Buddha's Army — Part One

The surprising discovery early this year of about 3000 Buddha figures buried in a riverbed in Hebei Province will be a source of fascination to anyone interested in East Asian Buddhist iconography and archaeology. This photo which accompanied an article about the find in the National Geographic Daily News from April 12 might represent the future Maitreya Buddha in a traditional contemplative posture as he cogitates upon ways to assist mankind in its restless quest for  enlightenment:

This sculpture is technically sophisticated enough to have originated in the Tang period, yet the theme is as old as Northern Wei, and the gesture universal in appearance, even if  considerably less agonized than Rodin's grunting thinkers.

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St Gotthard Pass

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While doing some research recently for my grad seminar at Berkeley I was looking at a biography of the 10th c. German bishop St Gotthard (Vita S. Godehardi). This put me in mind of crossing the St Gotthard Pass in Switzerland, which is approached by an awfully high bridge. The latest of several versions was built in 1977 and looks like this:

 Source: Wikicommons

The modern bridge was built over the gorge in the same spot as its 12th c. counterpart, and I was wondering how on earth medieval travellers managed to span the roaring waters in the gorge below.

The answer is shown by the German painter Carl Blechen, who shows how the bridge of 1833 was simply built on top of its medieval predecessor:

Building the St. Gotthard Teufelsbrücke, Carl Blechen, ca 1833

Then apparently the medieval version was simply removed, and the new one after time became the base for ever higher constructions moving up the sides of the gorge.

German Wiki, artist's name not given

I still have no idea why this mountain pass leading from Switzerland to Italy is named after St Gotthard; apparently there was a hospice on top run by some monks who perhaps were devoted to this bishop from far-off Hildesheim in Germany.

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Valentin's concert

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Valentin de Boulogne: The Concert, 1622-25

As a species of Italian baroque genre paintings, Roman tavern scenes are pretty much straightforward—boozers, card-cheats, pickpockets, loose women and the like. Valentin’s shot at Caravaggism however is totally mysterious.

Five musicians are gathered around a half-eaten meat pie which sits upon on a large chunk of funerary sculpture from antiquity. The violist and tenor at the left need a part book for the melody and words of the song. The child, and the guitarist and lutenist don’t need one; most Renaissance instrumentalists could improvise very capably.

In the foreground a young soldier fills another glass while a woman in the background chug-a-lugs a whole bottle. The three musicians on the right look up toward the viewer, as if responding to a  photographer who had come in to the room and asked to take their picture.

The picture suggests an allegory of some sort, but what does it really mean? If we knew what song or chanson they were singing, perhaps it would make sense to us. But we don’t, and so we must imagine the music for ourselves.

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London is still swinging

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The streets of East London may have been filled with riot and mayhem last week, but those participating will have performed their brief insurgency before the some of the finest street art in the world.

Spitalfields Life brings us an informative essay on the work of Malarky, who has his own blog elsewhere.

One of Banksy's most photographed creations is found in the same neighborhood, not to mention the elaborate animal portraits of Roa, which cover entire sides of buildings.

thanks flickr users bulent_yusu and londonstreetphoto; disclaimer.

From back in the days of unprocessed food...

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Luis Meléndez: Still Life with Beef, Bowl of Ham and Vegetables, and Receptacles, c. 1772

Nobody, but absolutely nobody, painted food as brilliantly as Luis Meléndez (Spanish, 1715-1780). His self-portrait from 1746 indicates that he had other things on his mind as well.

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Summer 101

Henri Matisse: Bonheur

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Summer 102

Ludwig von Hoffman (1861-1945):  Adam in paradisical landscape, detail.

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In the grand scheme

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Mike Davis, In the Grand Scheme

This painting by San Francisco artist Mike Davis reminds me strongly of the current budget debate in Washington. 

More Mike Davis at SF Bay Arts, where the debt ceiling is always unlimited.

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In the cave of forgotten dreams

Chauvet Caves:  Four horses with fighting rhinos

Acting on an enthusiastic recommendation from Francesca Rosa I went with Bruce Boone to see the excellent Werner Herzog film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a remarkable excursion through the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, which contain the oldest pictures in human history. The 3-D presentation was flawless and in fact completely necessary to show how the rock art images merged plastically into the shifting planes of the limestone walls of the cave. Herzog also left plenty of time for the viewer to simply gaze at the works themselves without acoustic intervention, returning to the same images from time to time seen from different perspectives.

The film was in every sense of the word an anabasis into the collective unconscious of humankind, down to the ancient-most layer of our own species-memory that we can access. Why did these cave artists portray animals and not trees and flowers, or geographical features like mountains and rivers, or other humans? Were they interested only in imaging the food supply in motion, or did they understand themselves as part of an animal spirit-world, and the creatures as fellow beings in the commonly-shared ancestral environment?

Assuming that the human population in the Upper Paleolithic in Europe was tiny, and the variety and number of animals running around as dense apparently as on the plains of Africa, the engagement with them must have been extremely intense. Perhaps the fact that the animals are almost always pictured in profile from their sides, in the way we would photograph grazing animals today, demonstrates the angle at which they were also able to be hunted—you don’t see their faces shown head-on, which would permit you to make eye-contact and get personal with them.

A brief excursus was made into the well-known, chubby Paleolithic female figures categorized as “Venuses” and given the common interpretation that these symbolize fecundity. I remain skeptical, remembering that Hawaiian and Polynesian royalty were once esteemed according to their body-weight, and that obesity functioned socially as a Schönheitsideal. Perhaps when food is scarce or difficult to obtain, body fat becomes desirable.

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More pictures of the Chauvet caves at the Bradford Foundation website. 

ΝΕΑΝΙΑΣ

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Kanellopoulos Museum, Athens -- Boetian, 5th-6th c.BCE

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Hotel noir

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Readers will be happy to learn that I have selected the firm of Zaha Hadid Architects to design my forthcoming chain of hotels.

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The Lord of Evil returns

I'm not so much on silent movies - a lack of patience on my part, I suppose - but I'm fascinated with the original Fantomas films, some of which are now available in high quality restoration on YouTube, as for example:



Inspector Juve's pursuit of Fantomas is of course doomed to failure. You know that he'll never succeed when in the opening sequence F. puts on his executioner's hood, which he'll use to good effect when he submerges himself in a huge vat of vin rouge after chucking a 20-ft python into the Inspector's sleeping chamber.

But the chase itself, which proceeds quite leisurely and with great attention to detail, takes you through the streets of Paris and places you into some fascinating Belle Epoque venues and contemporary interiors.

What better way to prepare for the several centenary events commemorating the first appearance of the Lord of Evil presented  this week in San Francisco by City Lights Bookstore.

I downloaded the ebook for the Juve vs. Fantomas novel off Amazon.com for only ninety-nine cents.

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Dennis Martin's remarkable silverpoint drawing

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Dennis Martin: Deanna XXVI

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Suze Rotolo's art books

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susan rotolo: august (2005) --  medialiagallery, nyc

Thanks to a post on Silliman’s Blog today, I found my way to a display of Suze Rotolo’s beautiful art books at a New York gallery. They are self-enclosed little worlds, and they remind of the movie Prospero's Books.

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Nancy Ewart's watercolors

San Francisco artist and critic Nancy Ewart posted some beautiful watercolors this weekend at Chez Namaste Nancy.

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The Godescalc Gospels

I've been researching illuminated Carolingian manuscripts lately, and I came across these lovely pictures of the Godescalc Gospels, named after the Frankish scribe responsible. There are five illuminations which were created in the scriptorium in or near Charlemagne's palace at Aachen between 781-783 AD.

A youthful Christ is shown with brown long hair, common also for early Anglo-Saxon portraits. For the Franks, the hair style may have recalled ancient royalty, since the first Merovingian kings were known  for wearing their hair long.

The panel to the left which prefaces a coppery page of scripture shows the "Fountain of Life," from which all creation springs forth. Behind the encircling pillars you have to imagine a round fountain of spring water.

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Hymn to the Perfection of Wisdom

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Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom, the lovely, the holy.

The Perfection of Wisdom gives light.

Unstained, the entire world cannot stain her. 

She is the source of light, and from everyone 

      in the triple world she removes darkness. 

Most excellent are her works.

She brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken, 

      and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion.

She herself is an organ of vision.

She has a clear knowledge of the own-being of all dharmas,

      for she does not stray away from it.

The Perfection of Wisdom of the Buddhas sets in motion 

      the Wheel of Dharma.

Painting by Peter Adams, American Legacy Fine Arts, Pasadena.

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Architecture as ice-cream

How marvelous it must be to come home each night to the Hundertwasser Haus in Magdeburg, designed by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser, (1928-2000).

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Photos: Wiki Commons "Friedensreich Hundertwasser"

Nancy Ewart's paintings

Visting Open Studios in San Francisco is one of the periodic pleasures of life in San Francisco: you can get to see more contemporary artworks in the course of a weekend in October or May than you can see anywhere else in town, plus which those of us on a fixed weekend can avoid the usual museum entry fees.

After visiting a small coven of artists at 689 Bryant this month, to my great surprise I came home with a painting, actually a collage which you can't see from the photo, entitled Black Sun, White Line:

The artist is Nancy Ewart, who writes an art column for the S.F. Examiner and who also writes her own art blog called ChezNamasteNancy. If you want to know what's going on around town for art shows, museum exhibitions and gallery events, these are the sites to visit.

Nancy is also a very talented painter, and shows regularly at Open Studios. Concerning her erratic career as an artist, (and whose isn't), she writes:

I came here in the 60's to study art (at the SFAI) but I always knew that I couldn't do it full time. I've always painted, done calligraphy, make small books and written. For a while, I even wrote an astrology column and read tarot cards,  but I had to make my living in other ways. For years, I worked for small presses/small newspapers, all the alternate media that SF used to have.

When that dried up, I went to work for UCSF. I got a history degree along the way and did a couple of years work toward an MBA but had to stop, due to the cutbacks in funding for higher education and the demands of my job.I retired a few years ago after 30 years in the salt mines and every day since then has been an exciting adventure. When I retired, I thought I would finish off that long-delayed second (third?) degree but the twists and unexpected turns of this stage of life have meant that I've changed my plans  - often and without regret. I paint more and have started a career in arts journalism, covering all the arts and museums in the Bay Area and sometimes beyond that my energy, interests and time will allow.

Concerning my new acquisition pictured above, she emailed me as follows:

The piece that you have was inspired by the NASA website which I look at every day. I love the images of the cosmos which are both graphically beautiful and scientifically fascinating. It's amazing to think about the wonders of the universe and I can't wrap my mind around the billions of galaxies that are out there. When I make art based on cosmic images, I prefer to use strong graphic shapes and bold colors; otherwise, it can be an amorphous mess. I also like to use layers of mixed media; "Black Sun, White Line" was painted on hand made paper, textured with several types of gel medium including my favorite one which contains pumice stone. Paint and oil pastel rubbed into that surface creates the most amazing textures and while it's not anywhere near the awesome wonder of the universe, it gave me great joy to make.

Nancy's paintings show in my mind perception an almost unique way of thinking about color, as you can judge for yourself  in this picture entitled Number 8:

Nancy is currently working on a series of paintings which she as she says are "based on images of the Elgin Marbles - sculpture from Ancient Greece which is the foundation stone of our culture." You can see them yourself right here.

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Jan van Goyen's skies

Watching the marvelous documentary film Dutch Light,* which explores the distinct atmospheric glow shown in paintings by 17th-century Dutch masters, has given me a new frame of reference for looking at their landscape paintings.

Take for example Jan van Gruyen's Landscape with Two Oaks, painted in 1641:

The realism of most Dutch paintings usually doesn't afford much opportunity for thematic interpretation, but this one presents quite a mystery. What have the three men been doing, are they travelers, or have they been out gathering edibles in their sacks? Have two of them paused to rest, or has one perhaps hurt his foot, while the third marches down the hill, in a hurry to get back to town before the gathering storm breaks? Do the two oaks, towering ominously over the two men in the foreground, have a symbolic meaning?

One doesn't often need to ask questions like this about Dutch paintings of the period; "What's going on here?" is not a common issue. One thing however is totally obvious: the lowering sky dominates the painting and threatens all that lies below it: the earth, the three men, the town in the distance, even the monumental presence of the broken, towering oak trees.

A less direful, but nonetheless commanding sky, radiant with "Dutch light," is shown in van Groyen's View of Dordrecht, 1644, one his favorite landscape subjects:

Known as the oldest city in (the county of) Holland, different waterways meet to flow into the North Sea at Dordrecht, where clouds continually sweep in from the west. Here the working men do the things they do in places where the land becomes water and joins with the overwhelming sky. The cathedral church is an anchor point between both; it remains in place there to this day, as does the Dutch light.



*The documentary film Dutch Light (2003) is available at Netflix.