THE BLUE LANTERN (via Mowser)

17 February 2012

The Androgyne And The Magician

Duality is an idea with a long history. Its most enduring symbol is an opposition between masculine and feminine, yin and yang. One way out of this unsteady binary state is through the figure of the androgyne, as in the hero/ine of Virigina Woolf's Orlando (1925).

When Fernand Khnopff met Sar Josephin Peladan in 1885 the circumstances were as dramatic as the Frenchman could have invented. Born Josephin Peladan, the magician of mysticism gave himself the honorary title of Sar, claiming it had been bestowed on his ancestors by a Babylonian king. The two men found in each other a rapport based on their fascination with androgyny.

Peladan invited the young artist to make an illustration for Le Vice Supreme, his 1884 novel of an artist who creates "an angel, without sex, the synthesis of a young man and a young woman." In the event, the result was not one of Khnopff's better works but it caused a sensation. Given that another Belgian artist Felicien Rops had illustrated the first edition it began an enduring enmity between the two artists. Eight years later, in 1893, Rops wrote in a letter to Armand Rassenfosse, "Knopff 9sic) no longer imitates the French; he has sunk up to his chin in the boots of the Englishman Burne-Jones."
Rose Caron, an opera singer who had sat for the artist, claimed that Khnopff' had appropriated her face for his nude woman. Khnopff was so upset at the charge that he confronted Caron, ripping the original sketch and throwing it at her feet. The press was thrilled to promote the scandal. Predictably, Peladan's sequel La Vertue Supreme, published in 1900, attracted little attention.

Khnopff went on to illustrate Peladan's Istar and Femmes Honnettes! (1888). For Istar he created a truly sensational image of a woman in the throes of passion, her eyes closed (and not in psiritual contemplation) her head thrown back, while a horrible phallic-looking plant writhes around her groin. Whether her bondage is literal (hands tied behind her head?) or figurative hardly matters.

Pallentes Radere Mores, roughly translated as "Immoral people turn pale under the lash of satire" was the frontispiece for Femmes Honnettes! (Honest Women!). The motto was taken from a satire by Persius (34-62 CE), a Roman poet who work became popular during the Middle Ages. The hands of the well-dressed woman reaching toward the toothsome nude suggest a world of dissimulation.

Years later, Khnopff told journalist Helene Laiilet, "Art is not a necessity." A sentiment that fits uneasily with Peladan's plan for a priestly class of artists whose work would promote spiritual evolution. Eventually the reticent Khnopff moved away from the garish Peladan. In the meantime, Peladan incorporated L'Asssociation de l'Ordre de la Rose Croix du Temple et du Graal in 1888 with its telltale reference to medieval times. Erik Satie became music director for the group and in the two years (1890-1892) before he broke with Peladan, Satie composed his most innovative music.

The Salon Rose-Croix, exhibited annually from 1892 to 1897 in Paris, to a large audience, lured by Peladan's notoriety, although the artists who participated were hardly a shabby group, including Edmond Aman-Jean, Eugene Grasset, Carlos Schwabe,, and Jan Toorop. At the first Salon in March, 1892, Khnopff's I Lock My Door Upon Myself captured public attention.

“My mind beats for no one; I live in myself for myself. I feel with my mind. I breathe with my brain, I see with my mind, I die of impatience and longing. No one here can sate my wishes or soften my lack and I have forgotten how to cry. I am alone, I rest and can wait.” – from Seraphitus Seraphita by Honore de Balzac, 1834.

Because Khnopff used titles for some of his pictures from poems by Christina Rossetti and because he used red-haired models, it is easy to see a pre-Raphaelite bent. But I Lock My Door Upon Myself and Who Shall Deliver Me are veritable catalogs of the artist's personal imagery. The locked room contains many possible exits. The window at right opens onto a scene of Bruges, the corridor behind the woman looks like the ones in early Flemish primitive paintings, and the table she leans on has been likened to a coffin. A circular mirror reflecting a vaporous scene, a bust of Hypnos that Khnopff had recently seen on his first visit to the British Museum, a faded poppy and arum lilies.

Khnopff's art is a demonstration of hise neo-Platonic belief that all natural things have a correspondence with a deeper truth behind the image. Khnopff used the arum lily as this emblem for androgyny. The flower belongs to the gynadnric class of plants, having both male and female characteristics which makes it an apt floral symbol for the ideal.
In Arum Lily, the model is Lily Maquet, one of three daughters of a Glasgow architect living in Brussels. who posed for the artist. She wears the armor-like white dress, and seems trapped between the lily and the curtain that separates her from past, represented by an antique column.

"Khnopff has created a type of ideal woman. Are they really women? Are they not rather imaginary feminites? They partake at the same time of the Idol,of the Chimera, and of the Sphinx and of the Saint. They are rather plastic androgynes, subtle symbols, conceived according to an abstract idea and rendered visible." - Jean Delvillle

Something else that Khnopff told Helen Laillet in their interview which appeared in Studio International for December, 1912: "The expression of the mouth is the truest, there it is impossible to dissimulate." You can peel this statement like an onion. It goes against the common wisdom that the eyes are the window of the spirit, through which we most fully experience another person. with Khnopff's opaque or averted glances. Its suggests dissatisfaction with what he saw there and, as a corollary, the goal of dissimulation and concealment. And the mouth can be greedy or cruel. When I look By The Seaside or many of Khnopff's pcitures, I'm reminded again of Norma Winstone's lyric A Timeless Place.

"The summer sky I saw reflected in the colour of your eyes,
but somehow I could never peel away the layers of disguise.
I'm drowning now, I'm slowly sinking in a sea of blue and green
Where what you are is never seen. How can anybody know you?"

Note: Thank you to Neil Philip for his help with the Latin and with Roman literature.
Images:
1. Alexander Seon - Portrait Of Josephin Peladan, 1891, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.
2. Fernand Khnopff - Le Vice Supreme, frontispiece 1885.
3. Fernand Khnopff - With Josephin Peladan, Istar, 1888, Wolf Uecker Collection, Lausanne.
4. Fernand Khnopff - With Josephin Peladan. Pallentes Radere Mores, 1888, Cheramy et cie, Paris.
5. Fernand Khnopff - Le reflet bleu (Blue Reflection), 1911, private collection, Brussels.
6. Carlos Schwabe - poster for the Salon Rose+Croix, March 1892, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
7. Fernand Khnopff - I Lock my Door Upon Myself, 1891, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
8. Fernand Khnopff - Arum Lily, modeled by Lily Maquet, 1895
9. Fernand Khnopff - At the Seaside, 1890, Mme Paul Philipsson, Brussels.

13 February 2012

"My Dream Will Become Your Reality"

" ..there can be no doubt that the guardians of the sun gate were put there in answer to the question, 'Why do the dead return not?' The beasts fawn on all who enter, but rend all who would pass thence again." - William Lethaby, from Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, London, Percival & Co.: 1892

After more than a century Caresses still startles, even without the frisson of knowing that the face of the woman/leopard is modeled after the artist's sister. The androgyne has been an ideal at least since Plato's Symposium where the brother-sister relationship seemed to offer a way out of the conflicts of sexuality. Closer to Khnopff's time, the theme reappeared in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg as a morality that might encompass perverse urges. And in French literature the place of honor that Shakespeare's Hamlet holds in English belongs to Racine's Phaedre, a play about incest.

When Khnopff was questioned about his intentions for the picture he replied that the image is a lot less mystical than people think; that it is a completely contemporary allegory. It may be an allegory on the choice between power and pleasure embodied in a sphinx and an androgyne but its imagery draws on the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, a popular subject with 19th century painters, notably Gustave Moreau. The leopard symbolized exquisite delight in the Middle Ages, but Khnopff intended a cheetah, the animal closest to the snake. He used the body of a leopard for plastic reasons, he explained. The red desert and the two ruined columns suggest that the two sexes are exiled in some stark burning infinity.

Like Moreau, who created hybrid forms not found in nature, Fernand Khnopff's forms were emblematic, but he used readily available symbols such as circles, mirrors, flowers, animals. The blue wings and the closed eyes of Khnopff's Icarus are the stuff of sleep and dreams. His sleeping Medusa is also an intensely personal revision of a well known mythological character. When Khnopff told the Italian journalist Marghareta Sarfatti that Hypnos "is the only deity I recognize" he acknowledged the centrality of dreams in his imagery. And always, although not acknowledged, that gorgeous Memling blue that he knew from childhood in Bruges.

"Behind appearance is a reality which appearance expresses but can never fully disclose. Beauty is a sort of symbolic disclosure. It is the invisible made visible through expressions, the revealing 'garment' of the invisible and kin to our natures." - Theodore Jouffrey, from a lecture to the Royal Acaemdy of Art, 1842.

What strangeness lies behind this voluntary solitude, immobile yet attentive - to what thoughts? The Symbolist belief that silence is necessary for spiritual revelation has links to many religious and occult practices.

"In the most remote antiquity, ornaments were emblems. The jewels which adorned the men and women bore the imprint of a profound sentiment, or better, contained an illusion to some religious idea...were less real representations than the forms of writing, thought made sensible." - Charles Blanc, from Grammaire des Arts decoratifs in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris, H. Laurens: 1876

"...to distinguish between the invisible and the hidden. For example, a letter in an envelope is visibly hidden, but not invisible." - Fernand Khnopff

Encadrement, or framing, was very important to Khnopff. From the French, the word carries the dual meaning of both framing and encircling. In the novel Against Nature (1884), J.-K.Huysmanns asserted that the artist is one who remains outside time. The multiple framing devices in Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff distance the viewer, so does Margeurite's averted glance. The white dress and the long gloves are a kind of armor. One arm is locked by the other in a hidden gesture. The door behind her is closed, an emblem of the space that separates the viewer (and the artist) from her. There are markings that suggest hieroglyphics on the hanging that drapes the door, but we cannot decipher them.

The golden circle was Khnopff's mandala. The circle is usually positive, symbolizing unity, perfection, and sacred form in geometry. The Latin word for gold - aurum - is similar to the Hebrew word for light - aor.

Khnopff often used the tondo, a round form from the Italian Renaissance. I suspect that his interest was specific enough that he would have known that its earliest instance was Burgundian and, thus, associated with Bruges, once seat of the Burgundian court. But there are more ambiguous interpretations of the circle and the erudite Khnopff was likely aware of them as they were common currency in his time. In his play The Birds (c. 414 BCE), Aristophanes claimed that each of us begins as a circle, without arms or legs. Medeival alchemists contended that the first sphere was a skull.

A mirror image has commonly symbolized art because both are mimetic, representing the sensible world. In light of Khnopff's neo-Platonic belief that human passions are elevated through their abstract expression, it may be that in With Gregoire Leroy. My Heart Cries For Other Times the artist intends us to question whether the reflection is an illusion or an emblem of the soul. There is more to this image than narcissism just as there is more to contemplating the past than nostalgia.

“We are merely the stars’ tennysballs, struck and bandied which way please them.” – from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, c. 1613.

By the time he completed Memories at the age of thirty-one, Fernand Khnopff was the most famous artist in Belgium and had an international reputation. He used photographs of Marguerite in making the picture. Through the powdery medium of pastels he created a timeless place, without shadows. I think of this picture as une ronde des femmes. The three women at left, with the youthful Marguerite-of-the-white-dress in front are like an exercise in time-lapse photography. The woman in the center, the only one with her back to the viewer, is turned toward this tableau. Like the Portrait of Marguerite, she clasps her tennis racket behind her back in a locked gesture. The knowledge that Marguerite married the next year and moved away to Liege seems a palpable presense.

The chimera, a character with specific attributes in Greek mythology, is also simply an imaginary creatre composed of incongruous parts, or even an unrecognizable creature from a dream. Here Khnopff's version, part animal and part human, stands in front of a woman who holds in her hands a veil that separates reality and dreams.

"My dream will become your reality." - (Sar) Josephin Peladan

What Peladan said, Khnopff, whose works Peladon adored, achieved. The painter of introspective portraits and Barbizon landscapes would never have cast the spell on viewers that this enigmatic purveyor of dreams has. But in retrospect, even Fosset in the forest of Arden appears to be a place "where what you are is never seen."

Images:
Caresses, 1896, Musee Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussles.
A Mask, 1897, Hambourg Kunsthalle.
Icarus, undated, Maitre Poirier Collection, Brussels.
Medusa, 1896, private collection, Belgium.
The Golden Tiara, 1909, private collection, London
Portrait of Margeurite Khnopff, 1887, Musee Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
Brown Eyes And Blue Flower, 1905, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.
With Gregoire Leroy. My Heart Cries for Another Time, 1889, private collection, Belgium.
Memories, 1889, Musee Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
Chimera, c. 1910, Marcel Mabile Collection, Brussels.
In Fosset. An Evening, 1886, Hearn Family Trust, New York.

For further reading:
1.The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff by Jeffrey Howe, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press: 1892.
2. Catalogue Raisonne by Robert Delevoy, Catherine Croes, Gisele Ollinger-Zinque, Editions Hossmanns, Brussels: 1979, 1987. Attributions, courtesy of.
www.expo-khnopff.be

06 February 2012

Bruges & Fernand Khnopff

"What is the effect of an early education and of peculiar surroundings upon a disposition abnormally sensitive and precocious?...Like birthmarks, these reflections and impressions grow with us - sometimes hidden, often shown in disfigurements, always there...Bruges has much to do with the art of Fernand Khnopff." - Walter Shaw Sparrow, Magazine of Art, London, 1890.

Idealized memories of childhood are common enough, and probably explain the persistence of the myth of a golden age. D'Autrefois, or other times, often give the subtext to Khnopff's art. We interpret at our own risk.

"Where life was concentrated in two or three rooms and where the salons were only used once a year for official receptions, only after ward to be closed once again for the length of the long silent winter but also in the desolation of the summers. grandiose dwellings, places of oblivion and solemnity, where a child's spirit is almost forced into melancholy meditations and solitary pondering...." - Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert on the Khnopff family in Bruges.

According to Pol de Mont, director of the Museum of Fine Arts-Antwerp, Fernand Khnopff told him in 1901 of the countless hours spent playing with his younger brother Georges in the cellar of the family home in Bruges. Khnopff's vivid memories of staring out the windows just above the waterline of the canal may have been the source of his later idiosyncratic image cropping.

"I have often been reproached for cutting the heads off my personages with the frame which surrounds them, but in doing that I have had each time a precise goal. Thus, in L'Offrande, I had wanted to give the impressions of a very large figure seen on high from below," (Fernand Khnopff quoted by Edmond-Louis de Taeye in Fernand Khnopff, in the sereis Les artistes Belges contemporains, Brussels, Castaiagne, 1894).

Edmond Khnopff (1826-1900), the artist's father, was a royal magistrate in Bruges. where Khnopffs had lived since 1726. Originally from Austria, the family had been elevated to the nobility by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1621 and several generations had served as lawyers and judges in the Austrian Netherlands. The independent Belgian nation was twenty-eight years old when Fernand Khnopff was born on September 12, 1858 at his grandparents' home, a castle in Dendermonde, east of Ghent His younger brother Georges was born at Bruges in 1860 at Bruges and a sister Marguerite was born in 1864 at Liege. The Khnopffs lived at Langestraat 1, a location with a view of the famous Quai Vert.

Khnopff's methods for keeping the curious at arm's length were themselves an artwork, the aristocratic skill of revealing only so much as he chose. He cooperated with interviewers throughout his career, but on his terms. His descriptions of his only known return to Bruges in 1904 never varied from what he told his friend Leon Tombu: that he had put on dark glasses before leaving the train and never removed them while outdoors. This story, true or not, has an antecedent in Dendermonde. After his grandfather's death in 1868, Khnopff never visited there again.

Khnopff obscured the extent of his use of photography but we still wonder about those dark glasses. In Bruges. A Church (above) shows the interior of the Church of Notre Dame and the altar by Michelangelo. The Khnopff family coat of arms was displayed one of the church walls; by no means was this just one among the many churches of Bruges for Fernand Khnopff

A country with two principal languages is a country in need of interpreters. The polymath Henry Van de Velde (1863-1957) said that he saw in Flemish and wrote in French. Flemish cities - the beads on the rosary of Flanders in Fierens-Gevaert's resonant phrase - existed as a living reminder of.another time So the works of the Belgian symbolists were rooted in reality as much as in dreams.. The repetitious images of stagnant pools and crumbling churches in Symbolist art, attributed to the stories of Edgar Poe Allen, had real-life counterparts in cities like Bruges.

The place that religion had occupied in everyday life hollowed out in the 19th century, leaving a vacancy that the Symbolists filled with a psychological mysticism. In L'Art Romantique (1869) Baudelaire asserted that an affinity exists between spiritual states and the natural world and, furthermore, "art is of value only in so far as it is capable of expressing these mysterious relationships."

What coded messages does this dual image hold? The upper panel is a tondo,a round painting of Marguerite. Enclosed in a circle, symbolizing perfection, she touches the lips of a mask of Hermes. Behind her is a wall hanging white a white crane embroidered on it. The lower panel shows St. Jan's Hospital in Bruges, home to a large collection of paintings by Hans Memling. At the bottom of the frame he engraved words from Aesop's Fables: "Light winged the crane fled." In an interview with Maria Bierme, Khnopff added: "clear is the light of noble thoughts which rise toward the heavens."

The year of Khnopff's Secrets/ Refkections, the Chapel House at St. Jan's hosted the first modern exhibition of Memling's work. It attracted 35,000 visitors but Khnopff was careful to state that he had not seen the Bruges Memlings, which may explain his painting - An Abandoned City - which shows the base of the Memling monument without the Memling statue on top!

Images:

1. Memories of Flanders. A Canal In Bruges, 1904, Hearn family Trust, New York.
2. A Canal In Bruges, 1905, left panel for the triptych D'Autrefois (Of Other Times), current whereabouts unknown, Catalogue raisonne, Croes et al, Brussels: 1979.

3. L'Offrande (the Offering), 1891, pastel, graphite and chalk on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
4. In Bruges. A Church, 1904, Musee Communale, Verviers.
5. Secret. Reflection, 1902, Groeningen Museum, Bruges.
6. Margeurite Khnopff photographed by Fernand Khnopff- c. 1901, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
7. unidentified photographer - D'Autrefois, 1908, Venice Biennial, Venice, Cartlgoe rainsonne, Croes et al, Brussels: 1979.

03 February 2012

Fernand Khnopff: Le Regard Hautain

“Two small, very sharp, metallic eyes, a slightly receding chin, a disdainful mouth, and a head of hair, Oh! Beautiful red hair of a barbarian, describing comma-like curls on his forehead and giving him a kind of widl crown; upright posture, neatly dressed, a simple person who had a horror of appearing disheveled; a Clergyman in the process of becoming a Dandy.” – Emile Verhaeren, in L’Art Moderne, 1886.

So the poet Emile Verhaeren took the measure of his friend Fernand Khnopff. Both men were in their twenties at the time and in the process of becoming: Verhaeren, the Belgian poet who narrowly lost out to his friend Maurice Maeterlinck for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911 and Khnopff, the great Belgian artist. Both had also studied law to please their families before turning to art.

Immediately attracted to the avant-garde group Les Vingts in 1883, Verhaeren became the voice of their new art in the magazines La Jeuen Belgique and L'Art Moderne and in his book Quelques Notes sur l’oeuvre de Khnopff (1887). Verhaeren expressed doubts that visual art was suited to the expression of ideas. Khnopff had no such qualms and his best works bear him out. The counter argument was made by Theodore Joufrrey in 1842: “Behind appearance is a reality which appearance expresses but can never fully disclose. Beauty is a sort of symbolic disclosure. It is the Invisible made visible through expression, the revealing “garment” of the Invisible, and kin to our own natures…”

But back to the visible world and what Verhaeren had in mind when he used the word Dandy about his friend. A haughty expression doesn't quite convey the weight of the French term le regard hautain that came to be the public face of the Dandy . Charles Baudelaire had written: "Dandyism is not, as many seem to think, an exaggerated love of fine clothes and material comfort. These things, to be perfectly dandy, are mere symbols of his own spiritual aristocracy. Dandyism is primarily a desire to be individually original, but always within the limits of polite social convention. It is the love of startling others and never being startled oneself." Dandyism, so defined, has something to do with art of Fernand Khnopff.

Khnopff began by sketching from nature ar age sixteen to pass the time during the long summer at his family's second home at Fosset. A village in the Haut-Fanges, or High Fens of eastern Belgium., Fosset is in the Ardennes, the Forest of Arden that Shakespeare immortalized in As You Like It. There, where the local people still cherished old beliefs in the occult and druidic tree worship, Catholicism was more a matter of formality than devotion. The dame blanche or white goddess was still venerated. She, too, would have much to do with the art of Fernand Khnopff.

The forests and fields of Arden not so much. Among his several landscapes, done in the style of another storied wood - the Barbizon - Une Crise (A Crisis) painted in 1881 when Khnopff was only twenty- three suggests that landscape by itself was not the subject. Whether he intended a general comment on the searching of youth or something specifically personal is left up in the air. In middle age, Khnopff made sketches of winter scenes at Fosset but the finished painting, La vielle en hiver, again suggests his favorite motto, a variation on an 18th century axiom of Nicolas Chamfort - "One has only oneself".

Images:

1. Fernand Khnopff - Self-portrait, 1879, Jean Willems Collection, Brussels.
2. Fernand Khnopff - Une Crise (A Crisis), pastel, 1881, private collection, Brussels.
3. Unidentified photographer - Fernand Khnopff, probably at Fosst, no date, Editions Lebeer-Hossmans, Brussels: 1979.
4. Fernand Khnopff - Mist in The Ardennes, 1882, private collection, Belgium.
5. Fernand Khnopff - La vielle en hiver (The Old Woman in Winter), c. 1916, Galerie Horta, Brussels.

01 February 2012

February by Franz Melchers

29 January 2012

Djuna Barnes: A Daring Young Woman

As a young journalist during the 1910s, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) proved herself fearless. For a woman to break into the profession - and in New York City - she had to be. Within the space of two months in 1914, she persuaded a doctor to force feed her like jailed women's suffragists were, spent time in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with a young gorilla named Dinah, and offered herself as a volunteer damsel-in-distress to firefighters in training at the Sixty-Seventh Street Recruit Center.

Barnes knew how to turn her phrases to a radical deviation from the normal and she executed her aphorisms like leaps from a trapeze with no safety net beneath her. What saved her articles from superficiality was something that now sounds old-fashioned. Barnes had a tragic sense and although she applied wit to her chosen subjects, they also constitute a catalog of potential misfortunes.

Images: from the exhibition Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913-1919, on view until August 19, 2012 at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art.

How it Feels to be Forcibly Fed from New York World Magazine, September 6, 1914.

The Girl and the Gorilla from New York World Magazine, October 18, 1914.
My Adventures Being Rescued from New York World magazine, November 15, 1914.

You may also be interested in Some Hard Captious Star: Djuna Barnes posted here August 26, 2011.

27 January 2012

Le Rouet des Brumes

"Phantom city, mummified city, vaguely preserved. It smells of death, of the middle Ages, Venice, in black, the customary ghosts and the graves." - excerpted from A Walk In Bruges by Charles Baudelaire from Pauvre Belgique, 1864 - reprinted by Editions L. Conard, Paris. .

"In Bruges a miracle of the climate has produced so mysterious chemistry of the atmosphere, an interpenetration which neutralises too-bright colours, reduces them to a uniform tone of reverie, to an amalgam of greyish drowsiness." - excerpted from Bruge-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, Paris: 1892

When the subject is Bruges, metaphor is everything. In the paintings of William Degouve de Nuncques and the novels of Georges Rodenbach atmosphere becomes a force of nature. But what is a force of nature and where is the line that separates it from human endeavor? These are not questions that metaphor can answer. According to Arthur Rimbaud, the French would have been second rates Symbolists without the Belgians.

Bruges became a port city by accident in 1134 when a tidal wave swept inward some eleven miles from the North Sea down the River Zwijn . The diligent citizens of Bruges built a web of canals to take advantage of their good fortune and their continued dredging eventually caused the Zwijn to silt in, leaving the city marooned at permanent low tide. In Psychologie d'une ville: Essai sur Bruges (1901), a book dedicated to the memory of Georges Rodenbach, Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert referred to the dawn of the 15th century as "The Twilight of Bruges"

"The Middle Ages...knew that everything on earth is a sign, a figure, that the visible is only worth what it extracts from the invisible; in the Middle Ages...which were not gullible, as we are, to appearances, closely studied this science and made it the caretaker and the servant of mysticism." - excerpted from The Cathedral (1898) by J.-K. Huysmans, translated from the French by Clara King (1981).

The waning of religion left a vacuum for nostalgia to fill. A more complicated response was a kind of psychological mysticism in the works of 19th century Symbolists. In the fate of Bruges they found confirmation of their sense of irrelevance to the industrialized present in its glorious art and architecture. What better image could there be than Fernand Khnopff's surrealistic rendering of the Memling Plaatz, named for the great artist Hans Memling (c.1430-1494) . Marooned by a rising tide, the plaza and the base of the statue are rendered recognizably but where is the Memling statue. When queried, Khnopff's reply was that he had never seen the statue.

Belgium has been called 'a country that does not exist", an allusion to its duality: Flemish (Dutch) in the north and Wallon (French) in the south. When it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, it was called the Austrian Netherlands and when it was de-accessioned, as they say in the museum business, the French considered annexing it but didn't.

Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) was born in the French speaking Flemish town of Tournai, poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) came from Saint-Amands in eastern Flanders, and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was from Ghent (Gand) in western Flanders. Maeterlinck,who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911, edging out Verhaeren for the honor, was hailed in his lifetime as 'the northern Shakespeare.' All three wrote in French.

Bruges-la-Morte, the novel and the metaphor, made Rodenbach's name. Equally claustrophobic is a story published posthumously - Le Rouet des Brumes or The Spinning Wheel of the Mists (1901). A refashioning of the myth of Narcissus, it is one of many late 19th century distortions of the myth to extremes never hinted at in its ancient origins. The protagonist of Le Rouet des Brumes is a nightmarish variation on Joris-Karl Huysman's exasperated aesthete, des Esseintes, in the novel Against Nature.(A Rebours, 1884).

Although the narrator identifies himself as a friend of the man who has died in a sanitarium, he recounts the tale with the detachment of a psychiatrist offering a case study. The nameless recluse gradually retreats from the world to a house full of mirrors. Happy at first, he descends into paranoia, only to be found bloody and bruised after attempting to smash through a mirror to "the other side."

"I was not surprised, knowing my friend to be sensitive, knowing besides what impressions can be created....within closed rooms, amidst the dust, the musty odor, the confusion, the melancholy one feels for things that seem to have died a bit during one's absence. Oh, the sadness of evenings of jubilation! Evenings of return, after the forgetfulness one experiences while away. It seems as if all one's sorrows that had remained at home come out to greet us..."

If we are tempted to share the detachment of Rodenbach's narrator, keep in mind that Rodenbach began another work, L'Ami des Miroirs (The Lover Of Mirrors), with these words: "Madness is frequently nothing other than the paroxysm of a sensation that originally appeared to be purely artistic and subtle.' This puts Rodenbach at odds with the artist whose name is most often linked with his, creator of the frontispiece for the first edition of Bruges-la-Morte: the purely artistic and subtle Fernand Khnopff. The circumstances of Khnopff's return to the place he considered his home town were obscured by the artist, whereas Rodenbach, who never returned to his birthplace in Ghent, spoke of it constantly, according to his children.

Note: Artworks by Khnopff were made during the year of his one acknowledged return visit to Bruges in 1904.

Images:
1. Fernand Khnopff - In Bruges. The Minnewater, 1904, Belgian Royal Musuem of Fine Arts, Brussels.
2. Fernand Khnopff - Souvenir Of Bruges. Entrance To the Beguinage, 1904, Hearn Family Trust, New York.
3. Fernand Khnopff - Abandoned City (Memling Plaatz - Bruges), 1904, Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
4. Fernand Khnopff - In Bruges. A Portal, 1904, Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany.
5. Fernand Khnopff - In Burges. St. Jan's Hospital, 1904, private collection, Belgium.
Fernand Khnoff - frontispiece - Bruges-la-Morte, Paris, Flammarion, 1892.
7. Henri Berssenbrugge (1873.1959) - photograph of an artist painting in Bruges, early 20th century, Fotomuseum, Antwerp.

23 January 2012

The Year Of The Dragon

The year of the dragon begins today. It is an auspicious year. Dragons partake of the five elements: water, earth, metal, fire, and wood. Like poet Walt Whitman, they are vast, they contain multitudes. After a Green Dragon or two, you too will be able to breathe fire.

The Green Dragon Cocktail is a simple, sweet drink whose most unusual ingredient is kummel liquor (a blend of caraway and other spices). While its origins are unclear, the classic version appeared in The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock in 1930. The following recipe makes one Green Dragon cocktail.

Ingredients:

1/2 oz. kummel, 1/2 oz. green creme de menthe, 1 & 1/2 oz. gin, juice of half a lemon, 4 dashes of orange bitters.

Method:
Fill a cocktail shaker half full with shaved ice.
Add the other ingredients and shake gently for 10-15 seconds, being careful not the bruise the gin (!)
Strain the liquid into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon. Drink!

Images:
1. Bertha Lum - Green Dragon Cocktail, 1937, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.
2. Bertha Lum - The Woman In The Chinese hat, 1924, San Francisco Musuem of Fine Arts.

Also: May I direct readers to the excellent Bertha Lum website by Laurent.

20 January 2012

Painter Of Mystery

In the midwinter here is another reason to look forward to spring. A collaboration between two museums is preparing an exhibition on the under-celebrated Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935). Portions of several of the artist's notebooks will be included in the exhibition catalog, revealing his thoughts about his work and his sources of inspiration.

Degouve de Nuncques defies attempts at pigeonholing, even among Symbolists His Pink House (1892) is often suggested as the progenitor of surrealism and, close to home, of Rene Magritte's inverted twilight world. A melancholy disposition and a deep pessimism underlined by personal tragedies - the death of his wife, a paralysis of his hand - appear in his paintings as a scrim that separates us from his images. We look at them and wonder what the artist inscribed there.

It is not obvious what makes the painting Mysterious Garden fit its title but it suggests the artist's puzzlement, perhaps something like this: " A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, .The Great Gatsby, chapter 8 - 1925)

Two years spent on the Balearic Islands off the Mediterranean coast of Spain from 1900-1902, seemed to intensify the artist's attraction to scenes of winter. What remained consistent was the usual lack of figures, the odd black swan or fair wagon, aside.

In recent decades, Degouve de Nuncque's paintings have been included in group exhibitions such as Autour de Levy-Dhurmer at the Grand Palaid in Paris (1973), Mystery and Glitter at the Musee d'Orsay (2008) and The Kiss of the Sphinx at Vienna Kunstforum (also 2008). Only now is a catalogue raisonne of the artist's work in preparation.

Images:
1. Birds In Winter, no date, Frank Welkenhuysen Galerie, Utrecht.
2. The Black Swan, 1895, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.
3. Mysterious Garden, 1891, private collection, Belgium.
3.untitled winter scene, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.
4. The Fair Wagon, 1910, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
5. Apple Trees in Bloom, 1908, private collection, Belgium.
6.. Snowy Landscape With Barge, 1911, Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterloo.

For further reading: Nocturnal World - William Degouve de Nuncques, posted here 16 November 2009
William Degouve de Nuncques: Maitre de mystere at Musee Felicien Rops in Namur, Belgium from 28 January 2012 to 6 May 2012 and at Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands from 27 May to 2 September.

THE BLUE LANTERN

17 February 2012

The Androgyne And The Magician

13 February 2012

"My Dream Will Become Your Reality"

06 February 2012

Bruges & Fernand Khnopff

03 February 2012

Fernand Khnopff: Le Regard Hautain

01 February 2012

February by Franz Melchers

29 January 2012

Djuna Barnes: A Daring Young Woman

27 January 2012

Le Rouet des Brumes

23 January 2012

The Year Of The Dragon

20 January 2012

Painter Of Mystery

Followers

About Me

Search This Blog

Share it

Blog Archive

Dispatches - Under Reconstruction

Photography

Music

Printed Matters

Under The Blue Lantern....An Archipelago Of Hidden Arts

Fish Game

Popular Posts