Arts and Exhibitions

[madupont]

jm

I became interested in this back when we were at the nytimes.com while they were not only doing a lot of color lay-outs of German post- WW1 Weimar art and on-line paintings in sequence. arranged by someone who has become a reliable acquaintance of mine when he finally came out from being a nameless employee. I have had a lot of luck that way meeting people in the Arts.
                                                     Secondly, over in the Book Reviews, after my erstwhile long ago room-mate from 9th.street just past 2nd.Avenue passed away prematurely, following her freelance status doing book reviews for the New York Times weekly Book Section, they happened to write up a contre temps Nadine Gordimer was having  with somebody she had hired to edit an autobiography and wasn't doing what she wanted.

Nadine had "married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their "wonderful marriage" lasted until his death from emphysema".

An ancestor of his, Paul Cassirer, had his gallery in Berlin following the Berlin Secession before the turn of the 19th to the 20th.century.

"The expertise developed by Paul in art, and in particular, in the French Impressionists, meant that the seven uncles were urged to purchase works that proved later to be extremely significant. For example, his uncle, Julius Cassirer, in 1900, bought the painting "Rue de Saint Honoré", by the French impressionist Camille Pissarro, from the artist's close friend and Paris dealer Durand-Ruel. The painting was subsequently inherited by his son Friedrich and his daughter-in-law Lilly. Pictures from the 1930s show the beautiful Pissarro painting in the living room of the Cassirers' residence in Munich. As will be described later, it was later seized by the Nazis and it remains to this day the center of a major controversy over whether it should be restored to the family."

[madupont]

jm

NOW, for some reason, I decided to go over some of the salient points about this family and their immense genealogy for Hannukah and a captive audience of mine: my own convoluted large multicultural family. Possibly because certain things written by the girls in the Cassirer lineage in the past tended to resemble things more recently written by sisters and nieces of mine.

The particular painting by Pissarro, mentioned above, which disappeared, is a scene from the arrondisement known as St.Germaine, and Rue Saint Honore is the location of the Horlogerie that one of our Dupont ancestors got into to support himself in Paris.  I sent a reproduction of the copy included in the original Cassirer genealogy to a friend of mine who left Escape from Elba  for another site, and in both locations he very often takes out a guest pass and slips in to read both here and there without making a sound.

There is a place where you can trace  works of art , which was published soon after the attack on Iraq in March 2003 when the Museum at Baghdad between the Tigris and Euphrates was attacked, bombarded immediately but which curator Donny George (I think, I have his name right?) immediately closed it down to become impenetrable. There is a lot of evidence of holes in the desert all around that were ransacked by marauders looking for artifacts, thousands of these holes. Meanwhile the Museum of Antiquities in Chicago,Illinois has removed all evidence that they ever had a collection covering that Civilization. Odd, no?

The curator from Iraq says the heist was carefully planned in detail well in advance. So, obviously, since the raid was carried out from here, the US along with her British allies had joined the Nazis in this hobby. He goes around the world lecturing, Donny George that is, and somethings have turned up. The destruction of course of art objects from the Assyrian era that were attacked by helicopters gunning down the museum will never be seen again.

[jm]

Madupont, I'm glad I found your posts.  They were concealed yet again, this time by the other art boards.  I'm not in NY but I think I'll check out the gallery next time I'm in town.  Are you in NY?  Have you been to any of the poetry readings at ows?  I think they're going back into weekly action, if they had stopped.  More and more, I'm interested in the outsider art scene.  However raw and uncultivated (not meaning raw in the .. gratuitous .. x rated sense - thought I should clarify since reading some other posts in these parts and what is "normal" or "acceptable" to some elba posters in terms of morality, taste, ethics, and more ..).  Yuch, I felt even nauseous.  Where is Andy Warhol these days?  Is he still alive?  I suddenly miss him and I never really followed his work.  It takes on new meanings with time.  In warmer weather, on a walk, I saw a man on a balcony I still remember - I believe he was visiting his son - he reminded me of Andy Warhol.  His son was living in a way he was trying to relate to.  The son was explaining his plants and Andy was dressed to the nines with a cocktail in his hand, feeling physically out of place in his son's choice, but intellectually very alert and aware of everything around him, as he observed down to the detail, including people walking by, as we mutually observed and acknowledged the rare moment of another sentient being passing by on this planet.  Really, we should all talk more often.  This might be the way we change the world, with the conscious recognition of consciousness at that moment, followed up on.

[jm]

I imagine the few police who work in certain specializations must develop strong stomachs - guts like steel.  Maybe like a medical student might pass out the first time they see a surgery on a human in person.  They develop resistance.  They must hang on to some very strong principles because the affect on your psychological state can be very bad.  You must have very deep anchors to do that kind of work.

[jm]

Madupont, shoot me another forum you chat at, if you like, under or above water, and whatever handle you use there.  Ciao.

[madupont]

Several artist friends of mine visited Warhol at the Factory, his studio in New York, because they were just brazenly pushy in that way as productive artists in the age of "happenings", in the Sixties following the death of JFK. People often came to "the City" for their experience on the Easter break, intending to crash with friends or friends of friends until they were in a one room apartment sleeping under a table in a room with wall to wall strangers.
                                        I had contacts with musicians who of course are unionized or they would not be able to perform in Manhattan, and they of course were able to know through other musicians whose girlfriend happened to need a room-mate to share the rent; so I went to live with Barbara Grizzuti (later known as Barbara Grizzuti Harrison)who was working at Macmillan Books as a reader for the poetry-editor,Emile Capouya. She had a boyfriend at the time named Grass Oliphant who had left her, thus the information was passed on to me by Art Farmer. Mrs. Capouya got ready to divorce her intellectual husband and moved her two children to Princeton where she died in an old folks home in the vicinity not too many years ago.  Barbara however went to Rome and discovered her cultural past, writing about discovery in several travel articles until The New York Times figured they might as well let her do small free-lance paragraphs at a time in Book Reviews.
        I had the good luck to move into a wonderful location fronting on 8th.street at MacDougal that had been an art school(now part of the N.Y. Historical Society) and when you went in the front door with a magnificent horseshoe staircase , on the left you could spot a narrow staircase going downstairs to the manager's apartment that exited through the kitchen to MacDougal Alley. It was directly across from the apartment of Uta Hagan(Marlon Brando's teacher) on Washington Square Park. The next street down or south of the Park was "Positively Fourth Street".

[madupont]

jm
     "like a medical student might pass out the first time they see a surgery on a human in person."  My father was a surgeon. I never got over it(he was also a movie buff). I'm the person who can not watch the scenes on Grey's Anatomy (which is named after the major textbook:
Gray's Anatomy). I have his teaching text books and the Gray's is full of his sketches stuck-in like book marks which he would use when putting them on the blackboard for his surgical interns, when he would visit  hospitals where he was on staff, to instruct them.
                                                                       Nevertheless, when we were kids, he would bring home movies from the Municipal Museum on rental to inform us about the world. Movies in the living-room. Consequently, I know how Todd Palin's Inuit ancestors lived hunting walrus when they went paddling out between the ice-floes; why baby seal flop their way up from the beach and are discovered sleeping on somebody's couch in a house up the hill above town across from  highway with a view of the ocean which was recently in the news on video.  Why priestesses in India put out bowls of milk at the cavern openings to entice the cobra to come out so they can bow to him for the ceremony in which they must kiss the cobra on his head three times.

So actually, it takes nerves of steel to develop that resistance to the sight of blood.

On more than one occasion, the film on the reel would  snap and we would have to turn on the lights while he repaired the film-tape. This might lead to an intermission after which we discovered he had decided to review a filmed surgical procedure of a Caesarean section; and here I am in the later decades of my life wondering how did he get his friend,Murphy,the college cinematographer for campus football games where the medical school was located. to shoot these for teaching purposes. As I think about it, you are right: resistance; as Murphy shot other things that had been described in some detail like doctors having to go to the scene of an air collision to tabulate body parts and calculate how many bodies of victims had been recovered.

But when I got to high-school and took required Biology in Sophmore year, after we disected the frog, a couple of the girls were interested in going with me to visit my Dad in Gross Anatomy at the University. So, I asked him. We went. I don't know how they related to it. But for a long time, I could not eat meat at the dinner table without recalling the smell of formaldehyde. Other than that, it is a fantastic place with Canopic jars
for exactly the purpose the Egyptians used them in preparing the dead for mummification(not to mention the headless corpses, swathed in the material used for the best shower curtains, resting in rows like library stacks, behind the blackboards that slide overhead).

[bintu]

i agree with MADUPONT......i am an engineer ...i first chose this job cz i can never be a doctor as i cant see blood ...its horrible for me

[madupont]

I got used to it. Through the matter of fact experience that some things have to be cleaned up. By the time that I was married to a man who had served in a MASH unit in the Korean War  and had been  assisting in heart surgery  where the blood circulates outside of the body, I realized it was a matter of perspective.

[barton2]

Fascinating essay about artist Richard Lethem, by his son....

http://www.richardbrownlethem.com/?p=91

[madupont]

Hey, barton 2,  IFC on tv is showing, Miller's Crossing, again this week and in Central Time Zone.  I couldn't find out   the scheduling for Eastern and shall I assume it starts an hour earlier or does it have a complete different schedule. Umh?   

I was throwing out my old e-mail and noticed I apparently had a subscription to their promos just sitting there.  Going through the agenda, thought of you.           Meanwhile, have to remember all the movies from the Oscars that I have to look up and watch for while they are still showing for their second round.

[jm]

i agree with MADUPONT......i am an engineer ...i first chose this job cz i can never be a doctor as i cant see blood ...its horrible for me

Anyone can get used to the sight of blood.  Think of war and all the death so many young people must accustom themselves to.  They do it, albeit with some vomiting and physical rejection at the onset.  And then, there is the after-effect on your psychology.  

Some can forsee the consequences for themselves after undergoing these types of experiences.  They face the reality of who they are - what has (so to speak) been given to them - and what will "become" after all these extras - and decide, whether or not, they want to become what that shaping will make of them ..

[barton2]

Thomas Kinkade, the Norm Rockwell of the religious right, is dead at age 54. 

[Lhoffman]

...of "natural causes" no less.    At age 54?