"When I once interviewed him, he had an orchestra playing live for us. He had the kind of paintings Spain would go to war with [Italy] over."

Said Antonio Mascolo, a journalist in Parma, quoted in "Thieves steal works by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse in less than 3 minutes/Four masked men are believed to have forced their way through an entry gate, grabbed the paintings and escaped by climbing a fence, Italy’s Carabinieri said" (WaPo).

The museum is The Magnani Rocca Foundation museum in the town of Traversetolo. It was not well guarded. We're told the paintings might be worth $10 million total. 

The paintings are Renoir’s “Fish,” Cézanne’s “Cup and Plate with Cherries” and Matisse’s “Odalisque on the Terrace.” Will we miss them?

Hey, remember the old "Renoir Sucks at Painting" Instagram account?

I've been inside the museums and I've scrawled my way through many life drawing classes, and it's never occurred to me to refer to nudes as "suggestive."

But this morning I'm reading The New York Times....

A key congressional committee on Monday released a note and sexually suggestive drawing containing what appeared to be Donald J. Trump’s signature that was included in a book for the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003 — a drawing that Mr. Trump has insisted he did not create.

And The Washington Post...

... Democrats on the committee released portions of the book — including a suggestive picture and note allegedly drawn by President Donald Trump when he and Epstein were friends.

A nude is suggestive? A line drawing of a nude???

Cover your eyes, children, we're in the Henri Matisse gallery!

A quote from Henri Matisse: "I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity… but as a means deliberately simplified so as to give simplicity and spontaneity to the expression, which should speak without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator."

When Henri — or Donald — speaks without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator, what does he suggest?

When a nude purportedly drawn by Donald Trump is called "suggestive" in the NYT or the Washington Post, we're supposed to think that the message is... what? Rape this? 

After talking with Meade about the sweet potato vine he's got trailing over the edge of the deck railing...

... I had a conversation with Grok, from which I will quote only my own writing. You'll have to imagine the Grokage:

1. Am I right that in the 1950s there was a trend, among housewives, to cut off a piece of a sweet potato and use it to grow a vine, which was considered decorative? And am I right that this was inspired by a Matisse painting?

2. I'm thinking of "The Red Studio."

3. Yes, please search for 1950s primary sources (e.g., magazine articles or gardening guides) to see if there’s any mention of Matisse or The Red Studio in relation to this trend.

4. Maybe I just remember my mother's sweet potato vines and then later I connected to "The Red Studio" because the item with personal resonance was part of the rather chaotic assemblage.

5. Something in a work of art can have resonance for you that has nothing to do with what the artist had in mind. That's great, perhaps, but some people don't like interpretation that isn't grounded in the intent of the creator.

6. No, I'd like you to connect my last observation to the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with the intent of the framers.

7. Now restate that point about the "living Constitution" to create resonance with the idea of the sweet potato vine twining about the 1950s kitchen or the Matisse studio. Be creative. Consider the potential for writing a poem (in the style of Billy Collins) about the memory of the sweet potato and the professionalism of judicial technique.

You can see the whole conversation here, including the poem Grok took the initiative to write.

"At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity..."

"... the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.... At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. 'She was notorious for being a terrible cook.... They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.' ... [T]he dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as 'a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!' Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.'"

From "Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells/The couple’s lives are preserved in a SoHo building where for decades they plotted their monumental projects" (NYT)(free-access link).

Lots of cool pictures of the Christo real estate, so go check them out at that link, but I want to show you this picture of Teeny, by Henri Matisse (who was her father-in-law during her first marriage):

Duchamp was her second husband. He said: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." Christo went colossal, but Duchamp went small. And he was married to a woman named Teeny.

Is there some idea that you should either go very big or very small? What springs to mind is the related idea of hot or cold: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." File that under: Things Jesus Said In Someone Else's Dream.

Looking for quotes that credit the very small and shun the medium-sized:

"It’s tempting to see our attention economy as purely dystopian. It is nightmarish, after all, to compete with one another via avatars..."

"... for work, for sex, for companionship, for cash to pay our medical bills. But the rise of the attention economy also reveals a truth that the dandies of the café terrace did not realize: of course our selfhood is defined by the attention, and with it the love, of others. Even in the disembodied terrain of the Internet, we are utterly contingent creatures: not just self-makers or, God forbid, influencers, but beings dependent on the attention of others, an attention that, at its core, is not so unlike love. (As Simone Weil famously put it: 'Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.')"

From "Eat Me, Drink Me, Like Me /Is love in the attention economy unreal?" by Tara Isabella Burton (in The New Atlantis, Winter 2020).

This is a very interesting article. Highly recommended. But I got totally sidetracked wanting to understand that Simone Weil quote — "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."

It doesn't really fit the idea Burton is talking about, which is the urge and effort to grab attention. The article title "Eat me, drink me, love me" comes from this Christina Rossetti poem, "Goblin Market." Excerpt:

“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

But the Simone Weil quote seems as though it must mean not clamoring for attention but paying attention.  Read the Weil quote in context here, then — if you're with me this far — apply it to what we are doing or failing to do when we experience what Burton calls "purely dystopian... in the disembodied terrain of the Internet."

As for "the dandies of the café terrace":

I haven't had anybody "You, a lawyer!" me in a long time.

But here's Otto this morning, commenting on a post of mine that found resonance in reptile rhetoric (the idea that Democrats were "slithering around" and a description of the jail in Congress's basement as "like the den of some foul reptile"):

I am constantly amazed at how unprofessional Ann covers the Russian collusion and obstruction investigation. She constantly cites unprofessional and partisan analysis and coverage by the usual hacks-NYT and WP. She never cites an in-depth judicial analysis from legal professionals like Andrew McCarthy or give an in-depth analysis herself. You would never know she is a career lawyer and was a law professor. As she would love to say, that's weird.

Commenter Carol reacts succinctly:

A professional gets paid for her analysis.

Yes, you could say I do this for love and you'd have to pay me to do what would not amaze Otto. But I think I deserve to be paid for amazing Otto and the Ottocrats. I do what I do and I'm entirely proud of it, even though I only do what I like.

Having been a lawyer — having lawyering in your past — can be a foundation for something else you go on to do. Who are the contributors to the human experience who have legal training and experience in their life story but went on to do something else? I'll snag a few from this list (and I'll exclude all the political figures, because there are so many):

Charles Perrault. Perrault, better known to some as the author of Tales of Mother Goose in 1697, practiced law for a few years...

John Cleese. One of the funniest men in the history of comedy has a law degree from no less than Cambridge...

Ben Stein.... He was the valedictorian of his Yale Law School class in 1970...

When is it appropriate to appropriate?

"It's time for cultural appropriators to proudly reclaim 'culturally appropriative' as a positive, empowering term. When asked 'Isn't that cultural appropriation?' you should enthusiastically answer: 'Yes! I freely adopt any cultures I choose, and I wouldn't have it any other way!'"

Writes John, bouncing off this WaPo piece by Cathy Young piece, "To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation/Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity." Excerpt from Young:

Most critics of appropriation... say they don’t oppose engagement with other cultures if it’s done in a “culturally affirming” way. A Daily Dot article admonishes that “an authentic cultural exchange should feel free and affirming, rather than plagiarizing or thieving.” A recent post on the Tumblr “This Is Not China” declares that “cultural appropriation is not merely the act of wearing or partaking in cultural symbols & practices that do not belong to you, it’s a system of exploitation & capitalisation on cultural symbols & practices that do not a) originate from b) benefit c) circle back to the culture in question.”

It makes sense to permit behaviors that encourage empathy and genuine interest while discouraging those that caricature or mock a sampled-from culture. But such litmus tests leave ample room for hair-splitting and arbitrary judgments. One blogger’s partial defense of “Kimono Wednesdays” suggests that while it was fine to let visitors [at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston] try on the kimonos, allowing them to be photographed while wearing them was a step too far. This fine parsing of what crosses the line from appreciation into appropriation suggests a religion with elaborate purity tests.

I actually think it's fine and good to contemplate these fine distinctions, especially as you develop your own ethics and taste. I'd say that criticizing others for drawing the fine lines in different places is also a matter of ethics and taste. Young asks:

What will be declared “problematic” next? Picasso’s and Matisse’s works inspired by African art? Puccini’s “Orientalist” operas, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot”? Should we rid our homes of Japanese prints? Should I take offense at other people’s Russian nesting dolls?

But I think all these things deserve attention, and I think they've all been subject to critique for a long, long time. It's hardly a "what's next?" matter to bring up Picasso's use of African art. The subject of cultural appropriation is not to be brushed aside. It deserves study, reflection, analysis, and interesting, wide-ranging debate and discussion. It's one of the great topics of conversation! Don't, in the interest of freedom, censor it. Some people take it too far and become offensive in their taking of offense, but most good subjects for study and conversation touch off some intemperate speakers who love to attack others. Like, I bet what I just said — which is setting up a good topic — has touched off some of my readers to go after me in an intemperate manner.

ADDED: For reference, here's how The New York Times talked about "those ubiquitous gold-dust twins of high-priced modern art, Picasso and Matisse" and their use of African art back in 1927. Click images to enlarge:

The Romanian woman who burned a Monet, a Matisse, a Gauguin, and a Picasso.

It's possible that those bits of cinnabar, chromium green, lazurite, and tin-lead yellow found in Olga Dogaru's wood-burning stove are not what's left of the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of paintings for which her son was arrested for stealing from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. But why lie and say you burned them? And yet, why burn them and not lie?

If you're hardcore enough to burn these things, why are you not hardcore enough to lie to the police?

Who knows what techniques the police in Romania use to extract confessions? It's one thing to crush fine art into the incinerator one night in a desperate frenzy, quite another to hold up to endless questioning. The impulse to have it over explains the burning and the confessing. It's not hardcore to burn and then not to lie. It's the weak combination. To resist destroying the evidence of your son's crimes because the art is beautiful and then also to resist the demands from the police for confession — that is the strong combination. That is hardcore.

The more mundane combinations are: 1. Burn the paintings and lie about it, and 2. Don't burn the paintings and, when confronted by the police, rat on your son. These 2 options are easiest to understand. #1 is the criminal mind, the sociopath. #2 is the virtuous person. These are the familiar and conventional types.

In her statement to the police, Mrs. Dogaru said she panicked when she realized the works would be used as evidence against her son. With officers combing the village, she told the authorities that she had looked frantically for places to hide the works, which were all in a large plastic bag.

She hid them in various places, including her sister’s home and her garden. Then, she said, she buried them at the village cemetery.... Fearful that the works could still be discovered... Mrs. Dogaru said she lighted a fire in the stove and went to the cemetery to get the works. “I put the whole package with the seven paintings, without even opening it, into the stove, and then placed over them some wood and my plastic slippers and waited for them to fully burn,” she said. “The next day I cleaned the stove, took out the ash and placed it in the garden, in a wheelbarrow.”

Congratulations to the police who extracted this confession? No. The police are to blame for arresting Dogaru the son, unleashing he mother Dogaru.

Art heist in Rotterdam.

Stolen: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; Claude Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London”; Henri Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow”; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait,” around 1890, and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work “Woman with Eyes Closed.”

Marinello said the thieves have limited options available, such as seeking a ransom from the owners, the museum or the insurers. They could conceivably sell the paintings in the criminal market too, though any sale would likely be a small fraction of their potential auction value.

The problem selling these things is obviously not protection enough to keep thieves from bothering.



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

From the link: the idea that an unscrupulous private investor might have commissioned the works’ theft was far-fetched. 'That’s something that comes from Hollywood movies,' he said.

Should they blame a Hollywood video or lax security?

UPDATE: Confession of destruction.

CNN puts blurry dots covering the breasts of a woman in a Matisse painting.

The clip is hilarious.

At 0:47, they cut to a voluptuous newswoman in a tight, low-cut shirt. It would have been cool if they'd put blurry dots over her breasts too.

(Thanks to my son Chris for IMing me about that. He says the effect was much more noticeable and ridiculous on HDTV, where he saw it.)

ADDED: Perhaps, like me, you thought of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the $8,000 drapery.

Camouflaging myself in a Matisse...

... doing a picture-in-picture Picasso...



... stopping for that train-in-a-fireplace Magritte...



... and getting lost amid the dimly lit glass cases in glass cases in the surrealist passages.



(These are just some more of my pictures from the Art Institute of Chicago. We've moved on to Lafayette, West Lafayette, and back through Chicago, and — almost to Madison — we're picking up free WiFi (and cheap cheeseburgers) at a McDonald's near Beloit.)

The Obamas selected a work of art that's an outright copy of Matisse — done by an African-American woman.

Michelle Malkin shows the 2 pictures side-by-side and reprints this bilge from Art in America:

A good place to begin thinking about Alma Thomas’s ravishing late work might be the moment in 1964 when, close to paralysis and bedridden, the 73-year-old artist found herself staring at the hollyhock shadows she had known her entire life and calculating how to use them in her paintings. A year earlier, she had seen the late Matisse cutouts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Matisse’s work had prompted her to paint an acrylic-on-canvas version of his collage The Snail (1953), in which nearly all the original colors were reversed. Thomas named her painting Watusi (Hard Edge), after Chubby Checker’s dance hit “The Watusi.” As well as marrying high modernism with the popular culture of black America — then entering the American mainstream — the title she chose noted Matisse’s debt to African art.

You know, the dance hit, which is actually titled "Wah-Watusi," was by The Orlons. It's not a Checker hit (though he may have covered the song). The Orlons are black too though, so it's as if it doesn't even matter to Art in America, as it makes up its inane explanation of what the old woman was doing.

Anyway, it's really sad to see this sentimental stretching to identify African-American artists. There are plenty of real ones, and mistakes like this make it seem as though there are not and that patronizing — which really ought to be called racism — is necessary.

Robert Rauschenberg has died.

Links to obituaries to follow.

Here's an old post of mine about him, from back in 2004:

Robert Rauschenberg answers some questions from Deborah Solomon in today's NYT:

Aren't you having another show now at Yale?

Yes. I am not happy with it. It was organized by the gay studies department, whatever that is. It's not an approach that makes sense. I refused to give them permission to reproduce the works in a catalog.

Hmmm.... a little more info would be nice! There's this description:

"Robert Rauschenberg: Gifts to Terry Van Brunt'' features about 40 pieces that Rauschenberg gave as presents to his former lover, Terry Van Brunt. ... Jonathan Katz, an associate professor at Yale who launched the gay and lesbian studies program there in 2002, organized the exhibit.

"Rauschenberg himself does not want the work talked about in a gay context,'' Katz said. "But I am not responsible to the artist's wishes. I am responsible to the work.''

The collection includes "Bob's Face With Fly,'' a self-portrait that shows a fly on Rauschenberg's face, and "Terry's Briefcase Piece,'' a briefcase that was painted and collaged. Katz believes the exhibit is important because it shows how Rauschenberg's personal life has shaped his work.

Meanwhile, back in the NYT interview, Rauschenberg is presenting himself as impersonally as possible. He speaks of painting from photographs. Asked “What sort of photographs do you prefer?,” he asserts that he “likes photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall.” Asked “What is so great about the ordinary anyhow?, he answers, “I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying." Asked if at 78, he thinks about dying, he says “No. Not at all” and tells a hackneyed anecdote about someone else. Asked why he left New York in 1970 to go live by the ocean in Florida, he alludes to a feeling of responsibility about “everybody … leaving their spouses,” then says a fortuneteller told him “it wasn't my fault but that I should go to sunshine and water” and he “was pleased with that.” He gives as the secret to happiness “enjoy[ing] something simple, like just looking at the ocean.”

ADDED: Here's the NYT obit — a very big one. Excerpt:

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show [in 1951]. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well, hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 28.

It's Day 28 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) I'm still at the Stedelijkmuseum, where we saw that video installation yesterday. Today, I look at a huge collage by Henri Matisse and draw a tiny detail, and then I go on to the sort of thing that makes people think sculpture is just terrible:





This sculpture was room size and not made of any fine material like marble or wood. It was just a shoddy assemblage. And, yes, the devil is sitting on a toilet. The angels are holding it aloft. It's called "The Triumph of Love." Doesn't that give you a wonderful opportunity to think deeply about... what? How crappy your last relationship was?

Some idiosyncratic arrangements. It's a nice cold morning in Wisconsin. The phone rang at 11:30 last night, after I was asleep, so I ended up having the opportunity to read a few pieces in the new New Yorker last night. I read Peter Schjeldahl's article on the Barnes Foundation:

Thousands of wonderful objects fill a graceful château that was finished in 1925. Among them, hundreds of School of Paris modern paintings and a smattering of Old Masters and American moderns are massed on walls covered in warm tan burlap, labelled only with the artists’ names. The pictures are interspersed with items of skilled metalwork (hinges, lock plates, utensils). Antique furniture, African sculpture, Pennsylvania folk art, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, and Southwest Indian rugs and ceramics and jewelry cluster throughout.

The question is whether this place can be kept intact, in its idiosyncratic form, according to the terms of the donor's will or whether a court will see the financial difficulties as sufficient to justify breaking it up. Schjeldahl begs for it to be kept as it is:

The Barnes is a work of art in itself, more than the sum of its fabulous parts. The same may be said for other institutionalized private collections—New York’s Frick, Boston’s Gardner—but without equal justice. None so engages visitors in an adventure of sensibility. As you test the virtues of the collection, they test you, probing the depths and exposing the limits of your perceptive powers. You don’t view the installation so much as live it, undergoing an experience that will persist in your memory like a love affair that taught you some thrilling, and some dismaying, things about your character. If there were other places like the Barnes, dispensing with it would not be tragic. But one minus one is zero.

You'll have to buy the paper copy to see the beautiful photograph of one orange-burlapped wall, a case of African sculptures, assorted paintings by Matisse and Picasso, and other items in an arrangement constituting one sector of the grand work of art by "the strange Dr. Albert Barnes."

The paper copy of this issue is also needed to read the David Sedaris story, "The Living Dead," which I also read last night. Serious mouse lovers should beware. Driving into work this morning, I was listening to slot 4 in the CD player which was also David Sedaris, the part where his sister Lisa is expressing her excessive concern about dogs and the story of the exotic turtles and the racoon that chewed two legs off each of them leaving them looking like half-stripped Volkswagens.

I pulled my nonstripped turtle-morphic green Volkswagen into the garage at Grainger Hall and came into my office where post-Impressionist reproductions (Matisse, Gaugin, Denis, Bonnard) are idiosyncratically arrayed on taxi-yellow walls.