Reviews and News:
An outsider gets his due: “David Bomberg was one of the great British artists of the 20th century but he was born and died in poverty and suffered neglect for much of his career…Art historians tend to speak of Bomberg’s career in terms of artistic movements and form: his early relationship with Cubism and Vorticism, then a more figurative style in the 1920s, as he moved towards landscape and portraits, with a growing emphasis on colour and pigment rather than geometric form. However, there is another way of looking at Bomberg’s career. He was always an outsider.”
The Odyssey and others: “He and his men, Odysseus explains to Polyphemus, are not piratical outlaws but Greeks who fought victoriously under the glorious Agamemnon. He ends on a note of supplication. He appeals to the code the Greeks called xenia, from their word for ‘stranger,’ which regulated how guests and hosts, especially when unknown to each other, ought to behave—an exaggerated etiquette meant to preempt the violence coiled within Other-anxiety: ‘Now we beg you, / here at your knees, to grant a gift, as is / the norm for hosts and guests. Please sir, my lord: / respect the gods. We are your suppliants, / and Zeus is on our side, since he takes care / of visitors, guest-friends, and those in need.’ Polyphemus explodes in contempt at Odysseus’s well-crafted words, declaring himself outside all norms that guide men and gods: ‘I do the bidding of my own heart.’ And then he snatches up two of Odysseus’s men and makes a quick and gory meal of them. Such wantonness untouched by pity could not be a starker expression of an unbridgeable gulf.”
Inside Cézanne’s studio: “Cézanne painted his studio walls a dark gray with a hint of green. Every object in the studio, illuminated by a vast north window, seemed to be absorbed into the gray of this background. There were no telltale reflections around the edges of the objects to separate them from the background itself, as there would have been had the wall been painted white.”
The uses and abuses of Paradise Lost overseas: “Slovenian poet Marjan Strojan tells the story of Milovan Djilas, the translator of Paradise Lost into Serbian. Born in Montenegro in 1911, Djilas would join the (illegal) Communist Party and end up in prison for refusing to name his collaborators, even under torture. He became a key guerrilla commander in the Partisan resistance against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, eventually becoming Vice-President of Yugoslavia. But after publishing criticisms of the Yugoslav regime, he was arrested and imprisoned for three years; then sentenced to a further seven years for writing, while in prison, a book that exposed the way communism had created a privileged bureaucratic class. Released in 1961, Djilas was swiftly re-imprisoned the following year for allegedly revealing state secrets in yet another book. It was during this period, while sharing cells with common criminals, that Djilas started to translate Paradise Lost into Serbian.”
Why is this Turkish novel from the 1940s selling 1 million copies today?
There are no Leonardo paintings in any New York museum. That’s why people are lining up outside Christie’s in the rain to get a look at Salvator Mundi, “which has been guaranteed to sell at auction this week for over $100 million.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Simon Willis revisits the drawings and writings of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson:
“In October 1944, Tove Jansson drew a cover for Garm, a Finnish satirical magazine, showing a brigade of Adolf Hitlers as pudgy little thieves. In one corner of the page, they rifle through someone’s drawers, in another they shovel possessions onto the back of a cart, and at the top a lone Führer sets fire to a house. Caricatures like this were not unusual for Jansson, who had been belittling Stalin and Hitler in the magazine since the early days of the World War II. Newer, though, was the tiny pale figure with a long nose peeking out at the chaos from behind the magazine’s title. This was one of the earliest appearances of a Moomin.
“This piece, which is shown in the first room of a new retrospective of Jansson’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, represents a turning point in her career and life. Born in Finland, Jansson (1914–2001) contributed her first illustrations to Garm as a precocious fifteen-year-old, and alongside her magazine work she developed a successful career as a painter. Then, in 1945, she published The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first in a series of nine children’s books about a family of hippo-like creatures living in Moominvalley, a place of forests and rivers on the coast of Finland. The books, in which Jansson intersperses her stories with simple line drawings of the Moomins and their adventures, have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold over fifteen million copies, in addition to which Jansson drew a Moomin cartoon strip syndicated to 120 newspapers around the world. The popularity of the Moomins spawned an empire of television shows, films, and theme parks, as well as all manner of merchandise from plastic toys to crockery.
“But over time, Jansson came to feel exhausted by the Moomins and that their success had obscured her other ambitions as an artist. In 1978, she satirized her situation in a short story titled ‘The Cartoonist’ about a man called Stein contracted to produce a daily strip, Blubby, which has generated a Moomin-like universe of commercial paraphernalia—‘Blubby curtains, Blubby jelly, Blubby clocks and Blubby socks, Blubby shirts and Blubby shorts.’ ‘Tell me something,’ another cartoonist asks Stein. ‘Are you one of those people who are prevented from doing Great Art because they draw comic strips?’ Stein denies it, but that was precisely Jansson’s fear.
“In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Jansson’s work beyond the Moomins. Much of this has focused on her novels for adults, which she began writing in the late 1960s and include short, crystalline works like The Summer Book(1972) and The True Deceiver (1982), which have been reissued in English since her death. Less attention has been paid to her range as a visual artist—something the Dulwich exhibition aims to rectify. The first room contains paintings made during the 1930s and 1940s, along with a case of her wartime political cartoons. The next room displays canvases from the 1960s and 1970s, by which time Jansson had given up the Moomin cartoon strip. These are followed by rooms dedicated to her illustrations for children’s classics like The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland, for the Moomin books and, finally, her Moomin cartoons. The exhibition’s progression has two somewhat contradictory results. On the one hand, by opening with unfamiliar parts of Jansson’s oeuvre it emphasizes her breadth. On the other, it gets that out of the way before moving on to better-known material. Its momentum ends up flowing toward the Moomins rather than away from them.”
Photos: Lake Schliersee
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “On a Box of Rainbow Sprinkles”
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