Portrait of Berthe Weill (c 1920) by Émilie Charmy (Credit: Galerie Bernard Bouche, Paris). [BBC caption and illustration]
The plasticity of the modeled flesh; the acuity of the subject’s skeptical gaze distorted by skillfully hinted pince-nez spectacles; the wristwatch: the rich blacks of garb against a brushy olive background: these excite notice in the expressive portrait of Berthe Weill by Émilie Charmy.
The title of the article is “How female Fauvists were some of history’s most audacious painters,” though half its illustrations are by men. Indeed, its first reference is a link to Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), a hot mess of a painting.
Here is the banner painting by Émilie Charmy featured in the article.
Self-portrait by Émilie Charmy (Credit: Galerie Bernard Bouche, Paris /Photo Credit: Studio GIBERT). [BBC caption and illustration]
Here are the paintings of other Fauves linked to in the article:
Émilie Charmy, “The Dressing Room,” 1902. Wikiart.orgSuzanne Valadon (mother of Maurice Utrillo), “Nude Arranging Her Hair.” Nmwa.orgSonia Delaunay, “Triptych,” 1963. Tate.org.ukGabrielle Münter, “Self-Portrait,” c. 1908. Royalacademy.org.uk. “My pictures are all moments of life,” Münter once remarked. “I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim.”Marianne Werefkin, “Twins,” 1909. Royalacademy.org.uk
(Deborah Nicholls-Lee, “How female Fauvists were some of history’s most audacious painters,” bbc.com, 9-12-23)
We all have moments when we’re prone to paraglide on feelings in lieu of actually knowing a thing or two. Here’s a way to break out of your stasis quo:
Park your smart phone. Knock back a snort of tequila. Drive to a tavern where bikers congregate. Approach the burliest man you see. Lock him in a fixed stare and say, “You got a problem with me?”
It’ll start a conversation every time. The vibrant exchange will cover a wide range of your problems examined from a fellow citizen’s perspective. In convalescence piercing insights accrue.
You’re skeptical — I get it. Take heart. Simply remember something a politician thinks Churchill said, write it down, stick it in your pocket. It will get you to the tavern.
The Arabic letter ta’ in isolation makes a smiley face.
“People who are coming from parts unknown, countries that you’ve never heard of. Languages that nobody in this country speaks. We don’t even have teachers of some of these languages. Who would think that we have languages that are like from the planet Mars? Nobody, nobody, knows how to, you know, speak it.”
Some cartoon premises are so good they hold up even without the drawing. Gary Larson’s “Professor Schwartzman” walks the suburban neighborhood in his antenna-festooned helmet. The device enables him to be the first human to understand “what barking dogs are actually saying.” As it happens, every dog in the frame, and there are several, is saying the same thing, which is, Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
It transports me, laughing, to a piercing birdcall heard in a former springtime. A lone bird close to my window uttered two syllables relentlessly with rising intonation — something like too-WEE! too-WEE! too-WEE! Instinct told me it was a young male angling for a first mating. I knew in my heart that his call was bird language for I’m HERE! I’m HERE! I’m HERE! It’s meant to bring the love candidates flocking. Every guy has tried it in his own time.
Max Beckmann “Self-Portrait With White Cap, 1926,” at the Neue Galerie in New York. His sober and analytical gaze was an artistic project born from disastrous war and political disenchantment. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Christie’s Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
“I have been drawing,” Beckmann wrote to his wife one evening, after a day caring for men who’d survived the trenches. “That protects one from death and danger.”
Though he never served at the front, Beckmann had a nervous breakdown by the end of 1915. The war went on, but Beckmann, now in Frankfurt, began painting biblical scenes with nightmarish directness: a sharp-angled “Descent from the Cross” …
Condemned by the Third Reich as a “degenerate” artist, he spent his later life in the Netherlands and eventually the United States…
Max Beckmann, “Paris Society,” which he began in 1925 and reworked in 1931 and again in 1947. The show reveals how the expressionism of the early 1900s would be distilled into the hard-boiled objectivity of the Weimar years. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Beckmann did not depict the war head-on. He preferred satire, effrontery, and a certain artistic sacerdotalism…
Max Beckmann, “In the Tram,” a Berlin public transport scene from 1922. The shallow spaces and hard angles Beckmann initially applied to Christian motifs get reapplied to acid views of Weimar society. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Drypoint Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The more urgent paintings and prints here are those that hold fast to the greatest virtue of German art of the years after World War I: Sachlichkeit, or “objectivity,” a view of society purged of emotion, which saw the substance of things on their surfaces.
Beckmann’s “Trapeze,” 1923, shows acrobats tumbling one over the other in a hopelessly failed circus act. Credit…Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Toledo Museum of Art. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Jason Farago, “For Max Beckmann, Art’s Ironist, Crisis and Rediscovery,” New York Times, 11-10-23)
“People who don’t speak languages. We have languages coming into our country, nobody that speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.”
A promotion that Mr. Tscherny designed for the Strathmore Paper Company in 1966. Credit… George Tscherny, via SVA Archives. [New York Times caption and illustration]
He recognized from an early age the way that high art and commercial art overlapped, blended together and even nestled inside each other.
I called myself a space salesman when I worked in newspaper advertising. When I was made ad manager, I “dummied” each day’s newspaper, which meant placing all the ads sold for the next edition, after which the editor could count up the column inches left over which he could fill with something to read which wasn’t an advertisement. That was then; the internet is now.
The digital titans have long since harvested our personal details. They can rifle advertising instead of shotgunning it like in the old days. They know what foods make me gassy and which cheek I shave first; they know when your period starts. They can micro-purvey amenable product for every susceptibility, disposition and failing of yours, mine, his, hers and theirs. Never mind that it’s deeply creepy.
But that’s an aside. I came here to admire a man I met in his obituary. George Tscherny (pronounced CHAIR-nee), who died in late 2023, created the logo for the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
The SVA logo.
It’s a squiggly flower “positioned next to the school’s name, written in what [Tscherny] called the ‘icy perfection’ of the elegantly formal Bodoni typeface…” Bodoni was the default typeface for the ads we laid out at the newspaper, so I registered its mention with affection. (The newspaper taught me to use no more than a couple of typefaces in an ad; to avoid script fonts like the plague; and to convince local merchants that white space was their friend.)
The cover of a 1958 appointment calendar. Credit… George Tscherny, via SVA Archives. [New York Times caption and illustration]
When Tscherny went to work there in 1955, the SVA was still called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (with no apostrophes!). Why couldn’t it keep that name? “School of Visual Arts” has neither originality nor distinction.
“I see myself as a bridge between commerce and art,” Mr. Tscherny said in an interview for the Art Directors Club in 1997, when the club inducted him into its Hall of Fame. “For just as copy can be literature, design can be art when it reaches certain levels of originality and distinction.”
A poster for the School of Visual Arts in New York, with which Mr. Tscherny was long associated. Credit… George Tscherny, via SVA Archives. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Clay Risen, “George Tscherny, Whose Graphic Designs Defined an Era, Is Dead at 99,” New York Times, 11-17-23)
Remember me to one who waits there, She once was a server of mine.
Love to Michelle and Phyllis in their respective states; to Raúl in Barcelona at the university bar; to the vendor near the Plaza de Cataluña who put extra cheese on my bocadillo (¿Desea más queso?); to the Parisian bartender who crafted the p’tit café crême which I drank standing every morning; to all the fine staff of the world’s eateries who put the heart in hospitality, the joy in dining out. And to Paul and Art for the music.
André Leon Talley on the Pont Alexandre III in Paris in 2013. Jonathan Becker/Contour, via Getty Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Poetry doesn’t need music. All of its music is contained in print on the page. (PJ Harvey)
People try to tell me I’m a poet and I say, No, I have music and rhythm to help me get my point across but real poets do it all just with the language and the lines. (Melissa Etheridge)
The language and the lines: Melissa Etheridge’s phrase sticks with me. I can’t think of an analogy to draw between music and poetry that doesn’t smack of overreach. Music has tone and beat. Poetry has word and line. Absent measured foot-fall, does sheer lineation mark rhythm in poems? Music has a certain existence on the page, but hardly completes its mission there. It wants to vibrate in a soprano’s or trombone’s voice. Poetry is happy to stay in print, to be read silently and aloud.
The lines of Derrick Austin’s eulogy of André Leon Talley are honed to within an inch of formal life (“dear to” goes no further!), yet they make statements celebrating the “lordly lantern”:
Notes Amanda Petrusich, “Feeling the Sting of Time With PJ Harvey,” The New Yorker, 7-23-23. By the Book, “Melissa Etheridge’s ‘First Love’ as a Reader Was Poetry,” New York Times, 2023, but no other date). Maureen Dowd, “Farewell, André the Glorious,” New York Times, 1-22-22). The poem is “André Leon Talley” by Derrick Austin, published in Poetry, September 2023.
Art is something scrappy and strange; it may hiss rather than purr. How it redeems, presumably, is at the heart of the critic’s project, but also the lay consumer’s. That’s me. In doodling my readings of <clears throat> lineated discourse, I’m at pains, inconsistently, to speak of the “verse-object” as I ponder a given text. I must feel the art before calling it a poem. It’s a high-horse presumption. No it’s not. It’s risible. It’s a stab at bootstrapping an expansive sensibility. Yes it is.
It isn’t clear. The non-ordinary object provokes, disquiets, taunts. An opportunity lies in paying it enough attention so it has a chance to impinge, and you come under its sway. Good critics are people who look, read, listen more closely than we chickens who scurry around “liking” stuff.
The phrase in my title is Roberta Smith’s assessment of painter Henry Taylor’s “excursions into three dimensional works.” It’s dismissive but indulgent, because she really likes his painting. “Taylor’s best impulses,” she writes, “are the ones he answers in two dimensions.” I’ve been swayed by his work before. His paintings are odd and engrossing; raunchy and raw; scrappy and strange.
“Untitled” (2020), a double portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama. Credit… Karsten Moran for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]
… Taylor’s paint handling… tends to be startlingly tough and direct. It proceeds in slabs of untempered color and skirmishes of brushwork, sidestepping traditional notions of finish and beauty… Taylor’s paint also makes his figures very present. As do their staring, often dissimilar eyes.
I relish the reference to staring, “often dissimilar” eyes, but what does Smith mean when she says they “make his figures very present”? Her answer may be in the observation that you “can keep pondering their expressions — and the feelings behind them.” Fair enough. I stumbled upon this uncanny feeling of “presence” recently in contemplating Frans Hals’s smiling lute player.
A painting titled “the [sic] dress, ain’t me” has an excitingly faceless figure — who needs one anyway? As if the painter said to himself, “I’ve done enough,” and washed his brushes.
The body language is superb. With her hands gently clenched, the older woman inspects the dress. The work’s palette of browns, ochers, white and light blue is an exemplar of Taylor’s odd, frugal color.
In “the dress, ain’t me,” 2011, a young girl seems displeased while a grandmother looks on. Credit… Karsten Moran for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Roberta Smith, “Henry Taylor’s ‘B Side’ Is Full of Grade-A Paintings,” New York Times, 10-17-23)
“What I’ve come to realize after 30 years of research is that the pictorial output of Picasso basically consists of drawings rendered in paint. His entire oeuvre is conceived, anticipated and elaborated through drawing.”
(Anne Baldassari)
Give my my pencil, madre, I must be about my drawing. Those joshing words are mine. The anecdote introducing the article is that baby Picasso’s first word was “piz,” which is the last syllable of “lápiz,” the Spanish word for “pencil.” It’s put forward as part of the great man’s legend that he drew, practically, from the cradle.
An experienced artist introduced me to the exercise of drawing without lifting point from paper. I was charmed at how the practice took me out of my head’s visual waxworks. I detect Picasso doing it in the drawing below, but of course <sigh>, with his storied finesse.
Pablo Picasso’s “Cheval et son dresseur” (1920), showing his sense of whimsy and his finesse with pencil on paper. Credit… Succession Picasso/RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris); Adrien Didierjean. [New York Times caption and illustration]
… Drawing was not just a quick preparatory pursuit for Picasso; it was an end in itself, and at the very core of his art, a discipline that came before all else… Picasso would draw with whatever he laid his hands on: pencil, crayon, charcoal, red chalk. He would cut pieces of wood and dip them in ink, paint, coffee, grease, anything he could find, when he had the urge to draw.
Picasso’s industry and improvisation inspire. Perhaps because they camouflage muddle I’m a fool for brush and pigment, ever spanking myself for not doing more line. A childhood of coloring books, paint-by-number kits and jigsaw puzzles weighs heavily. But this isn’t about me.
Ms. Baldassari said she sees Picasso’s pictures as “drawings rendered in paint.” Here, a 1937 drawing in pencil and crayon, “Tête de faune.” Credit… Succession Picasso/BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais; Jens Ziehe. [New York Times caption and illustration]
There’s interesting mention of an “ancient studio technique, which Pablo mastered from childhood,” though promoting it to “the basis of the Cubist revolution” sounds inflationary:
… Young Pablo was in charge of making paper cutouts, painting them in different shades and tones, and pinning them to his father’s canvases so that his father could see what effect the different tones would have on the final work. This… would go on to form the basis of the Cubist revolution.
Picasso’s “Baigneuses (Projet pour un monument)” (1928). Credit… Succession Picasso/RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris); Rachel Prat. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Anne Baldassari, the Picasso scholar interviewed for the article, says the following about a painting titled “The Weeping Woman” (not illustrated in the article):
People say [it] represents his lover Dora Maar, who has been mistreated by him. The reality is that at this time, the Spanish Civil War has just broken out, and Dora Maar is the face and representation of pain: a mask that is crying out with hurt. What Picasso is seeking to do is to mourn the dead of the Spanish Civil War.
Consistent with Susan Sontag’s position Against Interpretation, I like to dwell on the painting as an innovative treatment of a woman weeping. The last two drawings featured in the article (shown above) are exciting. Perhaps because I forget they’re by Picasso.
(Farah Nayeri, “Exploring the ‘Epicenter’ of Pablo Picasso in His Drawings,” New York Times, 10-17-23)
EthicalDative 
Savage Women
The plasticity of the modeled flesh; the acuity of the subject’s skeptical gaze distorted by skillfully hinted pince-nez spectacles; the wristwatch: the rich blacks of garb against a brushy olive background: these excite notice in the expressive portrait of Berthe Weill by Émilie Charmy.
The title of the article is “How female Fauvists were some of history’s most audacious painters,” though half its illustrations are by men. Indeed, its first reference is a link to Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), a hot mess of a painting.
Here is the banner painting by Émilie Charmy featured in the article.
Here are the paintings of other Fauves linked to in the article:
(Deborah Nicholls-Lee, “How female Fauvists were some of history’s most audacious painters,” bbc.com, 9-12-23)
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