CAMILLE CLAUDEL

Camille Claudel was a trained sculptor who became a student of Auguste Rodin and eventually his model and his lover.

After an abortion she broke off from a romantic association but stayed in his atelier for a while. Her life was difficult in many ways. She became erratic in her behavior and began destroying some of her work. Her paranoia eventually yielded to schizophrenia and she accused Rodin of stealing her ideas.

Paul Claudel, the poet, was her younger brother, but he was reluctant to help her.

The portrait above in marble was executed by one of Rodin’s technicians and when Rodin saw the technician about to add a collar to the bust, he stopped him and said that the bust was perfect as it was.

This sculpture was exhibited at the Rodin show in Montreal in 2015. Rodin did many portraits of Camille Claudel, but this seems to me to be the most evocative and touching.

Vera Brittain in Malta

The photograph above shows three nurses at St. George’s Hospital in Malta. Vera Brittain is the nurse on the right.

The recent film, Testament of Youth, based on the memoir of youth and warby Vera Brittain, one of the foremost feminists of the years between World War I and World War II, left off one of the most important periods of her service as a nurse during the war in 1917.

The film, excellent as it is in many ways, neglected to explore the last year of her service, which was not in England, but in Malta, where she served as a nurse in St. George’s Hospital, one of seven British hospitals on the island.

Her journal records her time there as having been more relaxed and more socially amenable than at any earlier time or place. Most of the patients were convalescent, so Vera and other nurses had time to play tennis in the afternoon and to socialize with the officers afterward. But it was not all a period of bliss. She had news of her brother’s death before she came to Malta, and then of her fiance’s death while there. She sat on the stones over the water in Draguenara for most of the day after she learned of Geoffrey’s death. The war was a monstrous episode in her life, and her years of writing afterward were a testament to her resilience and her profound life spirit.

Circles: The Mystery of the Nude

“Circles,” (New Britain Museum, 1928) by Polly Ethel Thayer (1904-2006)

“Circles” won a major prize, establishing her career as a painter when she was 24.  Known for her very skillful portraits, Polly Ethel Thayer lived to be a hundred-one years old.

But this is very different from the portrayals of Bostonian women in the 1920s. It is a mysterious painting with a powerful shape and form that take advantage of the contrast of the high-key nude with the dark brooding qualities of the drapery–as well as with the darkness of the room itself.

The circles of the title are implied throughout. That the circles are incomplete is central to the significance of the painting. From a distance the nude and her white drapery mimic the shape of a waxing moon, an echo of the feminine metaphors of the moon prevalent throughout classical imagery and classical literature.

The nude is cushioned on the right with a dark drapery which, mysteriously,  protects her. Her body, from her right hand to her left foot, cuts a brazen diagonal across the canvas–a diagonal of brilliant high-key flesh suggestive of the great nudes of the post-impressionists. But this nude is virtually academic in detail and realization. Because the dominant painting styles of the great Europeans of the age were the antithesis of academic, Polly Ethel Thayer (her married name was Starr) remained a local genius.

This nude shows how a woman–rather than a man of the age–could capture a woman’s mystery and create a sense of profound significance transcending the erotic, avoiding the maternal, all while implying a cosmic feminine life force that defies the dark.

Michelangelo, a Captive

One of the celebrated Captives, or Prisoners, originally intended for Pope Julius's tomb, but never finished.

I found this in Florence in a darkened space -- perhaps it was late in the day -- but dark nevertheless and my camera barely made it out. The impact of this and the others nearby is pretty powerful in part because these are so large and imposing in their tight spaces. But even more amazing is the feeling one gets from seeing the image seeming to emerge suddenly from the stone. Sculptors have a way of seeing and feeling that is different from mine. 

On the page, watching a line take shape and eventuallly reveal a figure is one thing; but discovering a three dimensional figure emerge from a solid block of stone is quite different. It may be magic or simply imagination -- and quite clearly those are cognate words.

I see this now as having a power similar to the great Roman and Greek ruins. Most great classic sculpture is unthinkable as a complete figure. The missing arms, the broken toes, the absent head all seem part of the design rather than a disfigurement. It is what we are used to, and we have imaginatively accounted for the missing elements.

Here, this Captive is a tribute to the incomplete. It seems so much like our own efforts, sometimes impossible to finish, always impossible to perfect. 

Graffiti as Art

Graffiti as Art    

Graffiti is public art when it speaks to us in mysterious ways.

These patterned young women with their deep sea diver heads showed up on a wall in Prague. They represented a mystery then and continue to do so now. Each holds a small packet with the letters MRP prominently visible. 

It seems that the reference is to a brand of Tarot cards, which adds to the mystery. I have found this image to be endlessly fascinating because it has a visual distinction rarely seen on wall paintings in the street. The colors are powerful. Each individual figure is strong in her casual but assured stance.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me is the repetition of the figures. This repetition implies a visual rhetoric similar to what is called ploce in poetry, a rhetorical figure that informs literature from classic times to the present. By repeating words, fragments, rhymes, and images, the artist magnifies the effect in immeasurable ways, whether in literature or visual art.

These five figures – literally a handful of figures – stand ready to engage the viewer in an aesthetic contract whose terms are inchoate, but visually palpable.