Arts and Exhibitions

[madupont]

I almost included that portrait - Diego and Me.

Thanks for the info, that  right-hand tall object is a stamper.

My definition of a Golem resides in Isaac Bashevis Singer, who arrived in the U.S. from Poland just before the invasion of Poland. It is distressful when you learn that he left his brother behind in Warsaw because he could not convince him now was the time to leave.

Yet he founded the Yiddish newspaper in New York City; and that factor suggests it somehow discredits his lack of ability to persuade his brother to leave.

As the author however of extensive Hasidic folk tale short-stories that are sometimes rather alarming when you first read them (Many more conservative Jews are shocked at the content and then take it so far as to  discredit Hasidism. That too is a denial; of their immediate ancestors, if they happen to come from that part of the European continent. Poland, Lithuania,Latvia, Ukraine, Russia,etc.) I have to accept his definitive explanation of  "what's a Golem?" as a man-made sin against the injunction/commandment forbidding idolatry or setting a substitute god before  The Lord Thy God, in the first commandment.

And that's probably because I was able to hear Singer speak at length, after I had read many of his stories when first encountering them following Hebrew classes(none of which I remember at this late day almost fifty years later; well, at least 45!) and as a result  having access to a specialized library at the local Jewish Community Center where I would usually go to read at least one day a week and becoming aware of a then little known topic in the gentile world: the many women who had fought the system of consigned role play. Not to be more free in the usual sense, from our viewpoint today; but rather to have the specific freedom to worship, study, and speak with the same authority as Jewish men.

It should therefore come as no surprise, that one of the best and most amusing descriptions, adventures, or stories about the existence of Golem ( I even forget how to to pluralize that word) comes from a woman who is probably as well known today in her own right/write, as Singer, and that is Cynthia Ozick who is a very amusing writer from a woman's view point.

Probably because of her sense of humor, the Golem made of mud, or earth and various junk you have laying around who is enlivened by particular  Kabbalistic spells seems less threatening and probably why I referred to the depiction, of the life-consuming fiery furnace god of the  less life-affirming opposition  which Abraham abjured, as Baal  in the sense that Berthold Brecht would write a play about Baal in those same years when Diego and Frida were dealing with their  own context.

I don't suppose Diego was a Jew, but Frida could have told him.  There was a reason in those years and before why her father was preferably not referred to as a Jew but as a Lutheran (in that case, probably not from Hungary).  I think the point was the onus of being described as an Austro-Hungarian when it was conventionally accepted that the first World War began because of the Jewish assassin who had thrown a bomb at the emperor's carriage.

Nevertheless, when I said that I've known women from dual cultural backgrounds who were like Frida in character and personality, two stand out as having a Jewish component in  their family background. One was Lucienne Moreau who left with  her parents ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht arrival  in Paris and became refugees on the roads South to Nice where they awaited passage to Algeria. Another was  also like Frida both Mexican and Jewish but add some Chinese to the mix and a few other things who told me her forebears arrived in Mexico as
Marranos.

These women had very much the same features; with the exception -- no monobrow.   Fully developed eyebrows, yes; kind of like Elizabeth Taylor at the height of her  femme fatale film making. No affected brow statement however , like Frida's poses with her pet monkey.

[madupont]

re:#161

Many of her paintings seems to convey the idea of duality.   Old, new.  Male, female.   Spiritual, earthbound.   Add to that the of oneness/duality in her relationship with Diego.   You see it at play in this work from 1944, Diego and Me:


It is axiomatic in Meso-American view of the cosmos: duality and how it functions.  I felt it more strongly in another painting of hers that emphasizes that landscape and natural celestial phenomena. But I'd have to go through the batch again to identify it positively because she had so often repeated the thematic with slighting altered emphasis.

What seems obvious is the interplay of the moon and sun as causative of everything.  So, she sometime paints dramatically, the smaller moon in a different perspective from the sun, if may show up in one of her variations of The Two Fridas, in which you suspect one is the mother of the other.  Yet again , it will be two different aspects of Frida, as she dresses them  in the same variation that little girls enjoy with dolls as projections of themselves.

However in one she depicts the two planets with blood red lightening in between and you catch the message of conception vs the aborting of the products of conception are both celestially determined by the position of the planetary motion.

[madupont]

I did, however, in regard to the Ford Murals,feel that several sections reveal a small comment on the part of Diego that is very large indeed and must have offended Frida deeply.

Particularly, the robust, fully developed, one might say over-developed neonate in utero that shows up like a keystone.  That indicates to me, at this point they were fighting about their direction, about their relationship.

(and, as I said before, there is the fecund brown girl with fruit.)    It is like they are having a paint-fight. His making public comment via art  that she is unable to give him their child.

Of course, one could justify an interpretation that he is graciously telling his patrons that they ARE blessed with a new advancement of civilization that has borne fruit and that there will be a very fruitful future in this success(?)

[Lhoffman]

I did, however, in regard to the Ford Murals,feel that several sections reveal a small comment on the part of Diego that is very large indeed and must have offended Frida deeply.

Particularly, the robust, fully developed, one might say over-developed neonate in utero that shows up like a keystone.  That indicates to me, at this point they were fighting about their direction, about their relationship.

(and, as I said before, there is the fecund brown girl with fruit.)    It is like they are having a paint-fight. His making public comment via art  that she is unable to give him their child.

Of course, one could justify an interpretation that he is graciously telling his patrons that they ARE blessed with a new advancement of civilization that has borne fruit and that there will be a very fruitful future in this success(?)

Offense taken by Frida...I've wondered that, too.  On the surface of it, this part of the work seems insensitive in the least.   And you begin to understand that Diego was all about the work.   He continued to work on his murals at the Palacio Nacionale in Mexico City when the government outlawed communism, an act that got him kicked out of the Communist Party.  He continued to work when Frida was hospitalized for miscarriage, and shortly after when her mother died and Frida returned to Mexico to bury her.  (He sent his assistants to be with her.)   He continued to work in NYC even when it became apparent that his mural would be destroyed.   There may have been anger and offense taken that he was driven by his art.   And she would have been both a part of this and apart from it.

The other side of this as related to the panels of the fertile women and the robust fetus:   These images are opposite the main entrance of the court.   There is almost the feeling of entering a temple.   The women are based on seventh century terra-cotta statuettes that were part of Rivera's collection.   The fetus (Infant in the Bulb of a Plant) I think is meant to represent the murals in microcosm....the interplay and balance between the earth, humans and technology.  The fetus is encased not in a uterus, but in a bulb.   The bulb rests in the earth.   Underneath we see the blades of plowshares, representing agriculture as the earliest technology.   What will happen to the infant?  Will he grow and thrive in the cradle of the earth?  or will he be swept away by the plowshares?   The plowshares that are used to clear the earth and make new growth possible also have the potential to destroy that growth.

The other thing to consider is that Rivera made the cartoons for these particular frescos in October of 1932.   It would have been about this time that Frida was working on her paintings related to her miscarriage.   Did Rivera paint the infant in response to Frida's work?   Was it a way of dealing with their loss or was it more of a paint war?   The wall to me almost takes on the aspect of the sacred...perhaps he meant it as memorial?   

------------------------

The infant in the vaccination scene is based on the Lindbergh baby.  Rivera had been in NY during the time of the kidnapping and he knew the Lindbergh's.   Just underneath the Lindbergh image is a scene that mirrors the the idea behind The Infant in the Bulb of the Plant.   This one is called The Healthy Human Embryo, and depicts embryonic cells in a uterus being attacked by bacterias...typhus, TB, diptheria, tetanus.

[madupont]

Re#168

"...Diego was all about the work.   He continued to work on his murals at the Palacio Nacionale in Mexico City when the government outlawed communism, an act that got him kicked out of the Communist Party. ..."
                                                           Men in general are all about work, as far as we know. Even communists.




"...The fetus (Infant in the Bulb of a Plant) I think is meant to represent the murals in microcosm....the interplay and balance between the earth, humans and technology.  The fetus is encased not in a uterus, but in a bulb.   The bulb rests in the earth.... these particular frescos in October of 1932...."    Charles Lindbergh,jr. was kidnapped in March of 1932.
He was found face down in the earth,a light covering of leaves, about 25 to 40 feet off the Fackler Road between Princeton and Hopewell, by a truck-driver who had parked to take a
"stretch".  That was on May 12,1932. His father identified the body at the Coroners Office in Trenton.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh bought the property and never sold it in her lifetime.



...The wall to me almost takes on the aspect of the sacred...perhaps he meant it as memorial? ....  


...The infant in the vaccination scene is based on the Lindbergh baby.  Rivera had been in NY during the time of the kidnapping and he knew the Lindbergh's.   Just underneath the Lindbergh image is a scene that mirrors the the idea behind The Infant in the Bulb of the Plant.   This one is called The Healthy Human Embryo, and depicts embryonic cells in a uterus being attacked by bacterias...typhus, TB, diptheria, tetanus."

I have just accidentally or coincidentally found more that to me was mind-blowing and I will post the link. Read each paragraph slowly to catch the interconnections of these people.  

The baby does indeed look like Baby Charlie; and the doctor giving the vaccination looks quite a bit like the surgeon for whom Lindbergh had invented and developed a pump that could be used for the circulation of the blood in Alexis Carrel's experiments at keeping living tissues alive.  I of course knew about Dr. Carrel before I ever knew anything about the Lindberghs or for that matter Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (because my father did what was known as "vein surgery" or, arterial for which I still have some of his drawings which were notes used in teaching medical students,interns and/or surgical residents in hospitals  where he was on staff, included in books from his library. There was also a very simple biography in his personal library  which I read  as a kid, before I started working in his medical and surgical library indexing file cards for reference to surgical procedures, the surgeons who researched and perfected the techniques, and the syndrome for which the surgery was required.

I do not recall whether the Lindbergh's first child was born in Manhattan at Carrel's apartment-cum-clinic or at the Morrow home where the couple had continued to live until they were ready to move into the house with the baby and baby's nurse, Scotswoman Betty Gow when it was completed; I know that the following child was born at Dr. Carrel's.( I lived across from the house in Hopewell six or seven years after I began researching.)  I certainly have almost everyone of Anne's books but I can't remember what she said about the delivery.  Following the kidnapping, when she felt that she had to get the surviving child(by then, children) away after an incident when their car was followed and people in the car behind tried to snap pictures(paparazzi syndrome was very big what with the trial in Flemington,N.J.) and she was still recuperating emotionally, Dr. Carrel offered his island off Brittany as a retreat, although she first took the kids and went to stay with the Honorable Mrs. Harold Nicolson(Vita Sackville-West) who had invited her to come to their estate at Long Barn, Seven Oaks, Kent; which was originally an outbuilding of the castle given to Vita's family by Henry the VIII th but which as a female she could not inherit.(and for which Virginia Woolf wrote her a novel as a birthday present: Orlando).   Vita and Harold simply bought another much smaller castle elsewhere and began their gardens in their retirement.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh had by then moved on with the children to the island off Brittany supplied by Dr. Carrel.

It was awful but Anne, future ecologist, was a regular girl-scout and had flown all over the place with her husband who was of course off to Germany to receive medal of honor while reviewing the Luftwaffe (which was a ruse, in order to make Lindbergh believe the Nazis were better prepared for war than they actually were; although they had  asked his father-in-law's boss (of Morgan banking)  for a hand-out for armament in so far as they could not pay their WW1 debts/reparations.  Anne appeared to be rather horrified in a photo where she appeared to get closer to Nazis than the Carrels'-island girl-scout outing would  suggest.

Yes, Dr. Carrel had a wife and here is where my mind got blown. Not only was he involved with Rockefeller Center (I ponder whether his clinic-cum-apartment may have been there?) but his wife was another one of the La Motte family descended from the in-laws of the Baroness who had been involved in the Diamond Necklace affair(swapping diamond substitutes for diamonds)in the days of Cagliostro, which inevitably brought down the French Royal family and led to the execution of Marie Antoinette and Louis.

(Same La Motte family that had apparently emigrated producing a daughter of the South whom the  duPonts of Delaware did not particularly want marrying their son who was a scientist by inclination.  They felt she might carry bad blood  by descent and somehow connected to an ancestor involved in the Diamond Necklace Affair.  As it turned out, eventually, Meta du Pont was a meticulous task-mistress who took over the running of the company and produced a son, also a scientist, known as Lammot du Pont who died in a dynamite explosion in New Jersey at Deptford [where Bruce Willis was  raised].  

I wish that I had seen a repro of that panel closer up or rather in more detail because the resemblance is so like a photo in the back yard, with Betty Gow out of the camera focus while Baby Charley  stands up. Hooray, Charley(or Charlie?) who then disappears from the scene.  But I did go back to look at the other panel, The Infant in the Bulb of the Plant, --
to discover why I had the impression that the child (who has a post-natal build) was unborn  and just laying down for a nap in the process of turning over to be born? Then I discovered the indications that Diego had included in painting the scene; notice above and at both sides equally are his inclusion of delicate Fallopian tubes by which the infant in the bulb had arrived there by the fortuitous meeting of sperm and ovum.  But I figure it is a nice touch by Rivera, kind of whimsical but, if the French can believe that babies are found under cabbages, why not?

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/innovators/bio_carrel.html

This is a bit sensational but, then again, why not?

http://www.amazon.com/Immortalists-Charles-Lindbergh-Alexis-Forever/dp/006052815X  

[madupont]

http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/04/rivera/gallery/index.html

#12

[Lhoffman]

Somehow I find it a bit disturbing to make the connection between the two images....ask whether both were related to the Lindbergh baby.   Maybe because the wall with the embryo seems so bursting with life and possibility.   But of course, underneath the whole are the plowshares....

Might Rivera have had those thoughts about baby Lindberg as well as about his own unborn child...so much possibility, but there lying in wait, underneath it all...

Rivera kept a file of news photos of the Lindbergh baby to reference while working on the mural.   

--------------

News stories:

http://www.charleslindbergh.com/ny/

Here is the story relating to the birth...he and his mother shared a birthday.

http://www.charleslindbergh.com/ny/12.asp

[madupont]

I had that site or another very much like it, same photographs, because I remember sending some to donotremove of Grandmother Lindbergh's "basement" which was much too much like the one of the "North Lake" house into which I moved at about the time of the death of Jacques Kerouac in '69. Scarey, until you got used to it  but where I found the most wonderful old junk like the old wooden drum perforated with holes to let the water run through and a latched door (into which you put the clothes) from an old hand-cranked washing machine. I used it for a lamp table in the parlor. You could put your books and embroidery or other sewing in iit when sitting on the old shirred plush upholstery from the period of those houses (mine was brick however).

For awhile, I exchanged posts with the other "pilots" who haunted that site and were into Lindbergh because I figured that I might pick up some other tips and insights, some  about that side of the family.  The old man had eyes like that guy who has been in the news today that they are trying to hang with some crime because he says the "government was behind 9/11". Mrs. Hauptman lived down here in Philadelphia where she relocated and raised her son; before that she had been just a Yorkville German girl who worked in a bakery and had another one of those houses, smaller, but much like the senior Lindbergh family of Minnesota. A girl who got together with the other German couples to go to the beach and boating --not exactly where harrie lives for instance, because it was still on the New York side of the state line.

Then the authorities showed up and tore up her attic and took apart the entire garage and flattened it until there was nothing left.
These were people who  were like -- or, right out of Berthold Brecht.  Tell you why.

I also have a newspaper which I save, which I can't make heads or tails of, theoretically it is The Philadelphia Inquirer; anyway it is loaded with pictures , photo copies, and in some cases courtroom sketches of "witnesses" drawn in the Flemington courtroom. It is a building much too big for the town at the time but it is worth while to cross the street and go in and have a drink in the downstairs restaurant or coffee shop of the hotel  where all the journalists stayed when covering the trial. You pick up a lot of vibes.

You will also find a lot of photos in Scott Berg's book. Although I haven't noted the photo of the actual killer.  The body found on May 12,1932.  The guy who stashed a shoebox full of money with his friend Bruno who put it in the broom closet, up on the shelf, left for Germany the following day,May 13,1932.

He hadn't wanted to have been caught with the marked money but he didn't get a chance to take it with him to Germany where in the infinite wisdom (sort of like the Chinese classic on Retribution) he died of a pulmonary disease either in the hospital or in the course of being transfered from the hospital after the nuns had the orderlies fetch a litter to put him in the back of a van. Which in those days the Germans had begun using as mobile units in which you gassed one who was a defective in some way and this saved the State, the expense during the Depression of wasting medical care on people who were obviously not "pure" Aryan.

Princeton held a seminar on Nazi Medicine and Medical Practice but I'd already seen this in operation in the eastern  part of New Jersey one morning when I couldn't figure out why the neighbor in back, a couple in a similar cottage to everybody else, left his van running in the open door of the garage.  He came running out of the house, carrying  a load of his collected ties, and a garment bag.  It was only
later when I met the new couple with three kids who moved into the cottage that I learned that was the husband's sister's boyfriend who had gassed all the cats who had been living in the garage where the girlfriend fed them. She threw him out although he would have left anyway because his boss was running for re-election and it would have been  bad news if his legal assistant was found to be living with a nice RC girl from Brick.

Now, back to ART. Although I think we have about covered the subject.

[madupont]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/arts/dance/29plan.html

There's another photo spread or slide within the above article, taken of the dance troupe on stage. I didn't get a chance to look at it.
Because my pop-up blocker was on. I thought about that a minute, trying to remember where to find it? I'm now of an age where I haven't needed a pop-up blocker since I can't  remember that either.
Similar sadly to have seen Ailey's program director, from Philadelphia, the beautiful tall dancer who appeared in countless magazine photos because people were always enthralled with the elongated eloquence of her body, her carriage,her stature.  Of course, I saw a photo a little earlier this past year which broke the sad news of what she was doing until she planned to retire from the company's office detail.  Then I mentioned it to a friend another former dancer who barely remembered but, who had been working, out on the West Coast for many years and recited her woes of how much of her body had broken down from the strain, the stress that all dancers suffer from. I remembered that was the truth but that's when I knew that we had parted company years ago; if she could not remember who Judith Jamison was.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/28/arts/plan1.html

[madupont]

http://www.momastore.org/EnlargeImage.html?sku=62873.jpg&src=ProductPage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foerFJqupYM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj6UsZJpH9U&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VPuD1vOAyw&feature=related

Schnabel's film is 4th. link, suggesting the introduction of Wright who has since become the pre-eminent Black Actor of Present day America. I could say more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be-gH8evQu0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5P6gaFEUmA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdYF8lW6Cas&feature=related

[madupont]

http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=851&cid=189313&which=&aid=4269&wid=426044013&source=exhibitions&rta=http://www.artnet.com/artwork/426044013/851/warrington-colescott-home-from-the-dead-the-reception-at-jeffersons-plantation.html#

[pugetopolis]

Warrington Colescott, "Judgment Day at NEA" (1991)

http://www.artnet.com/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=6BF60C40831709FB12393970777B2DFB

[Lhoffman]

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=34143



Picasso at the Zoo

[madupont]

Gee,whizz, I was hoping weezo had some erudite comment on Colescott's "erudite satire"?

I think that I need more coffee....

[pugetopolis]

I think that I need more coffee....

You need something all right, honey, but it ain't coffee.....