Frida

Wandering through the Philadelphia Art Museum's exhibition of the paintings of Frida Kahlo last Thursday, I couldn't help think of the similarities between Kahlo's work and Courbet's. Both are artists deeply invested in their self-image, to the point where their work, were it not for its brilliance, would seem like egoism. Both are concerned with being unconventional, and with shaking up their respective establishments. Both are passionately fond of the landscapes they grew up in, and delight in using these scenes as a setting for their work. And both are interested, in their own ways, in depictions of the female form; in redefining female beauty, portraying it in terms that are less pristine and therefore less feigned.

You have only to look at a Kahlo portrait (like the one above) though, to see where the comparison breaks down. For where Courbet's paintings radiate a sort of lazy, unconscious sensuality, his subjects often portrayed asleep or resting, Kahlo's dominant mode is confrontation. In painting after painting, the people in Kahlo's paintings stare back at you with a directness that seems almost a challenge. Kahlo forces us to pay attention to her images by having them pay attention to us - her paintings do not so much invite our gaze as demand it. In the dozen or so self-portraits that are included in the exhibition what you sense is not so much exhibitionism but a kind of generalized narcissism - this is a woman who is in love with the idea of looking directly at the world and having it stare right back [1]. And it's not only in the self-portraits that you feel this - nowhere is this sense of engagement more pronounced than in Kahlo's glorious portrayal of the Suicide of Dorothy Hale (below) in which the still open eyes of the corpse in the foreground glare back at you, their expression trapped somewhere between appeal and accusation, concentrated into an intensity that seems to deny Death itself.

Not that the expressions on her subject's faces is the only thing confrontational about Kahlo. The unflinchingness of her vision informs the content of what she paints: whether it's her famous depiction of a miscarriage in Henry Ford Hospital - a woman (Kahlo) marooned on a blood soaked bed in the middle of a barren plain, surrounded by a surrealist constellation of images, the ribbons of blood connecting them to her womb turning the whole scene into a grotesque May pole dance - or the almost bathetically macabre A Few Small Nips with its bloodbath spilling onto the frame, Kahlo seems determined to embrace all that is visceral and cathartic in the human experience. What shocks about these paintings is not just the subjects they depict, but the fact that Kahlo is willing to inflict such violence on the female body (and by association, on herself) while continuing to identify with it - her refusal to distance herself from the victim, from the pain. To see the savage dislocation of Kahlo's heart in the Two Fridas, or the ruined spectacle of Kahlo's body in The Broken Column (below) is to witness a kind of divine masochism, a strip-mining of the self in the service of art that is as disturbing as it is courageous. R.S. Thomas speaks of an "impulse to conceal your wounds / from her and from a bold public / given to pry" - Kahlo it seems, has no such impulse, and it is this, coupled with the sureness of her visual instinct, that makes her unforgettable.

For all the virtues of Kahlo's more passionate work, though, the paintings I prefer are the ones where intensity is balanced with restraint, so that the work, without losing its focus on the themes of death and suffering, depicts these in subtler ways, juxtaposing the stately with the macabre, and producing images that are the more shocking for the contrast. Two Fridas is a good example of this, the figures themselves seem composed, almost preternaturally so, suggesting nothing so much as a traditional portrait of two sisters sitting side by side, so that the effect of the heart torn out from one's chest is amplified. Girl with a Death Mask has a similar effect - the promised innocence of the little girl's figure, daintily clutching a flower in it hand is shockingly belied by the skull of the face. Most shocking of all, though, in its repressed, almost invisible horror, is The Deceased Dimas Rosas Aged Three (below). The image by itself suggests no violence - the central figure seems content and king-like, with its tinsel crown, its scepter like flower, its satisfied, almost complacent expression. It takes a moment for reality to seep in - what you are looking at is not some smug regent but the corpse of a three year old child, complete with poignant little toes pointing into the air and a circle of plucked flowers, the single note of outrage in the whole scene a black and white image of a Christ-like figure tied to a post placed on the pillow by the girl's head.

The Philadelphia Art Museum exhibition is a splendid collection of Kahlo's work, including many of her finest and most famous paintings, covering the full range of her work from the baroque, intricately programmatic visions of Moses and My Dress Hangs There (right) to her still life of Pitahayas, and showcasing many of Kahlo's abiding themes - the emphasis on linkages and bloodlines (most vividly seen, perhaps, in Family Tree), the repeated motif of exposed roots. Much of what I saw was familiar (though it's always a treat to see paintings like Dream - left - and the Love Embrace of the Universe in the original - since reproductions simply don't do them justice), but I also made a number of new discoveries, including the anthropomorphic The Flower of Life (below) and a hauntically delicate portrait of a young girl placed between the sun and the moon (which I can't seem to find online).

That painting, though painted later, seems like a premonition of what is, perhaps, Kahlo's most indelible self-portrait, and the painting that best sums up her work. In Self-Portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States (below) Kahlo stands on the margin of two worlds - the land of primal gods and ruined dreams and the land of modernism with its robot-like pipe figures, its electrical vegetation and concrete towers. Placed between these two landscapes, Kahlo herself seems an enigmatic and contradictory figure, the pink ruffled dress and elbow length gloves at odds with the revolutionary air of the casually held cigarette and the Mexican flag - as though she had been dragged away from a party to face, coolly, a firing squad. Seen three quarters of a century after it was painted it is the portrait of an iconoclast, a female colossus, who stands on the border not between Mexico and the United States but between the past and the future, myth and reality. And it is emblematic of everything Kahlo has come to mean, that her expression as she stands there is one of fierce certainty, eyebrows arched, mouth set in hard, proud line, lucid eyes staring right back at you.


[1] I am reminded of a line from Berryman - "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back."

Wright Off

While I've largely stopped paying attention to the farce that the contest for the Democratic nomination has turned into, I can't help commenting on the Rev. Wright controversy and Obama's response to it.

The general consensus, at least among Obama's critics, seems to be that in finally coming out and explicitly condemning Rev. Wright for his ridiculous remarks Obama is going against his natural inclination in deference to public opinion polls. He is, in other words, playing politics - choosing to distance himself from a figure who has clearly become a political liability - and that his 'real' feelings were those expressed in his earlier response to the Wright controversy, when he distanced himself from some of Rev. Wright's more extreme ideas, but refused to condemn the man himself.

It seems to me equally plausible, however, that the opposite is true. In particular, it seems to me that the truth about Obama may be both better and (politically speaking) worse than the conventional interpretation would suggest. This is pure speculation, obviously, but my suspicion is that Obama is precisely the kind of person who's intelligent enough to be able to separate the content of religion from the power associated with it, and use the latter while ignoring the former. In other words, Obama may not have paid attention to / been outraged by Rev. Wright's ideas not because he agreed with them, but because he (Obama) is not the kind of person who takes anything a preacher says seriously. I mean, it's all nonsense, isn't it? How is believing that AIDS is part of a conspiracy against black people any sillier than believing in, say, immaculate conception? Obama wasn't sitting in that church because he wanted to get spiritual or moral guidance or anything like that, he was sitting in that church because being seen as part of that community would get him votes.

The trouble, of course, is that there's no way Obama could ever admit this, even if it were true. No matter how many votes he may lose by being associated with Rev. Wright, he'd lose a great deal more if he were to declare, for instance, that he isn't a religious person, that he sat in church because it was part of engaging with a community and he didn't give a toss what some silly preacher was saying. I personally find the idea of a US President who has no religious faith whatsoever extremely appealing, but I suspect that any candidate who openly admitted this would be dead in the water. So the myth of spiritual guidance and close ties to the faith must be maintained, even at the cost of associating with Rev. Wright.

Seen in this (entirely hypothetical) light, it's Obama's earlier response to the Wright controversy, however skilfully delivered, that is, in fact, the more 'political', which is to say the less sincere. What Obama was trying to do, under the guise of taking a balanced, measured perspective, was to play both sides - appease voters appalled by the specter of Rev. Wright without alienating those who might see a strong repudiation of Rev. Wright as an ungrateful betrayal, an attempt on Obama's part to divorce himself from the very roots that are the source of their support for him.

The irony here is that Obama may be the victim of his own eloquence: because his initial response to the Wright controversy - which may have been just a wishy-washy attempt to pander to multiple constituencies at the same time - came across as so genuine, his more recent stand on the issue (if one may call it that) has come to be perceived as weak and reluctant, a compromise driven by calculative necessity, rather than what it may really be - an expression of the man's true feelings, relieved of the need to try and soft-pedal the issue by either the realization that the more 'political' strategy was untenable, or a sense that the Rev. had made himself enough of a pariah so that he could be repudiated without causing much damage.

Again, I emphasize that this is all speculation - I'm not saying (because I obviously can't prove) that any of this is true, just that it provides a counterpoint to the usual interpretation of Obama's actions and an alternative storyline that fits all the facts but gives us a completely different picture of the man himself than the one the media has been giving us.

Courbet at the Met

Was in NYC over the weekend, checking out (among other things) the Courbet exhibit at the Met, and was amused to find this painting tucked coyly away in a dimly lit gallery with a sign outside it warning visitors that the section contained explicit sexual images.

I suppose the Met has all sorts of legal issues it needs to be concerned about, but I can't help wondering how Courbet would have felt about such prudishness. I mean, it kind of destroys the point, doesn't it?

To begin with, the exhibition seemed a little underwhelming. Courbet's portraits - which make up the first few galleries - are excellent, of course, but coming so soon after the Met's exhibition of the Dutch masters it was hard not to see the influence of Rembrandt and Hals in Courbet's work, and they suffered by comparison. The ones I liked best (other than the familiar Desperate Man) was the Man Made Mad by Fear, with its Dali like depiction of a human figure poised on the edge of the abyss and Courbet's charming portrait of Proudhon, where a startlingly modern-looking figure of the painter is set against a backdrop that seems quaint and artificial, the blandness of the surroundings (those ubiquitous children) emphasizing, for me, the impression of Proudhon's living presence.


The other fascinating thing about Courbet is the subtle and not to subtle way in which he emphasizes the scale of his female figures, making them seem larger than life. In paintings like Young Ladies of the Village, The Source and The Woman in the Waves (below) Courbet sets the female form in settings that are at once realistic and diminished, using perspective to achieve an effect that is at once mythic and breathtakingly real.



The most impressive part of the exhibition for me, though, were the final galleries, that contained both Courbet's landscapes (including a set of immediate and powerful depictions of waves as well as the glorious harmony of brown and orange that is his Source of the Loue below) as well as his 'nature' paintings (including Fox in the Snow and Trout).


What stood out for me, going over the exhibition in my head afterwards, was the incredible range that Courbet's work encompasses, ranging all the way from the great Dutch and Flemish masters through the Impressionists and on to the first intimations of Surrealism. For an exhibition by a single painter to make one think of Rembrandt, Reubens, Renoir, Cezanne and Dali is a considerable achievement.

Note: Coming up (eventually) - posts on Poussin, Jasper Johns, the Tribeca Film Festival and Wajda's glorious Katyn. I love New York.

Life be not proud

[Just following up on yesterday's post, and with apologies to John Donne]:

Life be not proud, though some have called thee
Precious and beautiful, for thou art no gift,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost uplift
Live not poor life, nor yet can'st thou thrill me.
From play and love, which but thy pictures be,
Much sorrow: then from thee much more must shift,
And soonest our best men do bear thy shrift,
Ache of the flesh and soul's injury.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, midwives and fond women,
And doth with nursing, care and physic last,
And coffee, or drugs, make the heart beat as fast
And wilder than thy pulse, why swellest thou then?
One short thrill past we sleep unrevived
And Life shall be no more, Life shall take its life.

Quiem

If reincarnation exists, do the dead who remain mourn the loss of the newly living?

[Inspired by watching a performance of this]

Happiness

A tree he cannot name in a stranger's yard.

His happiness in leaf at last, boughs that dance seasonal and spontaneous, the tree shaking light like a drenched dog.

He has just time to pluck a sprig from the lowest branch before the bus arrives.

You, Tube

Like
a man
sque
eeee
eeee
zing
the
last
of the
paste
from
the
bottom
of the tube.

He dreams of his childhood.

Minimal Poems

from Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems (see also):

eyeye

P.S. I tried posting a bunch of other poems from the book here, but blogger really screws up the typography. You can see a bunch of poems from the book (including this one) here.

Constructing the Sky

[Was reading Walcott's Haitian Trilogy over the weekend, and sat down to write a post about it, but ended up with this instead. I'm not going to review the plays, except to say that reading them made me think of Shakespeare. I can think of no higher praise than that.]

This is how it began: not the stars ascending
to their orderly places but an explosion
of pregnant matter, glory's starburst, bang of revolt.
The white fist opened. Galaxies scattered like grain
from fingers of chaos, and the sky was a field
sown with flame. Who knew the stars would prove
so toothed? Would remember the dragon's hunger,
his meteor pride? Open mouthed and dumb,
we watched the armed constellations fly
North and South, watched them divide the sky
between them, dispute the unborn map of the night.
Anger released us, then tore us apart.
We fled in the centrifugal dark, defined our freedom
by the distance between us, bathed in the shifting
red of revenge. Dreaming of heaven,
we created the void. Nothing remains of those days
but this rubbish of burnt-out suns, embers
of a world ambushed and factioned, a history
of darkness wherein we sign imagined fates
to the black page of death. How to revive
the ancient gravities, convene the stars legislature?
How to arraign the galaxies in their opposed stances,
still the rippling rumors of these old injuries,
and construct, from these uneasy pinpricks,
something we could all believe in, look up to, use,
in a confusion of currents, to find our way forward.