is lassitude a deadly sin?

Since I've been thinking about the Seven Deadly Sins, you can imagine what I thought when I saw "Woman Lying on her Back: Lassitude" by Toulouse-Lautrec (Musée d'Orsay) in the "Easy Virtue" show at the Van Gogh Museum:

Is lassitude a deadly sin?

Ship of Fools plus Allegory of Intemperance

The Ship of Fools is one of Bosch's more famous works. It was part of a triptych, now dismantled, and is now in the Louvre. One time when I was there, as I waited for a chance to look at the Madonna of Chancellor Rolin by Jan van Eyck which was being monopolized by a large group, I kept going back to look at the Ship.

The composition of the fragment is pyramidal which feels more Renaissance than many of Bosch's paintings that are more like a carpet, flattened in a medieval way. The Ship is the upper part of the left panel.

The lower part of the panel is now in the Yale University Art Gallery and is called An Allegory of Intemperance. The triptych probably represented the Seven Deadly Sins with greed or miserliness on the right panel, now in the National Gallery of Art as Death and the Miser.

Here, the composition is not so centralized as the Ship, feeling more like the fields of cavorting individuals and monsters that are usually associated with Bosch. And it feels like a fragment. I was thrilled to see it in New Haven a few years ago but didn't think about how it fit together with the other fragments.

Because the two parts of this panel were separated a long time ago, they have aged differently. They were displayed together, without frames, in the Bosch show in Den Bosch. The cut between the Ship and Allegory is clear. Together, the composition is much flatter. This was the most compelling moment of surprise, for me, in the Bosch exhibition. There is a picture of the reconstruction, with the right wing, on the Wikipedia page for the Ship:

The Ship has now become part of a larger composition, rather than feeling independent as it does as a fragment. This was a revelation for me, a delightful revelation.

Though tickets for the last couple weeks of the show were pretty much sold out online, some day tickets were available on site. I did go to Den Bosch on Saturday even though my ticket was for Sunday night. A day ticket for Saturday at 6 pm was available so I got to go through the exhibition twice.

back and forth ... and finally on my way

It was probably a year ago when I first heard about the major retrospective exhibition of works by Hieronymus Bosch at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch in celebration of the 500th anniversary of his death. This is also a centennial year for Shakespeare and Cervantes, both died in 1616. A recent article in the Times about the two authors did not mention that it was also Bosch's year.

I decided that I just HAD to go to see the exhibition. Then I started reading about it and the anticipated crowds and I thought "no way, I hate retrospectives." I saw a list of paintings and realized that I'd seen all of them at least once in their respective collections except for one in Lisbon and I want to go there. So I thought I didn't need to go though I still wish I'd been to the Ottonian show in Hamburg many years ago. Then I read about the restoration of many of the paintings, partly funded by the Getty, and that a number of diptychs, triptychs, and altarpieces would be on view together though they are held in different collections. So I was back on for the show and got a flight late in March.

Then this spring didn't work out the way I expected because of Mohs surgery and reconstruction which meant I couldn't go in late March. I was able to get a new flight and accommodations reservations for late April without losing too much money though it took more frequent-flyer miles on American.

So now it's April 26th. I'm at the Rochester airport waiting for my flight to Boston. There, I'll transfer to a British Airways flight to Heathrow. Then, take the Tube and Docklands Light Rail to London City Airport for the flight to Amsterdam. By the time I could order an exhibition ticket, only late evening tickets (10 pm and 11 pm) were available. Most of the hotels in Den Bosch were full on May 1st but I did find a 3rd-floor room at the Hotel Terminus, near the train station. Since my viewing will be on May 1st, I plan on working on some Marxist interpretations of the Bosch paintings. No, not really.

With the London airport switcheroo, the late ticket for the show, and trouble finding a room in Den Bosch, I have been pretty anxious about this trip (and I'm probably still feeling a bit overwhelmed by the surgery and treatment which meant missing the ARLIS/NA-VRA conference for the first time since 1973). But now, here I am, at the airport, and the adrenalin is starting to kick in. I'm hoping it doesn't keep me up overnight since London will need attention. And, on top, it is King's Day tomorrow in the Netherlands so I have to do a workaround to get to the apartment where I'm staying in Amsterdam. The Central Station is closed for the holiday and public transit will not be running in the center of town. I'm thankful to the fellow whose apartment I'm staying at for letting me know and how to work around via South Station and a different bus.

(picture from "Jheronimus Bosch 2016" About page; the file is named vrijstandd1.jpg - "free-standing")

how do you get back to "normal"?

After about five weeks with four rounds of surgery involving local or general anaesthesia, how do you get back to "normal"? You are accustomed to the doctors and nurses having control of what the next day(s) will bring. You can only plan maybe a couple-three days out with any assurance. In mid-February, just after the College Art annual conference in Washington, D.C., it seemed like I would have a few weeks at home and then head off to Seattle for the joint ARLIS/NA-VRA conference, followed ten days later by heading to the Netherlands to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death by seeing the major retrospective at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch. The next two older blog posts give more detail of those plans.

Being in the midst of the surgeries made "recovery" seem like something in the future. I still had surgery on the horizon and recovery is for healing after treatment. Today I began to feel like I was entering that recovery phase and, strangely, it was unsettling. The secure, scary, uncomfortable momentum of waiting to hear what your caregivers needed to do next is replaced by the realization that real life has to recommence, those income taxes need to be filed, the Avery indexing and Scholes Library hours need to be re-established, real meals rather than grazing. No using the surgery or bandages as an excuse. Of course, part of you desperately wants to get back to normal.

I have been incredibly lucky in the whole process that my basic mobility (that is, movement of arms and legs) is not restricted and I've had very little pain. I just look like a Mack truck drove over my face. So tomorrow I'll go on my "normal" morning walk around the three-mile loop in Alfred, come back to the house, have some breakfast, maybe work on my income taxes, etc. We can do this .... I hope. And dream of Bosch.

Bosch: St John the Baptist

(Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid)
(Google Art Project / Wikimedia Commons)

(my current bookmark is a detail of this painting)

carrying on .... and on

The last ten days have been pretty intense. The second round of surgery, to move the flap from my forehead onto my nose, happened last Thursday (March 3rd, my dad's birthday). It rather zonked me out. Dr Quatela and others checked me on Friday morning and left me in the caring and knowing hands of nurse practitioner Julie Chatt while Dr Quatela went on a long-scheduled trip to work with children in Vietnam (HUGS Foundation). Julie has been re-dressing the wounds every day. I mostly feel up to doing things but the bandages between my eyes make it somewhat hard to focus on text, either printed or online. It's a little like the Vaseline that cinematographers use on lenses to soften the age lines (or sexy bits) in movies.

I won't know for sure when the third round of surgery, to remove the bridge supporting the patch on my nose, is going to happen but it is likely to happen within a week of Dr Quatela's return next Wednesday. That being the case, there is no way that I can imagine being ready to travel to the Netherlands for the Bosch show on March 23rd. So I've rebooked my flight for later April. The show closes on May 8th. Many of the works will then be in a similar show at the Prado in Madrid. I think I still prefer my other Plan B for missing the show in the Netherlands: going to all of the home collections of the paintings and drawings. Road trip! (with a bit of flying)

I've been staying with Rachel in Rochester and there's a Bosch electric box in the basement of the big old house that her apartment is in.

We're both used to living alone so we're working on not becoming some scenes from a Bosch ..... whatever? Hell mouth? Last Judgment? Ship of Fools?

medical selfies

When I posted a Bosch picture as a diptych with a picture of the current round of Mohs surgery for removal of skin cancer on my nose and reconstruction, the art librarian at Vassar College -- Thomas Hill -- speculated that "hospital selfies -- they seem to constitute a new and serious form of portraiture. I hate to look at mine, but I can't help wondering if they serve over time as trauma therapy."

I hope you'll forgive my using blog entries as more trauma therapy. The good part of the report is that I'm not in much physical pain.

This round of surgeries was originally scheduled in January and would probably not have conflicted with the joint ARLIS/NA + VRA conference in Seattle which is scheduled for March 8-12. And I've been dreaming of getting to the Bosch exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, since I first heard about it. This is the 500th year since Bosch died (1516). The progress of the surgery is dependent of the doctor's schedule and on the healing of the flap of skin which will be the new right exterior of my nose. Very much, one step at a time.

This morning's visit to the doctor involved removing the stitches on my forehead and replacement with steri-strips. Quite a lovely pattern:

One feels a weird mix of self-involved and over-exposed when you talk about these things on Facebook or in a personal blog entry but there's that other therapy: the simple "likes" and expressions of support and concern that mean an awful lot, especially when you're not at home and feeling rather adrift.

So it's a bit after 1 pm and there's a lecture at Eastman School by JoAnn Falletta, the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. The plastic surgeon's office is on East Avenue near the Eastman House. I'm staying with Rachel Stuhlman who lives next door. The lecture is downtown and I'm looking forward to the walk downtown, probably about a mile.

separated at birth: suburban life

Top photo: Paul Cadmus, Aspects of Suburban Life, seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, February 2016. cf http://shermaniablog.blogspot.com/2016/02/cadmus-berry-sonsini.html

Bottom photo: "Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the prominent black psychologist, scholar and educator, at home in the predominantly white New York suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson" cf http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/national/unpublished-black-history/kenneth-clark-at-home (part of the Times photo history for Black History Month)

Neither suburban existence was part of my growing up.

Cadmus, Getsy, Berry, Sonsini

Last week was the annual conference of the College Art Association in Washington. The conference hotel, the Marriott Wardman Park, was pretty far from the museums so I didn't get in much galleryhopping, just a quick visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum which shares its building with the National Portrait Gallery. There, I saw three paintings by Paul Cadmus entitled "Aspects of Suburban Life." Some suburb I've never been to. The paintings were transferred from the Department of State.

At the hotel, I saw David Getsy several times and did a fly-by greeting as we passed in the hallway. I was pretty excited that his new volume entitled Queer, in the Documents of contemporary art series co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, was available at the MIT Press booth.

Last night at the library, I was looking at the February issue of Art in America and the "Sightlines" column was a selection of things that are inspiring Ian Berry at the moment. One of them was David Getsy's new book Abstract bodies. Berry says the essay on Nancy Grossman "should be required reading for anyone looking at and thinking about contemporary sculpture." Berry is the director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. He and the museum do the finest shows.

There was also an advertisement for a John Sonsini show at the Ameringer McEnery Yohe gallery in New York City. Sonsini hails from Los Angeles and paints wonderful portraits of Latino day laborers. The exhibition catalog is available online via issu.com and includes essays by Ian Berry, Jeffrey D. Grove, and Allan M. Jalon. The name Allan Jalon seemed very familiar and then I remembered that I ran into him at Anton Kern gallery in New York City when I lived there, in late 2002. Allan used some of my comments in an article on Matt Mullican that he wrote for the Los Angeles times. It's such a small world, except when it's huge.

This is a Sonsini portrait from the Ameringer McEnery Yohe artist page.

maker, thinker, viewer

Julian Stair, potter, gave a compelling and thought-provoking talk on Tuesday night here at Alfred. He decided, early on, that he would call himself a potter rather than a ceramicist or ceramic artist. He did admit that he might have picked "maker" but it wasn't invented yet as a descriptive term for artist. The picture above is from his website. I liked that he considered something like this as one work with five pieces. He talked about the plinth as working like a frame for a painting.

But then he dismissed conceptual art because all art has a concept. I started gallery- and museum-hopping in the 1960s so conceptual art has long been part of my world. How could he? Back to the maker business, can a maker do conceptual art? Must a maker make some thing? Can a maker do social practice?

Those thoughts filled my head for quite a while after the talk and I was glad to run into Michelle Illuminato and Laurel Jay Carpenter at the Collegiate. They can probably say maker, conceptual art, performance art, and social practice in the same sentence and not have a problem. Thursdays are one of my work days at the ceramics library so I was upstairs, looking at the current art journals and noticed the title "Conceptual art and the acquaintance principle" in the summer 2015 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, by Louise Hanson. I hadn't heard of the acquaintance principle, the coining of which is credited to Richard Wollheim. "Judgments of aesthetic value, unlike judgments of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissable from one person to another." (from his Art and its objects, 1980, p. 233)

So it's back to objects. Things. Makers. Winckelmann said to Clérisseau: Write as much as possible in the presence of the actual object and return to it if you have second thoughts. (quoted in Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 62) Kind of the acquaintance principle, applied to you and yourself.

Just a couple days ago, a good friend was describing a wonderful moonrise she'd seen the night before. She went on and on. On one hand, you indeed had to be there; on the other, I have often been dumbstruck by a view of the moon and don't mind reliving such an experience while an acquaintance is carrying on about her moonrise view.

Caspar David Friedrich

Northern Sea in the Moonlight

60º on Christmas

So what do you do when it's 60º or thereabouts on Christmas Day, you're in New York City but the museums are all closed, it's cloudy but not raining now, your "supper" reservation is for 4:30 p.m. but it's only 9:30 a.m.? You go for a long walk. I noticed that Gates Avenue ran from near John's where I'm staying all the way from Queens into Brooklyn and Gates met Fulton Street near the Brooklyn Academy of Music. So Christie and I decided to start from our ends of Gates and we'd meet in the middle.

When I got to the corner of Gates and Bushwick, I found two incredible buildings: one a Masonic temple; the other was probably a villa and is now the Iglesia de Cristo Misionera, Inc.

Thank heavens for the Internet and the ease of searching and the wealth of information (right or wrong).

The Ridgewood Masonic Temple, aka Ridgewood Lodge No. 710, Free and Accepted Masons, was designed by Koch and Wagner, completed in 1920, and declared a city landmark in 2014. Currently unoccupied.

According to a photo on Flickr, the "villa" was the Eastern District Turn Verein, designed by Theobald Engelhardt and built in 1902. It was built as an extension to the Italianate Tuttle Mansion which has been demolished. Bushwiki has somewhat different, but rather more, information.

The Iglesia de Cristo Misionera is now closed so both of these buildings are sitting vacant. They do make for a lovely sight and I hope they find new uses.

After Christie and I met, we took the B52 bus down Gates toward BAM and had brunch at The Quarter at 87 Lafayette (in the space formerly occupied by Stonehome Wine Bar). The restaurant had only been open for 12 days so it wasn't crowded, and it WAS Christmas. Our brunch was very nice. Then we walked over to Janet's, where Christie is staying, took Riley for a walk, and then left for our 4:30 appointment at Bacchus Bistro on Atlantic Avenue. Adele beat us to the restaurant and it had started raining. Our supper was very tasty as was the wine: Altitudes Côte de Roussillon. The cute and scruffy waiter with the French accent (he may have been Algerian or Moroccan by background so I was feeling very ecumenical) stole my heart and he could say "Roussillon" a hundred times and I'd say "une fois de plus s'il-vous plaît" (one more time, please). Merci.