Japanese Screens

We recently attended an exhibit of Japanese screens that was jointly presented by the St. Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. There is something so ethereal and delicate about these screens, which were meant to be both utilitarian and works of fine art. The fragile paper, the subtle colors, the brush calligraphy that freezes words as if they were birds hanging on air -- it evokes a peaceful feeling in me that I can't quite name or define.

I don't know much about Japanese screens, but I'm eager to learn more. The image below, a detail from a six-panel screen called Pheasant and Pine by Kano Koi, adorns the cover of the catalog, which is available at both museums. We bought it because it not only has all of the screens in the exhibit, but seems thorough in its discussion of this art form.


On the surface, my two favorite works in the show are quite different from one another. The first is by Tosa Mitsuoki (Japanese, 1617-1691) and is called Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maple with Poem Slips. The poems appear to be painted on little strips of paper that seem to flutter in the breeze. This picture, from the Art Institute, hardly does it justice. But if you go to their website, there is a better copy, one that you can zoom in on to see details. Both trees are simply gorgeous.


This screen has another image on the back, which was not visible in the display. I wish it had been reflected in a mirror or something, since it is a grove of bamboo, one of my favorite plants.

My second favorite work was a twentieth-century take on the centuries-old screen tradition. These two screens are part of 1990 work called Mountain Lake Screen Tachi by Okura Jiro.
The original work spanned more than 120 feet on 16 screens, creating a wall or mountain effect, or possibly a golden city. The gold leaf is applied on rough-hewn walnut boards, sometimes quite loosely, so that pieces of it sparkle and blow in the air. It's really quite lovely and impressive, both for its size and beauty, and for showing that this ancient art still lives and continues to grow.

I found this picture of the screens in their outdoor setting, but even this photo does not capture the impressive size of the screens, which seem to tower over you like golden mountains.



The Mountain Lake website says, "The focus of Okura’s workshops developed out of his own deep respect for natural materials, especially wood. This respect is based on an understanding of the relationship between nature as an environment of material substance with physical location, and as a concept of pure space. For Okura, substance and space acquire a sense of plenitude when the self grasps this relationship, which wood (or any other natural material) can symbolize if treated properly. Okura’s ideas, which are expressed by his treatment of wood, are manifested in Eastern belief systems through ritual practices that allow for chance and indeterminacy in the processing of materials."

The exhibit also made note of my architectural hero, Frank Lloyd Wright, crediting him with shaping "Americans’ visions of the screen format." The show had a large-scale photograph of his bedroom in his home and studio, Taliesin, circa 1909, with a Japanese screen embedded in the wall. This room no longer exists in this form, having been destroyed in one of the two fires that consumed much of Taliesin earlier in the century. So, it was fun and surprising to come across this image in the exhibit.


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Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim Museum

The main reason we went to New York a couple of weeks ago was to see the first exhibition ever held at the Guggenheim museum featuring its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The exhibit commemorated the 50th anniversary of the building, which was completed 6 months after Wright died in 1959, at age 91. Original drawings, models (too few of these) and documents spiraled up the museum’s ramps.

A New Yorker article about the exhibit notes that "staff at the Guggenheim like to refer to the building as the most important object in the museum’s collection...." That is so true. We certainly go there to enjoy the building itself as much as the artwork it contains.

And if you believe the story told by the tour guides at Talesin, Wright's home in Wisconsin, the building was inspired by another object, this conch shell, which to this day sits on a shelf in his home. (I photographed it a few weeks ago through a window, since you're not allowed to take interior photos.)


It was strange and exciting to see Wright’s own drawings of the Guggenheim displayed in that very building itself. It was like walking into an M.C. Escher drawing. (Frink always says he wants to put an LCD TV with a video of a crackling fire in a fireplace over the real fireplace. Or one of those videos of fish swimming next to the fishtank. He's a clever lad, that Frink.)

It was also interesting to compare how the design evolved and changed – how the site selection, the other projects Wright was working on, and the negotiations with the client (who in the case of the Guggenheim, had a mind of her own) changed the artistic vision. Wright, for example, wanted the building’s exterior to be red. In another version, the widest part of the spiral was at ground level.

For architecture buffs and FLW groupies, the actual drawings, often larger than those in books, provided a lot more detail about the plans for buildings, both those that were built, those that were outrageously and brutally demolished (like Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel), and those that were never built (like a huge, spacey Jetsons-mod theater complex and park Wright designed for Bagdad.) Some of the drawings had never been reproduced or displayed before.

Speaking of the Imperial Hotel, here's a photo (from Wikipedia Commons.)



(My Aunt Fern and Uncle Edmond actually stayed there in the 60s, and when I get a scanner, I'll upload Uncle E's slides of this magnificent building.) Ahead of its time (built 1923), it was designed to withstand an earthquake. In a weird twist of fate, at the opening ceremony, one of the worst earthquakes in Tokyo's history struck. While buildings throughout the city crumbled and burned, Wright's hotel was unscathed.

I bet the Japanese are kicking themselves for their short-sightedness in tearing it down. Today, a single plate from the cafe sells for hundreds of dollars and chairs for thousands apiece. People would pay a premium to stay in one of the world's greatest structures. Tourists flock to the bit that remains in a museum. Until we can afford to fly to Japan, the closest Frink and I will ever come is this urn from the hotel, now in the Metropolitan Museum. It stands more than 5 feet tall. And our reproduction Cabaret china from the hotel's less formal cafe. But I digress.

The exhibit also included some computer animations, walking you visually through building. There was a cool "exploded" modle hung on wires of the Jacobs I, one of the most important Usonian houses. (Basically Usonian houses were built for regular folks, whom Wright felt deserved art and beauty as much as the wealthy. They featured a lot of wood and windows, great open spaces (Wright invented the "great room" concept), space-saving built-in furniture, and heated Cherokee red concrete floors.)

I'm getting a little better at looking at blueprints and such, but I am the kind of person who can't imagine spaces very well. (When some people want to rearrange the furniture, they can map it out or even imagine how it will look in their heads. I have to actually move the furniture and see it to decide if it looks good. Usually it doesn't. So then I have to move it back.) More models and animations would have made the exhibit even more enjoyable. Also, I wish they had included more photos of the finished buildings. Because FLW is our hobby, I've seen many of the actual buildings, but a lot of the visitors to the exhibit may not have.

In terms of collecting more objects to clutter our home, we were really restrained. We bought only two books, including the exhibit catalog. And of course I saved the free exhibit pamphlet. It featured this curtain, from the Hillside Theater at Taliesen, Wright’s home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Seeing the curtain out of context, hung web.

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Exposing Art to Our Selves

Human nature baffles and amuses me. This past weekend, we were in New York for a quick vacation. During our visit to the Metropolitan Museum, we noticed signs leading to "Michelangelo's First Work." We followed them, only to find a huge crowd gathered in front of this tiny painting like the monsters clinging to poor Saint Anthony. Now, don't get me wrong: The Tormenting of St. Anthony, attributed to a 12 or 13-year-old Michelangelo, is intriguing and historically significant. But it was interesting that the Renoirs, Vermeers, Monets, and Van Goghs were, in comparison, almost ignored by tourists intent on crowding around this small canvas.

Was it the "first"--that drew in the crowds? The novelty? The sense of seeing something that others haven't seen (despite the fact that the painting is owned by another American museum)? I've experienced the same thing myself -- I had to see the REAL David in Florence, the actual object, not a copy, despite the fact the the cast outside the Palazzo Vecchio is almost identical and is in the exact location where the original once stood. There's something incredibly moving and transformative about seeing the real thing.




And, like the typical American tourist, I, too, bought the souvenir mug. (Mine is of a work I didn't even get to see -- Hokusai's "Great Wave." The Japanese wing was closed the day we were at the Met. Nevertheless, I love this print and will enjoy drinking my coffee out of the mug.)

I also observed another phenomenon that was equally baffling but less amusing than the desire to see the real thing: Drive-by art snapping. At least half the people in the museum seemed to be trotting through the galleries with cameras glued to their faces. They raced up to paintings, especially those by famous artists, snapped a quick photo, checked the photo in the screen of the camera, then quickly moved on, spending virtually no time looking at, much less seeing the actual work of art in front of their eyes.

The drive-by photographers reminded me of a man I once saw at Cape Canaveral videotaping his wife as she bought souvenirs in the gift shop. At what point do these tourists stop framing everything through the lens of their camera and start living the actual experience? Do they need the photo to confirm they were there? Isn't the t-shirt (or mug--mea culpa) confirmation enough? That couple at Cape Canaveral actually led me to stop carrying a camera on my trips, a vow I kept until I visited Iceland and couldn't resist taking pictures of that glorious landscape. Now, too often, I find myself lapsing back into the mindset of seeing something beautiful or remarkable and instantly framing it as a photo, in my mind or in my viewfinder. I do take photos when I travel, but far fewer than I used to.

Watching and thinking about the drive-by art snappers reminded of "The Loss of the Creature," an essay by Walker Percy in which he writes about the difficulty of living an authentic experience in modern society. As summarized on Wikipedia:

"The more or less objective reality of the individual is obscured in and ultimately lost to systems of education and classification. Percy begins by discussing the Grand Canyon--he says that, whereas Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, who discovered the canyon, was amazed and awed by it, the modern-day sightseer can see it only through the lens of "the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind" (47). Because of this, the sightseer does not appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merits; he appreciates it based on how well or poorly it conforms to his preexisting image of the Grand Canyon, formed by the mythology surrounding it. What is more, instead of approaching the site directly, he approaches it by taking photographs, which, Percy says, is not approaching it at all. By these two processes--judging the site on postcards and taking his own pictures of it instead of confronting it himself--the tourist subjugates the present to the past and to the future, respectively."

That describes the drive-by art snappers to a T. And me, with my mug. If I ever do see an original print of the Great Wave, I wonder, will it live up to the expectations formed by the reproductions I've seen on calendars and coffee mugs?

(Here's an article about the Michelangelo painting.) Read more!

Help Needed Decoding Scarf

This fascinating and mysterious silk scarf tells a story in pictures, each of the 36 blocks depicting a different scene. The scarf reminds me of my books narrated through wood prints. It presents the same kind of reading challenge, trying to figure out the story it tells. Unlike the wood prints, it has words, but I can't even identify what language they are written in, much less read them. It looks something like Arabic, but for some reason I don't think it is. I don't even know where the scarf is from. It belonged to my Aunt Fern, who might have bought it in Ethiopia, where she lived in the 60's, or in Egypt (given the pyramids in some of the scenes.)

I'm not sure what direction it should be read from. There is, however, a clue early on in the story, where a letter is given to a messenger, who in subsequent panels gets in a boat and hands the letter to a priest. Based on this, I photographed the 36 panels in groups of 3 from left to right and from top to bottom.

The story is obviously religious, probably Biblical. It starts with two men (or a man and a woman), one carrying a child, the other a sacrificial lamb or goat that he feeds to some kind of monster or spirit. A crowd gathers, including several kings or priests. They have a celebration with music and drinks, culminating in what looks like a canonization or ordination (judging from the cross on the crown.) Two richly robed men travel in a boat past the pyramids. They are given a letter by some priests (?) and return to their boat, which travels past the same two pyramids. The letter is passed on to two priests, one of whom has a Star of David on his robe. A whole crowd gets in the boat and journeys past the pyramids, where they attend a big feast. We see still more priests, a figure that might be the Madonna and child, a lion, camels, what looks like a game of hockey (!) and perhaps a dead body. What it all means is a mystery to me.

In hopes that some of you can assist in interpreting the story, or identify the language or religious tradition it depicts, I'm posting it here. (If you want a closer look, right click on the photos to open them in a new tab, or just click on them then hit the back arrow to return. I haven't figured out how to make pictures open in a separate window.)

And even if you can't read it, I hope you enjoy its charm nonetheless!












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The Art of Dressing Barbie

My mother was an excellent seamstress, a skill I never had the talent, interest, or patience to acquire. (It took me all year and many tantrums to finish the gathered apron in my junior high home-ec class, when all the other girls finished that, the peasant blouse, and the gathered skirt to boot.) My mother, though, could turn a bolt of cloth into anything, from a fitted suit with flattering darts and covered buttons to pleated draperies and matching bedspreads.

But mom's special talent -- or at least the one I valued most when I was a child -- was Barbie doll clothes. My sisters and I had the most fashionable Barbies in town, outfitted in exquisite hand-sequined gowns, sleek satin sheaths, and hand-knit sweaters fastened with buttons no bigger than a lentil. She even made plaid pajamas and a robe for Ken. (This was long before Barbie dumped Ken for an Australian surfer dude, who wouldn't be caught dead in flannel pjs.)

My Barbie’s favorite party gown was a blue strapless number with scalloped flounces held up with tiny rosebuds. If the evening was chilly, she could throw on the matching satin-lined coat, which closed with miniature pearl buttons. (I got rid of my Barbies years ago, so my nieces gave me one from their vast collection to model the dress, which, like most of the other clothes, is now sadly worse for the wear.)

I always felt smugly sorry for my friends, whose Barbies had to wear ill-fitting, poorly-stitched store-bought clothes. Later, after my mother began selling some of her creations, other girls in town also could dress their Barbies in hand-made originals.

Mom sold the outfits so she could buy my father gifts with her own money. These gifts were usually things like boxes of chocolate covered cherries (dad's favorite candy) or bottles of Old Spice, but sometimes she used her earnings to buy him original oil paintings. I have one of these paintings, a landscape by Colorado artist Lyman Byxby. Mom paid $40 for it. My sister has the other paintings, including my favorite, a bold, abstract city scape. I wonder how many tiny dresses, how many hours spent cutting and stitching, these paintings represent.

For much of my life, I was dismissive of my mother's talents. I could justify my behavior by claiming that I saw her skills as mere "women's work" at a time when I was all about rebelling against the status quo in general and my family in particular. And there is some truth to that. But this explanation feels a bit too easy, a bit too neat. The messy reality is that for most of my life I was not a nice person. I was self-centered and tempermental, a bridezilla without the excuse of a wedding. And my mother was the most frequent target of my anger.

Even in Baby Boomer America, the land of perpetual adolescence, it took me longer than most to grow up. Looking back at the younger me isn't easy, and as I write my memoir, I often find myself sinking into depression. But these well-used doll clothes have made me feel a bit better. They have reminded me of several long-forgotten conversations I had with my mother. I don't remember the details, but I do remember letting her know how much I cherished the doll clothes, the fanciful birthday cakes, and the other things she made for me. And for that I am very grateful. Read more!

Postcards from 1944 New Orleans

(Click on the photos for a larger view. Click the back arrow to return.)

"My Dear," my uncle wrote in 1944, "The little man has had a very full day, and is now having his demitasse at Broussard’s, an old restaurant in the French Quarter. Shrimp remoulade, soup, plus a few other items. Friday night I have a reception at Antoines, supposed to be something in the food and atmosphere line. Pretty soft, isn’t it?"

This was the message on one of the 6 postcards my uncle sent from New Orleans. I'm not sure what he was doing there in 1944, but it probably had to do with WWII. The cards, marked with a "Red Cross War Fund" stamp, are addressed to my aunt in Houston. They had moved to Houston from St. Louis because Uncle E. wanted to do work that supported the war effort. This followed a devastating rejection when he tried to join the military, one final insult from a bout of TB he suffered as a young man. I remember my aunt telling me how they had to save all of their gas rationing coupons so they could drive their car from St. Louis to Houston. So, when I read my uncle's comment about the"soft" time he's having, I detect mixed emotions: pleasure at indulging in some hard-to-find luxuries during a time of rationing, mingled with a sense of guilt at not being in the trenches like other men his age.

That's one of the things I love about these cards: the intriguing hints of untold tales. I also love how they reflect my uncle's dry, Noel Cowardish wit, how his voice sparkles and smiles through his brief words. Here's another example:

Darling: This town is not so fun as the articles in Colliers and others would have you think, but undoubtably much more so than in the recent past. Plenty of gambling, but the lid is fairly well on so far as [illegible]. The place fairly abounds in night clubs and joints of every description. Maybe whiskey isn’t flowing freely, but most other kinds of giggle or weeping water are.

Uncle Edmond, I should add, was a teetotaler, having given up alcohol a few years before. Again, while the words are mere ripples, dashed off in a hurry, they offer intriguing hints of a deeper back-story whose details I will never know.

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Hand-painted Cards for the American Lady

After my Great Aunt Fern passed away and I was clearing out her house, I found a bag marked "Keepsake Cards by Segar." It was full of exquisite notecards painted in the early '80s by a Sri Lankan artist who was a friend of my aunt and uncle. I don't know when she and Uncle Edmond met him; they lived in Sri Lanka in the 60's, when he would have been just a boy. Perhaps they knew his parents. Or maybe they met him during a later visit there.

Once, Aunt Fern showed me a magazine cover featuring a cubist painting by this artist, who at that time worked in a bank. That was the sum total of what I knew about him. But, thanks to the internet (which still seems to me as magical as Merlin's book of spells) I found several articles about the artist. In one, I read the following:

"One of the handful of Sri Lankan artists who is able to make a living entirely from his painting....Segar [would] occasionally make greeting cards for his friends, especially for the American lady who complained that the Sri Lankan cards are copied, western-oriented and do not depict Sri Lanka life at all. His hand-painted cards were so popular that he got the idea to have the outline printed and get his friends and family to hand- colour them."

Reading this made me wonder if the "American lady" in the article was my Aunt Fern. It certainly sounds like something she would say. I can picture her blue eyes twinkling behind cats-eye glasses as she floated out her complaint in that direct, disarmingly gracious Southern drawl. In any case, here are a few charming early works by this internationally known artist. (Click on them for a larger view. The colors of the originals are brighter.) Read more!

Books, Brochures, Bartlesville

Several new objects came home with us after last weekend's road trip through Arkansas and Oklahoma, most of them books or pamphlets from The Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper. Wright called the tower "a tree that escaped the crowded forest." Its main form (the trunk) is a square, made more interesting by the intersecting squares (branches) that bisect it at rotated angles, creating triangular balconies and stairwells. This book, which we bought at the Arts Center on the ground floor, has an interesting history of its construction.






The current exhibit at the Arts Center, "Fallingwater en Perspectiva," features oil paintings of what is probably the most famous home in America. The artist, Félix de la Concha, is from Spain. This lucky (and talented) guy got to spend 14 months in residence at Fallingwater, painting it from dozens of perspectives over the span of several seasons. The brochure shows him with one of a series of paintings that, when hung side-by-side, create a 360-degree view of the living/dining room, each from different, slightly over-lapping angles. Stretched across an entire wall of the gallery, this grouping was stunning and a bit dizzying. (The curator complained that it was hard to hang because the paintings were at all sorts of odd angles.) This photo was taken from the exhibit website, which has many other images from the exhibit. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)

I love collecting brochures like this from places I visit. Even if I take scads of photos of a place, when I stumble across a tattered and yellowed brochure years later, it brings back memories -- who I was with, what the weather was like, what kind of flowers were in bloom, details of artworks and facts that I've long forgotten. Even better, brochures don't cost anything and don't take up much room.


Frink, on the other hand, is a collector, especially of coffee mugs, which take up A LOT of space. (If all the neighborhood Starbucks lose their coffee cups in an earthquake, we've got them covered. Someday I'll write a post about our dueling Oscar & Felix personalities when it comes to collecting things.) Frink hoped to buy a mug showing the Price Tower or its cool Wright-designed logo. (The originals are hard to find and beyond our means. Six cups sold at auction recently for $3,000 and two plates sold for $1000 each.) But, aside from some pens and a poster of Wright's presentation drawing, the giftshop didn't have anything depicting Price Tower or its logo. The guide said the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation claims copyright on all plans and images of his work. For this reason, visitors aren't allowed to photograph the interiors. It seems strange that the owners of the actual building aren't allowed to sell souvenirs showing their own property. But we followed the rules and didn't take interior photos (except of our room--shhh, don't tell anyone.) I did find some excellent pictures online if you're interested.


We also picked up a guide to Bruce Goff's architecture in Oklahoma, and a DVD about Shin'enKan, a home he designed in Bartlesville that was destroyed by arson in 1996. Goff was an architect who worked primarily in the Midwest in an astonishing array of styles, from Prairie to Art Deco to what I call Dean-Martin-Meets-James-Bond Martini Modern. Shin'enKan, a hip bachelor pad built for a wealthy young client, was definitely Martini Modern.
















Goff had an affection for recycling found objects long before it was trendy, and a key feature of Shin'enKan was aqua blue glass, left over from glass manufacturing. It was shattered into faceted chunks, which Goff incorporated into the walls of many of his buildings.



This blog has some amazing photos of Goff's designs, including this photo of the lost house in Bartlesville.

For more on our visit to The Price Tower and Bruce Goff's Oklahoma buildings, please visit my travel blog. Read more!

Angry Fox, Happy Monkeys

A short post today...no long essays of loss or longing. Instead, a couple of wonderful, whimsical works of art. I don't know much about them...I inherited them from my Great Aunt and Uncle, who traveled the world in the '50s and '60s. (If you can shed any light on the artists, I would be grateful! But in any case, I hope they bring a smile to your face, too!)

I call this charcoal painting "Monkey Joy." The label on the back reads "Lanka Framing Works, No. 113. Galle Road, Bambalapitiya." I've never heard of Bambalapitiya, but a quick web search shows that it's on the coast not far from Columbo, Sri Lanka. And Google Maps shows that the shop is (was?) across the street from Holy Family Convent. (As someone who remembers the old days of laboriously doing research in dusty 25-volume encyclopedias, it is nothing short of magic that I can be sitting here in the Midwest, see a label on the back of a picture, and 30 seconds later be looking at a satellite photo of that precise location half a world away!)



I love the grumpy expression this fox is sporting, and the simple lines suggesting rocks and bushes. This watercolor on parchment is signed by "Inikumo, who was a Japanese artist who seems to have worked mostly in woodblocks.
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Lynd Ward: Novels without Words

Lynd Ward (1905-1985) was an artist and illustrator best known for his Depression-era novels told entirely in woodcuts. I first discovered him in the '70s, when I found a second edition of Madman's Drum at a yard sale. The noirish mood of the book instantly appealed to my drama-teen sensibilities, but unlike many of my youthful enthusiasms (Black Sabbath anyone?) my respect for Ward's work has not only held up but grown. I'm enthralled by the Art Deco lettering, by the thick yellow pages, and by the vivid, often disturbing woodcuts, which at times slash and gash across the page like a visual scream.

As a writer who lacks the ability to draw even a convincing stick figure, I am fascinated by the concept of narration without words. To truly read a Ward novel, to read it well and close, requires no less skill and attention than does reading a masterpiece of the written word.

Ward was America's first graphic novelist, a medium that often doesn't get the respect it deserves. Commenting on Ward's first novel in woodcuts, Gods' Man (1929), one writer notes that "its artistic innovations were unprecedented; its visual structure and pacing owed as much to silent film and mass-circulation comic pages as they did to artistic predecessors like Kollwitz or Honoré Daumier. Wordless novels were political interventions, too, meant to take advantage of what Ward called the 'great asset of the book’s thousandfold duplication of contact with people.' Ward wanted to get art out of stuffy museums and snooty galleries and into the hands of an international community of readers who shared the language of images. From "Silent Beauty," by Christopher Cappozola.

Gods' Man tells the story of the seduction and redemption of a young artist and is said to have inspired Allen Ginsberg's Howl. I found a copy, along with a first edition of Vertigo (1937), when I was in college. And last year, my darling Frink gave me a lovely gift, a framed Ward print. Along with Eric Drooker's Flood! (1992), a graphic novel inspired by his work, that sums up my modest Lynd Ward collection.

Ward wrote six novels in woodcuts in all (10 if you count his wordless picture books for children): Wild Pilgrimage (1932), Prelude to a Million Years (1933), and Song Without Words (1936). I'm still looking for these, though not with great vigor--I lack the acquisitive obsession of the truly avid collector. He also illustrated children's books, as well as editions of Beowulf and Frankenstein, which I will certainly pick up if I ever come across them. And one of these years, when I can spare the $100-300, I'd like a copy of Storyteller Without Words, a 1972 book that features all of his graphic novels, accompanied by the artist's comments on his work.

If you're as intrigued by his work as I am, here are some links you might find interesting:

This fascinating blog has some excellent reproductions of Ward's woodcuts.
Georgetown University has an exhibit catalogue with illustrations.
A mini-biography of Ward can be found here.
The Graphic Novel, a pre-history features many pages from Ward's books.

This site has Ward prints for sale (but it costs nothing to look at them!) Read more!