Francis Bacon A Terrible Beauty

"Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite."
Francis Bacon

زندگیِ«اکنون» در چند نقاشیِ سهراب سپهری

فریبا حاج‌دایی

به انگیزة نمایش‌گاه آثار سهراب سپهری در موزه هنرهای معاصر

روزگاری سهراب سپهری از حیثِ جهان‌بینی‌اش، که بی‌اعتنا نسبت به حال و وضعِِ زمانه‌اش به نظر می‌آمد، با ویلیام بلیک مقایسه می‌شد و شاید هنوز هم می‌شود. من هم چنین قضاوتی داشتم تا چشمم به نقاشی‌هایِ خاصِ او از جنگل افتاد.

به دیدن 113 تابلوی موجود از سهراب سپهری در موزة هنرهای معاصر رفته‌ام. گفته بودند که از آن میان 18 اثر برای اولین بار در معرضِ دیدِ عموم قرار گرفته. می‌خواهم به طور اخص آن‌ها را ببینم که به جای آن میخِ چند تابلویی می‌شوم که سپهری از تنة درختان جنگل کشیده، فقط تنة درختان، نه بالاتر و نه پایین‌تر را. با دیدنِ آن‌ها فیلمِ«کودکیِ ایوان» ساختة تاروکوفسکی پیشِ چشمانم جان می‌گیرد که تقریباً در تمام طولِ فیلم تماشاگر ایوان را در حالِ راه‌پیمایی در جنگل بزرگی می‌بیند که از تمامی هیئتِ آن تنها تنة درخت‌‌هایش به چشم می‌خورد و بیینده نه سرشاخة درخت‌های جنگل را می‌بیند و نه قسمت‌های پایینی آن‌‌ها را.

سال‌ها پیش فیلم را دیده‌ام؛ در فیلم پسرکی دوازده ساله به نام ایوان به هنگام حملة هیتلر به شورویِ سابق به عنوان جاسوس و به شکل ناشناس وارد مرزهای آلمان می‌شود تا به جمع‌آوری اطلاعات بپردازد. او کوچک‌سال است اما جنگ کودکی او را زیرِ خروارها جسد له کرده و از همة کودکیِ او چیزی جز اندامی کوچک باقی نمانده است. درون مایة«کودکی ایوان» انسان را چنان که به راستی هست، هم چون یک فرد، با دنیای درونی‌اش، عاطفه‌ها و دلبستگی‌هایش و در کاستی‌های انسانی‌اش مطرح می‌کند و نه در هیئتِ وظیفه‌های اجتماعی و سیاسی‌اش.

هنوز توی موزه‌ام و فکر می‌کنم که هم نقاش، سپهری، و هم فیلم‌ساز، تاروکوفسکی، بی‌خبر از یکدیگر از یک زاویة دید جنگل را دیده‌اند، قسمتی از تنة کهنسالِ درختانِ یک جنگل را. آن‌ها نه با گذشته و ریشه‌هایِ درخت کاری دارند و نه به سرشاخه‌ها و آینده‌اش نظر می‌افکنند و شاید هردو می‌خواهند بگویند که ای ایهالناس، ای بزرگان، ای سیاست‌مداران، ای که و که... منِ آدم کوچولو نه به ماجراهایِ قبلی این جنگل کار دارم و نه می‌خواهم بدانم بعدها چه بر سرِ این جنگل می‌رود، تنها می‌خواهم در«همین اکنون» با رویاهایِ خود سر کنم و نمی‌خواهم دست‌خوشِ آرمان‌ها و رویاهایِ شما باشم. شاید می‌توان فیلم و نقاشی‌ها را از این منظر به تماشا نشست که اتفاقات بزرگ، سیاسی و بیرونی می‌تواند چه تأثیر مخربی بر زندگیِ آدم‌های ساده و معمولی بگذارد، آدم‌هایی که می‌خواهند ساده زندگی کنند و بی‌حادثه بمیرند. آن‌ها می‌خواهند بچگی کنند، جوانی کنند و از میان‌سالی و کهن‌سالگی خود لذت ببرند و نمی‌خواهند به مانندِ ایوان از بچگی به مرگ برسند، و شاید فیلمِ«کودکی ایوان» و نقاشی‌های سهراب این سوال را مطرح می‌کنند که اصلاً به چه حقی کسانی بر سرِ کسانِ دیگر فرود می‌آیند و به آن‌ها می‌گویند که چگونه فکر کنند و دنیا را از چه منظری ببینند؟!

مآخذ: سایت دیباچه

Picasso's Guernica (3D)

hamid & company: Picasso, Guernica (3D)

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, abstract expressionist, one of The Irascibles, the angel of the color field: Sep. 25, 1903 - 1970

ب ی هم

ب ی هم
acrylic on canvas
24"x18" each

painting

acrylic on canvas
24"x30"

FE

Collaboration of Two Artists, Nin and Telberg

"AND she danced; she danced with the music and with the rhythm of earth's circles; she turned with the earth turning, like a disk, turning all faces to light and to darkness evenly, dancing towards daylight."

Anais Nin's first novel, "House of Incest" (1936), ends with this verbal image of release. A later edition of the book, published in 1958, does not, however, end with words, but rather with a visual image, a photomontage by Val Telberg of Sag Harbor. The picture portrays a nude dancer, her wide-flung arms solarized into torches. Superimposed on her torso are blades of grass, and behind the dancing figure is a beckoning doorway.

Nin, who died in 1977 at 73, is best known for her seven volumes of diaries written from 1914 to 1974. When she saw Mr. Telberg's work in 1950, Nin detected a kindred spirit. "She loved his photographs and decided he should illustrate 'House of Incest,' " said Sheryl Conkelton, associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Theirs was a remarkable collaboration of two artists from different disciplines who produced a hybrid work of art combining words and pictures. " 'House of Incest' is the best thing Nin ever did, and Telberg's photomontages really capture the dreamlike state and Surrealist mood," said Benjamin Franklin 5th, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and an expert on Nin's work.

Nin described Mr. Telberg's photography as a "spiritual X-ray." After seeing his images for her book, she wrote, "I have a feeling you have done it, . . . captured the book's intent without illustrating." In another letter she added, "Your montages are poetic in their own terms -- in their own language." Conference and Exhibition

Mr. Telberg and Nin worked in different media, but they had much in common. Both were cosmopolitan and attracted to Surrealism.

Nin was born in France in 1903, the daughter of musicians. Her Cuban father was a celebrated pianist and composer who deserted the family when Anais was 11. She began her diary on a boat to America, in an attempt to win him back.

Mr. Telberg, was born in Moscow in 1910 before the Russian revolution, was the child of a mother who was an artist and a father who was the last prime minister of Siberia before the Bolshevik takeover. The family fled to Korea and Japan before settling in China, where Mr. Telberg grew up.

Trained as a chemist, he moved to New York in 1938 and began studying painting under artists like George Grosz in 1942 at the Art Students League. A part-time job developing photographs soon lured him away from painting.

"Photography was faster," Mr. Telberg, 84, said in an interview. "The space between conception and performance is very short in photography. Photomontage is more exciting, more immediate than oil painting, which is very laborious." Debt to Abstract Expressionists

His darkroom technique owes much to the improvisatory style of the Abstract Expressionists. "Their attitude of experimentation with new visions and new images appealed to me," he said.

Mr. Telberg created his montages from a stockpile of negatives that he sandwiched together on a lightbox, without preconceived notions of a final product. In a method akin to free association, he layered a variety of negatives in different configurations as a leaping-off point that evolves into a finished composition.

"Val works in the darkroom the way a painter works in the studio," said Jim Richard Wilson, director of the Rathbone Gallery at Sage Junior College in Albany, which originated the exhibition of Mr. Telberg's work.(1994)

Like Nin, Mr. Telberg was interested in Surrealism. "What appealed to me was magic and anything unusual," said the photographer, who was friends with surrealist artists like Pavel Tchelitchew, Salvador Dali and the film maker Maya Deren.

"Val was happy to be included with the Surrealists, because they welcome accidents, use the unconscious, and act on dreams," a photographer, Warren Padula, said.

"But he was not part of a defined group." Mr. Padula, who curated a show of Mr. Telberg's photomontages for the Art House Odeon Gallery in Sag Harbor, added. "He's an American original."

Nin was part of a Parisian literary group in the 30's that included writers like Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. "Surrealism," she wrote, "was part of the air we breathed." In "House of Incest," Nin tried to represent the subconscious, based on Jung's dictum to "proceed from the dream outward."

"Nin's greatest contribution was to liberate women through her diary. She opened doors to let women reveal their personal lives," said Suzanne Nalbantian, a professor of English and comparative literature at the C. W. Post campus of L.I.U. "Nin was seductive, erotic, very 20th-century and expressed herself with a freedom that is liberating."

Ms. Nalbantian, organizer of the conference on Nin, wrote "Aesthetic Autobiography" (St. Martin's), dealing with Nin's work.

Nin and Mr. Telberg shared an interest in avant-garde film making. When they met in 1950, "I was yearning to become a film maker, but I couldn't afford the equipment," Mr. Telberg recalled.

Instead he adapted cinematic effects like dissolve and jump-cut to still photography. "Val's photomontages have the feeling of movement that you find in cinema," said his wife, Lelia Katayen, a dancer and choreographer. "They take you from one image in time or place to another until they blend."

"Some critics say a Telberg photomontage is like a whole movie shown simultaneously in one frame," Mr. Padula noted.

Mr. Telberg contributed to a pioneering film, "Between Two Worlds" (1952), directing a dance sequence of superimposed frames projected simultaneously. The photographer also collaborated with Nin's husband, Ian Hugo, an experimental film maker, on the multi-image film "Bells of Atlantis" (1952), based on "House of Incest" and narrated by Nin.

After their brief alliance the careers of the artists diverged. Before her first diary gained acclaim when published in 1966, Nin had great difficulty publishing her novels. Even after she bought a printing press and produced her own editions in Greenwich Village in the 40's, Nin could not persuade critics to review her books.

In the 70's, however, she became a cult figure, a frequent speaker on the college circuit. She was considered a heroine of the women's movement, even though her brand of feminism was nondoctrinaire. Cacharel named a perfume, Anais, after the writer, and a film, "Henry and June," portrayed her friendship with Miller and his wife.

The conference at L.I.U. will offer further evidence of Nin's celebrity. Scholars from around the United States and as far away as Japan will debate Nin's fiction in terms of psychoanalysis and eroticism. Her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell, a musician, will deliver the keynote address, friends will offer reminiscences, and her husband's films will be screened.

In contrast to Nin's fame, Mr. Telberg was not widely known, even though hewas an important figure in this country for creative, as opposed to "straight" or documentary, photography. His work appears in major collections like the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum, but his emotion-laden evocative montages, in which images merge like watercolor, never fit the former fashion for realism.

"I was interested in dream images," Mr. Telberg said. "I was considered crazy."

A 1983 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art paid homage to his montages, but difficulty in classifying his oeuvre delayed recognition. "He doesn't belong in the painter's field, and yet his work is like a painting," his wife said. "Nobody knew where to place him."

"Poets were more interested in my work than photographers," Mr. Telberg said, adding that he was friends in Greenwich Village, before moving to Sag Harbor in 1959, with New York School poets like Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery and the musician John Cage.

O'Hara, an art critic as well as poet, called Mr. Telberg "a painter who turned to photography in order to accomplish the pictures he could not find in paint."

"I try," Mr. Telberg said 40 years ago, "to invent a completely unreal world, new, free and truthful."

source: NY Times archive, museum of New Mexico/fine art, MOMA's web site

A Career Woman’s Short but Sweet Career in the 17th Century

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: July 22, 2009
NYtimes

WASHINGTON — Think of “Judith Leyster, 1609-1660” at the National Gallery of Art as a 400-year-old answer to the art historian Linda Nochlin’s famous question “Why have there been no great women artists?”

Leyster wasn’t a great artist — not when compared to Rembrandt, Vermeer and other select contemporaries — but she was very, very good. And before her marriage to the painter Jan Miense Molenaer she managed to have an independent career, no small feat for a 17th-century woman.

After training with accomplished painters thought to include Frans Hals, Leyster earned membership in the prestigious Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem. The Dutch artist had her own workshop, her own students and her own style, one that combined the spontaneity of Hals’s brushwork with a Caravaggist chiaroscuro.

What happened next is a familiar story: She married, had children and painted less and less frequently. Her art, unlike her husband’s, fell off the radar. Many of her paintings were attributed to other artists and weren’t properly identified until the 1890s.

The National Gallery show, like Leyster’s brief career, is a bit of a tease. It includes just 10 of her paintings, orchestrated around a splendid self-portrait from the permanent collection. The rest is context: a smattering of work by contemporaries, as well as 17th-century musical instruments that relate to some of the images.

The exhibition was organized by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the museum’s curator of northern Baroque painting, in consultation with the Leyster scholar Frima Fox Hofrichter. It occupies the Dutch Cabinet Galleries, an intimate set of rooms intended to evoke period domestic interiors. This installation suits the generally modest scale of Leyster’s art, though the symbolism is unfortunate. (The galleries were carved out of storage space adjacent to the Rembrandts.)

read more

Judith Leyster's painting slide show

Aubrey V Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (August 21, 1872 – March 16, 1898) was an influential English artist, illustrator, and author. He was born in Brighton, England.

Beardsley was aligned with the Yellow Book coterie of artists and writers, and produced many illustrations for the magazine. He was also closely aligned with Aestheticism, the British counterpart to Decadence and Symbolism.

Most of his images are done in ink, and feature large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones, and areas of fine detail contrasted with areas with none at all.

Aubrey Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and the grotesque erotica, which themes he explored in his later work. His most famous erotic illustrations were on themes of history and mythology, including his illustrations for Lysistrata and Salomé.

Beardsley was a close friend of Oscar Wilde and illustrated his play Salomé in 1893 for its French release; it was released in English the following year. He also produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines (e.g. for a deluxe edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur) and worked for magazines like The Savoy and The Studio. Beardsley also wrote Under the Hill, an unfinished erotic tale based loosely on the legend of Tannhäuser.

Beardsley was also a caricaturist and even did some political cartoons, mirroring Wilde's irreverent wit in art. Beardsley's work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster Art Movement of the 1890s and the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists like Pape, Mucha and Clarke.

Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair."

Although Beardsley was aligned with the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and other English aesthetes, the details of Beardsley's sexuality remain in question. Speculation about the artist's sexuality include the rumors of an incestuous relationship with his elder sister, Mabel, who may have borne his miscarried child.

Beardsley died of tuberculosis in Menton, France at the age of 25 on March 16, 1898.

Alice Neel's Great Depression

Until June 20th, the New York City gallery Zwirner & Wirth has an art show collecting a series of nudes painted by Alice Neel during the Great Depression. One GalleyCat editor put together this short video about Neel, the Work Projects Administration (WPA), and New York writers in the 1930s--using actual WPA footage shot during the period.

Neel befriended numerous writers in the 1930s, including poet Kenneth Fearing and editor Malcolm Cowley, and the WPA created work for this group of artists. While Neel's official site provides an extensive biography, the book "Alice Neel: Paintings from the Thirties," edited by Wayne Koestenbaum, collects many of Neel's most gorgeous works from the Great Depression and the WPA.

After the Great Depression, hundreds of works of art--from state guidebooks to precious paintings--were literally scrapped. As we struggle through our own economic crisis, publishers are revisiting these lost artifacts. Garrett County Press recently republished the New Orleans City Guide written by WPA-contracted writers and in 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will mount a large Neel exhibit.


source: GallyCat
posted by Jason Boog

نقاشی و فروهر

اولین تجربه هائی که با رنگ،بوم و سه پایه داشتم با وجودپرستوفروهرآغازشد.حضورش،تحکمش، خنده های بی صدایش و زنانگی بی اندازه و بی زیورش به زودی جزئی جدائی نا پذیراز آتلیه نقاشی کنار زاینده رود شدند. دستهای پرستو ازهمان زمان که طبیعت بیجان را برایمان جا به جا میکرد یا دسته بزرگ و رنگارنگ گلهای وحشی را در کوزۀ سفالی قرار میداد، برایم بسیار پرمعنا بودند. حتی وقتی موضوعی را توضیح میداد از دستانش کمک میگرفت.فرم و حرکت دستهای او ازهمان روزهای اول در ذهنم به یک کلیشه تبدیل شد،کلیشه ای که لزوماً با اثر هنری ارتباطی تنگا تنگ داشت. کلامش تازه و شنیدنی بود و همین مسئله در عین حال که ما را تشنه تر میکرد به دستهای لرزانمان جهت می بخشید. جمله های منحصر به فردش قریب به ۲۰ سال است که هنگام خلق تک تک نقاشی هایم با من است، مثل «فقط نگاه نکن سعی کن رنگها را ببینی» و یا « این گلها بیش از حد گل شده اند.»

آن چنان به او خو گرفته بودیم که روز پایان ترم همه چشم گریان داشتیم. آن زمان گاهی از دو پسرکش میگفت و عکسشان را نشانمان میداد با کنجکاوی می پرسیدم مدتی که درتهران نیستید آنها با که میمانند؟ و او با حالتی که گویا میخواهد ازقدیسه ای واقعی صحبت کند چشمانش را به سقف میدوخت و می گفت: با مادرم، فرشته نجاتم، اوست که همیشه به دادم می رسد. آنچه مسلم بود اینکه رابطۀ او و پروانه فروهر رابطه ایست بس عمیق و صمیمانه. امروز در آستانۀ دهمین سالگرد پرپر شدن فرشته نجات او به همراه پدر بزرگوارش، پرستوی مهربان را می بینم که سیاهپوش با چهرۀ برغم نشسته چنان درسوگ آنها سخن میگوید گوئی درتمام این ده سال سر سوزنی از سوزش قلب داغ دیده اش کاسته نشده است و با همان صدای محکم وپرصلابتش، غمگنانه داد سخن سر میدهد، حال بعد از گذشت سالیان باز او می بینم. چشمها همان چشمهاست ولی سایه ی غمی سنگین روی آنها را پوشانده وقتی دستهایش را به حالت تمرکزجلوی صورتش می آورد باز همان کلیشه قدیمی در ذهنم جان می گیرد، دستهائی که روزی نقاشی ها یمان را با حرکاتش در فضا نقد و بررسی میکرد اکنون در حسرت به آغوش کشیدن بزرگان ازدست رفته اش گوئی بی جهت و سرگردانند. سخنانش، ظلمی که در حق او و سایربازماندگان فروهرها شده و درد سنگینی که بر دوش میکشد، همه و همه قلبم را فشرد.باز تاب این درد سنگین در آثار هنری پرستو آشکار است. آثارش به اندازۀ صدها کتاب حرف در بر دارد و من هر کدام را یک اثر هنری سهمگین می نامم پرستو فروهر یادگار این دو آزادۀ شادروان دردادخواهی از قتل های زنجیره ای همچنان پا بر جاست و به گفته ی خود او برای بر پائی مراسم بزرگداشت پیوسته پا فشاری خواهد کرد. کوچه مرادزاده و خانۀ پدری او آذر ماه هر سال با نور شمع مزین خواهد شد

.http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-474604886667294885 bakhshe awal (paris)
بزرگداشت فروهرها و دادخواهی قتل ها را در لینک بالا ببینید