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Tag: Henri Rousseau

September 23, 2014

parsing art : “A Table of Desserts” – de Heem/Matisse‏

Jan Davidszoon de Heem - "A Table of Desserts" (1640)

“A Table of Desserts“ (1640)

Jan Davidsz. de Heem

_________

Henri Matisse - "Still Life after Jan- Davidsz de Heem's 'La desserte'"

“Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La desserte’” (1915)

Henri Matisse

________

if Siudmak was a little too much like
Rousseau for my taste, then what
Matisse does to de Heem is just
right, though the blueprint is
identical the outcome is starkly
different and individual, Matisse
is evidently his own man

directors will do the same with
Shakespeare, for instance, or
Verdi, when they alter, or update,
the work’s time frame, giving it
more immediacy, a new life

not always however effectively,
we saw a Figaro in Dresden come
in on a motorcycle, we walked out
after the first act, though not
before my mom had fallen asleep
during the torpid arias

whose table of desserts above
would you like

Richard

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September 17, 2014

parsing art – Rousseau/Siudmak‏

Henri Rousseau "Alleyway in the Park of Saint Cloud" (1908)

“Alleyway in the Park of Saint Cloud“ (1908)

Henri Rousseau

_________

Wojciech Siudmak - "Poème Matinal)

“Poème Matinal“

Wojciech Siudmak

__________

the line seems fine here between homage
and appropriation

what do you think

Richard

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January 16, 2013

“Dumbo”‏

Pinned Image
 
                                                           “View of Murnau“
        
                                                           Wassily Kandinsky
 
                                                      ______________________
 
 
once again a movie for children of all ages – 
including for Zoë, incidentally, whose birth
date is coming up in May – “Dumbo“ is another
Walt Disney masterpiece, and once again
fraught with the tropes, the creative novelties
and devices, of the most modern arts
 
it’s not difficult to intuit the influence of
Saint-Saëns‘ – an awful lot of sibilants
in the possessive case of only those two
capitalized syllables, by the way – his, I say,

especially, of the elephants, for Disney‘s
famous sequence here of elephants on
parade, wherein psychedelia makes an
appearance in 1941 no less, years ahead
of its historical, and revolutionary, great
fruition, surely informing Warhol,
generally the entire Pop Art coterie 
 
he was transferring however what he’d
been learning from the German especially 
Expressionists, their attraction to bold,
dissonant colours, flat uninflected
surfaces, arbitrary and malleable
dimensions    
 
what Disney brought significantly to the
mix was essentially the spirit of fun, which
is what transformed all art after the First
World War, that generation’s response to
the utter failure of all that had come before,
politics, economics, ideologies, even the
very concept of the existence of God, none
of these had prevented the horror that had
been that signal event, the best defence, as
we said in the Seventies, was living well,
therefore the Roaring Twenties, therefore,
for that matter, the Seventies 
 
we haven’t retreated from that imperative
yet, be it for better or for worse remains
still to be seen, for faith or fun, the opposite
poles of personal responsibility, both fell 
and heal 
 
 
animals, incidentally, courtesy of the spirit
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
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