{painting} – Page 199 – { feuilleton }

Angels 1: The Angel of History and sensual metaphysics

Angelus Novus by Paul Klee (1920?).

The Catholic church failed to work its medieval magic on me beyond inspiring a fondness for ecclesiastic architecture and men with wings. But in keeping with the season it’s Angel Week here on { feuilleton } although some of the angels featured may not be quite Vatican-approved.

Above is the Paul Klee painting that prompted Walter Benjamin’s celebrated piece from ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) in Illuminations:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A world away from Benjamin’s wreckage, Caravaggio paints a typically luscious boy who just happens to have a pair of wings stuck to his back cradling a swooning saint in St Francis in Ecstasy. Ecstasy as a theme isn’t unknown in religious art, of course, but Renaissance painters usually showed St Theresa doing the fainting. Caravaggio was following a different muse.

St Francis in Ecstasy by Caravaggio (1595).

The pair of embracing angels tumbling into the marvellous Seven Acts of Mercy (below) are slightly more robust, a lot more so than the creature posing in Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1597), a picture whose precise religious content seems tenuous at best. And there are still those who believe Caravaggio’s interest in male flesh was solely artistic…

Seven Acts of Mercy by Caravaggio (1607).

More angels tomorrow.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953

Left: Stowitts photgraphed by Nickolas Muray, 1922.

Hubert Julian Stowitts had a number of careers, including dancer, film actor, painter, designer and metaphysician. As a dancer he worked with Anna Pavlova, who discovered him in California in 1915 and took him on tour around the world. His statuesque figure was used by Rex Ingram for the infernal scenes in The Magician (1926), an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s rather limp roman-à-clef based on the exploits of Aleister Crowley. The scene with Stowitts as a satyr owed nothing to the book, however, being more inspired by the director’s fondness for the tales of Arthur Machen. Most photos that turn up from this film show Stowitts rather than Paul Wegener who played the sinister alchemist of the title.

Stowitt’s painting developed in the 1930s and included a series of 55 paintings of nude (male) athletes for the 1936 Olympics (see Ewoud Broeksma’s contemporary equivalents at originalolympics.com). Other paintings depicted dance scenes, costume designs, people encountered during travels in the Far East and, in the 1950s, a series of ten Theosophist pictures entitled The Atomic Age Suite.

Prince Suwarno in Mahabarata role (1928).

Briggs Hunt and William Golden (1936).

The Crucifixion in Space (1950).

• The Stowitts Museum and Library
• Stowitts at the Queer Arts Resource

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Nicholas Kalmakoff, 1873–1955

Death from above

The apocalyptic spectacles of Romantic painter John Martin are routinely treated by art critics as kitsch, a dismissal which ignores the considerable power and perennial attraction that many of his best pictures possess. Kitsch is a bad thing, it seems, unless you’re Jeff Koons or Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Martin’s most famous work, The Great Day of His Wrath, has raised its tumultuous head again on the cover of Bombs, a recent single by Faithless. The painting depicts a scene from the Book of Revelations with city-capped mountains being upturned onto terrified sinners while lightning cuts through the sky. The video for the song is an anti-war affair by Howard Greenhalgh, juxtaposing innocuous images of everday life with weapons being fired and soldiers being attacked, often in the same shot. So a happy family skips along a beach while a mushroom cloud grows on the horizon. The moral guardians at MTV have duly banned this in order to spare the delicate sensibilities of America’s teenagers. And they wonder why people like YouTube so much? Or Google Video?

Faithless are a bit late to John Martin’s table, Lustmord featured the painting in full on the cover of Heresy in 1990, an album whose doomy rumbles I much prefer to the duo’s lightweight soul. Better late than never, I suppose.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby
• The Enigma of Desiderio

Two American paintings

The Titan’s Goblet (1833) by Thomas Cole.

Landscape with Grenade (1974) by Cliff McReynolds.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

The art of Thomas Häfner, 1928–1985

Lucifer (no date).

…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty.

As in all figurative art, fantastic art must of course be judged not only by its intentions but by the quality of the execution, and by standards that have been almost totally lost in the turbulence of changing fashions, movements and politics on the art market. This has led to a noticeable helplessness among the critics, who seem to ignore a growing tendency toward the fantastic in the hope that it will fade away and die. I do not believe it will.

Thomas Häfner

Who was Thomas Häfner? Good question, because he’s virtually invisible on the web. The painting above is scanned from David Larkin’s excellent Fantastic Art (Pan/Ballantine, 1973) and was also used as a cover image for an edition of Blaise Cendrars‘ scurrilous masterpiece, Moravagine. The Demon Woman below is a watercolour original for sale on eBay. Häfner was a member of a group of German artists who called themselves the Young Realists, formed in Düsseldorf in the mid-Fifties. Significantly, another group of young imaginative painters was active at the same time in Vienna, the Fantastic Realists, who included the great Ernst Fuchs among their number. “Realism” here can be considered as referring to a style that favoured the hard-edged realistic approach of Surrealism; Häfner’s content certainly wasn’t realistic.

These people remain neglected or unknown because art critics like to pretend there’s only one story being told in the development of art at any given time when there are usually several, often with conflicting agendas. So we’re always being informed that the dominant movement in fin de siècle Paris was Impressionism and hear little of the Symbolists who were equally—if not more—popular, productive and influential during that period.

(This laziness carries over to other areas; Debussy is continually described as “an Impressionist composer” when one of his most famous works, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, was based on a Symbolist poem by Mallarmé. There are no fauns in Impressionist paintings.)

The prevailing trend in the mid-Fifties was the thin gruel of Abstract Expressionism, the complete antithesis of the kind of art being produced by Häfner, Fuchs and company. There’s a reason for the elevation of this type of work over others. Critics such as Clement Greenberg saw abstraction (which, ironically, grew out of Surrealism) as being a politically acceptable direction after the turmoil of the Second World War. The Nazis liked realism in their art, while the Soviets under Stalin and the Chinese under Mao had declared Socialist Realism to be the official art of the Communist Revolution, therefore realism of any variety was reactionary and bad. Further irony comes when the CIA agreed with this argument and secretly promoted Abstract Expressionism outside America. This has led us to the situation we have today where a Willem de Kooning painting, Woman III (1952–53), was recently sold for $137.5 million which means collecting this kind of work is now a game for billionaires. It really would be the final irony if the kind of realistic art that Clement Greenberg despised was elevated to a new popularity by over-priced Abstract Expressionism as collectors with fewer assets were forced to look elsewhere. Critics can protest all they like but these days it’s money that speaks with the loudest voice in the world of art.

Demon Woman (no date).

Update: added some additional works:

Marionetten (1964).

Szene mit Schädeln (1970).

Phantastische Waldszene (1971).

Masken in zerfallener Umgebung (1974).

Die Harpye (no date).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive