tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45147706718896275092024-03-13T21:01:22.964-07:00In the Loopby Jan Looper SmithJan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-87768097748094540902019-11-02T06:43:00.000-07:002019-11-02T06:43:01.699-07:00Rippy FamilyRichard Rhea Rippy Family History<br />
By Jan Looper Smith<br />
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This article is based on a work by Gayle Campbell, called "The Life and Times of John William Rippy." Gayle is one of John William's great granddaughters, as am I. Gayle did some excellent research by accessing original documents and newspaper accounts, as well as visiting local museums. She thoughtfully included background information on the various locations where the Rippys lived in order to set the scene. However, I found that the colorful details served to obscure the plain facts in my memory, and I was unable to repeat the salient details. Therefore, I have written a sort of top-level summary of the plain facts, which I’m hoping will make them more memorable.<br />
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<i>First Generation</i><br />
<b>Matthew Rippy (1740-1817)</b><br />
The story starts with Matthew, who was born in Ireland, and came to America with his family in 1744, when he was four years old. His father was named Edward Ross Rippy. His mother, Susannah Thomas, was born in Wales. The Rippys came here before the Revolutionary War, and settled in North Carolina, in the county of Orange. They were farmers.<br />
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About 1759, Matthew married to Nancy Ann Holliday. They had twelve children. Their daughters were named Frances, Susannah, Virginia, Jane, and Sarah. Their sons were John M., Thomas C., Edward, Matthew Jesse, Joseph H., and James.<br />
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In his mid-thirties, Matthew provided supplies to the American army during the Revolutionary War. Later, he was designated as a Patriot by the Daughters of the American Revolution.<br />
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Further research shows that the Rippys were slave-holders. According to his will, when Matthew died in 1817, he had $400 in funds, over 300 acres of land, and four slaves to pass on to his children.<br />
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<i>Second Generation</i><br />
<b>Edward Rippy (1764-1828</b>)<br />
Matthew’s eldest son, Edward, was born in Orange, North Carolina. He married a woman named Nancy, like his mother. They had eleven children.<br />
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In 1811, when Edward was 47, he moved his family to Sumner County in Tennessee. He died there in 1828.<br />
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<i>Third Generation</i><br />
<b>Thomas Matthew Rippy (1809-1884)</b><br />
Thomas Matthew was born in Orange, North Carolina, before his family moved to Sumner County, Tennessee in 1811. He was a farmer. Thomas Matthew was married to Rosanna Williams and they had five children. He died in Sumner County in 1884.<br />
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<i>Fourth Generation</i><br />
<b>Edward D. Rippy (1836-1902)</b><br />
Thomas Mathew’s son Edward D. Rippy was born in Sumner County, Tennessee.<br />
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Edward was a farmer. He was married to Frances Lane. They had ten children in Sumner. Around 1884, when Edward was 48, he and Frances moved their ten children to Stony, which is in Denton County, in Texas. Another son was born there.<br />
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Denton is in Central Texas North, about half way between Dallas-Fort Worth and the Oklahoma border.<br />
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Speculation: Gayle wonders why anyone would move from the “lush, green hills” of Sumner, Tennessee to the dry, rocky land of Stony, Texas. “Perhaps it was the lure of cheap land, or maybe just getting away from all the other Rippys.” I think she’s right on both counts. The Rippy family were pioneers in sparsely populated Denton county, so it seems likely that land was cheap. Also, since families were so large in those days, young people were forced to spread out in search of farm-lands and wives.<br />
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I can’t find any documentation about this, but I’m speculating that Edward D. bought a large farm, which was then inherited by his eldest son, John William.<br />
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<i>Fifth Generation</i><br />
<b>John William Rippy (1864-1941)</b><br />
John William was the first-born son of Edward D. Rippy and Frances Lane. Like most of his siblings, John was born in Oak Grove, in Sumner County, Tennessee, but in 1884 when he was 20, he moved with his family to Denton County, Texas.<br />
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In 1886, when he was 22, John William married Louisa Griffen. He was farming in Denton, but he also owned a lumber yard. John and Louisa had four sons: Richard Rhea, Max, Herschel and Maud.<br />
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Louisa died in 1894, when her sons were all under 5 years old.<br />
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in 1895, less than a year later, John married Mary Anna Nail, called Anna. Anna and John adopted the daughter of a friend of Anna’s who had died, in addition to having four sons and one daughter together. That is ten children in total.<br />
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Also in 1895, John’s home was destroyed by fire.<br />
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In 1896, John’s lumberyard was damaged by a tornado.<br />
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By 1910 John and Annie had moved to Otter Creek, in Kiowa County, Oklahoma. John was 46 years old. This was the Rippy family’s first venture into Oklahoma.<br />
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By the fact that he later moved back to Denton, I speculate that John had retained ownership of their farm there, leasing it out to others while they were gone.<br />
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In 1920, John and Annie were living in Moore, in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, according to the census. Their adopted daughter Ruth was a school teacher there. Moore is close to Oklahoma City, and also to Norman, where the university is located.<br />
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In 1923, they were living in Shawnee, Oklahoma, which is a good size town in the same region. Their son Max owned the Pickwick Market there, and their son Herschel worked there as well.<br />
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In 1928, when he was 64, John and Anna were again living on a farm in Denton County. John also owned a filling station, probably on a corner of his own land, which he leased out. This “filling station” must have been a sort of community center; in addition to selling gas and oil, the mail came there, and there was a lunch counter. In July of 1928, John was accused of killing the fellow who leased the filling station from him, J. I. Hornsby. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in the penitentiary.<br />
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When it came to trial in April of 1929, the case against John was solely circumstantial. Several people had been passing through the area—bus-riders, bike-riders, drivers—who testified that they saw John near the station about the time of the shooting, carrying a shotgun. Hornsby had been killed by a shotgun. John testified that he had gone to the station to get his mail on the day of the killing, and had returned home through a field, stopping to shoot a rabbit with his shotgun.<br />
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John’s motive was supposed to relate to the lease on the filling station. Hornsby had been leasing the station for about six months, and since he didn’t want to extend the lease, John had found a new tenant, who wanted to take possession a week before the lease was up. When the tenant approached Hornsby about this, Hornsby said he wanted to hold onto the station until the lease was up. John said that was agreeable with him; however, a few people reported to the court that John was dissatisfied with Hornsby—because he wouldn’t sell beer or whiskey—and John had been known to make drunken jokes about giving Hornsby trouble. Many others reported that the two men were on good terms, and John Rippy was known as a law-abiding citizen.<br />
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Six months later, this decision was reversed and remanded because a witness for John Rippy had not been permitted to testify. A new trial was set for December, 1930.<br />
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In the second trial, the prosecution again presented many witnesses who saw John in the area of the filling station, and a few that who thought John felt some ill will toward Hornsby.<br />
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The defense offered testimony by George Smith and Will Drake who both said that they had seen Hornsby alive after the time that the State alleged he had been killed. Gayle’s report seems to mix the two men’s names, but one or both of them declared that he stopped at the station after the alleged time of the killing, and found Hornsby “standing in the door of the station while a white man and two Mexicans were there in a Ford touring car.” He said a shotgun was in the front seat of the car, and that the white man was drunk and was trying to trade a half-gallon of whiskey for some gasoline.<br />
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The drunken white man, therefore, was another potential suspect. Since it is known that J. I. Hornsby refused to sell liquor, it seems plausible that some sort of fracas might have broken out when the white man tried to trade whiskey for gasoline.<br />
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However, the jury wasn’t convinced. They convicted John again, and lengthened his sentence from 25 to 35 years!<br />
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John’s attorneys appealed the decision, so in 1934, over 3 years after the second trial, he was granted a third trial and a change of venue to Dallas.<br />
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John was convicted again, and sentenced to life in prison, but that trial was overturned a few days later because, during his summation, when referring to the fact that John had not testified in this trial, the prosecutor got the names of Hornsby and Rippy mixed.<br />
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A fourth trial was set, but John failed to appear and forfeited his bail.<br />
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John and Anna fled to Oklahoma, where four of their children were already living. Richard and Herschel were in Tulsa, Maxwell was in Shawnee, and their adopted daughter Ruth was in Cushing. Lloyd and John had already moved to California, and were living in Whittier.<br />
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In 1935, John and Anna had settled in Bristow, a tiny town, about halfway between Tulsa and Shawnee. They lived in town, as John was too sick to manage a farm. He went by the name of Bill, and that is the name on his grave in Bristol cemetery.<br />
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In 1941, John’s wife Anna, sometimes called Annie, was struck by a fast passenger train while walking into town with a neighbor. Annie was 77 at the time. Witnesses said that seeing the train coming, she had attempted to dash across the track, but misjudged the train’s speed. John died of natural causes later that year.<br />
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John William was Gayle’s main subject, so she concludes her story there. However, John's son Richard Rhea was my grandfather, so I’m going to piece together what I know of his story.<br />
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<i>Sixth Generation</i><br />
<b>Richard Rhea Rippy, 1889-1959</b><br />
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Richard Rhea was born in Denton County Texas, the first child of John William and Anna.<br />
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The next recorded event in Richard’s life was when he married Lillie Mae Ragle in 1911. Toward the end of her life, Lillie wrote her own memoir, entitled Whistle and Hoe.<br />
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Lillie was born in Parker County, Texas. Her farming family moved to a few other counties in Texas, before becoming pioneer settlers in Olney, which is in Young County, Texas.<br />
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When Lillie was a senior in high school, her father rented their farm out, and the family moved into the town of Olney. Without her father’s permission, she began going out with boys, and she met Richard at a party there. When her father discovered her one night alone in a buggy with another boy, he beat her severely with three branches of a peach tree.<br />
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After a year, her father moved the family back to the farm. Lillie refused to go with them. She got a job at a general merchandise store, and a furnished room, and lived on her own for awhile.<br />
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The following year, 1910, Lillie’s family moved 400 miles west to the town of Ralls, which is in Crosby County, near Lubbock, and not far from the border with New Mexico, and her father persuaded her to go with them. She soon found a job at the Crosby County Courthouse in nearby Emma, as the Deputy County and District Clerk. Her main job was recording deeds and licenses.<br />
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After about a year, she got a letter from Richard Rhea asking her to marry him. He was farming in Stony, in Denton County, on a farm near John and Anna’s place. Although she wrote back that she wasn’t ready to get married, he came out to Emma anyway. They were married that very day by the judge at the County Courthouse where Lillie worked. Born the same year, Richard Rhea and Lillie Mae were both 22 years old.<br />
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Richard was a tenant farmer, leasing first one farm and then another. They raised cotton and grains, and Richard did some livestock trading as well. Every year or two brought another move, and another baby.<br />
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In 1912, they had one son: Jay William Rippy. The following year, Lillie lost a baby.<br />
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In 1914, they moved to the Ralls area, where Lillie’s family lived. They rented a farm of about 300 acres, and they had a daughter, named Hazel. The next year Lillie had another stillborn baby.<br />
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In 1917, during the First Word War, they had a daughter. They named her Dulon after Mrs. Dulon Assiter, who was very helpful to them at that time. She was the wife of the man who owned the land they were renting.<br />
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In 1918, when Dulon was 13 months old, their son Fred Rhea was born.<br />
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The next year was a good crop year, and they were apparently able to save some money, because in 1919, Richard and his brother John bought a restaurant in Ralls, and the family moved to town. However while they were there, Richard had rented a farm and had a Negro working it on the shares. This venture was a failure due to a hail storm, and they had to return to farming. That year, Lillie had another stillborn child.<br />
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In 1920, their son Russell was born.<br />
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In 1922, they had daughter that they named May Ellen. Both Richard and Lillie were 33 years old.<br />
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The Payne-Rippy Feud<br />
In 1923, while they were living on a farm near Ralls, Richard, known as Dick at the time, got into a feud with David Leonard Payne, who was known as ‘Poppin’ because of his skill with a pistol. This feud has become something of a legend in that part of Texas.<br />
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This is the way it was reported at the time by the Galveston Daily News, and other newspapers: "The Vendetta between Payne, Sweaza and the Rippys began when Payne won their money in a poker game. The trio beat Payne with a cane-bottomed chair until they thought he was dead. The attackers summoned an undertaker to pick up Payne's body; however, when the mortician arrived he discovered that Payne was still alive. Knowing that Payne earned his nickname "Poppin" because he was an expert shot and fearing that he would seek revenge for his beating, the gang decided to finish the job by ambushing him as he approached a Ralls barber shop. Payne was wounded but survived this attack as well. Next, [switching to a shotgun] the trio fired upon him from an automobile as he worked in his garden in Ralls." Once again, Payne survived, and his attackers were put on trial for attempted murder in Crosbyton, Texas. During a break in the trial, Maud Rippy and Sweaza were at the east entrance of the courthouse conversing with their attorney when Poppin Payne killed them "by a fusillade of 45-caliber pistol bullets as they sat on the courthouse steps. Six bullets penetrated Rippy´s body, one of the shots going into his heart. Sweaza was shot twice, once through the heart. Poppin Payne…surrendered to Sheriff John McDermett in the Courthouse."<br />
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In 2014, the "Shootout on the Courthouse Steps" was re-enacted by high school students as part of Crosby County's celebration of the 100th anniversary of its courthouse. According to that version, the feud started with a poker game in the town of Dimmit, the county seat in Castro County. "Poppin Payne was sitting at a deal table with what seemed a kind of prohibition-era gang of three. The three were J. Sweaza and Dick and Maud Rippy. Poppin Payne was winning every pot, and finally the gang of three were completely cleaned out. It isn’t known if Poppin Payne laughed as he rose from the table with all their money, but it is clear the gang of three never wanted to see Payne alive again. They picked up their cane-bottom chairs and began beating him with all the rage their chagrin could inspire.<br />
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"Finally, he lay not only still, but dead. At least they assumed he was dead, and without fleeing the scene, they did what they figured was right — they called the undertaker to come get the body. But Poppin Payne wasn’t dead. He revived. And later…the gang of three feared revenge from a man they knew could shoot with deadly accuracy. There was only one thing to do — take out Poppin Payne. When he stepped out of a barbershop in Ralls, they were waiting. Apparently they got off just one shot, and it only hit Poppin Payne in a fleshy part of his arm. He was angry, and they knew it. A court trial had been set to deal with the issue, and Poppin Payne was the witness. They had to finish the job.<br />
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"This time, they picked a shotgun, which with its scattered pattern, couldn’t miss. Poppin Payne and his wife were working in their garden when the gang of three arrived for a kind of drive-by shooting. They hit him in the back with a load of buckshot, and that made it war. <br />
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"While he was getting the buckshot taken out, Poppin Payne learned the doctor had a 45-caliber gun. He needed a bigger gun for something he needed to do, he had said, and traded a small-caliber gun for the doctor’s .45." However, his assailants were in jail, so he didn't get a chance to use the pistol until the they were tried for attempted murder. The story goes on:<br />
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"At a break in the trial, two members of the gang of three — Maud Rippy and Sweaza — were sitting outside on the steps of the Crosby County Courthouse, and Dick Rippy was checking on something inside. Poppin Payne appeared with his .45 and quickly dispatched Maud Rippy and Sweaza where they were, because, as everyone knew, he was a good shot. Dick Rippy saw what was happening and fled out another door to hide in the restrooms, which were outside the courthouse at the time. <br />
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"Poppin Payne went inside the courthouse and surrendered to Sheriff John McDermett and was taken to jail in Lubbock. At his trial, the jury acquitted him, either because the jurors considered it self-defense after the fact, or else they just didn’t blame Poppin Payne for what he did."<br />
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Although this story is dramatic and memorable, it isn't credible. It appears the so-called "prohibition-era gang of three" was laughably inept at committing murder, and Payne was remarkably resilient. Moreover, the story has it that Richard and Payne, who both lived in Ralls, went all the way to Dimmitt, over 100 miles away, to play poker with Maud and Sweaza.<br />
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Just who were these characters, anyway? We already know that Richard was 34 years old, and the father of six children, one just a year old. His adversary, David Leonard Payne, was 50, and the father of nine children. Both lived in Ralls at the time of their quarrel. Maud, Richard's brother, was a County Commissioner in Castro County and lived in Dimmitt.<br />
Digging around the web for information on J. Sweaza, I found long quotations from the "Sweazea Family History." The man known in the newspapers as J. Sweaza was actually James Franklin Sweazea. James was born in 1850, so at the time of the 'feud' in 1923 he was 73 years old. He was a widower, retired and living in Dimmitt, in Castro County, Texas. He was friendly with the Cone family, who lived a few miles down the road, and frequently helped them out. The way he got involved with the Rippys is that one of Mrs. Cone's son-in-laws, Maud Rippy, asked him for a ride to Ralls; Maud doubted that his old model T would make it 100+ miles, while James had a new touring car. Maud had heard that his brother Dick was having serious trouble with his neighbor Poppin Payne and wanted Maud to come help decide what to do.<br />
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The Sweasea Family's version has nothing about poker or cane-bottomed chairs. It says that when Maud and James got to Ralls, Dick and Maud must have decided that they had to kill Poppin Payne. "With James F. passed out from drink, they drove by Payne's house, and shot Payne with a shotgun." Although all three were charged the same, it looks like Maud did the driving and Richard did the shooting. They failed to kill him, and all three were arrested for attempted murder.<br />
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The Sweasea Family History goes on to say that during a recess in their trial, while they were sitting on the courthouse steps with their defense attorney, James and Maud were shot by Poppin Payne. Payne slipped up behind them and shot James F. In the back of the head. When Maud jumped to run, Payne shot him in the back; he fell, but continued to crawl, so Payne shot him several more times. Then he shot Sweazea again, in the forehead. He didn't get Richard because he was in the restroom.<br />
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The Sweazea version states that Payne was tried for manslaughter in the killing of James F., because James wasn't involved in the Payne-Rippy feud. According to a report on the Texas Rangers, who guarded the courtroom during Payne's trial, another indictment against Payne was pending for killing Maud Rippy. Payne received a sentence of seven to twelve years, but on appeal the sentence was reduced to three to five years, and Payne served his time.<br />
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Payne was 58 when he died of natural causes in 1932, nine years after Richard had tried to kill him.<br />
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The court documents from the trial of the Rippy brothers and Sweasea that have been quoted say nothing about poker, cane-bottomed chairs, or three failed attempts at murder. The three men were tried only for the drive-by shot-gun shooting. Nor was Payne considered 'not guilty' because the jury didn't blame him for getting his own revenge on his attackers.<br />
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The only contemporary source I can find for the colorful details in the legend of the Payne-Rippy feud is a short, sensational article in a big-city newspaper from the time. It appears to have been based on rumor and hearsay.<br />
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Richard's brother John, and his father John William, got involved when Payne was tried for killing James Sweasea. John wrote about it much later in a letter. Since the shooting had taken place on the steps of the Crosby County courthouse in Crosbyton, Payne's trial was moved to Canyon, a distance of about 100 miles.<br />
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John's story skips over the start of the feud, but he adds a lot of colorful detail of his own. He says that he came down from Oklahoma City for the hearing, where Dick would be a witness. Brother Max furnished him a 30.30 rifle, and brother Hershel gave him a 45 Colt automatic, "and I went out to kill." A sheriff was supposed to take Dick from Ralls to Canyon, a distance of about 100 miles, and the Rippy brothers apparently feared that they might be ambushed by Payne’s sons on the way. Dick and his father, John William sat in the backseat of the sheriff's car, and brother John sat in the front seat with the sheriff. John was the spokesman. "Before we started, I told the sheriff we…thought more of Dick's bull dog than we did of him and if he led us into an ambush I would put the first shot in him and I had the forty five in my hand cocked and ready.<br />
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"Nothing happened until we were almost to Canyon City. Then we ran into a road block. The sheriff slowed down and I told him to drive on. Papa, Dick and I had agreed to shoot it out and kill every Payne in sight. When we got close enough to the blockade it turned out to be four sheriffs and two Texas rangers who took over the situation, also our guns, and escorted us to a rent house where we were guarded day and night until the trial started."<br />
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The report on the activities of the Texas Rangers includes a quote from the judge who asked for them to guard the courtroom during Payne's trial that confirms the high level of tension surrounding the case. It says the judge understood that the killing grew out of "a bitter factional feeling in Crosby County, and that it is believed that the respective factions are well organized and determined against each other, and that in all probability there will be further trouble growing out of the situation, and it is feared that there may be some outbreak during the trial…"<br />
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Brother John recounts a comical incident that did take place during the trial. "Nothing happened until the second day of the trial just after lunch when someone tried to start their Model T and it back fired three or four times. Court broke up--they thought the fight was on. Spectators jumped through the open windows but it was soon over and the Judge called a recess for thirty minutes."<br />
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There is no report about the disposition of the case against Richard for attempting to murder Payne in the first place, but it appears it was dropped. It is notable that this feud caused the deaths of two innocent men, and ruined the life of Poppin Payne.<br />
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In 1924, Richard fled to Shawnee, Oklahoma, where his parents and a couple of his brothers were living. Lillie sold out in Ralls, and took the children with her to Shawnee on the train. Lillie doesn’t say what Richard did for a living in Shawnee, but since his brothers Max and Herschel had a market there, I’m guessing that’s where Richard learned the skill of meat-cutting.<br />
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Around 1925, Richard and Lillie and six children headed back to Texas to pick cotton, stopping in a place called Dozier. By the end of the season they had enough money to rent a farm for themselves. They raised cotton and feed.<br />
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They stayed in Dozier for about a year, then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a big city in the eastern part of the state. From Lillie's memoir, it appears they spent 1926 and 1927 in Tulsa. She doesn't specify Richard's occupation, but I'm guessing he worked as a butcher.<br />
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In 1928, they returned to Shawnee, again living in town. They were both 39 years old. Their oldest child, Jay was 16; Hazel was 13; Dulon was 11; Fred was 10; Russell was 8; May Ellen was 6. Lillie bore another son that year, that they named John. Richard worked for his brother Maxwell, who owned the Pickwick Market there, and his brother Herschel worked there as well.<br />
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They next moved to Sapulpa (which is between Shawnee and Tulsa), and then they moved back to Tulsa. Lillie doesn't say what Richard was doing there, but I'm guessing he worked as a butcher, probably with Herschel.<br />
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From Lillie’s memoir it appears that they were in Tulsa about nine years. After Richard's father John William was accused of murder, he lived with them for awhile. Both Jay and Hazel got married toward the end of that period.<br />
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In 1937, when they were 48 years old, Richard and Lillie moved to California. I believe they took all the children except for Jay and Hazel, who were already married and established in Oklahoma. I think that son John, known as Johnnie, was nine years old, May Ellen was 15, Russell was 17, and Fred was 19. I surmise that Fred and Russell were soon working and living on their own.<br />
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The family first settled in Fullerton. Lillie's story lacks detail, but it seems they lived in Fullerton until around 1945, with interruptions, and that Richard had one, or a succession, of butcher shops.<br />
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In the first four years, Lillie made six trips back to Tulsa, once hitch-hiking, though she was in her fifties. At one point during this period, they moved to a farm in Enid Oklahoma, where they bought and sold milk cows.<br />
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They lived in Enid a year, but when the man who was running the meat department at their store in Whittier, CA, was drafted, Richard returned to California to take over. Lillie sold all their livestock, and moved back to California with Hazel, Dulon, and Johnnie.<br />
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Richard and Lillie lived in Whittier, not far from the market. Hazel helped Richard in the meat department, and Dulon, with her husband Frank, ran the grocery and produce sections. The market did a pretty good business, and within a few years, Richard sold out to Dulon and Frank.<br />
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Richard was 64-65 years old when he retired. He and Lillie bought a house in Whittier and fixed it up. He lived until he was 70, but he was bed-ridden the last year before he died. Lillie lived to be 93.Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-66318896227272436792019-10-16T03:01:00.000-07:002019-10-17T14:37:03.460-07:00My Chinese InfluenceAs a resident of Silicon Valley, I swim in a sea of immigrants and the offspring of immigrants. On my street alone are neighbors from Bolivia, Iran, India, Taiwan and China, while our housekeeper and yard man are both from Mexico. As a nondescript old white lady, I'm virtually invisible to all these people as they dart about self-importantly. It appears we have nothing in common, and that it is I who is out of place.<br />
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However, through our neighborhood writer's group, I have recently established a channel of communication with a fellow of Chinese descent who is half my age, and we seem to be on the same wavelength, sometimes.<br />
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This new friendship has caused me to think about the big influence of Chinese culture in my life. In my twenties, I was primarily seeking enlightenment, and I read books about Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen without concern for their national origins. My first book of Chinese philosophy was the <i>Tao Te Ching</i> by Lao Tse Zu. I associate Taoism with peace of mind through rational detachment from the past and the future, and total immersion in the present.<br />
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During that period a Jewish friend and mentor got me interested in the <i>I Ching,</i> an ancient Chinese book of divination, or fortune-telling. For several months, we consulted the <i>I Ching</i> whenever a question about the future arose. Instead of giving a pat answer, like a fortune cookie, the <i>I Ching</i> presents a set of evocative imagery about mountains and lakes, and other aspects of nature, that require deep interpretation, thus stimulating the imagination. It gives totally non-Western advice like, "The Great Man leads by following, or "Great action may be achieved by doing nothing."<br />
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When I was 28 years old, I was shocked to discover, on the last page of <i>Time</i> magazine, a profile of Maxine Hong Kingstong, a Chinese-American woman my age, who had written a book called <i>The Woman Warrior</i> that had quickly become required reading for freshman English majors. When I was an English major, only ten years before, we read only the work of white guys, mostly dead—very few females, and no authors who were thought of as second-generation immigrants at the time. I read Maxine's book then, and twice or three times more over the decades. It is such a heady mix of fantasy and reality that I still don't feel I have conquered it; it always leaves me in a state of mystification.<br />
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I followed Maxine's career, and read all of her work. Then as fortune would have it, I had a chance to meet this great author through mutual friends. She and I, with our husbands, have attended the same annual Christmas party for many years. When we chat, she is always very supportive of my own paltry efforts at writing; she's a great teacher as well as a great writer, and she taught at UC Berkeley for most of her career. From Maxine I got the idea that the effort to synthesize the Chinese and American cultures into one workable personality is challenging but rewarding.<br />
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As a student of art history, I'm also familiar with some contemporary Chinese artists. Until the 20th century Chinese art was confined by tradition and consistent adherence to art values that had been dictated centuries ago. There was little room for innovation or individualism. But in the 20th century some Chinese artists asserted their individuality, and adapted tradition to an entirely radical message.<br />
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The most obvious example is Ai Wei Wei, the maverick who got himself imprisoned by exposing the hard reality behind cheery Chinese propaganda. An iconic example of Ai's work is an installation of a long snake-like form composed of identical children's backpacks, such as those worn by the school children who were killed when a school collapsed due to shoddy construction. The show which has had the most impact locally was installed at Alcatraz a few years ago. Ai used the abandoned cells as exhibit spaces for installations related to the prisoners' experience—such as the recreation of the hospital ward, and another with speakers playing recordings of prisoners talking.<br />
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On of my favorite contemporary painters is a Chinese-American named Hung Liu. Hung Liu was a teenager in China during the cultural Revolution, and was sent to work in the fields at the time she was supposed to be entering college. She survived that and went on to get an art education and become a successful art teacher. But she always felt her personal vision was repressed by Chinese traditions of paintng, and even more confined by the dictates of the Communist Government. She was always looking for a way to get to the U.S. In her late thirties, she finally came here as a graduate student and quickly settled in, establishing a family and becoming a citizen. Most of Hung Liu's paintings reflect sadly on Chinese culture before it got erased or perverted by the Communist geovernment. She is adept at all Chinese traditional forms, but she always includes abstract element in her canvases, such as a veil of linseed oil drips, to show that her work is modern—as well as to express a feeling of loss.<br />
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As long as I'm doing an inventory, I could mention that the first international trip my husband and I made together was to Hong Kong. I remember colorfully elaborate architecture and decor, huge shanty-towns, opium addicts asleep in the street, vibrant Chinese temples with arcane rituals, and a hovercraft ride through a huge and fascinating harbor. My Hong Kong experience was completely disorienting—please forgive the unavoidable pun.<br />
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For me, exposure to Chinese culture and philosophy has been a crack through which I could escape the aggressiveness and hostility of Western thinking. With Westerners, life is all about dominance and power. With the Chinese philosophers, life is about detachment and acceptance, for the sake of peace of mind. I can relate to that. My goal is to let go of thoughts and emotions, to let them pass, for the sake of attending to the present moment.<br />
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It's reassuring to have this connection with one of the Chinese-Americans in my neighborhood. It makes me feel less like a stranger in my own land.Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-89305122478384983442019-08-24T08:47:00.002-07:002019-08-26T17:18:34.230-07:00J. D. Salinger: Franny and Zooey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Franny and Zooey </i>is a novel by J. D. Salinger, who is most famous for his earlier work, called <i>The</i> <i>Catcher in the Rye</i><i>. </i> It consists of two parts, <i>Franny</i> and <i>Zooey; </i> each was originally published separately in <i>The New Yorker </i>in the late 1950s, but they were always intended as one novel, as they were published in 1961.<br />
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The novel's most attractive quality is its humorous tone: self-conscious, over-sophisticated, and supercilious. On the very first page, Salinger describes the voices of a group of college boys at a railway station, waiting for their dates to arrive for a big week-end, as "collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue…" How well I remember boys like that!<br />
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The set-up has multiple layers of artifice, as though the narrator were hiding his true meaning, and his true personality. The narrator, Buddy, presents himself as an unqualified teacher of literature in a small girls' college in the ski country of New England, who is also trying to build a career as a writer of fiction. Buddy claims he got the story from the main characters themselves—Franny and Zooey and their mother Bessie—in long, detailed conversations and letters.<br />
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Dialog dominates the narrative to such an extent that it would be easy to stage the scenes as a play. The number of locations is minimal and there is very little action. <i>Franny </i>has scenes in a railway station, taxi, and restaurant, but <i>Zooey</i> mainly takes place in a bathroom—while Zooey is sitting in the tub, hidden behind a shower curtain— and a few other locations around the house. The action is so static that it would be easy to transform the novel into a series of radio plays.<br />
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We first meet Franny in a letter she has written to her boyfriend Lane. She is painfully self-conscious, apologizing in advance for her scattered thinking and bad spelling, as English majors are wont to do. After Franny arrives for the week-end, the pair have lunch at a fancy restaurant. Lane is also self-conscious, in a self-important way, wanting to look right and act right, and to have everything go right, according to his conventional pre-conceptions. Franny and Lane long to be in love with each other, but each criticizes the other constantly, and their hypocrisy breaks through appearances in comical ways. Describing Franny's internal life, Salinger says, "Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species' general ineptness, and Lane's in particular."<br />
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Franny veers back and forth between playing her role of giddy, gushing college girl and expressing her true feelings of doubt and disgust. For instance, she forces herself to listen to Lane's discourse with a "special semblance of absorption," and then totally condemns his speaking style and his self-presentation. She feels completely detached from Lane, but she covers it with an affectionate gesture.<br />
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Franny is suffering from total disillusionment with social conventions and conformity, with phoniness and self-promotion. Her way of life—majoring in English and acting in summer stock—seems embarrassingly ego-driven. She finds herself drawn to mysticism and prayer—in particular the so-called Jesus prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner." The conflict between her desire to conform and her spiritual inclinations finally causes Franny to faint in the midst of lunch with Lane. This gives her an escape, and an excuse to go home and languish on the couch, where <i>Zooey</i> starts.<br />
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Buddy interrupts his story at this point to give us the basics of Franny's improbable family background. Her parents, Bessie and Les, had been a popular vaudeville act, and all seven of their children had been youthful brainiacs, who performed on a radio quiz show for kids. To make it weirder, the two oldest boys indoctrinated their younger siblings in spirituality in general and Buddhism in particular from the beginning.<br />
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We first meet Zooey in that most intimate of activities, the long hot bath. His expectation of privacy, is frustrated by the entrance of his mother, Bessie. The fact that Bessie intrudes on his privacy tells us a lot about her character, and the fact that he lets her, with grudging good humor, tells us a lot about their relationship. Bessie is a genuine comic character, appearing in a hair net and a kimono whose pockets are so overloaded with paraphernalia that she "clinks faintly when she walks." She is worried about Franny's depression and wants Zooey to get her to snap out of it.<br />
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Zooey is a hidden character. When he finally emerges from behind the shower curtain, he quickly hides his face by lathering for a shave. When he tries to help Franny recover, he spends most of the time lying on the floor with his face hidden from her. When that doesn't work, he talks to Franny over the phone, pretending to be their brother, Buddy, who purports to be the author of this story. Zooey's personality is a contradiction in terms. He is extraordinarily handsome; he has astounding recall of everything he reads; his voice is naturally sonorous. In fact, he has quite naturally become a sought-after television actor, with additional roles on stage or in some independent film. The unexpected contradiction is that he has been fighting a private war against narcissism since he was seven or eight years old; he tries not to look at himself in mirrors, the way Narcissus of myth doted on his own image reflected in a pool. Zooey has already been through the sort of spiritual crisis Franny is experiencing, and he has been re-reading a letter that Buddy wrote to him at the time, looking for inspiration to share with Franny.<br />
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In <i>Franny and Zooey</i>, Salinger sought to express a spiritual synthesis of the highest order. He considered how a naturally creative performer can escape their ego and live consistently with their spiritual beliefs. His solution is both amusing and liberating.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-4573142590834621902019-07-18T11:18:00.000-07:002019-07-19T08:13:34.202-07:00Jack Kerouac: "On the Road"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What I like about Jack Kerouac's classic novel O<i>n the Road</i> is the poetic visions that Sal has. The narrator, Sal Paradise, is a seeker who thinks he'll find the truth by traveling rough around America. Like a prophet of old, he is seeking ultimate knowledge by living in self-imposed poverty and mingling with the most downtrodden and lowly folk, people he calls "beat." In this way, he has inspiring visions of the unity of humankind and expresses them in colorful and moving language.<br />
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Sal is a graduate student and budding novelist who periodically feels a need to take a break from academia and conformity in order to experience life more intensely; he craves a life of mythic proportions. As his guide, he chooses a "wild child" type character named Dean Moriarty who was born "on the road" and more or less raised by criminals. In other words, he is totally amoral, irresponsible, and self-indulgent. This allows the flame of pure enthusiasm and intelligence to blaze forth brilliantly. Sal is bewitched by Dean and periodically risks everything to travel with him; at the same time, the novelist in Sal recognizes good material for a story.<br />
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I like Dean because I too was once entranced by a wild and crazy character who lured me into doing wild and crazy things for the sake of kicks. With her also, I sank to some low points of recklessness and poverty.<br />
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I like Dean because he is attentive to his senses and wants to "dig" everything—to see and hear every detail of a new experience, and to feel it in the depths of his soul.<br />
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Dean is a pure hedonist, like Bacchus in Roman mythology, freely indulging in sex and booze. He has wives, or ex-wives, on both coasts, and children, too. Part of him longs for the luxuries of family life, but that part is frequently overcome by a mania that drives him to travel from coast to coast by any means available.<br />
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Dean Moriarty is famously based on a real person named Neal Cassady, who was a prominent figure in both the Beat generation and the Hippie era, but Dean is bigger than Neal; he is a character of mythic proportions, "a western Kinsman of the sun." He is a figure of folk tales, like Paul Bunyan. Where Paul Bunyan had prodigious feats, like carving the Grand Canyon with his ax, Dean performs fantastic feats of driving and parking in scene after scene.<br />
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I like Dean because he is obsessed with verbalizing every nuance of his experience. In several scenes he is shown baring his soul, or trying to, through outpourings of words, whether or not he understands them. And I like Saul because he is obsessed with listening, with absorbing this avalanche of thoughts and impressions. Ultimately, it is Dean's impassioned verbiage that fascinates Sal; he wants to give his own language a similar freedom and intensity, and he achieves that in passage after passage.<br />
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I like the musical theme in <i>On the Road.</i> In their travels, Sal and Dean constantly seek out jazz, bebop, and blues, and Sal makes a conscientious effort not only to describe individual performances, but to summarize the entire history of these musical styles. Beyond that, he tries to write passages that invoke inspired instrumental solos. I believe he even tried to imitate a musical form called a rhapsody, in which a set of themes is worked into a rapturous outpouring of melodic sounds. While I was reading this novel, I happened to hear Gershwin's <i>Rhapsody in Blue,</i> which is a compendium of American musical themes from marching bands to movie sound tracks, whipped into a satisfying lather of sound, and the similarity in purpose between Gershwin and Kerouac became apparent to me.<br />
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I can relate to the theme of traveling because, although I wasn't "born on the road" like Dean, when I was 2 1/2 my father was drafted, and my mother and I followed by car as the army transferred him from base to base for a year or more before sending him to Japan. We traveled on the cheap and picked up hitch-hikers for help with driving and gas money. From the snows of South Dakota to the heat of south Texas we traveled to be with my dad.<br />
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Moreover, as an adult I have visited nearly every major city in America, and innumerable smaller towns. Of course, I was middle-aged and well-funded, I was traveling with my husband, and we generally held fast to orderly plans, but there was still room for over-indulgence and risk-taking, and we had our ecstatic moments.<br />
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It's appropriate that Dean eventually burns out, like a dying star, losing his way and even his capacity to talk. Likewise, it's appropriate that Sal finds a good woman, escapes the tormenting fascination of aimless wandering, and writes the novel of his dreams.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-66750981372622138832019-05-31T15:59:00.002-07:002019-06-08T11:00:34.706-07:00The Late Monet: Always Innovating"The Late Monet" was a very important, and very large, exhibit at the de Young Museum that finished its run on May 27. The strongest impression I got from the show was that far from being a placid old man sentimentalizing his garden in his dotage, Monet was a relentless experimenter and tireless innovator throughout his career.<br />
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Monet was 32 years old in 1876—and already and accomplished realist—when he painted <i>Impression, Sunrise,</i> which is the source for the name Impressionism, a movement that lasted only about 10 years, but had an enduring impact on painting and painters. Instead of carefully delineating forms, Monet vaguely indicated boats and water with broad, casual brushstrokes. His main concerns were the light and color in the scene.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claude Monet, 1840-1926<br />
<i>Impression, Sunrise, </i>1873<br />
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
WikiArt</td></tr>
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For the next 10 years, Impressionism was all the rage in Paris, with many excellent painters being preoccupied with the effects of light and color, and the use of a variety of brushstrokes.</div>
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After traveling widely in search of subjects, in the 1880s Monet settled down with his family in a rural town not far from Paris called Giverny. There he turned much of his creativity toward landscaping, and created a large garden that became the only subject of his work.</div>
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"The Late Monet" presented works from around 1900, when Monet was 60; most of the works were from 1913 to 1926, Monet's final period. He died at the age of 86.</div>
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Monet's most famous subject is the water lily pond he created on his property, a subject he painted obsessively. The most amazing result is how different each is from the other. That is partly because Monet was observing the pond in different seasons and at different times of day. But the main difference is in the brushstrokes and the level of detail; every work is a painterly experiment.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies, Reflections of Tall Grasses,</i> ca. 1897<br />
Private Collection<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> 1906<br />
The Art Institute of Chicago<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Which of the vague forms represent real plants, and which patches of color are reflections of the sky? </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> 1914-1915<br />
Portland Art Museum, Oregon<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Some of the lily pads in this painting are barely indicated by one or two crude brushstrokes in an oval form. An unrecognizable yellow bloom is merely indicated by a few streaky brushstrokes. Or are those yellow strokes reflections of a plant hanging overhead? Some of the blue vertical strokes represent the plants growing beneath the surface, but other blue patches seem to be reflections of the sky. Monet merged different aspects of the scene into one flat, and highly decorative pattern.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> ca. 1914-1917<br />
Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Monet suggested the distance between one clump of lilies and another merely by lightening his colors and making his forms even more vague in the distance. Is that patch of sky in the upper section real or reflected?</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> 1915-1917<br />
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Unless the light is just right, the large violet patch on the lower right of this canvas looks unfinished and muddy. When you look at it directly, the downward streaking brushstrokes seem to indicate the scene beneath the water, but the beautifully modulated color suggests reflections of the sky.</div>
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Does this painting show the light of late afternoon? Do the downward streaks and bluish colors suggest a melancholy mood?</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> 1915-1917<br />
Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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This bright color combination and balanced composition is immediately attractive, but very vague. Painting reflections gave Monet an excuse to be vague and formless. Color and light were his abiding concerns.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-id2iuraL_So/XPEjho0TnQI/AAAAAAAARJg/xFM2JP5H9HEYerax-ow3Rxrg0U_PNelIgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Water%2BLilies%252C%2Bca.%2B1916-1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="408" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-id2iuraL_So/XPEjho0TnQI/AAAAAAAARJg/xFM2JP5H9HEYerax-ow3Rxrg0U_PNelIgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Water%2BLilies%252C%2Bca.%2B1916-1919.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> ca. 1916-1919<br />
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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We accept this as a lily pond, but why? The lily pads are pinkish, and the blooms are like roses. All the loose brushstrokes around them are vague; only the variation in color gives the picture a sense of spatial depth, and suggests a shady dell beneath overhanging trees.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4J8nCjf5RWI/XPEl2PTJT1I/AAAAAAAARJs/0rWnMXGIyOc0YskmZ04ILzv7ABmhXfziQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Water%2BLilies%252C%2B1916-1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="408" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4J8nCjf5RWI/XPEl2PTJT1I/AAAAAAAARJs/0rWnMXGIyOc0YskmZ04ILzv7ABmhXfziQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Water%2BLilies%252C%2B1916-1919.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies,</i> 1916-1919<br />
Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
This painting is so abstract and dark that the viewer might not recognize it as waterlilies in a pond. What are those white streaks? Are they underwater plants or reflections of something overhead? What are those purple splotches? Are you sure this is Monet?</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ut1GXfAUrD0/XPEssxSKDMI/AAAAAAAARKE/o6gmUmYf-LscKETrv9Ef5I9kGheoCk_nwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Water-Lily%2BPond%252C%2B1917-1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ut1GXfAUrD0/XPEssxSKDMI/AAAAAAAARKE/o6gmUmYf-LscKETrv9Ef5I9kGheoCk_nwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Water-Lily%2BPond%252C%2B1917-1919.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water-Lily Pond,</i> 1917-1919<br />
Private Collection<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2Br_jC6rEjI/XPEqRQAAf7I/AAAAAAAARJ4/2SNoe1_rJ4Ug7B1CUO43ds0Ab-0qk6E2ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Water%2BLilies%2B%2528Agapanthus%2529%252C%2Bca.%2B1915-1926.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="294" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2Br_jC6rEjI/XPEqRQAAf7I/AAAAAAAARJ4/2SNoe1_rJ4Ug7B1CUO43ds0Ab-0qk6E2ACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Water%2BLilies%2B%2528Agapanthus%2529%252C%2Bca.%2B1915-1926.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Water Lilies (Agapanthus)</i>, ca. 1915-1926<br />
Saint Louis Museum of Art<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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With its soft and appealing blend of colors and its almost total lack of definition, this work seems to express a state of heavenly grace or pure bliss. </div>
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During the same time period as the water lily paintings, Monet depicted a variety of other plants in his garden. But he wasn't interested in botanical exactness. Each work has painterly concerns.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4ffXytxNOWk/XPEviSvfCUI/AAAAAAAARKQ/1s6ifokC3D4vE6BlJARiN44frHp_xKFfgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Day%2BLilies%252C%2B1914-1917.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4ffXytxNOWk/XPEviSvfCUI/AAAAAAAARKQ/1s6ifokC3D4vE6BlJARiN44frHp_xKFfgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Day%2BLilies%252C%2B1914-1917.jpg" width="598" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Day Lilies</i>, 1914-1917<br />
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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The painterly concern in this work is those long green brushstrokes, arching so convincingly like the leaves of a day lily. The delicate red and purple flowers emerge energetically from the plant. The gorgeous pink and blue background is not tied to any reality.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G97ygBPySh4/XPExQeflG7I/AAAAAAAARKc/SlCSyQ8XPrQYU629u7CqYZauhOfaXWuHgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Irises%252C%2BCa.%2B1914-1917.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G97ygBPySh4/XPExQeflG7I/AAAAAAAARKc/SlCSyQ8XPrQYU629u7CqYZauhOfaXWuHgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Irises%252C%2BCa.%2B1914-1917.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Irises</i>, ca. 1914-1917<br />
National Galley, London<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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The dominant painterly value here is the bold, almost geometric composition. The subject also gave Monet a chance to work with long brushstrokes, each one so plant-like. The composition is flattened, as though this were a detail of a much larger overhead view.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yyp0Zypm6Ng/XPEyb_ZeB9I/AAAAAAAARKo/pYLD3qfFmqs-2R2ZEm1X5hM4WtO51GDSwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Yellow%2BIrises%252C%2B1917-1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="544" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yyp0Zypm6Ng/XPEyb_ZeB9I/AAAAAAAARKo/pYLD3qfFmqs-2R2ZEm1X5hM4WtO51GDSwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Yellow%2BIrises%252C%2B1917-1919.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Yellow Irises</i>, 1917-1919<br />
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Those joyous upswinging green strokes rushing toward a bright and buoyant sky express the luxuriant growth of springtime. This is sort of a worm's eye view, which makes it seem fresh and bold.</div>
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Another frequent subject of Monet's was a Japanese-style arching footbridge. It was Monet's private touch to shelter the bridge with a wisteria arbor.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zSjOZjikoz0/XPFAHX0j_fI/AAAAAAAARK0/S39JnyApzqcLapQlsXaKU6Jj5ciUpXlfQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/440px-Monet_in_Garden%252C_New_York_Times%252C_1922.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zSjOZjikoz0/XPFAHX0j_fI/AAAAAAAARK0/S39JnyApzqcLapQlsXaKU6Jj5ciUpXlfQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/440px-Monet_in_Garden%252C_New_York_Times%252C_1922.JPG" width="466" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Monet, right in his garden at Giverny, 1922<br />
Wikipedia</td></tr>
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Here's a photo of Monet on his bridge late in life. With plantings along the railing and an arbor overhead, the bridge doesn't look very Japanese any more.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SxhqqjIF-yY/XPFBKG86TtI/AAAAAAAARLA/ZmQKUqUvqycYWW1Yj9mKGxP2xm-S9pjggCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/giverny.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SxhqqjIF-yY/XPFBKG86TtI/AAAAAAAARLA/ZmQKUqUvqycYWW1Yj9mKGxP2xm-S9pjggCK4BGAYYCw/s640/giverny.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Japanese Footbridge<br />
Giverny.com</td></tr>
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Here's a modern photo of the bridge, with arbor above and weeping willows behind.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DUcsjfjohMU/XPFCvSAJ6VI/AAAAAAAARLM/1qcJZRv0R9U7yGxxjSAMwybp-mFqQ9OGwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BJapanese%2BFootbridge%252C%2B1899.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="504" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DUcsjfjohMU/XPFCvSAJ6VI/AAAAAAAARLM/1qcJZRv0R9U7yGxxjSAMwybp-mFqQ9OGwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BJapanese%2BFootbridge%252C%2B1899.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Japanese Footbridge, </i>1899<br />
National Gallery, Washington D.C.<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Just before the turn of the century, Monet did a depiction of the footbridge that is fairly realistic. The forms are definite, the color is springtime fresh, and the depth of space is rendered convincingly. But the dark horizontal green bands—are they underwater views or reflections of the surrounding plants? Monet loved his tricks of perception.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wPKsS3d8M1I/XPGcJMqthNI/AAAAAAAARLY/4ZOeW16inCMgN-EjvvnJC6OogpcZlqyYQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Tha%2BJapanese%2BBridge%252C%2B1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="364" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wPKsS3d8M1I/XPGcJMqthNI/AAAAAAAARLY/4ZOeW16inCMgN-EjvvnJC6OogpcZlqyYQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Tha%2BJapanese%2BBridge%252C%2B1919.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Japanese Bridge</i>, 1919<br />
Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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In this version from twenty years later, Monet gave the barest hint of the forms of the bridge and the plants and the water. He reduced the scene to an essay of greens, coming ever closer to nature's own elusive green. It seems to express the abundant growth of springtime.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vfjZeVX49oc/XPGd7GaMfII/AAAAAAAARLk/dO3s05i93qIMSXqwwWY_yb9qS4U1HuKQQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BJapanese%2BBridge%252C%2B1918-1924.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="482" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vfjZeVX49oc/XPGd7GaMfII/AAAAAAAARLk/dO3s05i93qIMSXqwwWY_yb9qS4U1HuKQQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BJapanese%2BBridge%252C%2B1918-1924.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Japanese Bridge</i>, 1918-1924<br />
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Later in the year, maybe early summer, the wisteria arbor comes into bloom, and the garden becomes a riot of color. This is one of many paintings by Monet that seems too red and contrasty. This coloration is generally seen as a "fault" and explained by the fact that he had cataracts at the time he painted it. However, it is also significant that European painting had already completed the period of Fauvism, when everyone was experimenting with the use of color to express feelings and emotions. The brushstrokes are also wild and crazy, each one distinct against the background. This painting seems to express the intense heat and humidity of the garden in high summer weather, and to express it better than "realistic" forms and colors. The careless scribbles, streaks and jabs of color also seem to express anger, perhaps because his vision was letting him down.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vc3IVi8Sjdg/XPGiD73WTqI/AAAAAAAARLw/xe40oiUAp9oX90rKg7G-5oBzRBqMbpLkwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BJapanese%2BBridge%252C%2Bca.%2B1923-1925.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="482" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vc3IVi8Sjdg/XPGiD73WTqI/AAAAAAAARLw/xe40oiUAp9oX90rKg7G-5oBzRBqMbpLkwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BJapanese%2BBridge%252C%2Bca.%2B1923-1925.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Japanese Bridge</i>, ca. 1923-1925<br />
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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The intense reds and yellows bursting from dark shadows immediately suggest anger, as do the smudged and layered brushstrokes. But the colors also relate to autumn when most of the leaves in his beloved garden turned vivid colors, just before withering. The painting also contains a painterly trick of perception. If you look at this painting carelessly or from the wrong direction, it appears to be random, messy and flat; but if you get just the right angle, the image conveys amazing depth. The longer you look at it, the more "realistic" it seems.<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Another frequent subject for Monet was the rose arbor in his garden. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Iza1kiWGXy4/XPGk48oJUJI/AAAAAAAARME/kLcOjNfL6GEKs9iGTREpEOJhLauI6fO7gCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Flowering%2BArches%252C%2BGiverny%252C%2B1913.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="548" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Iza1kiWGXy4/XPGk48oJUJI/AAAAAAAARME/kLcOjNfL6GEKs9iGTREpEOJhLauI6fO7gCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Flowering%2BArches%252C%2BGiverny%252C%2B1913.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Flowering Arches, Giverny</i>, 1913<br />
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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This version of the rose arbor is very descriptive. There is a clear division between the land and the pond, and between the sky and the reflections of the sky. In addition to the rose arbor, the painting gives us recognizable water lilies and iris. The painting is so pretty in its coloration and symmetrical in its composition that it is almost like a commercial product.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q31SvjitkiM/XPGoHj_BlzI/AAAAAAAARMU/00jMu8TfOuQhdouYXbgILbfMCRVumixsgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Path%2Bunder%2Bthe%2BRose%2BArches%252C%2BGiverny%252C%2B1920-1922.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="568" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q31SvjitkiM/XPGoHj_BlzI/AAAAAAAARMU/00jMu8TfOuQhdouYXbgILbfMCRVumixsgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Path%2Bunder%2Bthe%2BRose%2BArches%252C%2BGiverny%252C%2B1920-1922.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Path under the Rose Arches, Giverny,</i> 1920-1922<br />
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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Less than ten years later, Monet took a more modern approach to the rose arbor. Instead of looking at it placidly from a distance, he got right under the flowering vines. His coloration is again the tones of autumn and anger. Not only is his vision failing, but his garden is going dormant in the autumn weather. In a trick of perception, from certain angles this painting is just messy and arbitrary like the overdone crayon drawing of an angry child, but from the right angle you get an impression of tremendous depth, looking down the arbor with the path rising to meet the horizon at the end of the tunnel. The forms don't seem to matter as much as the pattern of shadows and brights that creates the feeling of a mysterious tunnel.<br />
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After his cataracts were surgically removed, Monet returned to a more normal and harmonious palette. Instead of being angry scribbles, his brushstrokes became more descriptive and true to nature.<br />
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During the First World War, Monet painted a series of images of a weeping willow tree. It has been suggested that the willow's drooping foliage represents fallen soldiers.This subject also gave the painter a different kind of problem in light and shadow, and represents his passion for painterly experimentation as much as his wartime sadness.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-whISZXK8TDc/XPGsObGOXCI/AAAAAAAARMg/qyPMcz6mSLciGU-cFNl5uDZZH3-Yjy64wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Weeping%2BWillow%252C%2B1918.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-whISZXK8TDc/XPGsObGOXCI/AAAAAAAARMg/qyPMcz6mSLciGU-cFNl5uDZZH3-Yjy64wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Weeping%2BWillow%252C%2B1918.jpg" width="556" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Weeping Willow,</i> 1918<br />
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
The willow tree is on the left of the canvas, with a murky recess on the right. Judging by the contrast between brights and darks, it appears to represent the late afternoon of a sunny day in the summer.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wVyt7QTnn_M/XPGvDXq9VaI/AAAAAAAARMs/Bv5acdMSEhQxD6YTBjpodmtQF7DmrWZrgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Weeping%2BWillow%252C%2B1918-1919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="526" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wVyt7QTnn_M/XPGvDXq9VaI/AAAAAAAARMs/Bv5acdMSEhQxD6YTBjpodmtQF7DmrWZrgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Weeping%2BWillow%252C%2B1918-1919.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Weeping Willow, </i>1918-1919<br />
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas<br />
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019</td></tr>
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This autumnal view of the weeping willow is expanded to reveal shadowy recesses on either side of the brightly lighted trunk.<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Some of Monet's late works are shocking and even repellant at first glance; but as you dwell on them, you begin to understand the painterly experimentation that motivated them. Even when they weren't popular, Monet's late works influenced several generations of painters to follow, and therefore the works of his old age still seem quite edgy and modern. </div>
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-7312392887136504182019-02-06T07:50:00.000-08:002019-02-06T07:50:00.734-08:00'Wise Blood' by Flannery O'Connor<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px;">
<i>Wise Blood </i>was the first novel by Flannery O’Connor, who is generally known for her short fiction; it was first published in 1952, though it was based on short stories that had already been published in magazines. It was challenging for me because none of the characters seem likable or even rational, and their actions seem arbitrary and mysterious. O’Connor was a Southern woman and an ardent Catholic, as well as a lupus sufferer, who died at the age of 39. All these factors figure in this story. </div>
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The main theme is redemption through acceptance of Christ. The protagonist, Haze Motes, was raised in a Christian home and his grandfather was an inspired preacher. Motes had also intended to be a preacher until he was drafted. In the service, he became totally disillusioned with religion, enough that when he gets back to the states, he decides to found a church without Christ, and to preach the falsity of religion. He lives largely in his mind, often unable to see or hear anything beyond what is going on in his head, or in his soul. </div>
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Haze Motes attracts one follower, even before he declares himself an anti-Christ preacher, an 18-year-old boy named Enoch Emory, who also lives in a world of his own imagining, based on his religious upbringing. He is crazy with loneliness, and would follow just about anyone who gave him a pat on the head, but Haze rejects him, mainly because he can’t really see outside himself. </div>
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Haze is inspired by a beggar named Asa Hawks who pretends to be a blind, unemployed preacher. He claims that he blinded himself for Jesus. Haze takes him seriously at first, but is later disillusioned. </div>
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Soon after Haze starts preaching the Church without Christ, a con man named Hoover Shoats tries to latch onto him, and to make a profit from his fervor. When Haze rejects him, Shoats hires a beggar to imitate him, dressing him in the same way, and coaching him to act in a similar manner.</div>
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The tone of the novel is Southern Gothic Humor. The idea is that the events in the plot are so horrible that they make you laugh, but they are played out in the generally benighted and backward culture of the south: religion is ubiquitous, and generally phony; police violence is routine, not just against black people but anyone they deal with; women are a little more in touch with reality, but they are ugly and gross, both in body and in spirit.</div>
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The story is loaded with religious symbolism and circular plot moves, as if for the amusement of graduate students in literature. Psychological 'truth' is irrelevant; Haze and Enoch behave in ways that symbolize certain ideas.</div>
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Though the novel is about redemption, reading it would not reinforce anyone's faith, nor would it cause anyone to seek salvation. Although the author, Flannery O'Connor, was herself a devout Catholic, but she had so much detachment that she could make an extended joke about the idea of salvation.</div>
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Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-71389037400940426522019-01-01T07:15:00.000-08:002019-01-01T07:15:21.889-08:00'Catcher in the Rye' by J. D. SalingerThe very popular novel <i>Catcher in the Rye, </i>by J. D. Salinger, seemed insignificant to me because the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is a first-class jerk. Holden Caulfield is an over-privileged, over-entitled, over-sophisticated adolescent who has just failed out of his elite prep school. He has a nervous breakdown, and eventually gets sent to a fancy rest home where he spins out the story of what he was thinking about when he hit bottom.<br />
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I think the thing that appeals to readers is his disenchantment. In the manner of a supercilious jerk, he sees the phoniness of everything. He sees that no one is quite what they claim to be. He sees that purity and idealism are impossible in the practical world; everyone espouses principles that they can't follow.<br />
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It is notable that a number of assassins and mass murderers have referred to <i>Catcher in the Rye</i> in explaining their motivation. This point was charmingly explained by the young trickster in a great old movie called <i>Six Degrees of Separation. </i>It was his surprisingly literary monologue that motivated me to re-read <i>Catcher,</i> which I had first read long ago. Like Holden, these killers and would-be killers were totally disenchanted with life, and obsessed with phoniness and pretension.<br />
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There's no arguing with Holden. Any teenager emerging from the protected dream of childhood, can see that nothing is what it seems to be. The briefest of looks at the political news or advertising or entertainment shows us that people are constantly trying to sell falsehoods and illusions. One of the major problems of growing up, at any age, is accepting this painful realization.<br />
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To quote an old song, "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies..." Total despair may cause a person to become a killer or to commit suicide, or to have a breakdown like Holden. Holden gets the opportunity to spell out his feelings, and after he gets through the negativity he finds love for his faulty world. As the song continues "...don't you want somebody to love, don't you need somebody to love." So a seemingly insignificant story about a jerk freaking out, actually treats one of life's major problems: transcending disillusionment through love.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-33829961687947629432018-11-18T16:07:00.000-08:002018-11-18T16:34:54.781-08:00'Black Boy' by Richard Wright<i><br /></i>
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<i>Black Boy</i> was an instant best-seller when it was published in 1945, and has remained one of the best-selling books by the pioneering African-American writer, Richard Wright, who lived from 1908 until 1960. It is classed as an autobiography but it reads more like a novel. Wright was already famous as a writer of stories and essays, and his first novel, <i>Native Son,</i> had been an immediate best seller when it was published in 1941.<br />
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Notably, the version of <i>Black Boy</i> that became the best-seller is not the book we read today. Wright composed the book in two parts. Part One, called "Southern Night," covers his youth in the South, and Part Two, called "The Horror and the Glory" and only half as long, covers his young adulthood in Chicago. Wright's major point is that life in the South did not prepare him for life in the North; he had to go through a second childhood to learn the ways of the city.<br />
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The two parts are very different. The first part strives for mythic status; Richard presents himself as a stand-in for every poor black boy in the South who wanted to be respected as an individual. The second part is increasingly specific to his own life and loses its mythic status, as Richard tries to understand and justify his actions in Chicago. Because of this, his publisher persuaded him to release the first part on its own in 1945. This is justifiable on the grounds that it is a coherent and complete work of art, but for Richard it meant that his story was brutally truncated. In the 1990s, Wright's original work was published whole as he had intended, and that is the version people read nowadays.<br />
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The book's full title is <i>Black Boy (American Hunger),</i> and in it Wright depicts spiritual and emotional hunger as well as the constant physical hunger of his youth. One of his major points is that racial discrimination deprives African-Americans of opportunities for self-realization and self-respect. He asserts that racism limits the emotional and cultural development of black people, so they have no idea of their own worth. Fortunately there has been enough progress toward equality that Wright's depiction of racism in the South in the first half of the 20th century seems dated now, but in its time, it was incendiary because it was shocking to see a secret aspect of American society depicted so vividly.<br />
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Racism is not the book's only subject. The boy Richard was permanently scarred by a peculiarly nightmarish childhood that deprived him of any form of worth. He defined the problem as one of racial discrimination, but I think his warped family situation made him dwell on this issue.<br />
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As a child, Richard is almost completely deprived of love and support. His closest relationship is with his mother, who routinely slaps him for asking too many questions or bringing up forbidden subjects. After she suffers a series of paralyzing strokes, the best she can do is to nag him weakly to do his best in school. As she becomes more helpless, he loses his sense of connection with her. Richard's father abandons the family when Richard is 6, leaving them in abject poverty. His mother's family takes them in, but they treat Richard like a little heathen.<br />
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The most excruciating part of his situation concerns religion. Richard's grandparents and an aunt who lives with them are ardent 7th-Day Adventists who insist on a host of forbidding rules and are determined that Richard join their sect. As a boy who had experienced little in life beyond hunger and disrespect, Richard can't accept any religious belief. Long passages are devoted to the Adventists' efforts to recruit him, and the thoughts he has about spiritual beliefs as a child. In fact, one of his earliest experiences of self-realization is his unwillingness to accept their beliefs, and his inability to pretend that he does in order to fit in. This condemns him to total rejection by his mother's family. After his mother converts to Methodism, she too tries to save his soul, and resorts to emotional pressure to get him to be baptized, but he soon returns to bitter skepticism.<br />
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Richard's family sees him as a wayward boy whose actions are always bad, and you can see their point. At the age of 4, he burns the house down. Soon after, he kills a kitten. At age 6, he becomes an alcoholic. He learns to talk dirty before he learns to read. He taunts the Jewish store owner with the same kind of prejudice he is subjected to. He is paralyzed by shyness in school. He unwittingly sells racist tracts. He refuses to be punished for things he didn't do, and uses a knife or straight razors to protect himself from his abusive relatives. When he graduates from 8th grade, he insists on giving the Valedictorian speech that he wrote himself rather than the one the principal wrote for him. As he grows older, he wants to read novels and write stories, the work of the devil in his families' view. He wants to work on Saturdays, a holy day for the Adventists. After he gets old enough to work full time, he finds he will never be able to save enough money to escape North, so he resorts to participating in a scam for extra money, and finally engages in theft to get a stake. Wright presents all these incidents in novelistic detail, including his thoughts and feelings at the time.<br />
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His extreme poverty forced Richard to seek work at a very young age, and this is when he begins to encounter racial prejudice. Wright catalogs every sort of racial indignity that a boy could experience in the heart of the South, and he analyzes just how these experiences affected his development. White people expect black people to be totally and smilingly subservient, like slaves. No matter how hard Richard tries to conform, he seems uppity to the whites, who frequently bully him into leaving his job.<br />
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Wright's childhood was so deprived— emotionally, spiritually, and economically—that his pursuit of knowledge and self-realization seems miraculous, totally inexplicable. He becomes an ardent reader despite the disapproval of his family and the scarcity of reading materials. His formal education is patchy due to poverty, but he is passionate about seeking knowledge, and adventure as well, through reading. Where did he get that passion? Where did he get the massive intelligence to digest all that material? Wright shows very few positive influences on his life.<br />
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Not surprisingly, Wright's adult life in Chicago is considerably more complicated than his childhood in the South. No longer can he encapsulate his experience into a string of deftly drawn episodes; various aspects of his life overlap and intersect, and learning takes place over longer arcs. On the plus side, there is less public racial discrimination; he can sit anywhere on public transportation, and he doesn't have to defer to white folks. But racial prejudices remain at a deeper level. This is true for Richard as well, who notices that even when white people try to treat him respectfully, he still assumes they are the same as white people in the South. His personality is so hardened that it is hard for him to form relationships.<br />
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Career-wise, Wright does rather well, though he never acknowledges this. He starts out as an errand boy and dishwasher, but he soon passes the exam for postal clerk. Meanwhile he reads all the important novels of his day and tons of sociology and psychology. During the Depression he becomes an agent for insurance and burial societies, discouraging work that nevertheless gives him access to the lives of a wide variety of poor black people. When that job dries up, a relief organization assigns him to be an orderly in a medical research institute. Finally he gets a job with the South Side Boys' Club that he finds deeply engrossing. Later he is assigned to do publicity for the Federal Negro Theater, which is a writing job, at least; when that fails, he is assigned to do publicity for a white experimental theatrical company.<br />
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What really muddies his narrative is his relationship with the Communist party. Richard finally meets some people with similar social and philosophical views, and through them he gets drawn into the John Reed Club, a group of artists and writers which was associated with the Communist party. At first the theory of Communism, and its version of history, enthrall Wright, but he realizes the idealistic Communist activists are deeply ignorant of the life of ordinary black people. He is suspicious of them, but he is drawn in when they offer to publish some of his stories. From this point, his memoir becomes a messy recital of political manipulation, group rivalries, and Communist tactics as he is unexpectedly propelled into a leadership position in Chicago's Communist party and just as unexpectedly demoted and reviled, as the international party becomes more rigid. After two chapters of ups and downs in the party, his relationship is finally ended definitively, and he concludes the book in a state of deep disillusionment, though nevertheless determined to continue writing.<br />
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In addition to racism, Wright struggles with rampant anti-intellectualism. His ardent and wide-ranging self-education plays a painfully ambivalent role in his life. On the positive side, reading is his only escape from his frustrating life; on the other, it automatically makes him unusual and suspect, not only among his family, but also his friends. As an adult, he talks like a person with a college education. This is an advantage in building his career, but it makes him suspect among other Negro members of the Communist party, who are mostly unlettered new arrivals to the North, because it identifies him with their white oppressors.<br />
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The first time I read this book, I was disdainful of the long passages of explanation and analysis, considering them to be artless. But the second time, the composition sounded seamless, and I realized that the development of the author's understanding of life is an important part of the story. Wright desperately wanted to understand himself and to make himself understood, and his voice rings with probing sincerity in every word. Many critics believe Wright helped change racial relationships in America.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-6681755260747379732018-09-27T03:25:00.000-07:002018-09-30T12:30:40.528-07:00Miguel Machuca: Drawing Light from Darkness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Miguel Machuca is a local artist. Although he was born in Guadalajara, he came to this country with his family at the age of 10. Now around 40, he has been an established artist in San Jose for several years, as well as working in programs for autistic and at-risk youth. </div>
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He is currently having a show at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara called "Drawing Light from Darkness." It lasts until October 21, 2018. Check it out.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Human Nature,</i> 2014</td></tr>
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Machuca's work comes from a spiritual point of view. It combines universal and personal symbols to express the unity of life. Here we see animal organs, leaves, an embracing horn, a penetrating eye, and a brick wall that transforms into a universal web—all heading toward the infinite.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Fire within You,</i> 2015</td></tr>
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Machuca has developed a unique technique for applying charcoal to a white painted panel. He draws each form in silhouette, then uses an electrical eraser to model the silhouette by exposing the white underpainting as highlights. He literally draws the light out of darkness. Likewise, meditation—here represented by positions of the hands—reveals an individual's inner light.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sister Whisper,</i> 2016</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sister Deception,</i> 2016</td></tr>
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<i>Sister Whisper </i>and <i>Sister Deception</i> are a pair of imaginary figures representing choices. <i>Sister Whisper </i> enchains her pathetic follower with dreams of death. <i>Sister Deception</i> inspires the wretch to take action and start building. Together, they are called <i>Orchestrated Religion, Part 2.</i> </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Orchestrated Religion,</i> Part 1, 2016</td></tr>
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<i>Orchestrated Religion</i>, Part 1 rises above the dichotomy presented by the two <i>Sisters. </i>It asserts strength, confidence and wholeness, with a combination of symbols both familiar and strange.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Manifest Your Destiny,</i> 2016</td></tr>
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Machuca uses his impressive draughtsmanship to render visions and symbols as though they were real. Here we have vision and power in the eyes and hands, with destiny represented by constellations, a wheel, and an embracing horn. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>7th Sense</i>, 2018</td></tr>
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A skull penetrated by spikes, an array of trophy horns, connecting to <i>nopales</i> cactus, a chest with a radiant lock in the center, a hand with a hole, a hand with a spike through it, an array of flowers with eyes in the centers, each eye penetrated by a spike—it's a puzzle that will keep the imagination bouncing around for a long time. I'd say it's about death and life being part of the same process.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EXn_a96KhPc/W6Ya90FVOGI/AAAAAAAAQ5s/gBY5MTX2WUk4bMXyexJY3VN-_AIcPRI9wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Embrace%2BReality%252C%2B2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EXn_a96KhPc/W6Ya90FVOGI/AAAAAAAAQ5s/gBY5MTX2WUk4bMXyexJY3VN-_AIcPRI9wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Embrace%2BReality%252C%2B2018.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Embrace Reality,</i> 2018</td></tr>
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This painful and frightening image has to do with accepting the need to work on one's self, as with the spike, in order to make an impact on the world, as with the hammer. The draughtsmanship is very skillful and evocative.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TTRVLLvZwb8/W6Ycw8YO6HI/AAAAAAAAQ54/aJB6_yJog5ULxdfWwqzt0mPNNWmraKIQQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Human%2BBody%2BEvolving%2BRose%252C%2B2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TTRVLLvZwb8/W6Ycw8YO6HI/AAAAAAAAQ54/aJB6_yJog5ULxdfWwqzt0mPNNWmraKIQQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Human%2BBody%2BEvolving%2BRose%252C%2B2018.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Human Body Evolving Rose</i>, 2018</td></tr>
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Starting at the bottom, we see the mystical number 3, a key, a strong triangle that firmly supports ribs and organs, a rose, a wheel that evolves into a halo, two symmetrical roses, and on top, a happy parrot. This is about the stages of development in the journey toward beauty and truth.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MYeMfBHHXTw/W6ykso4bUcI/AAAAAAAAQ6U/25irWCmSEfY1j1oAigN_c73CiNUauYVbgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Full%2BConsciousness%2Bin%2Bthe%2BDivine%252C%2B2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MYeMfBHHXTw/W6ykso4bUcI/AAAAAAAAQ6U/25irWCmSEfY1j1oAigN_c73CiNUauYVbgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Full%2BConsciousness%2Bin%2Bthe%2BDivine%252C%2B2018.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Full Consciousness in the Divine,</i> 2018</td></tr>
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A caterpillar is like a fetus because it is about to burst into life. These two are embraced by lovely leaves growing from the fertile earth. The plant wears a crown of planets, connecting the natural world and human life and with the universe at large.</div>
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All these artworks have many more symbols and interpretations than I have indicated. Because of their multilayered symbolism and their evocative draughtsmanship, these works stand on their own, without any biographical back story. However, once you read the Artist's Statement, also mounted on the gallery wall, the works take on an even larger significance. </div>
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<li>"This work is about my journey, before and after my experience with cancer. In January 2015, I was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer, and with only a small percentage of survival. Although, this was not the spark for this show, I started on my body of work from a spiritual point of view and while I was working with the Triton Museum towards a solo exhibition, cancer made its appearance in my life, and I was hospitalized. Everything stopped until I was either better or dead. Through the days, I worked on a collection of ideas, drawings and sketches that could describe the internal bliss of a perpetual cycle of fear and doubt. My art saved my life. I caught myself in and out of a state of consciousness."</li>
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Machuca felt that having the goal of creating his first solo museum show gave him the motivation to generate personal strength to overcome cancer. The Triton Museum, and in particular its Deputy Director Preston Metcalf, deserves applause for recognizing Machuca's talent early in his career, and for encouraging him during his treatment and recovery. It's a great story.</div>
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To October 21Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-71124673668182762122018-08-21T03:56:00.000-07:002018-08-22T03:10:18.432-07:00The Pre-Raphaelites of Victorian EnglandThe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a secret society of rebellious young artists and writers that was formed in England in 1848 for the purpose of redefining British art. It disbanded within a few years, but the aesthetic principles expressed in its manifesto, and the works of the original members, affected three generations of English artists, who were generally known as Pre-Raphaelites. You may never have heard of this movement, or any of the artists in it, because the French dominated art history in the 19th century and formed our ideas of what makes good art. This movement precedes Impressionism, which came along twenty years later. In the mid-19th century, French painters like Corot, Courbet, and Manet, were into realism, which involved looking at real scenes of modern life. The Pre-Raphaelites, by contrast, were looking backward toward the type of painting that came before the Renaissance, which was literary, decorative, and symbolic.<br />
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When the founders of the PRB—William Holman Hunt (age 21), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (age 20), and John Everett Millais (age 19), and several of their friends—were studying at the art academy, the Renaissance was considered the peak of art history, and Raphael was the ultimate artist. The art that preceded it, the art of the Middle Ages, was considered 'primitive,' and given scant attention by their professors.<br />
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The members of the PRB felt that English art had stagnated because artists were mindlessly working in a Renaissance style, without rethinking it or adding anything new. They scornfully branded these artists 'Raphaelites,' and that is how they came to think of themselves as Pre-Raphaelites. However, this name is misleading because as the artists matured, they took an interest in the art of the late Renaissance, and even began to study the Venetians, who were on a different track completely.<br />
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The thing that bothered them most about the paintings of their teachers is that the edges of their forms and figures tended to merge with the background, leaving certain details unaccounted for. What they liked about the art of Northern Europe was that the edges of the forms are crisp and all the details are depicted distinctly, no matter how far away. This was their idea of 'truth to nature.'<br />
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The special exhibit currently at the Legion of Honor Museum of Art, called 'Truth and Beauty,' has only one example of the style they were rebelling against, this very nice self-portrait by Raphael from the Uffizi Museum in Florence.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rySgXJOgsUM/W3hFjF1DQDI/AAAAAAAAQuI/b9vR63ECs7Evs_vifzJ9-_Fg5ckZ3b80wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4383.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rySgXJOgsUM/W3hFjF1DQDI/AAAAAAAAQuI/b9vR63ECs7Evs_vifzJ9-_Fg5ckZ3b80wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4383.jpg" width="468" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Raphael, Self-Portrait<br />
Uffizi / photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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One of the chief pleasures of the exhibit is the many examples of the art that inspired the Pre-Raphaelites.</div>
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<b>Early European Art</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3HKs0f9g-AM/W3hHYdK4q8I/AAAAAAAAQuU/ueWzrpvfweIeNffMOLG5095nVW91q1L0gCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4318.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3HKs0f9g-AM/W3hHYdK4q8I/AAAAAAAAQuU/ueWzrpvfweIeNffMOLG5095nVW91q1L0gCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4318.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jan van Eyck, 1390-1441<br />
<i>The Annunciation,</i> c. 1436<br />
National Gallery, Washington D.C. / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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Jan van Eyck was the greatest painter of his era in Northern Europe, and his version of the archangel announcing to Mary her upcoming pregnancy is widely revered. My photo has a distracting reflection right in the center, but you can see that every detail is richly imagined. Notice also that the figures are elongated and the space is compressed; this is why art historian of the time considered this to be 'primitive' art.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cpsJqSHZXHs/W3hJsXd_0II/AAAAAAAAQug/ZdsVERYpbqg2qZIZvDOkVORQe2939tj3ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4409.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cpsJqSHZXHs/W3hJsXd_0II/AAAAAAAAQug/ZdsVERYpbqg2qZIZvDOkVORQe2939tj3ACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4409.jpg" width="414" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Master of the Saint Lucy Legend, active c. 1475-1505<br />
<i>Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels,</i> 1400-1500<br />
FAMSF / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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The art that first interested the Pre-Raphaelites was so old that the artists could not always be identified. This painting is in the same style of another famous painting of the period, known as <i>The Legend of St. Lucy, </i>but the name of the artist is unknown. Here again, every detail is crisp, but the figures are elongated and the proportions are wrong; for instance, if the Virgin were to stand up, her head would bump the top of her throne.<br />
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<b>Early Italian Art</b></div>
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The best known Italian artist before Raphael was probably Sandro Botticelli, and the exhibit offers some examples of his work; however, the paintings they show are not the ones that most influenced the Pre-Raphaelites. Botticelli's most important works are very large and never leave the Uffizi Museum in Florence. I'm going to bring in prints from the Internet to give you a better idea of what the Pre-Raphaelites liked.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CssXHVzVk-s/W30zc6KuaLI/AAAAAAAAQ10/BXR2aHJ7l2sGypcMVd7qj1S5IBzmAQiqQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Botticelli-Primavera-590x391.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CssXHVzVk-s/W30zc6KuaLI/AAAAAAAAQ10/BXR2aHJ7l2sGypcMVd7qj1S5IBzmAQiqQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Botticelli-Primavera-590x391.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510<br />
<i>Primavera, </i>c. 1480<br />
Internet grab from Uffizi</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
In this dreamy painting, Botticelli united the imagery of Christianity (the Virgin in the center, and the putti overhead) with the imagery of classical mythology (the three graces on the left), and other standard mythological figures in painting, such as Flora (the flower clad maiden on the right). </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ik4uxikT3yU/W300bwRVuXI/AAAAAAAAQ2A/IT3iJ9P_cHovgxHwbZKxl3SAbn5NzQ3DACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Botticelli-The-Birth-of-Venus-c.-1482.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="404" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ik4uxikT3yU/W300bwRVuXI/AAAAAAAAQ2A/IT3iJ9P_cHovgxHwbZKxl3SAbn5NzQ3DACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Botticelli-The-Birth-of-Venus-c.-1482.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510<br />
<i>The Birth of Venus, </i>mid 1840s<br />
Internet grab from Uffizi </td></tr>
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Venus was the Goddess of Love, who arose fully formed from the sea. To her left the Wind Gods blow her ashore, and separate the strands of her luxuriant hair. On the right Flora welcomes her with a flowing robe. The edges are crisp, the forms are graceful, and details are evenly lighted throughout.</div>
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The exhibit did have one excellent example by Botticelli, but I accidentally failed to photograph it, so I'm including an internet grab; it also belongs to the Uffizi, but there are similar versions in two other museums.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HRh9d0OVTG0/W301B-eK2TI/AAAAAAAAQ2M/-GJAmijJ2xY97sZRwquPwIWCsZSLUu8UACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Madonna-Of-The-Magnificat-Madonna-Del-Magnificat-1480-81.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HRh9d0OVTG0/W301B-eK2TI/AAAAAAAAQ2M/-GJAmijJ2xY97sZRwquPwIWCsZSLUu8UACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Madonna-Of-The-Magnificat-Madonna-Del-Magnificat-1480-81.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510<br /><i>Madonna of the Magnificat,</i> 1481<br />Internet grab from Uffizi<br /></td></tr>
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Here we see the complex but balanced composition that Pre-Raphaelites admired, plus the crisp edges, the rich details, the graceful forms, and the rich coloration.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hoIKmZUdfcM/W3hT-AGRNbI/AAAAAAAAQvM/MBCnH7j7l5MXH39RtaCda1zIbaZAPLm7ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4361%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hoIKmZUdfcM/W3hT-AGRNbI/AAAAAAAAQvM/MBCnH7j7l5MXH39RtaCda1zIbaZAPLm7ACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4361%2B2.jpg" width="485" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandro Botticelli, 1444-1510<br />
<i>Madonna and Child with Two Angels,</i> c. 1470<br />
Naples / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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This is a fairly conventional portrait of the Madonna, with rather dull coloration. The was not the kind of thing that inspired the Pre-haphaelites, but it does have graceful forms and a mystical mood.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FpvBPPkZ4Bw/W3hZj3kEKaI/AAAAAAAAQvk/bs9CohKBGXQ6ENhAPVukThtSHNRmuwTtgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4334.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FpvBPPkZ4Bw/W3hZj3kEKaI/AAAAAAAAQvk/bs9CohKBGXQ6ENhAPVukThtSHNRmuwTtgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4334.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandro Botticelli, 1444-1510<br />
<i>Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph)</i>, c. 1475<br />
Städel Museum, Franfurt</td></tr>
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This type of idealized portrait, with its mystifyingly complicated hair arrangement, had a great deal of impact of the Pre-Raphaelites, some of whom specialized in idealized portraits.<br />
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One of the artists with a strong influence on the Renaissance was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a contemporary of Botticelli. Many artists got their training in his studio, including Michelangelo.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H4a79z_9tsc/W3hcxfPEl4I/AAAAAAAAQvw/4B6D381oEGoblz2CgPJfySvYUoznsSLOQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4349.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H4a79z_9tsc/W3hcxfPEl4I/AAAAAAAAQvw/4B6D381oEGoblz2CgPJfySvYUoznsSLOQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4349.jpg" width="472" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1449-1494<br />
<i>Portrait of a Man,</i> c. 1490<br />
Huntington Library / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uE-7NUd9wkI/W3hdn6eNIjI/AAAAAAAAQv8/ZPksj4kNVncwtngMqis7TcfPrAVdsBvUQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4350.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uE-7NUd9wkI/W3hdn6eNIjI/AAAAAAAAQv8/ZPksj4kNVncwtngMqis7TcfPrAVdsBvUQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4350.jpg" width="492" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1449-1494<br />
<i>Portrait of a Woman,</i> c. 1490<br />
Huntington Library / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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Piero di Cosimo was admired by the Pre-Raphaelites for his carefully articulated, naturalistic details.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7Y1GUHQe33w/W3hfdayZiDI/AAAAAAAAQwI/oAsnKIruFc8QuMtRH2A8qF9Eb72ndsvPACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4353.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7Y1GUHQe33w/W3hfdayZiDI/AAAAAAAAQwI/oAsnKIruFc8QuMtRH2A8qF9Eb72ndsvPACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4353.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1521<i><br />Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, </i>c. 1510<br />
Liechtenstein, the Princely Collection / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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The image of the Madonna resting on a stump in the wilderness, with a cloth strung from a tree to provide a little shade, is amusingly unassuming. The Christ child waves in a friendly fashion to his cousin, John, who later became known as the Baptist. The Madonna studies a book, presumably some holy work; perhaps she reads aloud to the two children, who are more interested in each other. The composition is balanced and the coloration is rich and jewel-like.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PfY0UVPa1g8/W3jNBX2YsbI/AAAAAAAAQxE/qsAoIxGABAcaUyKIRTYJ2IF_5Nu8LtQ7wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4324.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PfY0UVPa1g8/W3jNBX2YsbI/AAAAAAAAQxE/qsAoIxGABAcaUyKIRTYJ2IF_5Nu8LtQ7wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4324.jpg" width="512" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lucas Cranach the Younger, 1515-1586<br />
<i>Portrait of a Man,</i> 1545<br />
FAMSF / Jan's photo</td></tr>
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This is the style of portraiture that dominated Northern Europe in the early history of art. It is solemn, but bright and richly detailed.<br />
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Ironically, as the so-called Pre-Raphaelites matured, they became interested in the artists of the late Renaissance, and even the Venetians, whose robust and sensual figures, dynamic compositions, and deep shadows are a far cry from the work of Piero di Cosimo, or even Botticelli.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LfBCMBOOj8w/W3jBiF9nobI/AAAAAAAAQwU/DOzFLqtEzI8o6jBpQblXrGKza7LV5tlWQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4381.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LfBCMBOOj8w/W3jBiF9nobI/AAAAAAAAQwU/DOzFLqtEzI8o6jBpQblXrGKza7LV5tlWQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4381.jpg" width="532" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paolo Veronese, 1528-1588<br />
<i>Lucrezia</i>, c. 1580<br />
Kunsthistoriches, Vienna / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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Lucrezia was a heroine of Roman legend, who was an exemplar of honor and courage because she killed herself after she was raped. The Pre-Rapaelites liked the rich coloration of the Venetians and the idea of using a female figure to represent virtue.<br />
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<b>The Founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood</b></div>
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<b>William Holman Hunt</b> was a versatile artist who pursued various aspects of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics over the course of a long career.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ztB6OpNYq1Q/W3jHj2nB20I/AAAAAAAAQwg/xqaqHa6YEoQZishvqqoGX9PkMZE5Of-LQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4329.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="492" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ztB6OpNYq1Q/W3jHj2nB20I/AAAAAAAAQwg/xqaqHa6YEoQZishvqqoGX9PkMZE5Of-LQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4329.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910<br />
<i>Valentine Reproaching Proteus for His Falsity,</i> 1851<br />
The Makins Collection / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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As part of a movement that was both literary and artistic, the PRB was initially devoted to illustrating medieval legends. This legend of Valentine as a medieval knight is not known to me, but the story is pretty clear: Valentine is in the center with the wronged damsel in a flowered apron kneeling on the ground, and Proteus on the right, also kneeling and hanging his head. The figure on the left is probably the knight's servant.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JXuFPyBz8PA/W3jJn4m_fKI/AAAAAAAAQws/EsLyH1d-ZVMiO3cpBfre_VOjej8e3xh6QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4332.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="412" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JXuFPyBz8PA/W3jJn4m_fKI/AAAAAAAAQws/EsLyH1d-ZVMiO3cpBfre_VOjej8e3xh6QCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4332.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910<br />
<i>The Hireling Shepherd,</i> c. 1853<br />
The Makins Collection / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting from two years later has a simple, beautifully balanced composition (with cultivation on the right and herding on the left), jewel-like tones, crisp details even the the distance, and an instantly readable narrative.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m6w905WVq1E/W3jLbjMskCI/AAAAAAAAQw4/MvSRxXOzOIMGohslzFFz7XrHPMAMuFe5ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4406.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="492" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m6w905WVq1E/W3jLbjMskCI/AAAAAAAAQw4/MvSRxXOzOIMGohslzFFz7XrHPMAMuFe5ACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4406.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910<br />
<i>Henry Wentworth Monk,</i> 1858<br />
National Gallery, Ottawa / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This is a portrait of a Canadian mystic that Hunt met in Jerusalem. He is represented as a modern version of an Early European portrait, such as the example by Lucas Cranach the Younger, above. Notice that the mystic holds a rolled up copy of the London times, as well as a holy book.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gn76Li7NOyI/W3jOWKTYtTI/AAAAAAAAQxQ/MuS4e3y5LY8a0e-2Q2tFBrvAVnEn2AEWACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4408.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gn76Li7NOyI/W3jOWKTYtTI/AAAAAAAAQxQ/MuS4e3y5LY8a0e-2Q2tFBrvAVnEn2AEWACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4408.jpg" width="406" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910<br />
<i>Isabella and the Pot of Basil,</i> 1867<br />
Private Collection / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Reflecting his devotion to poetry, Hunt here depicts a scene from a poem by John Keats, an English romantic poet of the previous generation. Isabella is mooning over this pot of basil because it contains the severed head of her murdered lover, a rather creepy idea to moderns. Hunt elaborated the idea by placing the pot on a richly inlaid altar topped by a gold brocade cloth. A pearlescent water pitcher sits below. Notice that far from being prim and formal, Isabella is a voluptuous figure, in a semi-transparent nightgown, much more like the heroines of Venetian painting.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CZGpVlcmpdQ/W3jRUNUBinI/AAAAAAAAQxc/JWo-AgSxAroVJByQZu8HFeCafkke0FgpwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4379.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CZGpVlcmpdQ/W3jRUNUBinI/AAAAAAAAQxc/JWo-AgSxAroVJByQZu8HFeCafkke0FgpwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4379.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910<br />
<i>Bianca</i>, 1869<br />
Worthing Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Here Hunt goes for a full-blown tribute to the Venetian portraits of idealized women, abandoning complex composition and obscure stories. Bianca was a character in a play by Shakespeare, but who cares? She is the perfect modern realization of a Venetian ideal of beauty.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-45QW36EC2Dc/W3jaDQ37AdI/AAAAAAAAQx0/E4tk6n-U-dsmQsQ-KZ3twUsJbEOj-dmigCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4396.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-45QW36EC2Dc/W3jaDQ37AdI/AAAAAAAAQx0/E4tk6n-U-dsmQsQ-KZ3twUsJbEOj-dmigCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4396.jpg" width="494" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Holman Hunt, 1827-1910<br />
<i>The Lady of Shalott,</i> 1890s<br />
Wadsworth Atheneum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Late in his career, Hunt returned to the founding principles of the PRB in this depiction of a lyrical ballad by an English poet of the previous generation, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, one of the most popular poets of his time. It tells the story of a young noble woman who lives in a tower near Camelot, of the Arthurian legends, but she is prevented by a curse from looking at Camelot. She can view it only indirectly, through a mirror, and is further condemned to weave an image of what she sees. Here her frenzied and obsessive weaving is evoked by the thread wildly entangling her in her own work. This painting seems cluttered, confusing, and old-fashioned to the modern eye, but it has some wonderful effects. The spray of hair, activated not by the wind but by her furious work, is a beautiful pattern, and creates a mysterious, backlit cloud across the top of the image. The contrast between the dark shadows in the foreground and the brightly colored background (the scene in the mirror is more vivid in the painting than my photo), is striking and innovative. Hunt combined several unique jewel-tones and a variety of symbolism to depict the scene in sumptuous detail. This painting is considered the grand culmination of the Pre-Raphaelite agenda. </div>
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<b>Dante Gabriel Rossetti</b><i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>came from a literary family. His father was a Dante scholar, his sister Christina became a famous poet, and his brother William Michael was a member of the PRB who became an influential art critic. Dante Rossetti also established himself in the history of English poetry, but he chose painting as his profession because he thought it would make more money. He became quite successful as a painter, made a lot of money, and continued to write poetry as a pastime. Sometimes he wrote a poem to accompany a painting; sometimes he painted a picture to illustrate a poem.<br />
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Although Rossetti painted a variety of literary and medieval subjects, he had a complicated love life, and he became increasingly obsessed with painting a certain ideal type of woman—voluptuous but melancholy, dreamy and decadent. He used a variety of models as his muses, but he gave them all a similar look and attitude. Each of these women is supposed to represent a character in a certain literary work, but that's just an excuse; you don't really need to know the story to get the point.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8kV5NXou_AA/W3myl1-pxwI/AAAAAAAAQyA/2lheDfimUs4sk2pvpBh3FrCdf9HQ8AVbgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4341.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8kV5NXou_AA/W3myl1-pxwI/AAAAAAAAQyA/2lheDfimUs4sk2pvpBh3FrCdf9HQ8AVbgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4341.jpg" width="546" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882<br />
<i>Monna Vanna,</i> 1866<br />
Tate, London / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OAmGMsOyu68/W3myttaViYI/AAAAAAAAQyI/l6SI5PQU9MMOPOdsuLCO5eI70wpQ0z13ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4377.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OAmGMsOyu68/W3myttaViYI/AAAAAAAAQyI/l6SI5PQU9MMOPOdsuLCO5eI70wpQ0z13ACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4377.jpg" width="548" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882<br />
<i>Lady Lilith,</i> 1868<br />
Delaware / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H0uq-i0CK0U/W3myxw0Nw2I/AAAAAAAAQyQ/QkMUs7J82qgi2232kL0LNvyrfETU7yuvgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4386.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H0uq-i0CK0U/W3myxw0Nw2I/AAAAAAAAQyQ/QkMUs7J82qgi2232kL0LNvyrfETU7yuvgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4386.jpg" width="510" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882<br />
<i>Veronica Veronese,</i> 1872<br />
Delaware / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b>John Everett Millais</b> became the most prominent exponent of the PRB agenda, even though he moved toward greater realism in less than a decade. He was criticized for abandoning his principles, but his later paintings were very popular, and he became one of the wealthiest artists of his day.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Injli3VV2ws/W3ndklv2vNI/AAAAAAAAQyk/nLvXxsAuvK8PQMJ_wHFejgZL5aXPE-e-wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4403.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Injli3VV2ws/W3ndklv2vNI/AAAAAAAAQyk/nLvXxsAuvK8PQMJ_wHFejgZL5aXPE-e-wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4403.jpg" width="524" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Everett Millais, 1829-1896<br />
<i>Mariana,</i> 1851<br />
Tate London / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting from early in his career (he was 22) is the perfect embodiment of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, using a jewel-tone palette and depicting a scene from a literary source. Mariana started as a character from Shakespeare's play <i>Measure for Measure.</i> Alfred, Lord Tennyson then wrote a poem about her. It seems she has been abandoned by her fiancé for lack of a dowry, and she is passing the time by making a tapestry at table near a window. When she stands to stretch her back, she is supposed to be saying, "My life is dreary—He cometh not!"<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SVALhbywmPY/W3ngOvbH1fI/AAAAAAAAQyw/SPS8qiVXb7Qy39OkjG_4SK3Yy2dnEmNrgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4313.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SVALhbywmPY/W3ngOvbH1fI/AAAAAAAAQyw/SPS8qiVXb7Qy39OkjG_4SK3Yy2dnEmNrgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4313.jpg" width="558" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Everett Millais, 1829-1896<br />
<i>The Ransom,</i> 1862<br />
Getty / Photo by Jan, 2018</td></tr>
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The story in this painting is marvelously clear and its source is clearly literary. The knight in shining armor is ready to give precious jewels to the brigand on the right, for the return of two young girls, presumably his daughters. On the left side of the picture, a page or footman has the ransom note, and a fur rug to cover the girls for the carriage ride home. Between the knight and the brigand is a friend or supporter of the knight who has a bag of gold at hand.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K22ascCJxjw/W3niolMZpeI/AAAAAAAAQy8/TmBQ0gatswkN7Mr5Mu3y6ewqDQXJk9U7ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4344.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K22ascCJxjw/W3niolMZpeI/AAAAAAAAQy8/TmBQ0gatswkN7Mr5Mu3y6ewqDQXJk9U7ACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4344.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Everett Millais, 1829-1896<br />
<i>Leisure Hours, </i>1864<br />
Getty / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Here again are two young girls, but this is a straight-forward portrait commission, with no narrative or medieval elements. It's possible there is some symbolism in the fishbowl, which seems out of place.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y7O1GGnWW8U/W3njxPX1t8I/AAAAAAAAQzI/Ulvd0B1meh0JIdyqN7Rr-gshGo0Wf2tJwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4326.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="392" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y7O1GGnWW8U/W3njxPX1t8I/AAAAAAAAQzI/Ulvd0B1meh0JIdyqN7Rr-gshGo0Wf2tJwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4326.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Everett Millais, 1829-1896<br />
<i>Christ in the House of His Parents,</i> c. 1866<br />
Private collection / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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The humble, naturalistic detail of this painting is appealing to the modern eye: the way Millais has imagined Joseph's workshop, with tools hanging on the wall, lumber stacked out back, and shavings littering the floor is charming. Joseph has two young helpers (possibly Jesus' siblings), and it looks like Mary's mother Anne is also helping, or perhaps just looking on. Jesus has been trying to help assemble the door, but he has driven a nail into his hand. Mary is comforting him with a kiss, as mothers do. Millais' interpretation of this situation in the New Testament was considered blasphemous by many of his' contemporaries because the characters looked too ordinary and familiar. The controversy made the painting very famous, but was divisive to the Pre-Raphaelites. I was struck by the herd of white cattle and sheep looking on with concern.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>The Second Generation of Pre-Raphaelites</b></div>
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The second generation of Pre-Raphaelites includes John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Edward Burne-Jones, and Burne-Jones' friend, the designer William Morris.</div>
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<b>John Roddam Spencer Stanhope</b> painted two of the most remarkable paintings in the exhibition.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8HrpRZ367Vw/W30xdBGXmiI/AAAAAAAAQ1c/aH53w4gRn5I4ZoJAuzy00aFvOq0TVE7pgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4315.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8HrpRZ367Vw/W30xdBGXmiI/AAAAAAAAQ1c/aH53w4gRn5I4ZoJAuzy00aFvOq0TVE7pgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4315.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1829-1908<br />
<i>Robins of Modern Times</i>, c. 1860<br />
Private collection / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting is so unusual it is nearly surreal. The central section is a dark blob, forcing your eyes around the perimeter. The landscape and rocks are exceptionally naturalistic. But why is this girl on the ground? Did she fall to the ground and drop her apples? Was she cavorting about the countryside wearing a floral wreath and paused for a nap or a daydream? There is a robin with a red breast in the lower right, who seems about to put a leaf on her; a dull-colored robin can barely be distinguished on the left, also taking a leaf her way. The title adds to the puzzlement—the painting is not really about robins, is it?<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XXBjntDYqu0/W3nvzCpunZI/AAAAAAAAQzg/Kg2xI-simwsfvVOJDKMMN1zrZEQ4-1H0wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4358.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="430" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XXBjntDYqu0/W3nvzCpunZI/AAAAAAAAQzg/Kg2xI-simwsfvVOJDKMMN1zrZEQ4-1H0wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4358.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1829-1908<br />
<i>Love and the Maiden,</i> 1877<br />
FAMSF / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting is a perfect re-interpretation of Botticelli's aesthetic, as shown in <i>Primavera</i> and <i>The Birth of Venus.</i> The composition is balanced, the figures are graceful, the theme is mythical and romantic, every detail is carefully defined. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect is that Stanhope was able to use oil paint to imitate the effect of fresco and egg-tempera painting, techniques that Botticelli used himself.<br />
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<b>Edward Burne-Jones</b> was both an artist and a designer. He was a protege of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KE0AfIueTvI/W3nzPPMGcVI/AAAAAAAAQzs/R2aUWEWU1QEOpx11LkM-Wpcg6yaRiN-aACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4399.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="458" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KE0AfIueTvI/W3nzPPMGcVI/AAAAAAAAQzs/R2aUWEWU1QEOpx11LkM-Wpcg6yaRiN-aACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4399.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898<br />
<i>The Heart of the Rose,</i> 1889<br />
Agnew's / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting seems very unpleasant to me because of the dark coloration and the way the green of the woman's dress blends into the bush. The story comes from a poem by Chaucer written in the Middle Ages. The black-robed figure on the left is supposed to be a pilgrim; the black-winged figure on the right represents Love, who has led him to the Rose, personified as a woman in a rose bush. That is too obscure for me.<br />
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Burne-Jones designed some beautiful tapestries that are part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's excellent textile collection, one for <i>Pomona </i>and one for <i>Flora.</i> These are stock figures for decorative tapestries, with Pomona representing fruit and orchards and Flora representing flowers and springtime. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uAQHwujDpDE/W3n2D93xXvI/AAAAAAAAQz4/RzfKq1ey6MMfKzcifwep3k8zXSgTm0m3wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4390.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uAQHwujDpDE/W3n2D93xXvI/AAAAAAAAQz4/RzfKq1ey6MMfKzcifwep3k8zXSgTm0m3wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4390.jpg" width="372" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898<br />
<i>Pomona</i>, 1886<br />
FAMSF / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3aYzDYZJGWk/W3qBb2QFRiI/AAAAAAAAQ0I/XhlMcoyhR-cMZcWIiWF912CTAqjekhiuwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4392.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3aYzDYZJGWk/W3qBb2QFRiI/AAAAAAAAQ0I/XhlMcoyhR-cMZcWIiWF912CTAqjekhiuwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4392.jpg" width="360" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898<br />
<i>Flora,</i> 1886<br />
FAMSF / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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<b>William Morris</b> was a textile designer who was closely associated with Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1861, these three artists and several others formed a decorative arts firm, which eventually became known as Morris & Co. This company manufactured and sold the tapestries designed by Burne-Jones. Below are two examples of tapestries designed by Morris himself. You may recognize these bold, repetitive patterns. This company still sells coveted wallpapers and fabrics.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0mLBqbqNG78/W3qFyYD7OEI/AAAAAAAAQ0U/8cn2G60svB43nbUhHbaMiFMVaxZ1cmKEACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4411.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0mLBqbqNG78/W3qFyYD7OEI/AAAAAAAAQ0U/8cn2G60svB43nbUhHbaMiFMVaxZ1cmKEACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4411.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Morris, 1834-1896<br />
<i>Bird wall hanging, </i>1878<br />
FAMSF / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nHrh4fRw02U/W3qF3YfUJ_I/AAAAAAAAQ0c/HByBRGkAGjwRxRKENu02XFYwmyQtnwAMACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4388.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nHrh4fRw02U/W3qF3YfUJ_I/AAAAAAAAQ0c/HByBRGkAGjwRxRKENu02XFYwmyQtnwAMACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4388.jpg" width="252" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Morris, 1834-1896<br />
<i>Wandle, </i>1884<br />
FAMSF / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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<b>Third Generation Pre-Raphaelites</b></div>
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Among the third generation of artists to become Pre-Raphaelites were three women: Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn De Morgan, and Kate Bunce. Although they came late to the movement, they showed particular affinity for its romantic and decorative aspects. </div>
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<b>Marie Spartali Stillman</b> first became known for her stunning good looks. She was the daughter of a wealthy Greek merchant based in London, and her Grecian features gave her an exotic look to the pale British; in addition, she was over six feet tall. She was well-known among the Pre-Raphaelites, who vied to use her as a model. But after her marriage to an American journalist, she became one of the most prolific and successful artists of the movement, though she lived in both Europe and the U.S. and raised six children.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CEVJNdvuAN4/W3qRGWjCUXI/AAAAAAAAQ0s/caJ0vQ4Zw74qvjVF3lqX9J-dZp6ohDDDwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4336%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CEVJNdvuAN4/W3qRGWjCUXI/AAAAAAAAQ0s/caJ0vQ4Zw74qvjVF3lqX9J-dZp6ohDDDwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4336%2B2.jpg" width="520" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marie Spartali Stillman, 1844-1927<br />
<i>Love's Messenger,</i> 1885<br />
Delaware / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting creates the mood of romantic melancholy sought after by Pre-Raphaelites. The woman has just received a message carried by a white bird; she keeps corn kernels on her sill for it. She has been sitting by the window to work on a tapestry. The river comes right up to the window; does she live on an island? The river is a way of pointing into the distance, where her love lies. Stillman heightened the romance by softening the edges of her figures, and using fewer fussy details than the original Pre-Raphaelites.</div>
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<b>Evelyn De Morgan</b> was the niece and student of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. She is considered a follower of Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, but instead of dark and sickly images of the ideal woman, her women are fair-haired, robust, and paying attention. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jh-V9oSM6Co/W3sjvdycWKI/AAAAAAAAQ1E/YvBif2bOYSU5S5HLR71k2z0HysMIq55jACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4370.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jh-V9oSM6Co/W3sjvdycWKI/AAAAAAAAQ1E/YvBif2bOYSU5S5HLR71k2z0HysMIq55jACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4370.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Evelyn De Morgan, 1850-1919<br />
<i>Flora,</i> 1894<br />
De Morgan Collection / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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De Morgan's version of the stock figure of Flora, goddess of flowers, is closely related to the style of Botticelli, one of her favorite old masters. The figure's dress and stance are closely related to his <i>Primavera, </i>while her flowing hair recalls <i>The Birth of Venus.</i><br />
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<b>Kate Bunce</b> was not directly connected with the Pre-Raphaelite set, which was mostly based in London. She was born and educated in Birmingham, an industrial town about halfway between London and Liverpool that had its own art academy, and even its own style. Although she did exhibit in London and all over England, as well as Birmingham, and had a successful career, she didn't achieve as wide recognition as the Londoners did. Also the Pre-Raphelite style seemed increasingly quaint in 20th century.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HOLXvG_o0Yw/W3t0Y0TzOZI/AAAAAAAAQ1Q/6t3F-H4m1DYTVurZmpDX-_EY-AZtGwZBACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4355.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HOLXvG_o0Yw/W3t0Y0TzOZI/AAAAAAAAQ1Q/6t3F-H4m1DYTVurZmpDX-_EY-AZtGwZBACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4355.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kate Bunce, 1856-1927<br />
<i>Saint Cecilia,</i> c. 1901<br />
Private Collection / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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The gorgeous robe—silken and golden—the gold leaf halo, the crisp edges and abundant detail are all expressive of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics. Even the space is compressed vertically, like a painting by van Eyck. The head, however, looks very English, and the face shows concentration and determination, rather than the languid melancholy of the typical Pre-Raphelite idealized woman.<br />
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<b>Conclusion</b><br />
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The Pre-Raphaelite school was essentially reactionary. They objected not only to conventional British painting but to modern life in general. They dreamed of an imaginary time when beauty reined supreme. But all those lonely ladies languishing in luxurious environments seem really irrelevant and quaint from the 21st century. The Pre-Raphaelites created some romantic effects in their work and it's fun to imagine the medieval world of knights and religion, but you can see why the French dominated art history in the 19th century. The French were looking outside the studio toward the real world, trying to capture the modern look, studying the effect of light and the nature of vision, and they embraced modernity, eagerly painting the newly built urban squares, railways, and bridges.Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-42165692043516192102018-08-13T10:03:00.002-07:002018-08-13T16:53:13.538-07:00Clock Dance<div style="text-align: center;">
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Willa Drake—the protagonist of Anne Tyler's latest novel, <i>Clock Dance</i>—is a self-defeating, self-effacing wimp.<br />
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Tyler divided Willa's story into two parts. The first part consists of three situations in which Willa made self-defeating choices, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot type choices.<br />
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When she is eleven years old, Willa rejects both her parents in a prolonged pre-teen pout. It's easy to see why she rejects her mother: she's a moody person who sometimes leaves her family to fend for themselves, and then returns pretending that nothing has happened. Willa's anger at her mild-mannered, even-tempered father, is harder to fathom. She seems to deliberately take offense at something he says in an effort to comfort her while her mother is gone. The reader is left to wonder the real reason she gets angry and refuses his love. Is it because he is too passive to confront her mother? Because he goes along with the pretense that everything is fine? Or is it because he doesn't take seriously Willa's effort to fill the gap?<br />
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By the time she is 21, Willa is so far gone that when the passenger on one side of her in a jet airplane threatens her life with a gun, she doesn't react in any way. She doesn't scream; she doesn't question the guy about what he wants; she doesn't alert her boyfriend on the other side of her; she doesn't alert the stewardess who comes by. Her will is paralyzed. When she later tells her boyfriend, he is incredulous and discounts her story.<br />
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She and her boyfriend, Derek Macintyre, are flying to visit her parents because Derek wants to marry her. Where Willa is weak, Derek is willful and assertive. Willa wants to wait until she has finished college, but he wants to marry in the summer coming up and move to California to start his career. His plans are more important to him than her plans, which he discounts. Toward the end of their week-end visit, he announces their engagement to her parents. Her mother says all the right things: she points out that he isn't looking at Willa's side of things and what Willa would have to give up for him. And she particularly notes that Derek had brushed off Willa's story of being threatened on the airplane, because it shows how he disrespects her. Derek confronts her mother in a way that her father never could, and calmly tells her off. Instead of being strengthened by her mother's support, Willa reacts against it, and against her own best interests, by giving into Derek.<br />
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After 20 years of predictable life with Derek—giving up college to raise two sons, being the sort of dependable mom she wishes her mother had been—Willa is suddenly left to her own devices when Derek is killed in an accident caused by his own road rage. She feels helpless and incompetent, which is the way he had always treated her. She begins to wonder about the purpose of life, or simply 'why bother?' She had always wanted to be so reliable that her sons could take her for granted, but now she finds that being taken for granted is not very satisfying. She still longs for someone to take care of her, and to boss her around.<br />
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The real story, Part II, starts when Willa is 61 years old, and it opens with a call to another life, an offer she can't refuse. It takes the form of a phone call from someone who mistakenly assumes that Willa is the grandmother of an 8-year-old girl whose mother had been shot in the leg, in her neighborhood in Baltimore. She wants Willa to take care of the girl, Cheryl, while her mother, Denise, is in the hospital. Willa is now married to Peter, who is the same type as Derek, and is living the same arid retirement life in Arizona that she would have had with him. Uprooted from her world in California, Willa feels her life is meaningless and boring. When she hears of a child in need of a grandma, she can't resist the temptation to play the role. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she spontaneously makes a major decision, without consulting Peter, and books her flight to Baltimore. Her bid for independence is somewhat muted by his decision to accompany her, condescendingly assuming she can't handle the flight by herself.<br />
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Peter is fairly helpful, or at least non-interfering, but his attention is still on his own world, his business associates and golf buddies. Willa adapts to her role as grandmother, which includes adapting to a colorful cast of characters in the poor but respectable neighborhood where Cheryl and Denise live. She becomes so engrossed in her new life that she barely notices when Peter goes back to his world in Arizona. Meanwhile she is developing self-reliance—learning to drive a strange car around a strange town, learning to make decisions and choices on her own, learning to appreciate 'everyday people,' learning, for the first time, to enjoy the absence of a man to dominate her life. And the reader keeps thinking she ought to go back to her husband. Or should she?<br />
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My usual preference is for novels that are intellectually challenging, with a difficult vocabulary and complicated sentences, with big ideas and heavy drama. But sometimes I need a vacation from all that, and then I turn to Anne Tyler. <i>Clock Dance</i> is her 21st novel, and I have read about half of them. Her themes are positive and life-affirming, but her stories don't reek of sentimentality and preachiness because her style is so spare and understated. It's like Quaker wood furniture—functional but not fancy, well-crafted but plain. Tyler is generous with homely detail and engaging minor characters, but she is spare in her depiction of Willa's inner life. By leaving a lot unsaid, she forces the reader to use their imagination.<br />
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For me, Anne Tyler is consistently good, but never great. But that's okay. It's like simple home cooking compared to gourmet meals—sometimes that's just what I need.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_4NP_NMEpI0/W3HA3HWiDzI/AAAAAAAAQtk/R_HbvtQJjIgEYOerkj5V9J9kXgXXHS41wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IZRA6ITQZMI6RPKQXABYTJHFNE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_4NP_NMEpI0/W3HA3HWiDzI/AAAAAAAAQtk/R_HbvtQJjIgEYOerkj5V9J9kXgXXHS41wCK4BGAYYCw/s320/IZRA6ITQZMI6RPKQXABYTJHFNE.jpg" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne Tyler, 2017</td></tr>
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-18964570947195305272018-08-02T08:47:00.001-07:002018-08-02T08:59:40.512-07:00Six Degrees of SeparationThe phrase "six degrees of separation" was originally coined by a popular Hungarian author and playwright, Frigyes Karinthy, to describe his theory that everyone on this planet is connected to every other person on the planet by a chain of five other people.<br />
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For instance, you are connected to your father (first degree); consider everyone he knows (second degree), and everyone they know (third degree). That's a lot of people. If you add all the people they know (fourth degree), plus all the people <i>they</i> know (fifth degree), plus all the people <i>they</i> know, you come to the sixth degree of separation, where theoretically the network includes everyone on the planet. So, somehow, you are connected with Donald Trump, and Barack Obama, and a poor woman in Africa who has never slept in a bed, and a person in Rio undergoing chemo.<br />
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Whether or not this theory can be proven literally, it was an early declaration that all human beings are connected, all part of a network, and that idea has become ever more popular in both science and literature.<br />
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Karinthy illustrated his theory in a short story in 1929. In 1990, American playwright John Guare wrote a play to explore the connections between humans which he called <i>Six Degrees of Separation.</i> It was enormously popular on Broadway, having a run of 485 performances, and it was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play.<br />
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In 1993, Guare morphed his play into that rarest of all things: a movie for unabashed intellectuals—for people who love words and ideas, who talk about books and visit art museums, who know both Shakespeare and <i>Catcher in the Rye</i>, or at least know about them. The script is like a Shakespearean play in that the characters recite long monologues about weighty subjects, and the protagonist, Paul—a young and handsome black street hustler who cons, or bewitches, everyone he meets—enchants his marks with a long, and surprisingly incisive critique of <i>Catcher in the Rye</i>, which was on everyone's must-read list at the time.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul (Will Smith) bewitching his marks</td></tr>
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The way the six degrees of separation works out is that Paul first picks up a well-educated, closet-gay white guy named Trent, who quickly becomes infatuated with him. In order to keep him around, Trent tells Paul stories, like Scheherazade trying to seduce the sultan.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul asks Trent (Anthony Michael Hall) to tell him about his contacts.</td></tr>
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The main thing Paul wants to know is about Trent's contacts—these would be potential marks. Trent tells Paul a story about each of the contacts in his address book, which Paul absorbs word for word. But Trent becomes inspired by a larger goal: not satisfied with being Scheherazade, he aims to be Henry Higgins in <i>My Fair Lady </i>by transforming Paul into a guy who can fit in with rich white people. He teaches him how to talk and what to talk about. He teaches him about books and museums and libraries, where Paul studies his victims' interests. Paul stays with Trent for about 3 months, and takes from him all his good stuff—TV, audio system, etc—but Trent doesn't resent the loss.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9RhkKSPb7vg/W2MUL-AxDAI/AAAAAAAAQr8/nGLnbSsBe3UheAJfwOm3O5aU-W9zIRFDQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/6degrees-of-separation_6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9RhkKSPb7vg/W2MUL-AxDAI/AAAAAAAAQr8/nGLnbSsBe3UheAJfwOm3O5aU-W9zIRFDQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/6degrees-of-separation_6.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trent teaches Paul correct pronunciation.</td></tr>
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Armed with all this information, and dressed in a preppy outfit, Paul sets out to con three marks: an art dealer, a foundation manager, and a doctor—all parents of Trent's friends. Paul gains entry to their parents' homes by appearing at their doors with a stab wound and claiming to have been mugged in Central Park; he says that he came to them for help because he knew their kids at prep school. He knows so much about them and their kids, and has such a charming manner, that everyone believes him implicitly. Once he gains entry into their homes, he tries to gain entry into their affections: he tells them that their children love them, and he tells him about his own parents, claiming that his father is Sidney Poitier—a pioneering black actor who was universally lauded in the 1990s—thus adding a hint of glamor to his persona. He spins that story further, claiming that Poitier is directing a movie of <i>Cats,</i> a musical that was enormously popular on Broadway, but seemed trivial to critics and intellectuals. Ramping it up, he claims he can get them parts as extras, human extras. For a New Yorker living opposite Central Park, a walk-on role in a Broadway musical is a wicked temptation.</div>
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Thematically, the point of all this is that humans are connected to each other not only by a chain of other humans, but also by a chain of common feelings. Everyone is attracted to Paul and the stories he spins. He appeals to common human needs and expresses ideas that everyone finds appealing. Paul treats his marks with more courtesy and consideration than their own children.<br />
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The movie dramatizes only one of Paul's encounters with parents; the others are reported as stories. Two of his marks take in him, give him a place to sleep and a little spending money, and then go on with their lives, leaving him alone in their homes. But the art dealers, Flan and Ouisa Kittredge, take him into their life as well as their home. They tend Paul's wound and give him their son's new pink dress shirt. They introduce him to their visitor and invite him to join them for dinner. In one extraordinary scene Paul whips up a delicious dinner for them out of odds and ends in their kitchen, while entertaining them with more stories.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vwmaTe-ZUc8/W2MWlF0s2gI/AAAAAAAAQsI/fMegnOamoAYERAWjANO10bf_Y3diG6s7QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/release-date-dec-08-1993-movie-title-six-degrees-of-separation-studio-F6FWXG.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="315" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vwmaTe-ZUc8/W2MWlF0s2gI/AAAAAAAAQsI/fMegnOamoAYERAWjANO10bf_Y3diG6s7QCK4BGAYYCw/s400/release-date-dec-08-1993-movie-title-six-degrees-of-separation-studio-F6FWXG.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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With Flan and Ouisa another sort of connection is formed, a true emotional bond. Paul falls in love with the Kittredges, just as he entrances them. He wants to be like them, to know what they know, to do what they do, to be with them like a son—like a <i>loving</i> and devoted son, not their own resentful children. Flan manages with effort to retain some sense of detachment, but Ouisa feels an unfamiliar burst of love and affection.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u4nKKA720Ug/W2MW9QJ9luI/AAAAAAAAQsU/8iPULufZzDE_Hh89B-XZCXGdBnRbECN2QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/8304372-27585967-thumbnail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u4nKKA720Ug/W2MW9QJ9luI/AAAAAAAAQsU/8iPULufZzDE_Hh89B-XZCXGdBnRbECN2QCK4BGAYYCw/s400/8304372-27585967-thumbnail.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul with the Kittredges</td></tr>
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In addition to all these rich people, Paul cons a couple of poor young actors from Utah who are waiting tables for a living, Rick and Elizabeth. Paul not only swindles them heartlessly out of their hard-earned savings, he initiates Rick into gay sex—in a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, no less—just for the experience. And Rick accepts the experience as something he can use in his development as an actor, or so it seems.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zr7yjX6Wdlg/W2MXFWpJc7I/AAAAAAAAQsc/MLu0tPog9AI5Zjs5IhLshWtI4vjBpOF7ACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/sixdegrees75880_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zr7yjX6Wdlg/W2MXFWpJc7I/AAAAAAAAQsc/MLu0tPog9AI5Zjs5IhLshWtI4vjBpOF7ACK4BGAYYCw/s400/sixdegrees75880_.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul with Rick and Elizabeth</td></tr>
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Beneath the theme of connection is the theme of imagination and story telling. In fact, from the number of lines given to the proper use of the imagination you might think the playwright's main goal was to express his insights on this subject. Instead of being a mere vehicle for creating space fantasies and video games, Paul proposes that imagination is an essential tool for understanding ourselves and other people. The magic of a good story is illustrated both by the tales Paul tells the Kittredges and by the way Flan and Ouisa transform their interaction with him into an anecdote that fascinates their social circle.<br />
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The inherent problem with being a good con man is that you literally lose your soul—you submerge and deny your own identity, your selfhood; Paul rejects his old life on the street and loses himself in the role of rich college kid.<br />
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In addition a con man needs to be heartless—to disregard the effects his deceptions might have on his victims. Paul seduces Rick for the fun of it, without thinking of how it might affect Elizabeth. When Rick confesses all to Elizabeth, hoping she will understand, she flies into a rage and rejects him completely, whereupon he leaps off the fire escape to this death.<br />
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The effect of this is that for the first time Paul is forced to confront the fact that actions have consequences. But it is too late. The police arrest him, either for this swindle or for others, and throw him in jail. There he gets lost in the system because the Kittredges don't know his real name. Later they hear that a prisoner who fits Paul's description has hung himself in his prison cell with his shirt. It seems that lacking both a soul and a heart, Paul is unable to cope with reality.<br />
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The effect of all this on Ouisa is striking. After she and Flan have regaled their luncheon companions with this story and its poignant ending, Ouisa suddenly stands up and walks away from the table, saying, "We're turning an experience into an anecdote to entertain our friends. But it was an experience." A long closing shot shows her striding with determination down Fifth Avenue. The audience is left to wonder what it means. Is she giving up her old way of life? Why did her interaction with Paul have such an effect on her? I think she started to see that she and Flan were also con artists—private art dealers who parlayed every experience into dinner conversation, for the sake of financial gain or social status, and like Paul, they ignored the emotional consequences of their life-style.<br />
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The movie is very much like a play. It is even divided into acts by scenic views of the city accompanied by appropriate mood music. In addition, the acting style is slightly theatrical; sometimes the actors seem to be reciting lines, rather than acting naturally. The movie's theatricality is highlighted by the glamorous, high-fashion outfits that Oisa wears in the major scenes.<br />
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The script is played with high melodrama, but a satirical attitude underlies the whole. Guare pokes gentle fun at the "elite," who live on the upper east side in Manhattan, and send their kids to Harvard, of course, and work crosswords in ink, of course. The scene where all the parents and children get together to try to figure out Paul's identity is hilarious because of the stereotypical ways each kid immediately takes offense at their questions.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gdf8XyEo_LQ/W2MnCEiXJFI/AAAAAAAAQss/s3HKxyVt7skpHSIt2HEKLVlu-43-WO1WwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/maxresdefault-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gdf8XyEo_LQ/W2MnCEiXJFI/AAAAAAAAQss/s3HKxyVt7skpHSIt2HEKLVlu-43-WO1WwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/maxresdefault-3.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Woody Kittredge (Oz Perkins) freaking out because his parents gave away his pink shirt.</td></tr>
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All the acting is excellent, and the performances of Will Smith (as Paul), Stockard Channing (as Ouisa) and Donald Sutherland (as Flan) are riveting.<br />
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I happened to run into this movie on the MGM channel on cable TV, and having seen it in the 1990s, I recorded it. It was a rare treat to see it again. </div>
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-79526255629393110272018-07-22T05:30:00.003-07:002018-07-22T16:44:41.474-07:00To Kill a MockingbirdRecalling her reaction to reading <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, by Harper Lee, my friend said, "When I finished it, I just wished that everyone could be like Atticus Finch, or at least try." Indeed. If only everyone could be decent and virtuous through and through. If only everyone would treat others with respect, regardless of their place in society. If only everyone could retain their faith in humanity in the face of prejudice and ignorance, in the face of threats against himself and his family. If only every parent could be gentle and understanding while setting firm limits. If only every man who was a dead-eye shot could avoid using a gun except when it is necessary to defend the community from a clear-cut danger.<br />
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Harper Lee intended for readers to long for decency. Not only that, but she spelled out exactly what she thought 'decency' and 'right living' means on a wide range of issues from large to small: what is justice, what is honor, what is duty; what is sympathy, what is courtesy, what is tact; what does it mean to love one's neighbor; how does a reckless child learn to be a responsible adult? She demonstrated her code through both the actions and the words of her characters.<br />
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Far from being the utilitarian and sentimental potboiler that I expected, <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> is a masterpiece of fiction. Harper Lee unfolds her stories in such a homely and leisurely manner that you don't realize you're taking in a systematic moral treatise at the same time.<br />
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The literary device that enabled the author to reveal the setting, the plot, and the characters slowly, in tiny easily digestible units, was using the viewpoint of Atticus's daughter, a precocious little girl, in her eighth and ninth years, called Scout. Lee didn't attempt to create a childish voice, but she depicted events in the way that Scout experienced them.<br />
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In order to deal with themes of racism and justice, the major plot has to do with the trial of a handicapped black laborer, Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of the rape of a white woman. Atticus Finch is assigned by the judge to defend Tom, and he makes a very convincing case for Tom's innocence, while knowing that the jury would never take the word of a Negro over that of a white man. When a mob threatens to lynch Tom, Atticus is prepared to defend him without using a weapon, sticking by his principles at the risk of his own life.<br />
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The subplot concerns a reclusive neighbor, known by the children as Boo. When he was a young man, Boo, whose real name is Arthur Radley, got in trouble with the law while hanging out with a gang of ruffians. His parents' response was to keep him hidden at home. After 15 years of isolation, Arthur casually stabbed his father in the leg as he passes by. It is evident that he needs some kind of help, but his father refuses to let him go to an asylum, so he ends up back at home, even more isolated. When his parents finally die, his older brother Nathan moves in and continues Boo's confinement.<br />
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Scout and her brother Jem, who is about 4 years older, and their summertime friend Dill, who is 8-10 years old, make the mysterious Boo into a dangerous monster. Sometimes they are afraid to pass his house; other times, they try to provoke him to show himself. Although they manage to rile his brother Nathan—who takes a pot shot at them when they enter the Radley place late at night in an effort to leave Boo a friendly note—Boo sees their gesture as friendly play, as it was intended. He responds by leaving tiny keepsakes in a hole in an oak tree, but mean Nathan cuts off that form of contact by filling the hole with cement.<br />
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The way these two plots are intertwined is a marvel to behold.<br />
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The man who falsely accuses Tom Robinson of rape is a shiftless, no-account white man, named Bob Ewell, who lives on welfare with a ragged bunch of motherless children next to the dump—quite literally 'poor white trash,' but still higher in the social pecking order than the lowly Negroes. His eldest daughter, Mayella, age 19—friendless and isolated, like Boo—becomes attracted to Tom Robinson when he passes her house each day on the way to and from his job working as a laborer on a nearby farm. Although his left arm is damaged and hangs useless, he is young and strong. His only fault is sympathizing with Mayella's situation. He sees that she totally lacks support from her father and the younger children in the family, and he instinctively comes to her aid when she asks him to help with some task. When she takes advantage of the situation to kiss him and hold him in her arms, she seals his doom. Her father observes the embrace through a window and totally freaks out. He enters the house raging, and when Tom quickly departs, he proceeds to whack Mayella about the head and neck, not stopping until she is on the floor. Then he covers up his violence by accusing Tom of rape, and Mayella goes along with this in order to hide her shame.<br />
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The courtroom scenes where Atticus reveals the Ewells' squalid life and the flimsiness of their accusations through patient and respectful questioning are great set pieces of sustained drama. The children look on from the balcony among the black community, who are stunned that any white man would put so much of himself into defending a black man. The raucous white people on the floor are temporarily subdued by doubt and suspense. After unexpectedly long deliberations, the all white male jury finds Tom guilty and sentences him to death. The injustice of the verdict hits the children and the reader like an anvil falling to the floor.<br />
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Though Bob Ewell gets his way in court, he is humiliated by the experience, and he vows to get Atticus if it takes the rest of his life. Instead of going directly for the attorney, he attacks Scout and Jem on Halloween night. Scout is saved by the chicken wire in her ham costume and rolls comically out of danger, but Ewell succeeds in twisting Jem's arm behind his back and is on the verge of delivering a fatal blow with a jack knife, when he is overpowered by Boo, who stabs him to death with a kitchen knife. It is unclear to the children who saved them: Jem passes out and Scout's vision is impeded by her awkward costume. When Sheriff Tate arrives on the scene, he quickly figures out what has happened, but he chooses to cover up the truth—by saying Ewell fell on his own knife—because saving the children's lives would make him a hero in the small town, and he figures Boo would hate being the center of attention—it would be a kind of punishment.<br />
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The issue of killing mockingbirds is mentioned early in the book, when Atticus gives Scout and Jem air rifles for Christmas. He tells them never to point a gun indoors, and never to shoot a mockingbird, because killing a mockingbird is sinful. A friendly neighbor explains why: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us." At the end, when Sheriff Tate decides to hide the truth about how Bob Ewell died, he explains: "To my way of thinkin', Mr. Finch, taking the one man who's done you and this town a great service an' draggin' him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that's a sin." Scout understands this. She says, "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?" There's a time for justice, and a time for mercy.<br />
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All this drama and high seriousness is interwoven with comical scenes, such as the hilarious Halloween pageant featuring children dressed as the agricultural products of the region. Or the meeting of the ladies' Christian group that earnestly discusses the plight of some happy heathens, while freely engaging in un-Christian prejudice against members of their own community. Or Scout's first day in school, when her teacher is reduced to tears by her own ineptitude and one of the younger Ewell children, who sasses her and walks out of school. Or Jem's attempt to use a fishing pole to get a message to Boo in the middle of the night, and losing his pants in the process.<br />
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As appealing as this story is—full of homely detail, childish innocence, and colorful anecdotes—it is tempting to take it literally, but it is not a documentary, it is a story, a constructed piece of fiction. In fact it is a parable—a story with a moral. The characters have been idealized and simplified to illustrate certain principles.<br />
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I read this book because I wondered why it kept appearing on so many lists of best books and favorites. It appeals to our longing for basic human decency with subtle and refined artistry.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-46514159747426583642018-07-17T17:38:00.000-07:002018-07-18T17:34:47.730-07:00René Magritte: The Fifth Season<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UTnQkB7rrdU/W035VHZt5eI/AAAAAAAAQlk/AEoJlCl-fwgtJDGxSWWHFOW_4mIlR6oyQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4107.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UTnQkB7rrdU/W035VHZt5eI/AAAAAAAAQlk/AEoJlCl-fwgtJDGxSWWHFOW_4mIlR6oyQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4107.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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"The Fifth Season" is an exhibit of paintings by René Magritte (1898-1967) now showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It features work from the latter part of his career, starting with the 1940s, when World War II was raging in Europe.<br />
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I've been a fan of Magritte for a long time, but I gave up trying to figure out the meaning of his paintings at the Royal Academy of Art in Brussels, which had more works by this highly prolific artist than I could digest in one afternoon. However, after viewing this well-arranged show, with seldom-seen works borrowed from all over the world, and doing some online study, I suddenly had a feeling that I could understand the paintings now. I thought I would share my thoughts in hopes that the reader might be stimulated to put on their own interpretative cap: the "true meaning" is up for grabs.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WfFXUdII-IA/W01JR1gPUHI/AAAAAAAAQiY/Gb9-JuDyg1knnpA8EiZUrM0fbZMr6beAgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BHuman%2BCondition%252C%2B1933.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WfFXUdII-IA/W01JR1gPUHI/AAAAAAAAQiY/Gb9-JuDyg1knnpA8EiZUrM0fbZMr6beAgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BHuman%2BCondition%252C%2B1933.jpg" width="520" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Human Condition, </i>1933</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: start;">In the 1930s, Magritte was a well-known Surrealist. His images combined hard-edged realism with optical puzzles that played tricks between images and the realities they depict. He complicated the matter by assigning the works weighty titles that apparently bear no connection with the subject. My interpretation of this work is that the human condition is such that we mistake illusion for reality; we are deluded.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JSzVWHsP1ro/W01MwYShc4I/AAAAAAAAQik/gxNa3M6P0_gBqZ6w9b8iLJHjxg_HPiexQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BReturn%252C%2B1940.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JSzVWHsP1ro/W01MwYShc4I/AAAAAAAAQik/gxNa3M6P0_gBqZ6w9b8iLJHjxg_HPiexQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BReturn%252C%2B1940.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Return, </i>1940</td></tr>
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Here the silhouette of a bird in flight is filled with very realistic clouds of a daytime sky. The setting is a dark night where trees are silhouetted in black, as you would expect. In the foreground is a naturalistic depiction of 3 perfect eggs. If the bird form represents the soul, and the eggs represent the birth process, we might have a statement about death and rebirth, or the eternal life of the soul. </div>
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During the 1940s, Magritte abandoned his signature flat style, and experimented with brushier styles, such as Impressionism, Expressionism, and Fauvism. The generally accepted explanation is that he felt disillusioned and alienated during the German Occupation of Belgium. Magritte was born in Belgium and lived there most of his life, and he stayed in Brussels during the Occupation.<br />
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I think his reasons may have been more artistic than war-related. Even though his brushstroke might be loose to the point of messiness, his tricky turn of thought is very recognizable, and there is no emergence of social or political themes. Nazis were not keen on Surrealism, and it could be that he wanted to cloak his haunting questions in styles that had proved acceptable. It could also be that as an artist he was saying, "Even when I change my style, I'm still myself." It should also be noted that during this time Magritte was supplementing his income by selling copies of other artists' works.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qwLudTPuouo/W01Syl3rVnI/AAAAAAAAQiw/zcLTBkHEickq_gNW--YxskpFPIAlNbE3gCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BFifth%2BSeason%252C%2B1943.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="532" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qwLudTPuouo/W01Syl3rVnI/AAAAAAAAQiw/zcLTBkHEickq_gNW--YxskpFPIAlNbE3gCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BFifth%2BSeason%252C%2B1943.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Fifth Season,</i> 1943</td></tr>
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The show was named for this crude and brushy painting of two anonymous similar men carrying paintings in opposite directions. One carries an image of the forest; the other an image of the sky. There is something sombre about this work; the artist doesn't know whether he is coming or going; dragging himself though his routine, he perseveres in his effort to sell paintings. This painting is very much in the manner of Edvard Munch, a contemporary whose roughly rendered figures are doubtful and confused.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GczoMu0kQ40/W01UqPhm20I/AAAAAAAAQi8/Ti0_HRVe7cwr5vpJ3eudBdUzJUO1PoZnwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Forethought%252C%2B1943.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GczoMu0kQ40/W01UqPhm20I/AAAAAAAAQi8/Ti0_HRVe7cwr5vpJ3eudBdUzJUO1PoZnwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Forethought%252C%2B1943.jpg" width="532" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Forethought, </i>1943</td></tr>
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By shocking contrast, Magritte painted this utterly delightful bouquet, worthy of Renoir or Monet, in the same year. Surrealism as a movement was over at this point, but as a style, this painting clearly shows a similar way of thinking. The flowers are wonderfully convincing, but examples of several different species are growing on the same plant, which is more like a tree than a bush, and which looms gigantically over a serene impressionistic landscape.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L7tx1ccJ6Mg/W01WLv6EnTI/AAAAAAAAQjI/ULT840qPlboqlzDvTSRTMUM5LsMAR2YWQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BHarvest%252C%2B1943.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L7tx1ccJ6Mg/W01WLv6EnTI/AAAAAAAAQjI/ULT840qPlboqlzDvTSRTMUM5LsMAR2YWQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BHarvest%252C%2B1943.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Harvest,</i> 1943</td></tr>
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In that same year, Magritte made a little art history joke. There was a long tradition of treating the reclining nude in this posture with upraised arm and sleeping or dreaming face. Historically, she was supposed to be receiving the god Zeus in the form of a shower of gold; so she might be blissed out, so to speak. In this case, instead of Zeus hovering overhead, she has a dream of a beautiful, fertile landscape in the background. The surreal element is the body's coloration; if you had been in contact with a supernatural power, you might feel he had brought out your true colors.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wAzNKwFrruA/W02ybPq0jjI/AAAAAAAAQjU/uEbT2-vmPfImrWLdqCRcSK3OGxhOfQt_QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Elsinore%252C%2B1944.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wAzNKwFrruA/W02ybPq0jjI/AAAAAAAAQjU/uEbT2-vmPfImrWLdqCRcSK3OGxhOfQt_QCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Elsinore%252C%2B1944.jpg" width="522" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Elsinore,</i> 1944</td></tr>
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This picture shows a figure of a castle combined with that of a forest in a green land under a cloudy sky. Elsinore is a real port in Denmark, and it is also the name of the Castle where Hamlet lived with his benighted family. Again, this painting makes me think Magritte was seriously exploring the styles of other painters because it looks so much like the forest scenes of Gustav Klimt, another contemporary artist.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oyzAOPMAy0A/W020s_WTpyI/AAAAAAAAQjg/O7zJwxIYEkIk_DxsYreBT16bVDcvUHa0QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Image%2Bwith%2Ba%2BGreen%2BHouse%252C%2B1944.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="492" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oyzAOPMAy0A/W020s_WTpyI/AAAAAAAAQjg/O7zJwxIYEkIk_DxsYreBT16bVDcvUHa0QCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Image%2Bwith%2Ba%2BGreen%2BHouse%252C%2B1944.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Image with a Green House</i>, 1944</td></tr>
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Can we squeeze in a little music? The world is very regulated and insulated, very closed and overheated—is anyone making room for culture? The title directs us away from the violin, which is trying to hide in the shadows.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8rIILadXxCE/W022OfEOtqI/AAAAAAAAQjo/iDhF9WlBBVoA3jXr6CG2aLahscPn9w5QACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Intelligence%252C%2B1946.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="532" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8rIILadXxCE/W022OfEOtqI/AAAAAAAAQjo/iDhF9WlBBVoA3jXr6CG2aLahscPn9w5QACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Intelligence%252C%2B1946.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Intelligence, </i>1946</td></tr>
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Here we have two identical men wearing masks and caps looking at each other as though they were scheming. Behind them are icons of industrialization. On the right is a candelabra-like figure with three identical female faces gazing toward the men with very expressive looks. The color scheme is overheated. Once again, culture appears to be threatened. Perhaps a painting like this does show alienation; the painter feels that his values are threatened.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fXyG6BZqrYc/W024WqG5UuI/AAAAAAAAQjw/Wdsnsr-f1Vg83RdQ0OeOvieUwWfBEs2wQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BCut-Glass%2BBath%252C%2B1946.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fXyG6BZqrYc/W024WqG5UuI/AAAAAAAAQjw/Wdsnsr-f1Vg83RdQ0OeOvieUwWfBEs2wQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BCut-Glass%2BBath%252C%2B1946.jpg" width="452" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Cut-Glass Bath, </i>1946</td></tr>
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This little work from the same year, a gouache on paper, is a straight-forward wine-drinker's joke. Want to feel as lofty as a giraffe? Have a nice glass of wine; it centers you, as shown by the concentric white brushstrokes.</div>
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By the late 1940s Magritte had resumed his signature crisp style, and added new complications to his philosophical themes. The War was over and life was starting to return to normal. The art market was waking up, and his contemporaries were pumping out work in fresh styles.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-79yWlVH46F0/W028l6pUm8I/AAAAAAAAQj4/of5tyLjD6cAjhbaXelQZUaWGZUAyrnTCgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BLiberator%252C%2B1947.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-79yWlVH46F0/W028l6pUm8I/AAAAAAAAQj4/of5tyLjD6cAjhbaXelQZUaWGZUAyrnTCgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BLiberator%252C%2B1947.jpg" width="506" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Liberator, </i>1947</td></tr>
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Magritte's hard-edged super-realism has returned with this image, along with cynical wit. Whatever the liberator is, he ain't what he's cracked up to be. His promises are just castles in the air. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ehSB1UocH-g/W02-Hv-SmDI/AAAAAAAAQkE/1j7FFa3Hc7sADa2qEAmOuA-BAKsYxUebwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BPebble%252C%2B1948.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ehSB1UocH-g/W02-Hv-SmDI/AAAAAAAAQkE/1j7FFa3Hc7sADa2qEAmOuA-BAKsYxUebwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BPebble%252C%2B1948.jpg" width="520" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Pebble, </i>1948</td></tr>
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Here Magritte clones the late style of fellow surrealist Georgio de Chirico to present a frank image of a woman masturbating. She is in a room that morphs into the ocean, suggesting that auto-eroticism can take you away from it all. The experts who mounted the show worried about the painting's title; I think the meaning would be evident to any woman similarly engaged.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EQfvZunXG_8/W03AtgffvLI/AAAAAAAAQkQ/Sx1Z1SzlLfMQVVKFcQgKJHCnpDl53MmPACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Sheherazade%252C%2B1950.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EQfvZunXG_8/W03AtgffvLI/AAAAAAAAQkQ/Sx1Z1SzlLfMQVVKFcQgKJHCnpDl53MmPACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Sheherazade%252C%2B1950.jpg" width="524" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sheherazade, </i>1950</td></tr>
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Sheherazade is a character in a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales first compiled in English in the early 1700s. She is a young woman who attempts to trick a sultan who has a practice of bedding a virgin every night and beheading her the next morning. She forestalls her own death by telling the king a fascinating story, and stopping each morning before it is finished. She has prepared herself for this challenge by absorbing all the great literature and histories of her time. She holds the king's interest for 1001 nights—which would be over 3 years—by which time, he is in love with her. He marries her and makes her his queen. Which says a lot about the value of story-telling and the imagination. Magritte represents this magical person as a bejeweled carnival mask; she is the ultimate mystery because she contains infinite wisdom.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k_Hm-J-36jw/W03EysrX-uI/AAAAAAAAQkc/y0s4wRndhYQxdQDjTUe2F3_Xllx6ngURgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BWorld%2Bof%2BImages%252C%2B1950.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k_Hm-J-36jw/W03EysrX-uI/AAAAAAAAQkc/y0s4wRndhYQxdQDjTUe2F3_Xllx6ngURgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BWorld%2Bof%2BImages%252C%2B1950.jpg" width="512" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The World of Images, </i>1950</td></tr>
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This sunset is so gorgeous that it burst through the window.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vnjgieg5W8k/W03FNbD6GeI/AAAAAAAAQko/0U4wGe8yhJMQDRbQGnJAt2GXFG2qu9SxACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BSurvivor%252C%2B1950.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vnjgieg5W8k/W03FNbD6GeI/AAAAAAAAQko/0U4wGe8yhJMQDRbQGnJAt2GXFG2qu9SxACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BSurvivor%252C%2B1950.jpg" width="506" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Survivor, </i>1950</td></tr>
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This is the most pointed and poignant of Magritte's images, a weapon covered in blood. Its placement in a homey, well-lighted room, depicted with loving attention to textures and patterns, connects it with American pop art. It resonates loudly nowadays when random bloodshed is so commonplace.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WFH2BKUuX7U/W03GWbGmdEI/AAAAAAAAQk0/rdhFBxzJapUaL-WAWtrxDFfOmK_L1WQ9wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BFair%2BCaptive%252C%2B1950.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="470" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WFH2BKUuX7U/W03GWbGmdEI/AAAAAAAAQk0/rdhFBxzJapUaL-WAWtrxDFfOmK_L1WQ9wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BFair%2BCaptive%252C%2B1950.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Fair Captive, </i>1950</td></tr>
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A stormy night on the ocean; a brilliant campfire illuminates a picture frame, which may be empty or may be a perfect likeness of the ocean, but somehow manages to reflect the fire's light; the fire is complemented by a boulder on the other side of the easel. The four elements are represented: air, earth, water and fire. I think the implied artist is trying to express something infinite; a successful painting is a fair captive of his effort.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vD-VUEQmCcU/W03KN-iupeI/AAAAAAAAQlA/83Q-5lpc_tQ3IG2fwzg9rTiNzpcgcGgnACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BActive%2BVoice%252C%2B1951.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vD-VUEQmCcU/W03KN-iupeI/AAAAAAAAQlA/83Q-5lpc_tQ3IG2fwzg9rTiNzpcgcGgnACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BActive%2BVoice%252C%2B1951.jpg" width="518" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Active Voice, </i>1951</td></tr>
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This portrait of an isolated rock—could be a boulder or a magnified pebble—is one of Magritte's bluntest statements. No matter how closely you look at an object, you still can't understand it. The title adds an aggravating complication; nothing seems more silent and passive than a stone. Is an active voice as hard as stone? The artist wants to worry you with these questions, in order to point you toward the mystery in art.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-192bRahEipw/W03MM0jcZ9I/AAAAAAAAQlM/U3KdLhIbIC0Dwnsjp9p4BO-xR6NEkUMfQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BKiss%252C%2B1951.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="504" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-192bRahEipw/W03MM0jcZ9I/AAAAAAAAQlM/U3KdLhIbIC0Dwnsjp9p4BO-xR6NEkUMfQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BKiss%252C%2B1951.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Kiss,</i> 1951</td></tr>
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Here we recognize the free spirit represented by a cloud-filled silhouette of a bird in flight. The free spirit feels at home in the starry night with the eternal ocean as its companion.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b3JB4gQyc_I/W039DSi6XDI/AAAAAAAAQlw/ZeelJ0xdUXMCNRXJh9o3ggY5rt9Eqf1JACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Pandora%2527s%2BBox%252C%2B1951.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="510" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b3JB4gQyc_I/W039DSi6XDI/AAAAAAAAQlw/ZeelJ0xdUXMCNRXJh9o3ggY5rt9Eqf1JACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Pandora%2527s%2BBox%252C%2B1951.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Pandora's Box, </i>1951</td></tr>
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Pandora is a character in a Greek myth who unknowingly opens a jar left in her husband's care by Zeus, the most powerful of the gods. The jar contained sickness, death and many other unspecified evils, which were then released into the world. The jar was long ago mistranslated as a box. Magritte said of this painting, "The presence of the rose next to the stroller signifies that wherever man's destiny leads him, he is always protected by an element of beauty."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YbBY9R-6IV4/W04Ac5y3NVI/AAAAAAAAQl8/EiG-T9NIvpEb7DO6q8Q1MWxrrNBFRToSgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4136.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YbBY9R-6IV4/W04Ac5y3NVI/AAAAAAAAQl8/EiG-T9NIvpEb7DO6q8Q1MWxrrNBFRToSgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4136.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Personal Values, </i> 1952</td></tr>
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This humorous painting, which is owned by SFMOMA and frequently on view, is such an appealing puzzle that the mind can hardly settle down. We recognize a comb, a neatly made bed, a wooden match, a wine glass, a bar of soap, a mirrored armoire, and a shaving brush, but the proportions are comical, the walls give way to the sky, and we have a pesky reflection that can't be explained. Can we say that sleeping and dreaming, smoking and drinking, personal grooming and reflective thinking are some of the painter's personal values. Or is this just a silly joke. The painter wants to put you on the edge of understanding.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P16_ep2B2gY/W04C9qndUxI/AAAAAAAAQmI/gE2KgQr9WKUij-QK5q-Etp1gsBWmneJlwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BBlow%2Bto%2Bthe%2BHeart%252C%2B1952.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P16_ep2B2gY/W04C9qndUxI/AAAAAAAAQmI/gE2KgQr9WKUij-QK5q-Etp1gsBWmneJlwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BBlow%2Bto%2Bthe%2BHeart%252C%2B1952.jpg" width="546" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Blow to the Heart, </i>1952</td></tr>
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It doesn't take much interpretation to relate to this figure. A pink rose generally stands for love, and the sharp connection between a thorn and a dagger is easy to make. Whenever you let love into your life, you open yourself to the possibility of pain. Is this a general observation, or is Magritte reacting to something in his life? For instance, Magritte's mother tried to commit suicide several times and finally succeeded in drowning herself when he was 13.<br />
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<b>The Enchanted Domain, 1953</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5d81F3vkBbE/W04JQYJJFrI/AAAAAAAAQmU/75EVHf-Sc5IUZ6r9g-C2UqTf6CmdTg5LACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/763.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="334" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5d81F3vkBbE/W04JQYJJFrI/AAAAAAAAQmU/75EVHf-Sc5IUZ6r9g-C2UqTf6CmdTg5LACK4BGAYYCw/s640/763.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Enchanted Domain</i> in place at the casino.<br />
Internet grab.</td></tr>
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In 1953 a fan of Magritte's commissioned him to decorate the walls of a grand circular room in his casino in the seaside town of Knokke, Belgium. Instead of painting directly on the walls himself—which is a specialized skill—he did a series of eight easel paintings that technicians could enlarge and place continuously around the room. This gave the artist a chance to create an enchanted world filled with his own metamorphic figures. This exhibit includes five of Magritte's paintings.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KoK5Nt8kuIA/W04M2K6H9gI/AAAAAAAAQmg/ufdvZeWvscAFjO0PVE8q1oZ9mjPmymaGACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KoK5Nt8kuIA/W04M2K6H9gI/AAAAAAAAQmg/ufdvZeWvscAFjO0PVE8q1oZ9mjPmymaGACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aW9DYVqGkXo/W04NANF0nQI/AAAAAAAAQmo/EAYLYY68hDsL0lvBTE4hvlBqZS9kuQPSACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="306" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aW9DYVqGkXo/W04NANF0nQI/AAAAAAAAQmo/EAYLYY68hDsL0lvBTE4hvlBqZS9kuQPSACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yuz0NDgPP44/W04NQZ4sxVI/AAAAAAAAQm4/aiaBkW_-wMoRoSTfde2DkG354zUeRgxUQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4218.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yuz0NDgPP44/W04NQZ4sxVI/AAAAAAAAQm4/aiaBkW_-wMoRoSTfde2DkG354zUeRgxUQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4218.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w-Xdr1Z-7MI/W04NWcqEisI/AAAAAAAAQnA/8WDCspWFTuEdnPFWIdnZy0LMuXUjEnYswCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25283%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="456" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w-Xdr1Z-7MI/W04NWcqEisI/AAAAAAAAQnA/8WDCspWFTuEdnPFWIdnZy0LMuXUjEnYswCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25283%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mHHpk_7FHNc/W04Nf4T6gPI/AAAAAAAAQnM/D6qsMHK5FkA59X47ePFZHpa1fSHGERqwACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mHHpk_7FHNc/W04Nf4T6gPI/AAAAAAAAQnM/D6qsMHK5FkA59X47ePFZHpa1fSHGERqwACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BEnchanted%2BDomain%252C%2B1953%2B%25284%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Can we say that the enchanted domain, or enchanted realm, is a world where nothing is what is seems to be? Where absurdity reigns supreme? Where the rules of rationality don't apply? Good setting for heedless gambling.<br />
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<b>The Dominion of Light, 1954</b></div>
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One of Magritte's best known themes is a dark city street under a blue sky with puffy daytime clouds. It should be mentioned that the scene he saw from the windows of his own home was a neighborhood like this one. Also in far northern regions like Finland, where the sun never goes down, it is possible to see real scenes where the streets are dark while the sky is still light. Some of these paintings seem almost like that. </div>
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The artist produced several variations on this theme, partly because it was popular, and partly because the idea fascinated him. In each one, the idealized sky is a different shade of blue, the arrangement of houses and street lamps and silhouetted trees is different, and the light effects in the dark half of the image vary. The exhibit included several of these, but a two is enough to get the point. </div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6iCmvD4b1wg/W04RzE9ziwI/AAAAAAAAQnc/xKgiQwKJKusG6EJqcQijHa4Q9_ry-s3NwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4199.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6iCmvD4b1wg/W04RzE9ziwI/AAAAAAAAQnc/xKgiQwKJKusG6EJqcQijHa4Q9_ry-s3NwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4199.jpg" width="498" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BkjskVrOohQ/W04R_0tkYbI/AAAAAAAAQnk/qAXtBBwJqIQSEMbOianTY7rkaeWbxcivwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4197.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BkjskVrOohQ/W04R_0tkYbI/AAAAAAAAQnk/qAXtBBwJqIQSEMbOianTY7rkaeWbxcivwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4197.jpg" width="472" /></a><br />
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If you have day and night at the same time, you have the whole day at once. And the best part of the night or the day is the light, which makes everything visible, or almost visible, and makes painting possible.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tpEBdGRE01s/W05eB8O8GhI/AAAAAAAAQn0/yjhRHZG6pv0XyLSbh9YmsJv_WXIoYOpUQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Euclid%2527s%2BPromenades%252C%2B1955.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tpEBdGRE01s/W05eB8O8GhI/AAAAAAAAQn0/yjhRHZG6pv0XyLSbh9YmsJv_WXIoYOpUQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Euclid%2527s%2BPromenades%252C%2B1955.jpg" width="512" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Euclid's Promenades, </i>1955</td></tr>
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Once again we have a canvas on an easel in front of a window. The cityscape in the window, presented as the real thing, is just as much an illusion as the cityscape on the canvas within a canvas. And the confusion between illusion and reality is compounded by an optical illusion calling attention to the illusion that from a certain perspective, parallel lines do come together, just like the sides of a cone. Euclid was a Greek mathematician who is considered to be the founder of geometry. Space, like time, is arbitrary and relative.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-c8sfpMf3fj8/W05frpisfgI/AAAAAAAAQoA/x9rNQHRBjJU2ezt7_RFvglY7C8KxlmidgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Hegel%2527s%2BVacation%252C%2B1958.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-c8sfpMf3fj8/W05frpisfgI/AAAAAAAAQoA/x9rNQHRBjJU2ezt7_RFvglY7C8KxlmidgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Hegel%2527s%2BVacation%252C%2B1958.jpg" width="532" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hegel's Vacation, </i>1958</td></tr>
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Now that we're all familiar with the value of absurdity, at least from the songs of the Beatles—"I'm fixing a hole where the rain's comin' in, and stops my mind from wanderin'"—the juxtaposition of a glass of water and an umbrella draws an easy guffaw. Hegel was a 17th century German philosopher who proposed the idea of "absolute idealism," in which the dualisms, such as mind and nature, and subject and object, are overcome.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ziJwHLa1WqI/W05g8HhJ5KI/AAAAAAAAQoM/TdvgZ7PZbUoVBdRwUo8NudPyLzkvnexkwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BListening%2BRoom%252C%2B1958.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="518" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ziJwHLa1WqI/W05g8HhJ5KI/AAAAAAAAQoM/TdvgZ7PZbUoVBdRwUo8NudPyLzkvnexkwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BListening%2BRoom%252C%2B1958.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Listening Room, </i>1958</td></tr>
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This gorgeous oversized apple looks trapped and wistful. From <i>Genesis,</i> apples have associations with temptation, with knowledge, and with evil. And what about this 'listening room.' Is the room listening to the apple? Is the apple there to listen to the ocean? Is listening a form of temptation?<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZqfMat_e-dM/W05iPQ6dcKI/AAAAAAAAQoY/3JsD7gp_LcMKxuHw-sVH3qCqp4y6dY6uQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BAnniversary%252C%2B1959.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="492" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZqfMat_e-dM/W05iPQ6dcKI/AAAAAAAAQoY/3JsD7gp_LcMKxuHw-sVH3qCqp4y6dY6uQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BAnniversary%252C%2B1959.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Anniversary, </i>1959</td></tr>
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Now it's the boulder's turn to fill the room and gaze at the ocean. Taken at these gargantuan sizes, inanimate objects such as an apple and a rock, seem to assume awareness and feelings. The rock seems a little more at home than the apple, but it must long for a little breathing space. Is Magritte an animist? Does he see every natural object as living and aware? Or perhaps when an anniversary comes up he feels too large for his situation.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--raOAn0AWUA/W05juk9-o2I/AAAAAAAAQok/4L_gV2Zzwt87tBeSPk4jo4dUExZfqROJgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BTomb%2Bof%2Bthe%2BWrestlers%252C%2B1960.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--raOAn0AWUA/W05juk9-o2I/AAAAAAAAQok/4L_gV2Zzwt87tBeSPk4jo4dUExZfqROJgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BTomb%2Bof%2Bthe%2BWrestlers%252C%2B1960.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Tomb of the Wrestlers, </i>1960</td></tr>
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This poor rose is not only too large for its space, it is harshly lighted as though by an interrogator. How the title might be related stumps me; I comfort myself by remembering that Magritte was happy when he posed a problem that foiled the thought process.<br />
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Magritte was in his sixties in the 1960s, and his work reached its peak of popularity, with his images being adapted to commercial uses. He continued to be concerned with the nature of reality and the role of imagination and illusion. Many of his symbols returned in different formats.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KKhBm-oTtdM/W059vtLhpWI/AAAAAAAAQo8/Q74iRk87Vzgg18hDaIsquIUzJu4i2R_6wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BGreat%2BFamily%252C%2B1963%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KKhBm-oTtdM/W059vtLhpWI/AAAAAAAAQo8/Q74iRk87Vzgg18hDaIsquIUzJu4i2R_6wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BGreat%2BFamily%252C%2B1963%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="526" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Great Family, </i>1963</td></tr>
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Once again we have the cloud-filled silhouette of a bird in flight, this time rising out of the sea and into a stormy sky. Seabirds are at home with both the sea and the sky. The free spirit need not fear the threatening storm.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yzJs93mvofg/W05-WPRi-8I/AAAAAAAAQpI/ueBqJophP3gGuH4UTmRjEbnjrtRSgZ0oACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BEnd%2Bof%2Bthe%2BWorld%252C%2B1963.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="518" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yzJs93mvofg/W05-WPRi-8I/AAAAAAAAQpI/ueBqJophP3gGuH4UTmRjEbnjrtRSgZ0oACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BEnd%2Bof%2Bthe%2BWorld%252C%2B1963.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The End of the World, </i>1963</td></tr>
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Once again we consider the view on a dark street, with buildings and trees, and a bowler-hatted head, are silhouetted against the sky. This time, however, the cheery daytime clouds and light is replaced by a dim and threatening sky. For a painter, the end of light is the end of the visual world.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wymNgIi0090/W05_W7WtwlI/AAAAAAAAQpU/Mjs3G3XqRz0bAQkD1AYmEdQY8E0MDlw7wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/A%2BSense%2Bof%2BReality%252C%2B1963.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wymNgIi0090/W05_W7WtwlI/AAAAAAAAQpU/Mjs3G3XqRz0bAQkD1AYmEdQY8E0MDlw7wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/A%2BSense%2Bof%2BReality%252C%2B1963.jpg" width="416" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Sense of Reality, </i>1963</td></tr>
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This time our beloved boulder is hovering over a serene landscape. Is the painter's sense of reality floating away?<br />
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We conclude with four paintings featuring a bowler-hatted man, or his silhouette, centrally framed, like a religious icon. The bowler-hatted man is generic and anonymous (none of the many images of him show a face), so he may stand for Everyman. However, Magritte himself dressed formally and wore a bowler hat, so he may have identified with the figure.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-18kdL2KvQyo/W06E5CTFClI/AAAAAAAAQpg/urXck7lXl3AypGI5CDRuFBY8_FMxNHieACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BSon%2Bof%2BMan%252C%2B1964.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-18kdL2KvQyo/W06E5CTFClI/AAAAAAAAQpg/urXck7lXl3AypGI5CDRuFBY8_FMxNHieACK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BSon%2Bof%2BMan%252C%2B1964.jpg" width="492" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Son of Man, </i>1964<br />
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This image illustrates the idea that behind every reality is another reality, or the truth is always hidden by illusion, and illusion is based on temptation. The artist offers his creations in place of himself.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s3ViymOPvqI/W06Fwl0851I/AAAAAAAAQps/PI5l4wh233ErtO0S4qlIPhtorvGJurAmQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BGranite%2BQuarry%252C%2B1964.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s3ViymOPvqI/W06Fwl0851I/AAAAAAAAQps/PI5l4wh233ErtO0S4qlIPhtorvGJurAmQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BGranite%2BQuarry%252C%2B1964.jpg" width="440" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Granite Quarry, </i>1964</td></tr>
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The tempting apple returns in a group of three, arranged on a granite wall by the sea. The silhouette of the bowler-hatted man is filled with both fluffy clouds and bright stars, with a crescent moon thrown in as well, against a pale, disappearing seascape. Dichotomies of night and day, organic and mineral, natural and spiritual come to mind. This figure is attending the mysteries inherent in reality.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ihx51p08gqA/W06HWSKVlQI/AAAAAAAAQp4/bUpt5IU263ABjWwwnR78UB5uvXwxbAIwQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/High%2BSociety%252C%2B1965-1966.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ihx51p08gqA/W06HWSKVlQI/AAAAAAAAQp4/bUpt5IU263ABjWwwnR78UB5uvXwxbAIwQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/High%2BSociety%252C%2B1965-1966.jpg" width="532" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>High Society, </i>1965-1966</td></tr>
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The bowler-hatted silhouette is filled with the familiar puffy clouds and peaceful seascape, and its shadow (!) is filled with a close view of foliage, suggesting a forest. The sea and the forest are good company, the highest form of society.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-J-C1OEtgY9E/W06I0bnc25I/AAAAAAAAQqE/aDqc3ZApOe4ggsgwiYFlQAB8yMhYMVe4gCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BHappy%2BDonor%252C%2B1966%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-J-C1OEtgY9E/W06I0bnc25I/AAAAAAAAQqE/aDqc3ZApOe4ggsgwiYFlQAB8yMhYMVe4gCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BHappy%2BDonor%252C%2B1966%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="532" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Happy Donor, </i>1966</td></tr>
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This time the bowler-hatted silhouette reveals a night scene, with a night sky. It is placed in front of a brick wall and accompanied by a bifurcated sphere, against a dull brown background. While the silhouette seems like a memory of home, the sphere has no corollary in the real world. The bifurcated sphere appears in many of Magritte's paintings, though only once in this group, and it never accumulates any meaning for me. Does the silhouette represent a happy donor? And what is it donating, anyway? It is donating mystery to life, or donating life to mystery.<br />
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Magritte died of pancreatic cancer in 1967 at the age of 68. Year after year he made viewers question their assumptions about the nature of reality and the role of the imagination, and his influence is widely felt.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DpoWaQnIHVY/W06NDhMNnsI/AAAAAAAAQqQ/mxbDwgcmA3AvzqpQMCXdQAASFSp88FhagCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/7c12670909d0d32b797c801eec7e1dd3--rene%25CC%2581-magritte-artist-studios.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DpoWaQnIHVY/W06NDhMNnsI/AAAAAAAAQqQ/mxbDwgcmA3AvzqpQMCXdQAASFSp88FhagCK4BGAYYCw/s400/7c12670909d0d32b797c801eec7e1dd3--rene%25CC%2581-magritte-artist-studios.jpg" width="291" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">René Magritte with his bowler hat.</td></tr>
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Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-39635991043753564332018-07-08T12:07:00.001-07:002018-07-09T07:30:18.527-07:00Nathan Oliveira at StanfordThrough a serendipity of web browsing, I discovered that Stanford University has a meditation center called Windhover, and that Windhover, which is normally open only for the Stanford community, has a weekly Public Tour on Saturdays at 11:00 a.m., no fee and no reservation. I learned that the building has a unique, Japanese-influenced style, and that it is adorned by paintings by Nathan Oliveira, an important California painter who was also a long-time professor at Stanford. As a meditator myself, and an art hound as well, I felt bound to check it out.<br />
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My usual venues at the university are the art museums, which are some of the first buildings you reach from the town side of campus. Windhover is a half mile across campus from there, away from town, and no cars are allowed in the the central section of the campus. To approach by car, it would be practical to enter the campus from the other end, but I wanted to see what lies between the museum and the meditation center, so I parked in my usual spot in front of the museum (The A-permit lot there is open to the public on week-ends), and made the distance on foot. A half-mile jaunt is not a big deal, but it is noticeably uphill, and the temperature was way too hot to be outdoors. It was well worth the effort though because the campus is so beautiful. Ancient spreading oaks offered welcome shade along the route between noble sandstone buildings. Lawns, courtyards, and wading pools were occupied by young adults playing with scampering children. There could hardly be a lovelier vision of utopia.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k-0yN66DmaM/W0I62wD33lI/AAAAAAAAQbo/UmBLEipId-ErWFRKrw1wbZ7tq9J8I-0TQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4035.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k-0yN66DmaM/W0I62wD33lI/AAAAAAAAQbo/UmBLEipId-ErWFRKrw1wbZ7tq9J8I-0TQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4035.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ve6n3_o3V44/W0I7DTKfNKI/AAAAAAAAQbw/XZ3z1y4d-vcT_sxR1Ba7o3xzcJdEfv9mgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4036.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ve6n3_o3V44/W0I7DTKfNKI/AAAAAAAAQbw/XZ3z1y4d-vcT_sxR1Ba7o3xzcJdEfv9mgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4036.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WXnmrYVJFcY/W0JU1Bk9SsI/AAAAAAAAQfU/90oiKgXXGlUkgS26XvyEKV-4lTa3BispwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4074.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WXnmrYVJFcY/W0JU1Bk9SsI/AAAAAAAAQfU/90oiKgXXGlUkgS26XvyEKV-4lTa3BispwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4074.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Windhover is almost hidden—its presence is so muted. The sign at the entrance is transparent, cut into a sheet of iron. The entrance is hidden behind a dark wall and a long row of lofty bamboo, shielding it from the busy campus.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wz3zhk4PeCU/W0I7UUq0j6I/AAAAAAAAQcE/d9zFEj7xqYU4Y2joBzptqyvO498K6lgbgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4038.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wz3zhk4PeCU/W0I7UUq0j6I/AAAAAAAAQcE/d9zFEj7xqYU4Y2joBzptqyvO498K6lgbgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4038.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
The building is low, and has glass panels in certain sections. I arrived early, so I had time to walk around to the reflecting pool on the far end, and to look inside the building. I saw a great red canvas on the wall, and on the floor, two students, lying prone. They squirmed when they noticed me, but were undeterred in their "meditation."<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eoqxeGUdy7A/W0I76GzK2_I/AAAAAAAAQcU/Efpa2YLlx3YfY0XnwrAcBmUpt2KbQvLwgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4039.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eoqxeGUdy7A/W0I76GzK2_I/AAAAAAAAQcU/Efpa2YLlx3YfY0XnwrAcBmUpt2KbQvLwgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4039.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UTGj-DQe4AQ/W0I8MCfbBYI/AAAAAAAAQcg/2RetUre5aToW6LVLjaSRkbzCLJOl4ZmTwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4041.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UTGj-DQe4AQ/W0I8MCfbBYI/AAAAAAAAQcg/2RetUre5aToW6LVLjaSRkbzCLJOl4ZmTwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4041.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I sat on a stone bench by the tall wooden front doors and waited. After a few minutes, two other women arrived, one at a time, each asking about the tour. And then two tiny, bent elders shuffled up the long, bamboo-lined path to the entrance. The man fussed around the card-reader getting the doors opened up, while the woman introduced herself as Lucky, and asked our names. Then we entered the sanctum.<br />
<br />
The first gallery has a window wall that looks out on the reflecting pool, another wall features one grand red painting, and the third wall is formed by a divider and a low dark water feature.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YwPuVeDMq_k/W0I8ljNGE7I/AAAAAAAAQcs/bTAn6tgc9YIc6cQSB1dJKQUwrLSOvWrdQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4043.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YwPuVeDMq_k/W0I8ljNGE7I/AAAAAAAAQcs/bTAn6tgc9YIc6cQSB1dJKQUwrLSOvWrdQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4043.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uDC_ElHAji8/W0JIMjtktdI/AAAAAAAAQc4/Lid4ZMTNE3wkv-CvpvdVWCZ9ixI1KT9FwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4067.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uDC_ElHAji8/W0JIMjtktdI/AAAAAAAAQc4/Lid4ZMTNE3wkv-CvpvdVWCZ9ixI1KT9FwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4067.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<br />
Lucky wasn't very authoritative or informative about the site; what interested her was to know what we saw when we looked at the grand red painting, with its radiating impasto and its two perfect arcs. Each of us noticed different things, and that led to some discussion and further looking.<br />
<br />
However in the course of our time with Lucky, we gradually learned the story of how Windhover came to be. The meditation center was the dream of artist Nathan Oliveira, who taught studio arts at Stanford for over 30 years, from 1964-1996. Lucky and her husband, who slumped mutely on a bench, had known the painter and his wife, because Lucky's husband had also been a professor there; the wives had met through the Faculty Wives Club. It was an honor to meet someone who had been close to the artist and to the project of establishing Windhover.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eUTVg9jff_s/W0JI4EBBsaI/AAAAAAAAQdE/hbbunNtgS6YAzEm9-Bqhq1VLJm5OuyrTQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4063.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eUTVg9jff_s/W0JI4EBBsaI/AAAAAAAAQdE/hbbunNtgS6YAzEm9-Bqhq1VLJm5OuyrTQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4063.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Nathan worked in the art department's studio up on Dish hill, on the back side of the campus. It had great views and access to trails. He took regular walks, and the landscape inspired a suite of huge abstract transcendental paintings. He did this series late in life, and kept the paintings as aids to meditation. They are said to have been a source of comfort to him during the losses and sufferings of old age, and he dreamed of bestowing that peace upon the Stanford community in the form of a meditation center featuring these works as vehicles to a transcendent state, like mandalas.<br />
<br />
The next room has two paintings. One is a diptych that is very wide, at least six times the width of his own outspread arms, and bears the image of spread wings soaring.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-F5ogO3a41Mw/W0JJl1UgpJI/AAAAAAAAQdQ/4GsJzq75FGkBEBjTvhpb_ANqqN0v2pPegCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4064.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-F5ogO3a41Mw/W0JJl1UgpJI/AAAAAAAAQdQ/4GsJzq75FGkBEBjTvhpb_ANqqN0v2pPegCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4064.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wk6J7rSva84/W0JJ1y9HkNI/AAAAAAAAQdc/SKCYib6nWIIvjnjxCCMAW0P-Zun4_RwOACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4047.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="560" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wk6J7rSva84/W0JJ1y9HkNI/AAAAAAAAQdc/SKCYib6nWIIvjnjxCCMAW0P-Zun4_RwOACK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4047.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h1J1pMdYmgw/W0JNyp1erQI/AAAAAAAAQew/sJUDEH1rE1g97a4Id66-RaZ5GQcnK_olQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4049.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h1J1pMdYmgw/W0JNyp1erQI/AAAAAAAAQew/sJUDEH1rE1g97a4Id66-RaZ5GQcnK_olQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4049.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
On another wall is a canvas one third that size that bears only an arc, trailing glory in the form of creamy, glowing impasto.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U7Zr330EF0w/W0JKuooK8RI/AAAAAAAAQdo/QvezN4SB8X4pQU9WLQ5OxdtNvbD6DSGtgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4052.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-U7Zr330EF0w/W0JKuooK8RI/AAAAAAAAQdo/QvezN4SB8X4pQU9WLQ5OxdtNvbD6DSGtgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4052.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
A glass wall looks out into a shady grove.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZT-HdmkhHrM/W0JLXtO-2eI/AAAAAAAAQd8/7RIr9yJ-IJQj2YD47rS1NkZhC1AbXujfQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4045.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZT-HdmkhHrM/W0JLXtO-2eI/AAAAAAAAQd8/7RIr9yJ-IJQj2YD47rS1NkZhC1AbXujfQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4045.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Passing down a long, glass-walled hallway, we came to the final gallery, where a disgruntled student sat cross-legged, facing the grove.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UswAe8U6gpY/W0JMEhImHuI/AAAAAAAAQeM/exw6cwOCno8dnHkWTIuf7yoaVNSrygWDQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4059.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UswAe8U6gpY/W0JMEhImHuI/AAAAAAAAQeM/exw6cwOCno8dnHkWTIuf7yoaVNSrygWDQCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4059.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Another glass wall showed a small gravel-lined court with a modest, silently flowing water feature.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b-FDpYovJfE/W0JMagSkY3I/AAAAAAAAQeY/UhOp5KCMK4oWyXXHoYyyvaNU0CoR4pg8gCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4060.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b-FDpYovJfE/W0JMagSkY3I/AAAAAAAAQeY/UhOp5KCMK4oWyXXHoYyyvaNU0CoR4pg8gCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4060.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
The huge painting in this space looks like dawn to me, the essence of universal dawn.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sAyS_ufPNgs/W0JNRshuH7I/AAAAAAAAQek/k46RH7PqzSgKKjV4kstr3ljSSDW4sbNSQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4055.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sAyS_ufPNgs/W0JNRshuH7I/AAAAAAAAQek/k46RH7PqzSgKKjV4kstr3ljSSDW4sbNSQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/IMG_4055.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Like the meditation center, this suite of paintings is known as 'Windhover.' The title was suggested by a visitor to Oliveira's studio, an Irish poet, who was inspired by the paintings to recite a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins by that title. Here's the first stanza:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!</div>
<br />
Hopkins' poem is obscure, but basically it is a tribute to a type of bird known as a Windhover in some places, but in northern California is known as a kestrel, which is a type of falcon. Oliveira's paintings had, in fact, been inspired by the flights of the kestrels and hawks seen from the trails near his home, and so he adopted that title for the suite, not giving titles to the individual paintings.<br />
<br />
Lucky pointed out that there was a long-standing debate among fans and meditators about the pronunciation of Windhover, whether <i>WINdhover </i>or <i>wind-hover</i>. I thought the former the most common, but she pointed out that <i>hover</i> is more poetic: the kestrel hovers in the wind.<br />
<br />
When I said good-bye to Lucky and the professor emeritus, and the two other visitors, I felt quite elevated and enlightened. A passerby with a bicycle advised me not to miss the meditation garden, so I walked around to the area that is visible from inside. There I found a magnificent pepper tree, probably original growth, guarding and keeping the meditation center, and nearby a meditation maze worked in tile on the ground.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sHxPzXWA87Q/W0JT_7bUdmI/AAAAAAAAQe8/Ef_lkbAag9Mrd9hA9lDkphY6xsaroyNtwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4068.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sHxPzXWA87Q/W0JT_7bUdmI/AAAAAAAAQe8/Ef_lkbAag9Mrd9hA9lDkphY6xsaroyNtwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4068.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3JN9mRJewO8/W0JUE2EXJnI/AAAAAAAAQfE/XiHH75zfYlwvNW7GfUfsHlr0aLe4Hh1awCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4070.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3JN9mRJewO8/W0JUE2EXJnI/AAAAAAAAQfE/XiHH75zfYlwvNW7GfUfsHlr0aLe4Hh1awCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4070.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
From there I coasted comfortably downhill toward the Cantor Art Center, maneuvering between dark patches of deep shade and the cool outer hallways of massive sandstone buildings to mitigate the baking heat.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zr20e0fHlUo/W0JVap32TYI/AAAAAAAAQfg/7mjuMaxipWUtv1ohk6pTAto-x0jNimNYgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_4076.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zr20e0fHlUo/W0JVap32TYI/AAAAAAAAQfg/7mjuMaxipWUtv1ohk6pTAto-x0jNimNYgCK4BGAYYCw/s400/IMG_4076.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I headed straight for the Cool Café, the museum's order-at-the-counter eatery. Air conditioning, iced tea, and a juicy grilled chicken sandwich restored my strength.<br />
<br />
I began to think about Nathan Oliveira again. I wanted to see examples of his usual work, which hadn't made a very big impression on me in the past. So I took a quick sprint around the upstairs gallery devoted to late 20th century and contemporary art. There I found one canvas.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W_aex3l67SI/W0JX5OGSfwI/AAAAAAAAQfs/Acr9SGbG6QwG8vnHulYlgzG1aIKtN9d5wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Stelae%2B%252320%252C%2B1993%252C%2BCantor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W_aex3l67SI/W0JX5OGSfwI/AAAAAAAAQfs/Acr9SGbG6QwG8vnHulYlgzG1aIKtN9d5wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Stelae%2B%252320%252C%2B1993%252C%2BCantor.jpg" width="524" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Stelae #20</i>, 1993</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
A stela is a stone memorial, so this image suggests overlapping grave markers, perhaps signifying a descent into death. This work from the 1990s is very late in the artist's career.</div>
<br />
Making a final push, I went next door to the Anderson Collection at Stanford, where I discovered three more canvases by Nathan Oliveira.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7iMtRDqCOSc/W0JaaBrlSMI/AAAAAAAAQf4/oW0VAgHApsATA6F6GaewLm1RyVYLbzkTgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Reclining%2BNude%252C%2B1958.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7iMtRDqCOSc/W0JaaBrlSMI/AAAAAAAAQf4/oW0VAgHApsATA6F6GaewLm1RyVYLbzkTgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Reclining%2BNude%252C%2B1958.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Reclining Nude,</i> 1958</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
This highly abstracted nude emerging from, or sinking into, obscurity, reminds us that Oliveira's reputation was originally as a member of the Bay Area figurative school, a group of painters who applied the techniques of Abstract Expressionism to the figure, as well as to landscapes and other subjects. </div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MOP98Nogmsg/W0JdWYqMI-I/AAAAAAAAQgE/OtoYk_l6kPA8cyN3z11XgjyfPOiEzBitQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Stage%2B%25232%2Bwith%2BBed%252C%2B1967.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="630" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MOP98Nogmsg/W0JdWYqMI-I/AAAAAAAAQgE/OtoYk_l6kPA8cyN3z11XgjyfPOiEzBitQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Stage%2B%25232%2Bwith%2BBed%252C%2B1967.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Stage #2 with Bed, </i>1967</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
After the bright and radiant images of Windhover, the dark palette of Oliveira's work in the 1950s and 1960s is shocking. This image of an empty stage in the dark seems to be a reference to death. Notice that in this work he uses a smooth, invisible brushstroke to create crisp lines and edges. </div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ru6hSc9aHQM/W0Jd08_MEfI/AAAAAAAAQgQ/kuqTKICp7_cxRNU7zbky1872gDX8JMebACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Nude%2Bin%2BEnvironment%2BI%252C%2B1962.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ru6hSc9aHQM/W0Jd08_MEfI/AAAAAAAAQgQ/kuqTKICp7_cxRNU7zbky1872gDX8JMebACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Nude%2Bin%2BEnvironment%2BI%252C%2B1962.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Nude in Environment I,</i> 1962</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
This colorful work depicts a female nude looking toward us from an inner world swirling with ideas and emotions, or so I surmise.</div>
<br />
By this time, I was worn out. I didn't have the energy to do either the Anderson or the Cantor justice. I couldn't explore any more of the campus's wonderful gardens and architecture. I just needed to rest—and to meditate on my findings.<br />
<br />
When I looked at my photos of Oliveira's work, I could see that my sample was too small to indicate the nature of his art. I was also surprised by the darkness of the vision they projected. So I did a little online research. When Oliveira died, in 2010, at the age of 81, the New York Times neatly summed up his career. The obituary says that he was influenced by the dark visions of European artists like Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, and especially Max Beckmann. He was committed to expressing the dark side of human emotions.<br />
<br />
The obituary in Stanford News pointed out that Oliveira's father, a Portuguese immigrant, drowned in the Russian River when Nathan was young, a fact that seems to explain a lot. The article points out that Oliveira described his artwork with the Portuguese word <i>saudade, </i>a feeling of yearning and nostalgia.<br />
<br />
Here are a few more significant examples.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Xy14hs56Uo/W0NMNsYWLjI/AAAAAAAAQg0/Qb430ZdHhR8AVhnH6QA3-1QMlyZ_k6M9QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/standing-figure-with-hands-on-belt-1960.jpg%2521Large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Xy14hs56Uo/W0NMNsYWLjI/AAAAAAAAQg0/Qb430ZdHhR8AVhnH6QA3-1QMlyZ_k6M9QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/standing-figure-with-hands-on-belt-1960.jpg%2521Large.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Standing figure with Hands on Belt, </i>1960<br />
from WikiArt</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gA4ZjIVzz6Q/W0NIajj-dnI/AAAAAAAAQgc/5gYGAPqEzYoi1nrvBovdmx7P1Zso1DqCACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/subOLIVEIRA3-obit-popup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gA4ZjIVzz6Q/W0NIajj-dnI/AAAAAAAAQgc/5gYGAPqEzYoi1nrvBovdmx7P1Zso1DqCACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/subOLIVEIRA3-obit-popup.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Standing Figure,</i> 1970<br />
from New York Times</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZNX_AQNgilI/W0NQYX8pORI/AAAAAAAAQhM/B0KofJfCrx4dL0TD0jmGNzBo7ngIL1WEwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/0bb5ffa65b595725833fdbe80343fab0.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZNX_AQNgilI/W0NQYX8pORI/AAAAAAAAQhM/B0KofJfCrx4dL0TD0jmGNzBo7ngIL1WEwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/0bb5ffa65b595725833fdbe80343fab0.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Untitled - Figure Leaning,</i> 1972<br />
Watercolor and graphite on paper<br />
from Berggruen Gallery</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6t6VSlzpEbM/W0NRRPvdopI/AAAAAAAAQhY/9MIJ_JydpqgjpGFnM2l1pI2rPXOLMwMXQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/a8bc087ee7f08707b16556cd0154526d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6t6VSlzpEbM/W0NRRPvdopI/AAAAAAAAQhY/9MIJ_JydpqgjpGFnM2l1pI2rPXOLMwMXQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/a8bc087ee7f08707b16556cd0154526d.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ryan Figure #9</i>, 1982<br />
Oil on canvas<br />
From Bergrgruen Gallery</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vJkgUzqFno4/W0NLWqhkMmI/AAAAAAAAQgo/4GLNJDg5VjsHKtDMLKTYItwDOq3mpOnaQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/oliveira_figure_news.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vJkgUzqFno4/W0NLWqhkMmI/AAAAAAAAQgo/4GLNJDg5VjsHKtDMLKTYItwDOq3mpOnaQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/oliveira_figure_news.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Untitled Figure, </i>2010<br />
from the Stanford News</td></tr>
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-13229889917290276012018-06-19T05:13:00.003-07:002018-06-19T09:09:40.336-07:00Shadows and Fog<i>Shadows and Fog</i> is a movie from 1991 that was written and directed by Woody Allen. It is available for rent on Amazon Prime.<br />
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In my opinion a work of art should be interpreted and evaluated on its own merits, as a unit, without reference to the biography of the artist and changing moral standards.<br />
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<i>Shadows and Fog</i> is a fascinating work of art composed of serious philosophical reflection, silly gags, cultural references, and special visual effects.<br />
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The movie considers all the Big Questions: what is the nature of reality, what is the meaning of life, what is our role in the larger universe, what is love, how is it different from lust, what is the value of marriage and family, what is evil and what causes it, what is the nature of political oppression and how does it work, does God exist, and, finally, what is the value of art. Barely a frivolous word is spoken in the movie, yet it is full of silly gags, jokes you might hear in vaudeville or melodrama.<br />
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The plot is generated by the problem of Evil, here personified by a homicidal maniac stalking the streets on foggy nights, and several murders are depicted with artful detachment. Overcome by fear and distrustful of the police, citizens have formed a vigilante committee, and they insist that Everyman join their cause.<br />
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Allen, the director, plays the nebbishy Everyman; he has been called to action by the Vigilante committee to combat Evil, but he can't figure out what to do or where to go. He seeks his way through a vague and undefined world symbolized by dense fog and evocative shadows.</div>
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Mia Farrow is Everywoman, who can swallow swords if need be, but wants only to raise a family.</div>
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John Malkovich is the Artist, who speaks for the creative life, and feels threatened by the demands of a family. He is a Clown, and his art is comedy. He says, significantly, "Nothing is more frightening than trying to make people laugh, and failing."</div>
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In the plot, the Sword Swallower and the Clown are part of a circus, where everything is an act, everything is an illusion, and reality is irrelevant.<br />
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Lily Tomlin plays the Whore with Heart, disillusioned and jaded, but broad-minded and generous. </div>
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John Cusack plays the Smart Ass college student, who feels superior to everyone and doubts the value of everything.</div>
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In the plot, these two come together in a brothel, where Everyman and Everywoman also make an appearance. It is funny-ironic for characters to discuss love and marriage in a brothel.</div>
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One of the attractions of the movie is seeing so many well-known actors—a standard Hollywood ploy—in unusual guises.<br />
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David Ogden Stiers plays the Vigilante, who wakes Everyman from his sleep and demands that he join a plan to fight Evil, in the form of a maniac serial killer. </div>
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Jodie Foster has a bit as a whore with fetching ringlets. </div>
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Madonna plays a voluptuous acrobat. </div>
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Much of the acting seems exaggerated, like the acting in a melodrama, because the actors are not playing 'real' characters, but roles in an extended existential joke.<br />
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Julie Kavner delivers a hilarious monologue as the Jilted Bride, eager to see Everyman dead because he humiliated her.</div>
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The key role of the Magician is played by a lesser-known actor named Kenneth Mars.</div>
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In the plot, the Magician saves the day—or at least foils the immediate danger—through the power of illusion; he captures the villain through trickery, or so it seems.<br />
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For art lovers, a major attraction of the movie is the look, composed of artful set design, stagey lighting, and very tricky cinematography. Some of the shots seem impossible. In one, the view goes from a closeup of a selfish Bitch standing in a second story window, pulls out to include back views of Everyman and Everywoman, moves clear around those two characters, and back up to the close-up in the window, without a cut. In another scene, the camera is in the center of a circle of Whores—talking about the role of illusion in creating sexual satisfaction—panning mechanically around, sometimes showing faces close-up, sometimes showing the woodwork and windows, just panning democratically around and around until Everywoman starts her lines, then it settles into extreme close-up, and our whirling feeling settles into attention.<br />
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Without getting into specifics, the score consists of clips of existing recordings. The music is circusy, discordant, old-fashioned, clanky. The melodies sound familiar but somehow off, inharmonious. This contributes to the carnival / whorehouse atmosphere, and the feeling that nothing is what it seems to be.<br />
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So, what is the meaning of all this melodramatic confusion? In the end the Artist discovers that family can be more satisfying than creativity, and so he agrees to settle down with Everywoman and make a family. Everyman finds his way at last by doing the thing he really loves. He apprentices himself to the Magician, ready to follow him at any price. Magic is defined as creating illusions, and symbolizes all the arts. If the universe is by nature chaotic and meaningless, the role of art is to make sense of things, to impose a temporary sense of order. Magic and Art satisfy the soul's quest for understanding and direction.<br />
<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-9042659585049050422018-06-11T05:15:00.000-07:002018-06-25T13:49:47.676-07:00Gertrude Stein: Three Lives<div style="text-align: center;">
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Gertrude Stein's <i>Three Lives</i> is a literary masterpiece that everyone admires, and no one reads. Of those who do read it, few understand it. The reason is that it is innovative on many levels, and innovations have the big drawback of being shocking and disorienting.<br />
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The most shocking aspect is that the novel depicts women of the servant class with respect. The innermost lives of women who are generally overlooked and undervalued are studied with care and sympathy. The humble are raised up. In addition, Stein shows how being in service constricts their opportunity to develop a sense of self, and their lack of self-hood makes their lives futile.<br />
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The true subject of the novel is selfhood or authenticity; it's about free will and self-awareness. The three lives represent three unsuccessful stages of development of self-awareness, not culminating in fulfillment. Stein embodies these stages in fully-drawn characters, and then immerses these protagonists in detailed renderings of their social scene, peopled by vivid minor characters.<br />
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The first story is called <i>The Good Anna.</i> Anna represents the perfect servant, according to certain parts of the German-American community who adhered to old world traditions in the early 1900s. She devotes herself to service, both in her job and in her private life. She lives by an elaborate set of rules and strives to control everything around her.<br />
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Anna's life story is told through her relationships with others. We learn the complete life histories of her dogs, and we meet the under-servants that she scolds constantly, but her principal relationships are with her employers. First there's Miss Mary Wadsmith, "a large, fair, helpless woman, burdened by the care of her brother's two children." She manages that household for several years, until the girl gets married. Then Anna goes to work for Dr. Shonjen, a jovial bachelor doctor. When he gets married to a social-climbing woman, Anna goes to work for Miss Mathilda. This was the happiest period in Anna's life:<br />
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<li><i>With Miss Mathilda Anna did it all. The clothes, the house, the hats, what she should wear and when and what was always best for her to do. There was nothing Miss Mathilda would not let Anna manage, and only be too glad if she would do.</i></li>
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Anna's only family is a half-brother, a wealthy fat baker, and his sharp-tongued wife. Anna does her duty, as she sees it, by their family, but she doesn't really care about them, nor they about her.<br />
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The romance in Anna's life is Mrs. Lehntman, a widow who supports her two children by working as a midwife. Anna is entirely "subdued by her magnetic sympathetic charm." Romance, Stein explains, is the ideal in one's life. The way this plays out is that Anna helps Mrs. Lehntman in all her endeavors—especially tending to poor young girls who are pregnant and alone. The two remain friends for many years, though Anna disapproves of some of her friends' actions and gradually gains a more realistic attitude toward her.<br />
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Anna's other friends are all needy and dependent. She spends all her spare income helping people who are sick, who have bad luck, who are too ignorant to care for themselves, who long to follow their dreams. She makes no effort to plan for her own future or to care for her own health.<br />
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Anna complains constantly about the failure of the people in her life to meet her high standards of behavior, but generally she finds both success and contentment in her work as a servant. But service is the only way of relating to people that she understands, and it is the basic rule of her life. When she comes to a point in her life when she can no longer work as a servant, she opens a boarding house, and basically works herself to death in the service of the poor young men who live with her.<br />
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All of Anna's employers and friends urge her to take better care of herself, but Anna is not really aware of herself. That is the problem: no sense of selfhood.<br />
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The third story is called <i>The Gentle Lena.</i> Lena represents a person who is totally lacking in self-determination; she is a good girl, meaning a good maid who does as she is told without complaining. Her passivity causes her to be pushed about; her lack of will or self-assertion condemns her to a short, unhappy life, ending in gray and miserable dissolution.<br />
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Stein represents Lena's sweet and gentle nature in a lovely passage:<br />
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<li><i>Lena's german voice when she knocked and called the family in the morning was as awakening, as soothing, and as appealing, as a delicate soft breeze in midday, summer. She stood in the hallway every morning a long time in her unexpectant and unsuffering german patience calling to the young ones to get up. She would call and wait a long time and then call again, always even, gentle, patient, while the young ones fell back often into that precious, tense, last bit of sleeping that gives a strength of joyous vigor in the young, over them that have come to the readiness of middle age, in their awakening.</i></li>
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When we first meet her, Lena's life is an easy routine of housework and childcare, with an "unexacting mistress," and she is fairly content.</div>
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But Lena totally lacks will or self-determination:</div>
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<li><i>Lena always saved her wages, for she never thought to spend them, and she always went to her aunt's house for her Sundays because she did not know that she could do anything different.</i></li>
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Several times, the author describes her with this phrase:<br />
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<li><i>She was always sort of dreamy and not there.</i></li>
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Her downfall starts when her bossy aunt succeeds in marrying her to an unaware gay man named Herman who appears to be as bland and obedient as she is, despite the fact that neither wants to marry. Herman is a tailor. He works for his father and lives with his parents in the house next door. Though the family is prosperous, they are stingy with money and lax in their grooming.<br />
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<li><i>Lena began soon with it to look careless and a little dirty, and to be more lifeless with it, and nobody ever noticed much what Lena wanted, and she never really knew herself what she needed.</i></li>
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The worst part of living with Herman's parents is that his mother harangues Lena constantly for not having their same stingy ways. Lena has no reassuring contact with old friends, who might come to her defense. Always dreamy, she becomes ever more absent and dull. When she gets pregnant, she is paralyzed with fear and sickness.<br />
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The only way Lena gets any relief is through the help of an old cook who intervenes on her behalf and starts a process that leads to Lena and Herman getting a separate house after the child is born. But neither having her own place nor motherhood is enough to lift her out of her despair.<br />
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<li><i>This did not seem to make much change now for Lena. She was just the same as when she was waiting with her baby. She just dragged around and was careless with her clothes and all lifeless, and she acted always and lived on just as if she had no feeling. She always did everything regular with the work, the way she always had had to do it, but she never got back any spirit in her.</i></li>
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Herman's sense of self is awakened by his strong desire to be a father, and the pair have two more children. Herman takes over the care of the children, while Lena becomes more and more lifeless.<br />
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Lena's fourth baby is still-born, and she dies giving birth as well. Except for the 'good german cook,' no one cares. In fact, now Herman can raise his family without having to worry about her.<br />
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These two stories serve as book-ends or supports for the central story, <i>Melanctha.</i> Melanctha is a seeker. She says she wants to know the world, but what she is really looking for is unconditional love, expressed as unbridled passion. When you dig down into the depths of this story, you learn that she was unloved in childhood, both by her pale, ineffective mother and her absent brute of a black father. A psychologist might say that she never learned to love herself because her parents didn't show her much love. Early in childhood, she developed a cheery and helpful personality that hid her emotions and prevented her from making authentic contact with people. No one can ever love her enough to make up for her parents' neglect.<br />
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While Stein makes women from German culture represent suffocating tradition, she reaches into the African-American community to create a character on a quest. Her father is black, but her mother is described as a pale yellow colored woman. Stein makes much of the fact that Melanctha is half-white. Her personality combines the stereotypical attributes of the two races: smart and articulate like white people; passionate and wild like black people, all this according to the stereotypes of the time.<br />
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When we first meet Melanctha she is in high school and just beginning to explore the world of men. When she gets out of school, she doesn't seek employment. Just how she gets by is not explained, except to say that occasionally she does a little sewing for people. She spends more and more time hanging about with men; while she might not be hooking, she might be receiving various favors from admirers that help her get by. None of this is stated. Her circumstances are not important to the story. The story that Stein wanted to tell was about her inner life. <br />
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After a lot of romantic and sexual adventure, described in very vague terms, Melanctha rises to the point of engaging in a romantic relationship with a serious and virtuous doctor from the black community. The development, culmination, and decline of their romance is rendered with greater intimacy than any other fictional romance I know: we see exactly what Melanctha and the doctor think of each other at each stage of the process. From the beginning, they argue about authenticity. Doctor Jeff is a thinker, and has a lot of ideas about virtuous living that he likes to expound. Melanctha accuses him of ignoring his own principles; she says his behavior is not so virtuous as he likes to think. On the other hand, Doctor Jeff doesn't quite trust Melanctha; she always seems to be holding something back.<br />
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Despite these initial misgivings, the two are attracted to each other. Melanctha grows to like Doctor Jeff's warm and generous ways. Jeff is attracted by her beauty and her ability to articulate her thoughts, and he is charmed by the sympathetic way Melanctha listens to his incessant ruminations. Melanctha begins to hope he can make her feel secure. Their earliest conversations seem to be very authentic, each one expressing their truth sincerely. Stein allows them months of blissful wandering in nature and enjoyment of each other's company.<br />
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But there is a fly in the ointment, and that is the original question of authenticity. At the peak of their bliss, Melanctha does something, just some random gesture, that reminds Jeff of her other life, her life with other men, the world she doesn't talk about while she is listening to him so demurely. And in fact, Melanctha is not quite satisfied with Jeff either; she still thinks he is out of touch with his emotions; she secretly thinks he is sort of a wimp, but she has been submissive because she wants to please him. Stein depicts every step in the unwinding of their relationship. In the course of their arguments, they seem to cover every aspect of the search for authenticity that any psychologist ever identified, though they use everyday language, and are not sure themselves just what they are talking about.<br />
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Doctor Jeff drives himself crazy with too much thinking, but eventually he figures out that he was right all along. He rejects Melanctha's claim that he is hypocritical and inadequate; he rejects her neediness that manipulates him into expressing more than he feels; he rejects her inability to talk about her past life. He sees that some place along the way, she quit talking to him sincerely like an equal, and started putting on an act in order to bind him to her. Slowly and painfully, Doctor Jeff backs away, and resumes his quiet, virtuous life.<br />
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Melanctha, on the other hand, is unable to learn from the experience. She doesn't quite achieve a level of self-awareness that would enable her to learn from her mistakes; she is all instinct, driven by unquenchable psychological needs. Generously, Stein allows her to meet the man of her dreams and to have the perfect all-encompassing romance, for awhile; but the man is a gambler, and when his luck runs out, his love fades as well. Players only love you when they're playing.<br />
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The strongest character in Melanctha's life is Rose Johnson. Rose is described as careless, negligent, and selfish, but she is completely authentic: she always knows what she wants, she always has an idea of how to behave to get what she wants, she always has faith in herself. Melanctha becomes more attached to Rose than to any of the men in her life, and will demean herself with any sort of service in order to be with her. But even Rose eventually rejects her. She too becomes concerned about Melanctha's other life, her secret interactions with unspecified men. She hates that Melanctha's self-defeating behavior patterns. She gets sick of her simpering submissiveness, hiding a wild and promiscuous personality. She totally disdains Melanctha's whimpering threats to end her own life.<br />
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Stein handles the rest of Melanctha's life in summary fashion. She gets very sick, with consumption or something; she gets well after long treatment. She takes an actual job as a servant, and attempts to live a quiet regular life, but her health is compromised, and she dies young. Sad story.<br />
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An aspect of the novel that sounds harsh to the modern ear is Stein's use of stereotypes in building her African-American characters, including the use of the word 'nigger.' However, you notice that she uses positive as well as negative character types, and she makes each character rise above type into eccentricity and particular traits. Moreover, her German characters are all stereotypes as well. All the characters conform to some known type, but the way they talk and the details of their lives are highly individualized and convincing.<br />
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On top of innovations in subject, theme, and structure, Gertrude Stein invented her own writing style, an elusive style that sometimes serves as a barrier because people reject its lack of conformity. The most obvious feature is repetition—repetition of descriptive phrases, sentences and whole paragraphs. Characters may be described with the same phrase in one situation after another, but each time that phrase relates to new phrases. She treats phrases like shapes that can be repeated in different parts of the picture. Whole anecdotes might be told in the beginning and repeated at the end of a story. For instance, Melanctha's story opens with an event in a friend's life: Rose Johnson has a hard time with her baby. That anecdote is repeated toward the end of Melanctha's story, after we learn a lot about Rose and Melanctha.<br />
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This aspect of Stein's style has been compared to Cubist painting, because it looks at a subject from different angles, and builds up a picture from layers. Repetition of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs also makes it sound like music; repetition is like the chorus in a song. These stories sound a little like long ballads.<br />
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For the critics of Stein's time—who were steeped in the stilted prose of the 19th century and enthralled by the elaborate sentences of Marcel Proust and James Joyce—the ordinary, everyday quality of Stein's language and sentence structure must have seemed primitive. Stein's vocabulary is about 6th grade level, maybe lower, the type of words used by the servant class. The most complex psychological concepts are alluded to vaguely by everyday words, vernacular speech for German maids and women in the lower levels of the black community.<br />
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Stein also minimized punctuation: no colons or semi-colons, only commas allowed, and only when really necessary. Similarly, no capitol letters: she refers to 'german' girls.<br />
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More remarkable, Stein doesn't use subordinate conjunctions, like 'although' or 'since', to show relationships between facts or ideas. She tends to string simple sentences together with 'and,' piling up details one at a time. Nor does she use a lot of modifying prepositional phrases, such as 'despite her reluctance…' The result is, the novel can be read very rapidly; it sounds like ordinary conversation. Stein's style is so fluid that she moves in and out of the thoughts of various characters without the reader noticing the changes from one to another. If you let down your resistance, the novel sounds like a long sad song cycle.<br />
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<i>Three Lives</i> is a hard book to put down. It sort of seeps into your soul.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-71951882124214798042018-05-24T17:44:00.001-07:002018-05-25T03:03:16.742-07:00The House of Unexpected Sisters<div style="text-align: left;">
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Although Alexander McCall Smith is "only a man"—and a Scotsman at that—he tries to create a story world that is dominated by women and women's values in his latest novel <i>The House of Unexpected Sisters. </i>The values he expresses in his heroine are sympathy and understanding, compassion and cooperation, toleration and forgiveness.</div>
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The context for this fantasy is an idealized country in Africa, called Botswana. While Botswana is a real place, and all the place names and geographical features described in the book are real, the country in the book is an ideal place, a sort of Heaven on Earth, where people act with respect for themselves, for other people, for tradition, and for the land.<br />
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<i>The House of Unexpected Sisters</i> is the 18th novel in Alexander McCall Smith's <i>The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series,</i> which features Precious Ramotswe, who has created herself as the first lady detective in Botswane. The name 'Precious' is traditional in her country, but it also symbolizes her character, like the name of her assistant, 'Grace.' Precious is exquisitely sensitive to the feelings of others and couches every utterance as tactfully as she can. Her investigations are slow and polite; no violence, no speed, no threats, no danger. Just complexity—overlapping motivations, misunderstandings. Some problems seem to be solved by the mere process of investigation.<br />
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Her clients don't bring her the big scary problems, like murder and gang activity. That stuff naturally goes to the police. They come with vexatious problems, like a rash of petty thefts in one of the stories; the culprit in that one turned out to be a mischievous wild monkey. There might be a question of suspected impersonation, or suspected adultery. In this book the problem is wrongful termination; a client says she was fired for no good reason. Investigation of that issue reveals various other shenanigans by the people involved. And, very realistically, Precious has some problems of her own to work out. I think it won't be too much of a spoiler if I tell you that everything comes right in the end, and everyone gets justice.<br />
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The book's theme is indicated in the title, and it is a basic tenet of feminism: women stick together, women support and encourage each other, women are sisters by nature. All of the women in the story, except for the villainous Violet, cooperate to bring about equitable solutions.<br />
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And what sort of roles do men play in this feminine universe? Precious' husband isn't nearly as smart or useful as her friends, but he loves and supports Precious as well as he can. One of her part-time assistants is a mousy male, retired and feeling useless, who has a good heart and occasionally a good idea. Her first husband, Note, has been a villain throughout the series—having battered Precious during their marriage, and returning now and then to cause her trouble. Her late father was the epitome of wisdom and virtue. The employer who is accused of wrongful termination is a philanderer. In general, men make a mess of things, and women set things straight again.<br />
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This novel is not what you would call great literature. It's so easy you can read it while waiting in line at Starbucks, as I have. In fact, the series makes great reading for jet travel; I discovered my first one at an airport bookstore. You could say that McCall Smith churns this stuff out exactly for that purpose, especially for women passengers. However, that doesn't mean it is without charm. The culture of Botswana, both real and imagined, is very colorful and exotic. The characters are irresistibly nice; it is soothing to hear the way they reason. And it seems clear to me that the author genuinely cares about the values he depicts, and he is genuinely fond of the way women do things.<br />
<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-66756826526972309122018-05-20T09:17:00.000-07:002018-05-20T13:31:41.352-07:00Theodore Wores, 1859-1939A delightful remnant of the past has been rescued from oblivion by the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, with the help of the Farrington Historical Foundation, and is presently being featured in a special exhibit at the museum, called "Theodore Wores: Under the California Sun."<br />
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Twenty-three lovely Impressionist landscapes by pioneering California painter Thomas Wores, including scenes from the Santa Clara Valley, the San Francisco coast, and the dramatic valley of Yosemite, were discovered in storage at the museum by its Deputy Director, Preston Metcalf.<br />
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These paintings date from 1912, when San Francisco was still surrounded by sand dunes covered in blue lupine, from the 1920s when Saratoga was synonymous with orchards, from the 1930s when Yosemite was still a rare sight. Metcalf, who grew up in Santa Clara in the 1960s when some of these scenes still looked much the same, recognized the historic and nostalgic significance of these works now that so much has been paved over and polluted, so he determined to secure funding to have them restored and exhibited. From the Triton, the show will move to other venues around the state.<br />
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<b>1910-1920</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FCzbgOl4eoQ/WwGan1u88pI/AAAAAAAAQUk/ukU1Ht-7hMEJOee_WCC72vSPbjrc8mI2QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/The%2BSand%2BDunes%2Bof%2BSan%2BFrancisco%252C%2BCa%252C%2B1912.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FCzbgOl4eoQ/WwGan1u88pI/AAAAAAAAQUk/ukU1Ht-7hMEJOee_WCC72vSPbjrc8mI2QCK4BGAYYCw/s640/The%2BSand%2BDunes%2Bof%2BSan%2BFrancisco%252C%2BCa%252C%2B1912.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Sand Dunes of San Francisco, Ca</i>, 1912</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1Dqx4MDcMiw/WwGa1nXljWI/AAAAAAAAQUs/JfGJ377wVnQaIYcZTjThzu7CenEQuQIywCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Blue%2BLupines%2Bof%2Bthe%2BSand%2BDunes%2Bof%2BSan%2BFrancisco%252C%2Bc.%2B1912.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="530" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1Dqx4MDcMiw/WwGa1nXljWI/AAAAAAAAQUs/JfGJ377wVnQaIYcZTjThzu7CenEQuQIywCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Blue%2BLupines%2Bof%2Bthe%2BSand%2BDunes%2Bof%2BSan%2BFrancisco%252C%2Bc.%2B1912.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Blue Lupines of the Sand Dunes of San Francisco,</i> c. 1912</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fcoENMheba4/WwGbVKjxtfI/AAAAAAAAQU8/5U43_3ItBtkmDK9JZIUG1_TTeKQMRj8ggCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Entrance%2Bto%2BGolden%2BGate%252C%2Bc.%2B1914.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fcoENMheba4/WwGbVKjxtfI/AAAAAAAAQU8/5U43_3ItBtkmDK9JZIUG1_TTeKQMRj8ggCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Entrance%2Bto%2BGolden%2BGate%252C%2Bc.%2B1914.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Entrance to Golden Gate,</i> c. 1914</td></tr>
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<b>1920s</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qqHHyJhzO9Y/WwGb1sQdKAI/AAAAAAAAQVI/iOTQqn2nxWoXO5sBWecSv-IIql0IL5O6gCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Tree%2BBlossoms%252C%2B1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qqHHyJhzO9Y/WwGb1sQdKAI/AAAAAAAAQVI/iOTQqn2nxWoXO5sBWecSv-IIql0IL5O6gCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Tree%2BBlossoms%252C%2B1920.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tree Blossoms</i>, 1920</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lkQWLnVwj-A/WwGcFpfMu0I/AAAAAAAAQVU/vtqR1ej4vLgSCHSrfX9yovvusW8WgZFigCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Peach%2BOrchard%252C%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2Bc.%2B1925.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lkQWLnVwj-A/WwGcFpfMu0I/AAAAAAAAQVU/vtqR1ej4vLgSCHSrfX9yovvusW8WgZFigCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Peach%2BOrchard%252C%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2Bc.%2B1925.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Peach Orchard, Saratoga, California,</i> c. 1925</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lZ3a74EuhPA/WwGcTBcVlzI/AAAAAAAAQVc/klfGOwPR4II1Sq9pissgbXJ7yF-I8GNmACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Road%2Bwith%2Ba%2BBlossoming%2BOrchard%252C%2B1925.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lZ3a74EuhPA/WwGcTBcVlzI/AAAAAAAAQVc/klfGOwPR4II1Sq9pissgbXJ7yF-I8GNmACK4BGAYYCw/s640/Road%2Bwith%2Ba%2BBlossoming%2BOrchard%252C%2B1925.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Road with a Blossoming Orchard,</i> 1925</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tpc5tXQ0o7Q/WwGcgPtWkfI/AAAAAAAAQVo/jVFl8I0VXBcUTf4LH2PGknh-zB1w-pwmwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/A%2BGarden%2Bin%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2B1927.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="520" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tpc5tXQ0o7Q/WwGcgPtWkfI/AAAAAAAAQVo/jVFl8I0VXBcUTf4LH2PGknh-zB1w-pwmwCK4BGAYYCw/s640/A%2BGarden%2Bin%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2B1927.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Garden in Saratoga, California,</i> 1927</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1sUpLIESJ9w/WwGc0X95RlI/AAAAAAAAQV4/nBdJQ3Voiecqqa6yNhIvLhZ673w2RYZcQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/My%2BStudio%2BGarden%2Bin%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCa.%252C%2B1926.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="504" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1sUpLIESJ9w/WwGc0X95RlI/AAAAAAAAQV4/nBdJQ3Voiecqqa6yNhIvLhZ673w2RYZcQCK4BGAYYCw/s640/My%2BStudio%2BGarden%2Bin%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCa.%252C%2B1926.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>My Studio Garden in Saratoga, Ca,</i> 1926</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ejqoyf42e5w/WwGdE_BsscI/AAAAAAAAQWE/Yg0uTfaAdVsU_t50w1HjbLlZQMOgAA3hgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/My%2BSummer%2BHouse%252C%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCa%252C%2B1928.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ejqoyf42e5w/WwGdE_BsscI/AAAAAAAAQWE/Yg0uTfaAdVsU_t50w1HjbLlZQMOgAA3hgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/My%2BSummer%2BHouse%252C%2BSaratoga%252C%2BCa%252C%2B1928.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>My Summer House, Saratoga, Ca,</i> 1928</td></tr>
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<b>1930s</b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d47cPRvSius/WwGe3XFsNnI/AAAAAAAAQWQ/GEuLmJCK-PMlYLUHOGHcshfdvnZ6U8h0wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Yosemite%2BValley%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2B1931%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="504" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d47cPRvSius/WwGe3XFsNnI/AAAAAAAAQWQ/GEuLmJCK-PMlYLUHOGHcshfdvnZ6U8h0wCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Yosemite%2BValley%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2B1931%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Yosemite Valley, California,</i> 1931</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YFwR_j7ZwBI/WwGfF9NQPlI/AAAAAAAAQWY/Fr4H4zGLiQUGv1720qI8aLO6o4-C9ab5QCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Yosemite%2BValley%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2B1931.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="504" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YFwR_j7ZwBI/WwGfF9NQPlI/AAAAAAAAQWY/Fr4H4zGLiQUGv1720qI8aLO6o4-C9ab5QCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Yosemite%2BValley%252C%2BCalifornia%252C%2B1931.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Yosemite Valley, California,</i> 1931</td></tr>
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From the point of view of art history, Theodore Wores is significant because he was one of the earliest California-born artists to achieve international fame in his own time. Wores was born in San Francisco—to parents who had fled the war between Austria and Hungary—and at the age of 16, he became one of the first students at the San Francisco School of Design, the first art academy on the West Coast. The following year he moved to Munich, where he studied for six years. After several years of building his career in different locations, Wores settled in San Francisco. Now a well-established painter, he became a Dean at the San Francisco Institute of Art, which was the current name of the academy where he first studied art.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio,</i> c. 1893<br />Crocker Museum / Jan's photo, 2010</td></tr>
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Wores' best work depicted "exotic" scenes—in Chinatown, Japan, Hawaii, Samoa—in a style that was heavily influenced by his academic training. </div>
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The landscapes in this exhibit, done in a softer, brushier style, are minor works, but they have a special appeal for folks in the Bay Area, and the longer you look at them the more you appreciate their high quality.<br />
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In 1924, when Wores was in his mid-sixties, he acquired a second home and studio in Saratoga, and painted many Impressionist depictions of the orchards surrounding it. The paintings in this show were donated by his widow, Carolyn Bauer Wores.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-92138885603589598842018-05-14T06:09:00.001-07:002018-05-14T07:16:57.149-07:00In Cold Blood<div style="text-align: center;">
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The big question in the non-fiction novel <i>In Cold Blood </i>by Truman Capote is why murder a family of four people, why invade their home in the middle of the night, tie the up, gag them, and shoot them in the face with a shotgun? The answer is fairly simple, actually; the murderers were psychopaths, meaning they had no conscience and no attachment to life, to other humans, or even to their own life. But it doesn't seem obvious to the neighbors of the victims, to the investigators, or even to the reader. It seems senseless and horrific, and you have to wonder how anyone's personality could become so warped that they would commit mass murder.<br />
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Capote developed several innovations in order to consider this problem. In the first place, there's is no suspense in the usual sense: Capote used a famous murder case in which the perpetrators had already been convicted and hanged by the time the book was published. But for the detectives there is plenty of suspense; they have a real "who done it" with very few clues. Capote develops the characters of a few of the detectives, and follows them in their investigations, so that the reader feels their suspense. There is also plenty of suspense for the people who knew the murder victims—the prosperous Clutter family—as they all begin to suspect each other, and to be fearful about the future. The characters of a few of these people are sketched in as well, so the reader absorbs their suspense.<br />
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The innovation that set the literary world abuzz was that the novel occupies a new space in between factual reporting and fiction. Capote conscientiously reports every scrap of evidence, even false leads, what would be 'blue herrings' in a British mystery show. He reports every interview. He quotes from the detectives' notes. It's a wonder that he can keep the reader interested in all this minutia. But he escapes the bounds of journalism by using the facts to conjure scenes, complete with atmospheric details and dialog that the author could not have heard. Of course, some people object with his taking this much license, but that's what makes it a novel; otherwise, it would just be journalism, and nothing new in terms of form. Also, it would not have become a major hit in the publishing world. People were already familiar with the basic facts of the case; it is the imagined part that holds your attention.<br />
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A third quality of the novel is harder to describe. Usually the narrator of a novel has a consistent voice, a sort of attitude, a point of view. <i>In Cold Blood </i>is presented in the form of reports from the participants, so the point of view is constantly shifting. Part of the story—part of the evidence—is told from one character's point of view, part from another, following several characters. The reader hardly notices any general narration pulling all these "factual" reports together.<br />
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Instead of a voice, the novel has style, a truly exemplary style of using the English language. Capote's sentences are remarkably clear and graceful—just the right choice of words, the perfect word order, no clutter or self-consciousness. Each sentence calmly, sensibly, sympathetically leads to the next.<br />
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The reader experiences the magnitude of the crime—we meet the victims and hear their dying words as they are slaughtered methodically. We experience the gnawing hunger for answers that motivates the lead detectives in the case. But most importantly, we get an intimate look at the childhood and development of psychopaths, not just the two murderers in this case, but of other mass murderers as well, plus the text-book description of this pathology. And the result is the reader feels some empathy with them; you can see how a neglected and abused little kid could become angry at the world; you can feel how much they needed a little love and guidance when they were vulnerable. People aren't born psychopaths; it's a result of the way they are treated in those early years; maltreatment warps their personalities. Which is not to say you <i>sympathize</i> with them. No, hanging seems the right punishment in the situation. They seem irredeemable. They don't even care. They place no value on their own lives, never did.<br />
<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-82072749982056454642018-05-12T06:24:00.001-07:002018-05-12T06:58:40.258-07:00Wayne Thiebaud, from 1958 to 1968<div style="text-align: center;">
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Born in 1920, Wayne Thiebaud, now 98, is the grand old man of California painting. Since the 1960s, he has consistently produced cutting-edge paintings that everyone could understand and appreciate, not an easy combination to achieve.<br />
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Because Thiebaud spent several years working as a designer and a cartoonist right after high school, and he served a hitch in the Army Air Force during World War II as well, he didn't get started on his career in the fine arts until the 1950's. At the age of 30 he enrolled in Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento), and by the age of 40, in 1960, he was an assistant professor at the University of California in Davis. Thiebaud remained at Davis until 1991, 31 years. This career stability gave him the freedom to pursue the art values that interested him. Thiebaud's career went through a half-dozen phases, taking up one subject after another, and adapting his technique to make his ordinary subject matter look exceptional.<br />
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Thiebaud first attracted wide-scale attention between 1958 and 1968 when his simple renderings of common food items available in diners and bakeries, cafeterias and delis fit right in with Pop art and the fad for elevating commerce in art. A special exhibit of Thiebaud's work during this period was presented as its inaugural show by the new museum at UC Davis, the Manetti-Shrem Museum.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Beach Boys, </i>1959<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Before Thiebaud developed his signature style, he experimented with one of the styles that was popular in the Bay Area, figurative painting with heavy <i>impasto,</i> or thick application of paint with expressionistic brushstrokes. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Pancakes, </i>1961<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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His rediscovery of the still life was a major breakthrough. The tradition of painting food and tableware dates back to the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, but in the 1960s still life was considered too tame. Thiebaud reinterpreted the still life for his era, while also turning from the sumptuous repast of tradition to the lowliest, and loneliest, meal in a diner. As a work of art, this composition is interesting for the way the artist conveyed three-dimensions on a flat structure; also, the brushstrokes are flatter and more controlled, and distinct outlines define the objects.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Delicatessen Counter - Bologna and Cheese, </i>1961<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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As a subject, a deli counter is even more detached than a meal for one, removing any emotional connotations. The emphasis is on the geometry and the colors; the image is close to abstract, barely tied to reality. The brushstroke has been carefully controlled in order to define shapes as well as to suggest the texture of the deli items.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Delicatessen Counter, </i>1961<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This painting shows amazing control of the brushstroke to define shapes and especially to mimic the textures of the food items. The artist was very interested in the way paint compares to the textures of the subjects he is depicting. The composition is based on a strong and stable geometry. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Drink Syrups, </i>1961<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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At the level of subject matter, Thiebaud documented certain objects and customs that no long appear in the same form; this row of drink syrups must have been intended for snow cones, but I believe they usually come in bottles nowadays. The dispensers have been simplified to their basic geometry, removing all associations and connotations, making them merely containers for the primary colors, with blue added in the triangular base, making this sort of an art joke. Thiebaud enlivened his dull subject with colorful and vibrant outlines.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sucker Tree,</i> 1961<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Have you ever seen a cone, perhaps styrofoam, with branches formed by lollipops? It looks like a relic of the past. The subject gave the artist the chance to play around with angles of placement for circular shapes on a flat plane as well as with types of patterns within a circle, requiring very precise brushstrokes.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Refrigerator Pies,</i> 1962<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Thiebaud is most associated with paintings of cakes and pies, not the homemade type, but products available in bakeries. His goal here is to make the paint mimic the textures of the food; the chocolate cream pie looks luscious. He simplified the shapes to their basic geometries and arranged them uniformly, cropping out any context of the bakery.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cream Soups,</i> 1963<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Again the artist strides the border between realism and geometric abstractionism. Oil paint has been mixed to the creaminess of soup, but the shapes have been simplified to basic circles, and modified in size and shape to indicate depth. Vibrant outlines in arbitrary colors make the shapes lift off the canvas.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Football Player,</i> 1963<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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In his next phase, Thiebaud turned to the figure, however, as with his still lifes, he treats the figure more as an object than as a person, simplifying the component shapes, eliminating personal detail, and reducing the figure to a bold icon; he barely gave the figure a place to sit, though he placed it in a seated position. The helmet and mask are perfect because the artist is not interested in the football player as an individual, or even as an athlete; he is interested in the figure as object, and about playing with modeling and dimensionality.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Man Sitting - Back View</i>, 1964<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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It is quite surprising to see the rear view of a lone figure in a painting. Is it a statement about alienation and isolation? Is this the poor guy about to slurp up cream soup? Or is it an exercise in treating a figure as an object, creating convincing roundness and depth of shape without any supporting context, just perfect horizontal brushstrokes. The figure doesn't even get colorful contours except in the difficult area where the bottom meets the seat.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Standing Man</i>, 1964<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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This figure is all suit and no personality. Brushstrokes are virtually invisible and details have been eliminated. The question is how does light fall on a standing subject? The objective is to convey modeling through light and shadow; to make the figure look like it is really there, though there is no definition of any particular space, except for a single horizontal line to represent the floor.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Woman in Tub</i>, 1965<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Isolation, alienation, and sterility are conveyed in this image; there's no denying its emotional content. The tub is indicated by a few colorful horizontal lines on a ground of flat whites and grays. The head is photographically real but dehumanized by its position. If there is a person in that tub, she is lost in revery, her personality withdrawn and at rest.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Five Seated Figures</i>, 1965<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Like still life, the group portrait dates back to the Dutch Golden Age, but Thiebaud reinterpreted the subject to leave out the "groupiness" of the group. By their positions ignoring each other, you see these people are not in the same room at the same time. The artist probably painted a separate portrait of each person, then combined them arbitrarily into a design. He treated the figures not as people but as objects. Perhaps the artist is saying "This is the way the world is; no one pays attention to anyone else; each is a self-absorbed unit." Or it could be a study of how the light falls on faces looking 5 different directions, how light and shadow models legs and shoulders, how to create enough space for 5 chairs and get all the legs to overlap convincingly.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Girl with Mirror,</i> 1965<br />
Special exhibit, Manetti-Shrem Museum / Jan's photo, 2018</td></tr>
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Here is a girl with great breasts and a solemn expression. If the face were smiling or looking up, the image would be erotic, but the girl herself is absent from this figure. This beautiful torso is treated as an object, like one of Monet's haystacks, for studying light on organic shapes and the amazing range of shades and tints included in "skin tone." Brushwork is very refined and smooth.</div>
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Wayne Thiebaud is a traditional realist with a contemporary twist. He hides systematic variation of abstract aesthetic values in the form of ordinary objects and detached figures. During the first decade of his career, covered by the special exhibit at the Manetti-Shrem, his work grew increasingly complex and subtle, while he examined the traditions of still life and figure painting. This was only the beginning of a long and beautiful career.</div>
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Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-85117194824582901452018-05-01T10:08:00.001-07:002018-05-01T10:08:52.546-07:00Breakfast of Champions<div style="text-align: center;">
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I didn't like Kurt Vonnegut's novel <i>Breakfast of Champions.</i> I should have liked it—Vonnegut is an extremely important 20th century writer. I expected to like it—I liked several of his other novels. I tried to like it—and there are brilliant passages in it. But it the end, I was just glad it was over with.<br />
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At the largest level, the problem is that Vonnegut interweaves fantasy with reality, and fantasy with fantasy. One of the characters is supposed to be the author, and he interacts with the characters he has created; he gets badly mauled by a dog of his own creation. He creates and uncreates characters, moves them to different times and places, and offers commentaries on his reasons.<br />
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At the stylistic level, Vonnegut's prose is choppy, partly because he keeps darting around in overlapping universes. The other reason is that he throws in so much minutiae of verisimilitude that there is a long distance between subject and action.<br />
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Thematically, the problem is nihilism. The author and his surrogates are at pains to point out and illustrate the banality and inanity of modern life, presumably for comical effect. This is a dystopian novel, no holds barred.<br />
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None of the characters is developed in a sympathetic way; they are basically place-holders in a game of 3-D chess.<br />
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Existentially, Vonnegut wanted to show the interconnectedness of everyone's stories, the absurdity and tragedy in everyone's lives, and the futility of the whole flawed human enterprise.<br />
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You have to be the right age to appreciate this type of bitter humor and this casual way of mixing fantasies like cards in a deck.<br />
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So, if I disliked it for all these reasons, why did I keep reading it? Because some of Vonnegut's ravings express his insights in a unique and impactful manner.<br />
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Here's a paragraph that aptly describes his intentions:<br />
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"I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. <i>Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done</i> (my italics)<i>. </i>If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done."</div>
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Here's a funny line that is still apt:</div>
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"Much of the conversation in the country consisted of lines from television shows, both past and present."</div>
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Here's a good description of women's defense mechanisms:</div>
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"The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they didn't use them for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interest of survival they trained themselves to be agreeing machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking and then they thought it too."</div>
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For a major fan of Art History, the most interesting part was a commentary on the Minimalist paintings by Barnett Newman, who puzzled art-lovers with canvases bearing only one or two stripes on a uniform background. Here's an example of Newman's simplest composition, grandly called <i>Onement</i>:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Onement, </i>1953 by Barnett Newman<br />Internet </td></tr>
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To carry his interpretation, Vonnegut creates a character called Karabekian who has painted a work called <i>The Temptation of Saint Anthony.</i> He then places the painter in a bar scene where the patrons scorn his work, saying a child could do better. This quote is his response:</div>
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The painting did not exist until I made it…Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find…</div>
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It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal–the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us–in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us."</div>
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Just because I didn't <i>like</i> the novel doesn't mean I didn't appreciate it. But I'm eager to get onto something richer and more satisfying.</div>
Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-82971058305913004002018-04-28T16:23:00.002-07:002018-04-29T02:58:24.788-07:00CendrillonTo hear and watch an opera with four stellar women's voices is absolutely stunning. The opera <i>Cendrillon</i> was shown Live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera Company at local movie theaters, April 28, and the recording will be shown in the Met Encore the following Wednesday night.<br />
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The lead role of Cendrillon—Cinderella in French—was sung by Joyce Didonato, a Kansas-born medium-range (<i>mezzo)</i> soprano who has made this a signature role for several years. Her voice is captivating from the first note; it's as though all the minor characters who set the scene for the story were just singing, while Ms. Didonato was making a sublime sound that she had invented herself. </div>
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At the same time, her wicked step-mother was sung by another <i>mezzo,</i> Stephanie Blythe, who has a true power-house voice; she is known for playing a goddess in one of Wagner's grand operas. </div>
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As if to make men irrelevant, the lead male role, Prince Charming, was also sung by a <i>mezzo,</i> Alice Coote, who has made a sort of specialty of singing men's roles. Which immediately invites the question, why write a man's role for a woman's voice? Two sopranos with perfectly matched voices singing romantic duets is a gorgeous sound, quite sublime. In fact, Massenet's ultimate goal with this opera was to create a context for this thrilling soprano sound.</div>
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It's very unusual to have three sopranos in the same range singing lead roles in an opera. To add highlights to the sound, the Fairy Godmother was sung with great flare in the highest range, by Kathleen Kim, a Korean-American who is a <i>coloratura</i> soprano. Although she was singing groups of very high notes, she never screeched; she entered each high note gently and and moved on with control.</div>
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In the lower range, there was only one significant male role, that of Cinderella's father; it was handled competently by Laurent Naouri, but he couldn't compete with the women, and didn't try to.<br />
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While we're talking about voices, we have to mention the orchestral parts. The orchestra not only supported the vocalists, but had an independent role in long passages right in the middle of the opera that have no words at all. The orchestra "sang" about what is going on in the hearts of Cinderella and Prince Charming; it set up the situation and mood; it marked the passage of time in the young lovers' lives.<br />
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<i>Cendrillon</i> was composed around 1900 by Jules Massenet, a Frenchman, in a style that is very French: romantic, graceful, frivolous, sentimental. For modern ears, it is so pretty that it is almost comical, almost embarrassing. Therefore the production designer, Laurent Pelly, who also designed the costumes, created a comedy context for his poignant romance.<br />
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The wicked Step-Mother and vain Step-Sisters were caricatured with silly costumes and stylized behavior. </div>
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The Met chorus and assorted dancers adopted a sort of tiptoe-through-the tulips prance, and mimed various phases of the Prince's Ball and the contest for his affections like fanciful marionettes. Overall, there was so much funny business and so many fanciful costumes, that the opera recalled <i>Beach Blanket Babylon</i> in its effect<i>. </i>Everything fit together so neatly it seemed that the music was written to support the comical dances, rather than the other way around.<br />
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Another comical aspect that was added by the production team was that the Fairy Godmother was shown hanging out in a giant library when she was off-duty. And, at the penultimate moment, when she brought the two lovers together in a moment of magical recognition, she was sitting on a tower of massive tomes! Laurent Pelly was paying tribute to the books that hold our dreams and myths.</div>
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Opera is about voices first and foremost, but all these great singers were also great actors. Ms Didonato is nearing 50 now, and will likely quit playing young women's roles soon, but she makes you feel the loneliness of a girl whose widowed father has remarried a woman with two daughters her age. Wouldn't the step-sisters feel that <i>she</i> was the interloper? Wouldn't they look down on her and try to keep her down? What a sad situation for her.<br />
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To make us feel her sadness more, Mr. Naouri, as her father, reflected her pain very sincerely; anything he lacked as a singer, he made up for in the richness of his portrayal of a man who is basically a wimp, sympathetic but impotent.<br />
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Ms. Coote, who plays Prince Charming, was surprisingly good at conveying masculinity in her stance, her walk, and her attitudes. Where Cinderella feels helpless loneliness, Prince Charming conveys petulant ennui.<br />
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Ms. Blythe, the step-mother, is alternately comical and impressive, and you really believe her when she recites her family's long and glorious heritage.<br />
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Ms. Kim seems to have invented her own version of the Fairy Godmother with a personality that is both feisty and fairy-like, magical. While there is nothing in the lyrics that calls for this, you can hear it in the flighty melodies she sings.<br />
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Opera is the most comprehensive art form, with music and drama and dance. When all of it is of the very highest quality, you feel fully entertained. Who could ask for more?<br />
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A note on the photos: Usually I crib a photo from the New York Times for my reviews, but this time I managed to whip out my iPhone when I saw the Fairy Godmother sitting on a pile of books, so these shots are my own.<br />
<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-78475921749383788522018-04-24T05:28:00.002-07:002018-04-24T05:28:39.669-07:00Judy Chicago Interview<div style="text-align: center;">
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The opportunity to hear and see one of the greatest living artists live and in person is a rare event. Judy Chicago was interviewed last night at Bing auditorium at Stanford University, and being there was just as thrilling as I had expected it to be.<br />
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Now 78 years old, Judy is fit and vital, giving us hope that she will go on making art for much longer. Her mind is like a vast, well-organized warehouse—like a gallery or a museum—filled with a succession of clearly thought-through ideas. She seems to be able to summon all her ideas, all her growth experiences, all her studies, at will. And her ego is transparent; her self-esteem is high, but she doesn't do any posing or bragging. She just explains everything neutrally. Judy is known for introducing feminism into the values of the art world, but there is no resentment in her manner for the way her work was scorned for several decades.<br />
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In fact, she has a generous spirit, in a sort of detached way. All of her work has expressed important ideas that she wanted to share; her purpose has been to empower women to come out about their lives and their concerns. She's not an impassioned warrior, she's a cool and determined educator, using art to educate while maintaining the highest aesthetic standards.<br />
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The most important thing I learned from the artist is the importance of the idea to creativity. <i>After</i> she has thought through her idea, she chooses a way to express it, whether it be a series of paintings, or a huge installation combining ceramic, embroidery, and tapestry, and requiring the participation of many crafts workers.<br />
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Secondly, I got the idea that confronting and analyzing issues that bother you, helps you break through your barriers and unclog your emotions. Judy doesn't say that explicitly, but you see it in the succession of subjects she has taken up. When she was upset by the neglect of women in the history of art, she studied history in general, and art history especially, and <i>then</i> created a huge installation called <i>The Dinner Party</i> which calls attention to 39 important women usually left out of history. The problem is that a woman could be important and influential in her own era, but historians tended to focus all their attention on the important men of that era, and to denigrate the importance of women's contribution to culture.<br />
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When she was angered by the men in the art world, and also at her husband because he was sleeping with his students, she analyzed men's role in society, their thirst for power, and their attitudes, and then produced a series of paintings that expressed all this.<br />
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When she felt rejected, she painted a design called <i>Rejection</i>, and added in pencil a poetic description of her psychology.<br />
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It seems to me that all this truth-telling empowered <i>her</i> to keep moving, to keep growing, and to liberate her art-making energies fully.<br />
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If Judy's work has escaped your attention, you can read a very nice article that I wrote about her: <b><a href="http://oneofakindwomen.blogspot.com/2017/03/born-1939-judy-chicago.html" target="_blank">Judy Chicago</a> </b>It's not easy work to like; some of it is beautiful, some it is shocking, all of it is new and innovative. Anything truly new and different requires open-mindedness, but your reward is the growth you experience.<br />
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<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514770671889627509.post-39761167889677842452018-04-23T03:19:00.001-07:002018-04-23T03:38:54.097-07:00The Merchant of Venice<div style="text-align: center;">
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<i>The Merchant of Venice</i> is a four-hundred year old play by the most celebrated playwright in the English language, William Shakespeare, about the relationship between Justice and Mercy.<br />
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Shakespeare is tough to play and tough to appreciate, mainly because English was a very different language in the 1600s than it is now. The big problem for the actors is to make Shakespeare's words sound natural, to make their roles look like real people, to make the strange sound familiar. No matter how good they are, it's still a big problem for the audience to distinguish the words and understand their meaning. The reason the audience is willing to work so hard is that Shakespeare considered ethical problems that are everlasting in life, and frequently he expressed ideas in a way that just knocks you flat, it is so spot on.<br />
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Shakespeare is generally played in a large, round theater, like the one Shakespeare wrote for. Sometimes it is played on a big stage, with big stars, and a lot of hoopla. In both cases, the play is in one place, and the viewer is in another; the experience is rather formal and detached. The special attraction of the production by the City Lights Theater Company in San Jose was that it was in a small venue, with no raised stage or proscenium—the actors and the audience shared the same space. We could see every nuance of expression, gesture, and body language. This intimacy really helped to make the poetry understandable.<br />
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The director of this production, Kit Wilder, further clarified the drama by using modern dress and by adding lots of stage business, not necessarily called for by the script. The minor characters were played with lots of kinks and quirks and funny business, as they no doubt were in Shakespeare's company.<br />
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So far we have the consideration of a serious theme, lightened by a lot of slapstick. Now weave in a corny, Hollywood-type love story that comes to an improbably happy ending. And throw in a little identity-confusion, deceit and trickery.<br />
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The conflict of Justice vs. Mercy is realized through the problem of the Jew, the problem of the outcast, the problem of prejudice. In a way, it was an easy problem for Shakespeare to consider because there weren't any Jews in England; they had been banned in 1290; that's why the play was set in Venice. On the other hand, there was plenty of prejudice against them, mainly because of their practice of money-lending, but also for religious reasons. Shylock, the money-lender in this play, is presented rather sympathetically early in the play. He gets to point out that he has been ill-used and insulted by Christians, even as they used his money. His eloquent speeches might resonate with any group in society that feels themselves to be maltreated. But it is impossible to like him because of his intense desire for revenge on a Christian merchant who has repeatedly insulted and offended him. It's like a crazy and unreasoning obsession. In the end, Shylock gets a severe come-uppance that would have given his prejudiced audience a lot of pleasure.<br />
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Shylock tries to use Justice and the letter of the law to exact revenge on the merchant he hates the most, Antonio. He tricks Antonio into offering a "pound of flesh" as security for a loan, because Antonio feels confident that his ship is about to come in—multiple ships, actually, which are at sea in various places fulfilling trading enterprises. When it is reported that all those ships have been lost in storms or other misadventures, the question of the "pound of flesh" becomes all too real.<br />
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Like a Hollywood movie, this courtroom drama has an improbable romance in the background. Portia is a well-heeled Venetian woman, with a deferential personal assistant always close at hand, whose dead father has set up a fairy-tale problem for any man who seeks to marry her: the winning suitor must choose from three chests the one that holds a picture of Portia. The chests are made of different materials: gold, silver, and lead; and each one has a cryptic saying on the lid. The idea is that this puzzle would select the most genuine and committed suitor. Shakespeare, and Wilder, the director, have a lot of fun caricaturing the first two suitors as greedy, arrogant, self-serving clowns.<br />
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The third suitor, Bassanio, very conveniently, happens to be in love with Portia already, and she with him, and even more conveniently, he figures out the riddle correctly.<br />
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It wouldn't be a Shakespeare comedy if there weren't at least one character who masquerades as another. In this case, unspecified shenanigans have enabled Portia to masquerade as a learned Judge, and her assistant to appear as a court clerk. In this way, Portia gets to represent the quality of Mercy, and she gives a moving speech about Mercy that is often quoted. However, when she cannot persuade Shylock to be merciful, and she cannot persuade him to accept monetary compensation instead of taking the merchant's life, she stoops to low legal chicanery herself and exacts a very punitive revenge on Shylock. The audience is left stunned and wondering.<br />
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But, again like a Hollywood script-writer, in the conclusion, the playwright soothes your feelings with a healthy dose of comedy and romance. After Portia tricks Shylock, she goes on to trick her new husband with some funny business about an exchange of rings, taking advantage of the fact that he hadn't recognized her in court. And, like a mirror or an echo, Portia's assistant, Nerissa, just happens to be in love with a companion of Bassanio's and plays the same trick on him. Thus, in the end when the two men are undeceived, two happy couples depart arm-in-arm. Very cute. As a counterpoint, there is a third romance: between Shylock's daughter, who becomes a Christian, and another of Bassanio's companions. They run off together and join Bassanio and Portia's party, thereby adding a third happy couple to the final parade.<br />
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All the actors were good in this production. Occasionally, one of the actors who played a minor character got their delivery muddied a bit; about 10% of the script was unintelligible to me, but I found that acceptable, because all the British-produced mystery shows on television have references or accents that I don't understand. The actress who played Portia, Maria Giere Marquis, had true command of her role and clear expression. Brian Herndon, who played Shylock, handled his difficult role with professional aplomb. One thing that's good about local theater productions is that the actors look more like real people than big-time actors; it's easier to relate to them.<br />
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Another good thing about small theaters is that they are forced to dispense with scenery and sets. Directors are forced to devise minimal staging; actors double as stage-hands to move limited props on and off stage that indicate the setting in the barest way. This serves to focus attention on the script, on the action, and on the drama.<br />
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The approach to costuming for this production was interesting. Though the clothes were vaguely "modern," the clothes had strange styles—coats too long or too short, lapels too wide or too narrow—and vivid, intensely contrasting colors. Portia wore spring-like greens and pastels while her suitor wore wine red suit and tie; his companions wore purple or green and the unsuccessful suitors had gaudy clothes of gold lamé. These highly differentiated costumes helped to identify the characters and to give the story a fantasy quality.<br />
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We saw the last performance of this production, and stayed after to mingle on stage with the theater company, and to compliment them all around. All in all, this was an exciting, stimulating afternoon, and Shakespeare was redeemed once again.<br />
<br />Jan Looper Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09894919150958930607noreply@blogger.com