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John Wilde ~~ 1919-2006~~ Vis Medicatrix Naturea

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John Wilde was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1919. As a child he had a deep, instinctive love of drawing, but his parents discouraged his art-making. He liked to draw battle scenes, airplanes, and “imaginary cities, which (he) then erased and re-created.” He believed most of his early art was thrown out. Luckily, when Wilde began high school, some of his teachers recognized his talent and encouraged his drawing. Art classes were the only ones he enjoyed. Like so many artists, Wilde had difficulty making it through high school. Still, he loved to read, and a book that influenced him greatly was The Charter House Of Parma by Stendhal. He enjoyed the field trips his class went on to the studios of WPA artists Santos Zingale and Alfred Sessler, where he saw for the first time that art could be a serious profession. He started entering art shows and spent time with his mother’s cousin, the famous local artist Gustave Moeller. Wilde’s brother Leslie was friends with another local artist, Paul Clemens, who Wilde became something of an apprentice to. He swept the studio, mixed paint and gessoed panels. Clemens would regularly have drawing classes with a live model—Wilde and others would pay a dime for three hours of instruction.

Wilde blossomed intellectually and artistically when he entered University Of Wisconsin- Madison in 1938 to study art and art history. He had wanted to attend school in Chicago, but his parents didn’t want him to leave Wisconsin. They were unhappy enough that he was studying something as frivolous as art! He traveled often to Chicago and Milwaukee and got to know many artists there. This Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago gang, which included Julia Thecla, John Pratt, Charles Sebree and Gertrude Abercrombie influenced him even more than university. The professor he was most drawn to was James Watrous. His classes in renaissance techniques and personal encouragement effected Wilde deeply. In 1942 he was drafted into the army, but didn't go overseas. While in the military he carried Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey To The End Of Night and The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek. He designed camouflage, made maps and propaganda drawings for army Intelligence (for the venereal disease prevention program). He wasn’t thrilled about being in the military and later said, “How war can be sanctioned by the government and approved by the public is just beyond my grasp.” Being in the army took time away from his art, but he was able to produce several drawings of smiling women with strange wounds or growths. He enjoyed adding script to his drawings. The text would ramble on in a stream-of-consciousness until it eventually inspired a different drawing. Even at this young age, Wilde had remarkable skill, which of course improved with experience. Interestingly, his style, technique and philosophy changed very little throughout his life. In 1943 he married fellow art student Helen Ashman and they had two children, Jonathan and Phoebe. Helen died in 1966 and in 1971, Wilde married Shirley Grilley.

When the war ended, Wilde returned to Madison to attend graduate school. After getting his degree, and with a family to support, he began teaching art at the university. Meanwhile, he kept making his own surreal and personal work. He dressed formally for classes, in a suit and tie, but would wear “artist’s clothes” when working in his studio.  He did many self-portraits (mostly drawings) and placed himself in several of his paintings, sometimes slyly in the background. He said,“To me, there is very little difference between being in the painting and the act of painting—it’s the same thing. It’s impossible to separate myself from the things I am doing, and, therefore,very often, I include myself.” The surreal works helped him examine his inner thoughts; it was a kind of self-analysis. His subject matter was often strange and dream-like, but drawn or painted realistically. James Watrous’ lessons about renaissance technique stayed with Wilde. He used and honed them throughout his career, enjoying the preparatory process as much as making the art itself. He made many paintings, but his true love was always drawing. His favorite method was silverpoint, a technique in which he used a fine-pointed tool to scratch prepared paper or panel. The images are ghostly and fine, difficult to see in photos.

Wilde drew objects that had great significance to him. He gardened, and many of his paintings are still lifes of the fruits and vegetables he grew. He said painting and gardening were alike: “both areas resist sham, oddness and are receptive of long evolution, love and devotion.” He lived a conventional life in the rural area outside of Madison. He didn’t like traveling, except for the rambles he took in the countryside. He loved to draw and paint things he saw or found on walks: birds, rabbits, chipmunks, nests, cocoons, grasshoppers, cicadas, animal skulls, plants and leaves. He also often put guns, daggers and small fish in his pictures. For him, drawing or painting an object was a way of worshipping it. He said still lifes had to have some spooky element that made them more than an illustration. He would change or heighten the color, or he’d play with the sizes of things by juxtaposing a giant bird next to a tiny woman. He taught at the university and pottered around his house, but looking more closely at his art, one sees that he was “on the edge of shrieking with horror and vomiting (his) spleen.” His painting Wildeworld from the fifties shows the jagged rent that exists between reality and the artist’s inner world. Wildeworld Revisited from 1995 is more disturbing; an apocalyptic vision of an orange vortex sucking away not only reality, but the fantasy world as well.

Like many artists, Wilde did not like talking about the meaning of his work. He felt art had to have a deep significance to the artist for it to be good. In spite of the fact that he taught drawing, he admitted that he believed the true essence of art could not be taught. You can teach someone technique, but not the indefinable quality that truly makes something art. He said, “To rediscover the old art-truth is as inevitable as it is impossible, that is to say, it is found in spite of and because of self, or it is not found at all. It cannot be made to happen. It happens because of intense selfless work, through time, skepticism, love, awe and single-mindedness, if at all.”

Wilde liked old art best. He used techniques to make his own art look old. He loved many renaissance artists like Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. He liked making small, detailed paintings that people had to get up close to see. He also loved Paul Klee and Max Ernst. He was out of touch with the art of his time and didn’t care. Wilde was uninterested in fame. He ignored trends and wasn’t particularly aggressive about galleries and competitions. “I am outside of art. I know what is ‘going on,’ but only intuitively, for I have little contact with it. I know, in fact, that 94%, more or less, of the Au Current (sic) is nonsense... Equally, I am certain that what will happen today, if anything happens, will happen in isolation...Art comes from lonely men, cooking in their own juices, but physically able and driven to state their madness.”

Wilde made art about nature, society and the strange world inside his head. He painted parades of naked women marching through small, empty Wisconsin towns, towering kohlrabi plants next to tiny men, a house full of “happy, crazy, American animals and a man and a lady at my place.” He died in 2006, age 87. He lived a quiet life teaching, taking long walks, pottering in his garden and forever dreaming, reading, thinking and drawing. There was no fame or fortune, but there was the incredible joy and delight of cooking in his own juices and stating his madness.

©2017 Alice DuBois

• "Wildeworld: The Art Of John Wilde" Organized By Russell Panczenko, Hudson Hills Press, New York 1999
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilde

Toshirō Mifune ~~ 1910-1998 & Akira Kurosawa~~ 1920-1992~~ Fervet Olla, Vivit Amicitia

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In 1965, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made his twenty-second film, Redbeard. It was the sixteenth film he made with his favorite leading man, Toshirō Mifune, and the last time they worked together. Both men continued working into the 90’s, but neither achieved the brilliance of the films they had made together: Drunken Angel, Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and High and Low. Redbeard has brilliant parts, but overall it is not a masterwork. No one has ever solved the mystery of why these talented men never worked together again. Some speculate that Mifune was aggrieved because the filming of Redbeard dragged on for many months and forced him to keep a shaggy beard that barred him from other roles. Seeing the film, one can’t help but feel his talents were a bit squandered. Mifune and Kurosawa never spoke publicly about the split and to this day no one knows why they ended such a successful partnership.

Toshirõ Mifune was born April 1,1920 In Japanese-occupied China. Very little is known about his early years and personal life. Mifune had a sister and brother and his father owned a photography studio. In school, Mifune excelled at karate, archery and swordsmanship. These skills, coupled with his robust physicality, would later serve him well in the dozens of samurai movies he starred in. When war broke out in the 1930’s, Mifune’s family moved back to Japan. Mifune, then twenty-one, was drafted. He was assigned to arial photography because of his experience in his father’s studio. Mifune disliked military service, though he never experienced combat. Exceedingly intelligent, he was bored, fearful and philosophically at odds with the war. After being discharged, Mifune was at a loss about what to do. In 1946 it occurred to him to apply for a job as a cameraman, since photography was the one thing he knew a little about. Stories vary as to how it occurred, but somehow Mifune’s application to the Photo Chemical Laboratory (which later became Toho Studios) to be a cameraman somehow got shifted to a pile of applications for new actors. Mifune auditioned. Apparently he didn’t make the greatest impression on the judges, except for two directors named Kajirō Yamamoto and Akira Kurosawa.

By the time Mifune auditioned at Toho Studios, Akira Kurosawa had risen from assistant director to full-fledged director. He had a few years under his belt and was a rising star at Toho. He was born March 23, 1910 and had a bit of a rocky start in life due to difficulty in school. Called “Mr. Gumdrop” by schoolmates because of a popular song about a cry-baby, Kurosawa was a late bloomer. He was slow and didn’t get into the swing of things until third grade. Even then, he never really liked school much except for a wonderful teacher named Mr. Tachikawa who saw Akira’s potential and nurtured it. His first feelings of confidence had to do with praise he received for artwork he made. Being a little apart from the other kids came naturally to Akira who was the youngest of nine children. His eldest sister had a child his age. When his youngest sister died at age sixteen, Akira and his brother Heigo thought the Buddhist ceremony “idiotic” and left the funeral. Heigo had a huge influence on Akira, planting the seeds for his love of film. Later, at age twenty-seven, Heigo committed suicide, which was shattering to his worshipful younger brother. Kurosawa recalled Heigo taking him for a walk around Tokyo after the devastating earthquake of 1923. A typhoon wind had fanned fires that the earthquake had started, and on their walk the brothers saw hundreds of burned corpses piled in the streets. Akira wanted to look away, but his brother told him not to. He said if you turn away from something frightening it would always haunt you.

After high school, Kurosawa managed to fail the entrance exam for university. Instead, he decided to become an artist on his own and dabbled in clandestine communist activity. He soon lost interest in being a communist, and in being a painter. By a lucky coincidence, he saw an ad one day for assistant directors at Photo Chemical Laboratories. He decided to apply. The application was to write an assessment of how to improve Japanese film-making. Kurosawa gave them an intelligent, but smart aleck essay that they were luckily impressed by. Out of hundreds of applicants, Kurosawa was given a job. Being an assistant director was hardly a dream job for Kurosawa, but when he was assigned to his future mentor Kajirō Yamamoto, he began to love the work. He felt it was a happy melding of many of his passions—music, theater and literature.

In that fateful audition of 1946, Kurosawa and his mentor Yamamoto had to intervene on Mifune’s behalf. In fact, Yamamoto personally took responsibility for the decision to hire Mifune because he believed in him that strongly. Mifune took acting classes at Toho and worked hard. He had natural intelligence, charisma and good looks, but he didn’t take it for granted that he would get good roles and make money. In 1948 Kurosawa and Mifune made Drunken Angel, the beginning of a long run of excellent movies. Kurosawa hadn’t intended for Mifune’s character to be so prominent in Drunken Angel, but he said later that Mifune’s talent and intuition couldn’t be tamed, and he let Mifune roll with it. Mifune had stolen the show, but Kurosawa had made the decision to let him steal it. The films they made together are artful, but entertaining. They combine Japanese culture with a worldview that encompassed European, Russian and American influences. Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford, and later Westerns would be influenced by Kurosawa. To Western viewers their films were curious looks into Japanese culture, where Japanese viewers sometimes thought the films too Western. Infusing them always was intelligence, curiosity, humor and insight, not to mention incredible visual beauty (harkening back to Kurosawa’s love of painting).

In Mifune’s long career, he appeared in one hundred and twenty films, sixteen of which were for Kurosawa. Mifune himself said they were the only films he was proud of. Sadly, after Redbeard, Mifune misguidedly ventured into production and even directing. Ever the stubborn and independent spirit, he never had an agent, so he was woefully underpaid for much of his work. Struggles with money, work and his personal life reduced Mifune to being viewed as the Charlton Heston of Japan. At one point he even opened a sushi restaurant in Germany that eventually failed. In America he is best known for his part in Shōgun, a made for TV movie about feudal Japan. Mifune never regained his groove and spent the remaining decades scraping by doing more or less hack work. Years after his death, his daughter announced that he had been offered the roles of Obi Wan Kenobi or Darth Vader by George Lucas, but turned them down fearing Star Wars would cheapening the Samurai culture.

Kurosawa had his own cross to bear in the years after Redbeard. The changing landscape of media took its toll on film-makers across the globe. No one wanted to see artistic films. TV shortened people’s attention spans. Kurosawa had trouble getting movies funded, and that was partially his own fault—he demanded tremendous budgets to make his lavish period dramas. At a low point, Kurosawa attempted suicide after the critical failure of Dodes’ka-den, an interesting and very unique experiment in color film. He recovered, but it was ten years before he was able to make another film. Kurosawa had enjoyed so much success and liberty early in his career, it seemed difficult for him to accept the roadblocks most directors take for granted. One of his last movies, Dreams, was backed by Warner Brothers only with the endorsement and urging of Steven Spielberg. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola had also befriended and helped Kurosawa at various times. Kurosawa never really fully recaptured the brilliance or success of his early films. He still enjoyed critical respect and was able to wow audiences with movies like Ran and to a lesser extent Dreams. The consummate artist, he wanted to keep working and improving. Upon receiving a lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1990, at the age of eighty, Kurosawa wondered if he deserved the award and told the audience he would keep making films and hopefully someday earn the honor.

Both men were tall (Mifune 5’9” and Kurosawa 6’), both married Toho actresses, and liked to drink (a bit too heavily). Both men were modest, and both sadly resorted to being in liquor commercials in the leaner, later years. (Sophia Coppola used the story of her father and Kurosawa appearing in Suntory whisky commercials as inspiration for a scene in her own film, Lost In Translation.) Throughout the rest of their lives, their mutual admiration and even friendship remained. Their work together on Redbeard ended their alliance, but there was no bitterness. Mifune said everything he had learned was from Kurosawa and that his best work was in his films. Kurosawa gushed about Mifune’s brilliance unabashedly, unreservedly—he was overwhelmed by his talent.

In 1992, after years of heavy drinking and smoking, Mifune succumbed to a heart attack. He would be in and out of hospitals until his death from Alzheimer's in 1997. Kurasawa, no stranger to cigarettes and alcohol, fared better. He remained vibrant until he was in his mid eighties, but by then there was no denying he was an old man. In 1995 he slipped on a tatami mat and broke the base of his spine. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair or bed, but spent his time listening to classical music, watching sports (which he’d always loved) and yelling at the maid. He died of s stroke in 1998 and seemed to be smiling.

©2016 Alice DuBois

For More Information See:

• "Something Like An Autobiography" By Akira Kurosawa, Vintage Books 1983
• "Akira Kurosawa: Interviews" By Bert Cardullo, University Press Of Mississippi 2007
• "The Emperor And The Wolf" By Stuart Galbraith, Faber & Faber 2002
• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/toshiro-mifune-turned-down-star-845721

R.B. Kitaj ~~1932-2007~~ Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

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Ronald Brooks Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. From a young age he was obsessed with books and movies. He remained an avid reader his whole life and once even wrote to Ezra Pound (who wrote back saying,“Pay more attention to external phenomena”). He attended art classes for children at the Cleveland museum, which seemed “like paradise to him.” He liked to draw war scenes and loved baseball. He pored over art books and “Life” magazine. He called his book collecting a “lifelong disease.”

In his teens, he sailed as a merchant seaman to Mexico and Cuba. He lost his virginity in a Havana brothel. A year later he moved to New York. He watched Action Painting “out of the corner of his eye”— he was more drawn to surrealist and symbolist art. He read James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka and, of course, Ezra Pound. Later he said that Kafka was the writer he could most relate to.

He moved to Europe in 1951 and studied art at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna. There he did watercolors of bombed-out ruins, hiked through the Austrian and Yugoslavian countryside and fell in love with the art of Gustav Klimt and Egon Shiele— both of whom made an impression on him. In 1953 he married Elsi Roessler. Together they spent time in Europe and North Africa. They had a son, Lem Dobbs, and adopted a daughter, Dominie.

Kitaj joined the army and was eventually sent to Germany during the US occupation. He did illustrations for army intelligence, working on anti-Soviet war games. He went to Paris on weekends and didn’t make any art for two years. When he left the army he went to school at Oxford University on the GI Bill. Around that time he saw the drawings of Michaelangelo and Raphael, which “stunned him for life.” He moved to London where he attended the Royal College of Art and met his lifelong friend David Hockney.

In 1963, when he was thirty-three, Kitaj had his first major show at Marlborough Gallery in London. Marlborough remained his dealer his whole life. He became good friends with many British artists like Lucian Freud and, to a lesser extent, Francis Bacon (whom he called “the Wicked Witch”). He did many drawings of family and friends, especially poets and writers he admired. His art was deeply influenced by poetry and literature. In 1969, during a very difficult period financially and emotionally, Elsi committed suicide. Kitaj returned to the US with his children for a time to recover and teach at UCLA. Years later, the painter Sandra Fisher became his studio assistant at Marlborough gallery, and a decade later they were married. They had a son, Max, in 1983.

Kitaj collected the art of his friends and fellow painters as well as that of historic painters he admired. His favorite painter was Cézanne. He once kissed Cézanne’s painting “The Bathers” when he was curating a show at the National Gallery. He thought the best painting ever was Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgement.” He love Van Gogh and spent many hours in Amsterdam looking at his work. Bacon and Balthus were his favorite post war painters. Kitaj’s own art is a weird delight. He achieved a mastery of oil paint, especially when using it lightly in a sketchy technique which gave his work an ethereal quality. A master of figure and face, color and form—in later years Kitaj seemed to actively reign-in his skill and make it cruder. It was difficult for him to not be elegant—you can see his struggle to be rougher in the work. His use of pastels was particularly beautiful, and he often made oil paints look like pastels. His subjects came from literature and life: cryptic, esoteric ideas laid down in strange, personal code. His wonderful use of color—odd and somehow still familiar, tied it all together.

In the 1980’s Kitaj grew unsure of his art. He felt he “had no method and was driven nearly mad, experimenting with more painterly painting and feeling (he) was going nowhere.” He felt better when he found out Cézanne was plagued by self doubts and had sometimes not known how to finish a painting.

In 1994 Kitaj had a large retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London. He was very interested in the stories behind the paintings and also felt limited by not being able to elaborate on them like in novels and movies. He decided to write and include text with the work, explaining and expanding on the meanings of the paintings. The show triggered ferocious attacks from several prominent critics—they felt he was pompous and condescending. It seems they felt by writing about his own art, he was doing their job for them. The fiercest attacks came from very conservative critics who disliked Kitaj’s experimentation. Some of the articles were merely critical of the art, but a couple were overt personal attacks on Kitaj as a person. They are embarrassing to read because of their transparency and venom. It seems that some could not forgive Kitaj for being successful and sadly used their position to launch a personal assault. Kitaj’s friend Sandy Wilson wrote a letter chastising the cruel critics and many London artists signed it. Lucian Freud did not, and offered this suggestion: “I feel it pointless to gang up on a third-rate critic when you don’t consider him seriously. As they wisely say in Ireland: what do you expect from a pig but a grunt?” Sadly, during this time, Kitaj’s beloved wife Sandra suffered a fatal brain aneurism. Kitaj felt there was a direct connection between her death and the critics’ reaction to his show. He said they were aiming at him, but killed Sandra instead. He was never able to put these events behind him. He moved to Los Angeles to be near his mother and son Lem.

Sandra had been a connecting factor between Kitaj and the world. He said, “I have few social graces and I get in trouble when I go out into the world.” He had left England and was alone in the alien environment of LA with his anger and sadness. Pouring out his emotions in his work, he made paintings of himself assassinating the critics who had savaged him. He said he made art about “deep and hidden wounds.” In 2007, at the age of seventy-four, Kitaj committed suicide. He was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and a friend speculated that he was losing his ability to make art. He had wondered if his art would leave a legacy; would he be remembered? One of his last journal entries reads “Failure, failure as always.”  It seems he was quite a different man than the 1994 critics made him out to be—not quite the brazen egoist they said he was. Kitaj believed that paintings, even bad or dull ones, exposed what was going on in the artist’s head. We see in Kitaj's work mystery, curiosity, humor, elegance, sadness, intelligence, and overall, a sense of joy and delight. 

©2016 Alice DuBois

For More Information See:

• "R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective" Edited by Richard Morphet, Tate Gallery 1994
• "R.B. Kitaj: An Obsession With Revenge" By Tim Adams, The Guardian

Max Klinger~~ 1857-1920~~ Laborare est Orare

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Born into bourgeois comfort, Max Klinger maintained ties with his wealthy family throughout his life. Indeed, their money allowed him to live in comfort and focus on his very personal art without financial worries. There were certain themes that literally gripped him: the dark and unknowable horror of death, the eternal beauty of Nature, sexual taboo and anxiety, the sublimity of love and its sometimes destructive results. His life was art and he began making remarkable and highly sophisticated work when he was in his early twenties. He possessed a gift not only of draftsmanship, but of deep inner thought. He had the rare ability to express his ideas with mysterious, visual poetry.

He said his ideas came to him in the morning, before waking completely. He wasn’t interested in explaining the strange and oblique content of his work. His art was highly personal and very emotional, influenced by Francisco de Goya, Arnold Böcklin and Gustave Doré. Some of it is clearly about his inner world. In his most famous series of prints called “A Glove,” he portrays himself as the story’s protagonist; a lovelorn, bashful young man who finds a woman’s glove on the ground, but is too shy to return it to the owner. The images show him in tormented anguish, dreaming of an unreachable love. Some of his work was about social issues and yet others were about unfathomable questions regarding life and death. Running throughout his work was a skillful mastery of process and deep desire to express profound ideas.

Klinger began his career mainly as a print-maker. He used etching, a method where a drawing is scratched onto a metal plate and aquatint, a fluid, watercolor-like technique using acid. He would first make the elaborate drawings, then transfer them onto the plates for printing. He believed black and white was the best medium to portray the dream world of the inner mind and the dark side of life. Color he considered best for showing the beauty of nature. Klinger didn’t like or appreciate the expressionist art that was emerging during his later years. Like some trail-blazers, he wasn’t supportive of the new and shocking innovations of younger artists. In spite of this, his work clearly influenced many of them, like Giorgio deChirco, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Ernst and Edvard Munch. He himself had raised eyebrows with work that was traditional in technique but controversial in subject matter. Like Charles Dickens, Klinger questioned the bourgeois social mores of the time and made pointed visual commentary on subjects that ranged from prostitution and unwanted pregnancy to domestic abuse.

Besides print-making, Klinger explored his favorite themes in oil paint and sculpture, all with equal facility. He used color in his sculptural works, an idea he borrowed from the ancient art he studied during the many years he lived in Rome. Klinger read a lot of classic literature and loved modern realists like Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. He also read Marx and Darwin and was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He often used myths and legends in his work. He did a series called “Rescue of Ovidian Victims” in which he changed the outcomes of Ovid’s stories, but did not necessarily give them happy endings. He was very moved by music— it was important to his work and the way he worked. He loved the emotionality of Beethoven and Schumann and made artworks to compliment the songs of his good friend and admirer Johannes Brahms. Klinger was a loyal friend who dedicated much of his art to fellow artists to show his gratitude.

Klinger had an overriding philosophy that art should be far-reaching in scope. A highpoint of his career was the unveiling of his “Beethoven” sculpture in 1902 at the 14th Vienna Secession. It is not merely a sculpture, but an environment created  to express the power and emotion of Beethoven’s vision. He portrayed Beethoven as a god from antiquity, something more than human. He worked on it for twenty years— it was a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. In keeping with his philosophy about color as opposed to black and white, Klinger’s sculpture and paintings are not as personal or intense as his etchings— they evoke more grandeur, sensuality and his love of classicism.

 The details of Klinger’s personal life have not been well documented, except for what can be read into the work he left behind. “A Glove” seems to conjure a painfully shy and romantic young man, agonizing over an unrequited or perhaps unspoken love. In one print of the series, a weird lizard-bird holding the glove in its beak crashes through a window, someone’s hands reaching out after it. In another, a man in bed writhes in the grip of a nightmare, while horrifying creatures and an enormous glove assail him.  Klinger was a bachelor until age forty-one, when he began an enduring romantic relationship with the author Elsa Asenijeff that lasted almost twenty years. They had a daughter, Dèsirée, in 1900. Klinger painted and sculpted his partner numerous times, including a bawdy engraved bookplate of the two of them frolicking naked on a beach, Asenijeff holding the fallen Klinger by his beard. 

Although he did eventually enjoy success after the 1890’s, Klinger’s work was misunderstood and criticized throughout much of his career. Had he not come from a wealthy family, it’s unlikely he would have created such a body of rich and personal work. Neglected after death, it wasn't until the 1970’s that Klinger’s art was appreciated again. Whether he depicted social issues or fantastic flights of fancy, his work was truly progressive, unique and utterly personal. He could sneer at human folly and feel the deepest empathy, too. His obsessions with the life of humankind filled pages of prints and canvases. In these works we see his soul, his true self. 

©2016 Alice DuBois

For More Information See:

• "Max Klinger" By Jonathan Watkins and Jeanette Stoschek, Ikon Gallery, 2005
• "Graphic Works Of Max Klinger" by Kirk Varnedoe and Elizabeth Streicher, Dover Publications, 1977
• "The Grove Dictionary Of Art" Vol. 18, Oxford University Press, 1996. Entry by Annegret Friedrich

Balthus~~ 1908-2001~~ Quantum Mutatus Ab Illo

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It seemed preordained that Balthasar Klossowski, later known simply as Balthus, would become an artist. He was born in Paris. His father was a painter as well as a stage and costume designer. His mother painted too, and cast herself in the role of muse (though not of her husband–they separated when Balthus and his brother Pierre were children). Balthus’s mother Baladine, as she poetically renamed herself, became the lover of family friend Rainer Maria Rilke. When young Balthus made forty clever drawings which told the story of a beloved pet cat, Rilke had the pictures published in a book for which he wrote the introduction. Balthus remained enamored with cats his whole life. He remembered his childhood romantically—a  magic time often spent in the mountains of Beatenberg, Switzerland, a landscape that he never forgot.

The family moved in circles that included Pierre Bonnard, André Gide and Jean Cocteau. Bonnard, Rilke and others gave Balthus advice and encouragement. He applied to the State Academy of Fine Art in Berlin, but was rejected. Most of what he learned about art was self-taught. He picked up drawing and painting by copying masterpieces in the Louvre, and later from Renaissance art he saw in Italy. He loved Courbet and emulated his style. His rejection of modernism didn’t endear Balthus to critics and collectors. It would be decades before his lovingly crafted figures set in precise interiors would be appreciated by a larger audience. All along, many other artists saw the value of his art. Among his friends were Man Ray, Antoine de Saint-Exupére, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti.

As a young man, Balthus spent much of his time painting in a Paris attic. Like his father, he also did work for theaters, designing and painting sets for the likes of Albert Camus and Antonin Artaud. In 1930 he spent 14 months in Morocco in the French military. During World War II he served a less pleasant stint in the military— he was wounded in the leg and traumatized by having to clear human remains off of battle fields. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged. The thing he had feared most was loosing his sight on the battlefield.

Balthus was extremely private and, like many artists, disliked talking about the meanings of his paintings. He once sent a telegram to a gallery that said: “NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS: BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B.”  His paintings are a charming mix of naïve and classical. He painted street scenes and many portraits, both personal and for income. He called the portraits he did just for money “monsters” and disliked doing them. He seemed to make some of them purposely unattractive and made the subjects sit in uncomfortable, straight-backed chairs. When he painted someone he liked, like Joan Miró and his daughter, he painted with interest and delicacy. Balthus’s art was personal, intense and unstylish for that time (Abstract Expressionism was au courant). His slightly stiff figures and the not-quiet-realistic style (sometimes verging on cartoonish) give his work an “outsider” look. He had no formal training, after all. He had difficulty selling his art. 

A topic he painted again and again were young girls who were just on the cusp of womanhood. In 1939 he began painting a young girl named Thérèse Blanchard, whom he met in the neighborhood. She wasn’t particularly attractive, and didn’t smile when she posed, but there was something about her that Balthus related to and was compelled by. He painted her more times than anyone else. Balthus’s interest in painting young girls (who often posed with childish ease— legs sprawled, a glimpse of underwear visible) has raised an eyebrow or two. One woman who posed for him when she was a girl said that each time she posed, her skirt had to come up a little higher. None of his models seemed to feel uncomfortable or threatened—perhaps at worst they were bored. Another former model said he didn’t even seem to be there as he painted, his focus on the work was so intense. The model was a conduit, the painting was where he saw magic. Balthus stood firm his whole life: there was nothing sexual about these paintings. If the viewer saw something sexual in it, that was their issue. He didn’t like critics reading into his work, and felt psychoanalysis had done great harm in the world. Later in life he said he felt that young girls were sacred, untouchable. Like Lewis Carroll, he worshiped their youth and innocence. Balthus said he didn’t discover “Alice In Wonderland,” but had known her always. 

His one intentionally sexual work, “The Guitar Lesson,” came to be a painting he regretted making. He had intended it to provoke and enrage. In spite of his claims that they were quite innocent, many of Balthus’s paintings provoked and enraged. This was particularly true in his old age when times had changed and awareness of child abuse was more pronounced. His first solo show in 1934 caused a small scandal, in no small part because of “The Guitar Lesson.”

Less controversial was Balthus’s love of cats. Many of his paintings include frolicking or napping cats. He called himself the “King of Cats” in a self portrait he painted and gave to his good friend Margrit Alice Molyneaux, which she kept her whole life. He made a painting of his friend Sheila Pickering inscribed “Princess of Cats.” The title “Queen of Cats” was reserved for Antoinette de Watteville, Balthus’s first love, and later wife. They were married in 1937 and had two sons, Stanislas and Thaddeus. Echoing his parents, Balthus and de Watteville separated about ten years later, but remained lifelong friends. As an adult, Thaddeus said that his father had spent little time with him and his brother. He said Balthus had a quick temper and there were theatrical encounters with tax inspectors being thrown down stairs and fist fights.

In 1946 Balthus had two major shows that went virtually unnoticed. Few people at the time were interested in his strange, seemingly outdated paintings. In the 1950’s, Balthus moved to a mountainous region of France into an old chateau surrounded by trees. Five sympathetic collectors and friends who believed in the worth of his art supported him. He paid them back with the paintings he created.

From 1962 to 1977 Balthus took a post as art ambassador of France. He lived in Rome and spent his time doing administrative work, traveling and giving parties. Not surprisingly, he made little art during this era and the intensity and passion of his earlier work more or less came to an end. He made about 10 paintings in sixteen years; pastel, pretty and frivolous. Interestingly, these works were popular and sold well. In 1962 (at age fifty-four) he met his future wife, nineteen-year-old art student Setsuko Ideta while on an official visit to Japan. They had a son, Fumio, who died in infancy and later a daughter, Harumi, who became a jewelry designer. His son Thaddeus tells an interesting story about how when Harumi was a rebellious teenager, she kept sneaking out at night to go to parties. The befuddled Balthus asked his adult son what he thought he should do and said, “I don’t understand young girls at all!”

In his later years Balthus became more receptive to journalists, but stubbornly would never talk about the meaning of his work. The mystery of his art was for him alone, and maybe even he did not fully understand what they meant. Perhaps something in his disjointed, unstable, but enchanted childhood always shone through. Maybe it was his attempt to recapture his own lost youth, a carefree and magic time (at least in memory). In adult life the horror of war, the harsh reality of survival and a troubled marriage did not comfort him like the carefree trips with his mother and Rilke to the mountains of Switzerland. Balthus lived to the ripe age of ninety-three. The rock star Bono sang at his funeral, which was attended by Jacques Chirac, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elle MacPherson. His petulant child-friend Thérèse remains, daydreaming perhaps about playing outside, or the day she had at school or about the sadness of misspent youth.

©2016 Alice DuBois

For More information See:

• "Balthus: Cats and Girls" By Sabine Rewald, Metropolitan Museum Of Art, 1984
• "Balthus" H.N. Abrams, 1996
• "Balthus The Painter" BBC Documentary directed by Mark Kidel, 1996

Maurits Cornelis Escher~~ 1889-1972 ~~Obscurum Per Obscurius

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Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in Leeuwarden, Friesland in the Netherlands to a wealthy family. Maukie was a sickly child who did poorly in school. In fact, he had to repeat a grade and failed his final examinations for secondary school. The only class he did well in was drawing. He liked geometry because it engaged his imagination, but did poorly in that as well. Mauk played piano and learned carpentry. Later in life he would take up cello (which he didn’t excel at because he had small hands) and flute (which he wasn’t that good at because of his thin lips). In spite of his musical limitations, he was a lifelong lover of music and enjoyed going to classical concerts. As a teen he would practice cello by the light of a bulb rigged into a skull, keeping his family awake until 2 AM with his “caterwauling” on two strings (the others had broken).

At least one teacher appreciated Escher’s artistic skill and taught him the basics of linoleum printmaking. Later he would learn lithography (printing on stone) from an older artist who let Escher make prints on his press. When Mauk failed his final exams, he consoled himself by making a linoleum cut of a sunflower.

In spite of doing poorly in school, Esher was a great reader and was a book lover his whole life. He and his friends would recite poetry and prose out loud, and in later years Escher became quite good at lecturing about his own artwork. His father thought an architect would be a good occupation for his son, but it soon became clear he had no interest in or aptitude for that field. A sympathetic instructor, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, encouraged Escher to study decorative arts, which was obviously where his talents and interests lay. Escher gladly took this advice. Even though his parents were not thrilled, they supported his choice.

When he was twenty-four, Escher traveled to Italy and Spain with a friend. He fell in love with southern Europe, particularly Italy. The landscape, mild weather and warm people enchanted him. He found the region and culture suited him better than his native Holland. He took long walks, drawing as he went, feeling peaceful and full of joy. He drew bridges, towns, hillsides, the sea and flora. It was there he met his future wife Jetta, and where they eventually started a family together. They remained in Rome for twelve years. Both Escher’s and his wife’s family hoped he would settle down and get a more stable job, especially when Jetta and he began having children—three boys named Arthur, Giorgio and Jan. In secret Escher told a friend he would never do this: making art was his life. Luckily, in the end, both families were sympathetic to Escher’s desire to be an artist and they helped out with money, his father sending a monthly allowance. Escher had to always be frugal, but was never in real financial danger. Perhaps more difficult was enduring the subtle scorn his father doled out with his gifts of cash.

In spite of seeming like a paradisiacal haven, fascism was on the rise in Spain and Italy, and the political climate there was souring. In 1935 Escher moved his family to Switzerland, where his wife was from. The mountain air would be good for their son Arthur who had tuberculosis. Escher was not an overly demonstrative father, but did read to his children often and put on puppet shows at Christmas. He had a speaking tube the family would use to call him from his attic studio to dinner. Often he was so engrossed in his work that he’d come to dinner late. He was almost like a hermit at times. Escher said of himself he was “A lonely man who sat in his room most of the time.” 

Throughout his career, Escher had varying degrees of success.  He got good critical attention and some commissions to do work, but he often doubted himself and his art. He also had bouts of bad health and depression. When he felt blue, he would work on his prints and it would uplift his spirits. The forced move to Switzerland had made Escher miserable. He hated the cold and snow. The one print he made of the Swiss landscape he declared a failure—the land did not inspire him. His artistic lifeblood had been drawing the southern Italian hills, towns, sea and flora. Escher began looking inward for inspiration, and his interest in geometry and illusion came to the forefront. He started filling up pages with interlocking creatures and divided planes with geometric designs. To him, the straight lines of crystals were a direct connection to the beauty of nature. If he couldn’t be on a long walk drawing a landscape, he’d find another way to make contact. His illusions became more and more complex and uncanny; a house with stairs going in all directions, rigid architectural scenes warped by bumps and waves, fanciful creatures emerging out of mirrors or off of pages, two hands drawing each other. Black and white was his preferred realm, and with surgical precision and intelligence, he conveyed realism and illusion with equal finesse. The flights of fancy Escher conceived became his life’s work, and he did it in a way beyond compare—sometimes photo-realistic, sometimes graphic, sometimes like a dream.

In time, Escher and family moved to Belgium, then back to the Netherlands. Every day before he settled down to his art, he took a two hour walk in the woods to clear his mind and organize his thoughts and ideas. During the Nazi occupation Escher did not want to make art for or in any way work with the Germans, so his career was put on hold. His mentor and teacher de Mesquita, along with his wife and son, were arrested and later murdered in concentration camps. Escher organized an exhibition in their memory two years later. His world was one of fascination with and love of life and beauty. The horror of Nazi handiwork was a monstrosity beyond his comprehension. 

 In 1951, both Time and Life magazines featured articles about Escher and his work. His new subject matter struck a chord and the publicity it garnered changed the course of his life. Suddenly his prints were so sought after that Escher spent most of his time printing. Print-making is labor intensive work. The artist must first make the art itself on stone, metal, linoleum or wood. Once that work is perfected, the prints themselves must be made. Escher did not have an agent or studio assistants; he did all the work himself. He attended many speaking engagements and art shows. For a shy man who most enjoyed spending time chipping away at a complicated woodcut, this newfound fame was a double-edged sword. Escher appreciated the attention, success, and certainly the increase in income. But he lamented the loss of time to make new work. He was particularly pleased by the attention of crystallographers and mathematicians who had a special understanding of his geometric art. Escher’s marriage to Jetta eventually floundered. After her children were grown, she had no engaging occupation and became bored. Escher thought his delicate, perhaps neurotic wife just needed to “pull herself together.” Years of playing second fiddle to her husband’s art took its toll and Jetta went to live with her son in Switzerland. 

In the last decade of his life, Escher often felt taxed by the pressures of his new-found success. He enjoyed giving lecturers and corresponding with many people, but he missed having time to just work on art. Escher also stewed about and lamented the horrible condition of humanity; to him the world was hopeless. He preferred to live among unreal abstractions. In 1962 he had a major stomach operation and his health never fully recovered. There were more operations in the decade to come (for what doctors presumed to be complications from cancer), and as Escher became weaker he was less able to make artwork. He said he didn’t fear death as long as it was without pain and “an almost imperceptible transition to nirvana.” He died at the age of seventy-three. His sons were with him in his final days, but polite and private to the last, he slipped away when they were not in the room. Three years earlier, he had made his final print Snakes, a tricolored woodcut no less remarkable and precise than his earlier work. Escher had always lamented the fact that art often falls short of the emotional vision of the artist. He once said, “I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say.” 

©2017 Alice DuBois

For More Information See:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher
• "Meatamorphose" Documentary by Jan Bosdriesz
• "M.C. Escher : His Life And Complete Graphic Work" Abradale Press/Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992
• "The magic of M.C. Escher" By J.L. Locker, Harry N. Abrams, 2000