a blind flaneur

Georgia O’Keeffe.Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. 1935.
A blind flaneur follows his hnose, and his heart, whenever he can. So when I heard a friend’s story about a trip to Taos, one detail took me back to a New Mexico night long ago when I drank camp coffee for the first time and heard […]

Eve Koch. Figure. Acrylic, 60″x40″. Private Collection of Tom Roberts.

Tom Roberts sent me images of two acrylic paintings by Eve Koch which he found in a Santa Fe gallery in 1999. Tom writes, “Her work has a frank and poignant fascination with women’s aging bodies. Sadly, Eve died from an aggressive form of cancer […]

Eve Koch. Hand Applying Lipstick. Acrylic, 15″x12″. Private Collection of Tom Roberts.
See also Eve Koch, Figure.

Édouard Manet. Olympia. 1863. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

When I came home from Toronto recently, I found an over-sized, flat envelope waiting for me. I recognized the handwritten address without being able to read it. I knew without opening it that it would contain visual art that would catch my eye. Over the past thirty years I have been surprised to receive in […]

Paul Cézanne. Self-portrait. 1875.
From Jeffrey Meyers’ Impressionist Quartet (p. 168):
The Impressionists had social as well as artistic differences, and the less well off were more Bohemian. Though Paul Cézanne came from a prosperous family in Aix, he adopted a defiant pose, exaggerated his southern accent, and wore a battered old hat, blue worker’s overalls and […]

Edgar Degas. The Cotton Exchange. 1873
From Jeffrey Meyers’ Impressionist Quartet (p. 168):
Though Degas recruited the Impressionist painters, he freely criticized their work. He maintained that Monet created nothing but beautiful decorations, and at an exhibition of brightly colored paintings he dramatically exclaimed: “‘Let me out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my […]

Edgar Degas. Spartan Girls Provoking Boys. c.1860-62. National Gallery, London.
I’ve never cared much for the paintings of Edgar Degas. I’ve stood before his canvases at the National Gallery of Art many times over the years, but they failed to move me. This includes the portrait of his sister-in-law from New Orleans, Madame René de […]

Claude Monet. Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day. 1906. National Gallery of Art, Washington

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Selbstbildnis als Halbakt mit Bernsteinkette II. 1906. Kunstmuseum Basil.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was a young German artist who created 600 paintings and over 1000 sketches in her brief career at the beginning of the 20th century. She lived and worked in Worpswede, an artist enclave in rural Germany that resisted artistic domination […]

Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. Oil on canvas. 123.5 x 103.2 cm. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Anna Akhmatova Foundation]

Amedeo Modigliani. Anna Akhmatova. c. 1911. Pencil on paper. Apartment-Museum of Anna Akhmatova. St. Petersburg, Russia. [Source: Olga’s Gallery]
From Poem without a Hero
Paris is in dark mist
And probably again Modigliani
Imperceptibly follows me.
He has a sad virtue
To bring disorder even to my dreams
And be the reason of my many misfortunes.
Anna Akhmatova
[Source: Olga’s Gallery]

Lee Miller, Surrealist muse, photographed by Man Ray, Paris ca. 1930 [Source: NYT]

[Photo by novella78]

I remember seductive summer days in the Musée Rodin when the windows were thrown open and soft,rose-scented breezes caressed the marble and bronze. Where else but Paris would a museum open its windows to the world?

Auguste Rodin. L’Illusion soeur d’Icare. 1895. Musée Rodin, Paris. [Photo by Dave Rytell]
This sculpture beguiled me when I saw it at the Musée Rodin. I so much wanted to touch her wing. It was marble but it looked like a living thing. It had the delicacy of feathers, the muscularity of pulsing blood, the […]

Gustave Courbet. A Young Woman Reading. 1866/1868. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The best reading is forbidden reading, rapt reading, reading with wild abandon until you are done with it, until it has had its way with you. The young woman in Courbet’s painting is reading this way. What could the book be that captures […]

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian […]

NUPTIAL SLEEP
At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on […]

The Siren, by John William Waterhouse (circa 1900) [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
I worked on a small literary magazine in the 1970s with a graphic designer who was smitten with the intricate book illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. I should rummage around in the boxes of geologically stratified ephemera that constitute my literary archive to find a […]