galette, Musée d'Art Moderne, Troyes


La femme fatale of Picasso will be replicated by Van Dongen in his rendering of Le Moulin de la Galette.








Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Phillips Collection, Washington DC But Renoir himself would give a replica to his Le Moulin de la Galette.
One month ago I was visiting again the Phillips Collection, near the DuPont Circle in Washington. The Renoir replica to Renoir was on view, The Luncheon of the Boating Party. Was it any more possible to tell the world again your vision, with the same creative force? The answer was in front of my eyes.





(Renoir)

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