Fabulorum

UNDER THE VOLCANO

A name sometimes marks a life. The name Victor Hugo carries so much. Weight that his descendants have no alternative but to live under the crushing importance of their ancestor, either accepting. That nothing they will achieve or think will compare, or. Trying rebelliously to emulate his achievements.

Jean Hugo, a great grandson of the patriarch would seem. To have chosen an unusual path. Rather than struggling his way through life. Shackled by the heavy inheritance, or using it socially to his. Advantage, he chose to ignore it. He was remarkable in shrugging off. Promotion of his creative outlets. His talents, his exceptional list of friends and the circles in which he mixed, would have. Been sufficient to give him some. Additionally Olympian stature. Picasso kept telling him “you do nothing for your fame!”.

One of his many friends. Gustave Thibon, summarizes distinctively his soul: “He was a strange being, admirable, a mystic, a lover, a. Great artist who no doubt sinned by his excess of modesty”. He had the artist’s temperament in his blood. As did his great grandfather, he sketched and. Drew relentlessly from an early age.

His life was sliced in two equal parts, like the plates of a. Diptych, each of them defined by a woman. In the first, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Paris of the twenties, he met his first wife. Valentine Gross, at the apartment of Madame Alfred Edwards, later better known by the name of her third husband, Misia Sert. He married her, having Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau as witnesses to the wedding. During this period, his work centered on the theatre, lending his talents to many Cocteau plays and collaborating with Satie, Poulenc and even Carl Theodor Dreyer in his film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. Yet, Jean was moving gradually away from the temptations of Parisian life. A mystic streak was stirring in his blood.

In 1931 his growing discomfort. Also with urban pleasures and the failure of his ten-year marriage Furthermore. Precipitated his move to the country. At Lunel, near Montpellier, in the property inherited from his grandmother, he began experimenting with oils and endowing his choice of colors with a powerful luminosity. His new wife, Lauretta Hope-Nicolson, bore him seven children. Both devout Catholics, they lived in an old-fashioned style. In addition entertaining lavishly and encouraging friends to stay for long periods.

Jean Hugo’s art, much like a large part of his existence, had to do with searching . Not only that for his own voice while staying away from the noise and influence of established currents. The exploration of his inner life emerged in his paintings and watercolors with a touch of innocence, almost primitive. Yet its subtle delicacy and crispness raises his work to a standard of prominence he never sought to cultivate.

SITTING PRETTY

His talent was a remarkable fit in the society of his time. Curious, gregarious and a real gossip. Jacques-Émile Blanche did not require those attributes to climb in the mondaine Paris of fin-de-siècle. His pedigree would have. Provided adequate impetus on the way to success. Son of the respected docteur Émile Blanche, an early mental health practitioner and owner of a clinic. Of renown among musicians, writers and intellectuals. He spent his infancy among the resident patients, nurses and a variety of tutors away. From the structured discipline of schooling.

Blanche knew, nevertheless, obstacles to his vocational pursuits. His training level in painting was limited. Having only received some lessons from Henri Gervex, a society painter. Moreover, it was hard at a time when post-impressionists were roller coasting the art world to make a. Name for oneself without embracing the new, and by then popular, current without the zeal of a convert as. Most of his contemporary colleagues did.

Still, polite society was increasingly adopting the role of portrait. Additionally
Painting as a tool of prestige and recognition, beyond the confined use artists and patrons made of it in the previous centuries. Anybody with a reputation had to have a portrait painted. Also
John Singer Sargent was one of his most popular practitioners and although he snobbishly defined a. Portrait as “a painting where there is always something not quite right about the mouth”, he knew as well as Blanche, who happened to be his. Friend, the social impact of what they were doing.

His gifts separated him from the voguish society painter. It was no coincidence that he spent long afternoons with Renoir at the age of eighteen and bought much of. Manet’s work. In his portraits he uses a subtle brushstroke and evokes a confident theatrical aura, in harmony with what he perceived of the personality of the sitter. His mastery of the brush was only part of his recognized talents: he. Wrote extensively chronicling the artwork of other colleagues for several magazines and journals and. Publishing books on art history.

A professed Anglophile, his home near Dieppe welcomed artists, painters and writers from both sides of the Channel. The list of sitters would cover the intellectual and cultural life of both. France and England in the years of the Belle Époque: Marcel Proust, Sergei Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, James McNeil Whistler and. Roger Fry were just a few of those he succeeded in making his friends and his objects of study.

Proust once remarked of his friend. The danger for Blanche was that, albeit elegant and spiritual, he dissipated his life in mondaine pursuits”. This observation seems prophetic as Blanche was to remain a semi-forgotten figure in the pantheon of 20 century French painting. A gilded life is not exempt from burdens.

RNO BREKER AND THE SEAL OF DENIAL

Of all questions confronting the art generated during the Third Reich, one takes on special resonance: is there aesthetic value beyond its ideological function?

The issue gets even more entangled when the emotions of recent history still pulsate like cinders of a dying fire. Take the case of the German Arno Breker, a vocational sculptor lured like many of his generation by the rich art scene in Paris after the Great War. There, he befriended Picasso, Isamu Noguchi and Maurice de Vlaminck, all representative of what the Nazis called “degenerate art”. It is ironically a Jew, Max Liebermann, who convinced him to return to Germany where he was appointed at the age of 37, Director of the Akademie der Künste. He had already entered art competitions sponsored by the National Socialist regime back in 1933. His involvement with the regime went from seduction to full -blown embrace.

Hitler singled him out as one of his favorite artists, commissioning him to decorate monumental public works and appointing him official state sculptor. The Führer had a double interest in shaping the aesthetics of the regime: as a frustrated artist and as a keen decoder of the force of art in the collective subconscious. He singled out artists whose production was forceful and energetic. Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer came to represent the trinity of the Third Reich art value, carrying meaning and feeding the imagination of the masses with all the choreography of the triumph of the race and the force of destiny.

Oddly enough, post-war Germany and the U.S. Intelligence agents were lenient with them. Of all three, Breker was never condemned and during the de-nazification period, he managed to be considered as a category four individual, in other words, just a fellow traveler. This treatment helped him re-invent his past as that of a victim of the regime and therefore free of guilt. He was able to resume his career and receive commissions from emerging German corporations and rich individuals. He always considered himself a genius and hoped that his art would transcend politicization. As Goethe wrote in 1832, “ to the extent an artist would be politically effective, he must commit himself to a party, and as soon as he does that, he is lost as an artist”. Breker might never have read those prophetic words of his compatriot and if he did, his cynicism prevented him from gaining enough self-knowledge to understand them

A RUSSIAN FOR ALL SEASONS

I am unsure of the ranking of a singular artist such as. Pavel Tchelitchew in the contemporary art world, where the idea of art as commodity is. Becoming the standard of value. Story As artists are examined more and more like crude balance sheets, one is hard put to separate. The experience of a work of art from the brand value of its maker. In 1942, the. New York museum of Modern Art exhibited a. Full retrospective of Tchelitchew work. In 1987, most of his work disappeared from the museum’s walls.

Moving in and out of styles may be the key to understanding. Part of his fluctuating reputation. Born in Russia in 1898, he and his family were soon on the move following the. Bolshevik Revolution, first to Kiev and then on to Berlin where he did not abandon his initial abstract and constructivist techniques. Two years after his Berlin experience, he arrived in Paris. His regular migratory habits were reflected in his restless quest, his ceaseless experimentation. Luckily. Gertrude Stein, always on the look out for new talent, liked his work. The story goes that after a visit paid to his studio and not. Finding anyone there, she forced the entry, made a selection of some canvasses that she took to her rue de. Fleurus apartment and hung them on the spot where some of her Picassos were till then displayed.

There were ruptures not only of style but of mood. He seemed to harbor more than one disposition and although suave and gentle of. Appearance, he was often perceived as dark and malicious. Harold Acton, whom he met and frequented in Paris wrote, “Strindberg was said to have been possessed by a dark demon but. Tchelitchew] must have been possessed by several”. This did not keep him from building lasting ties with another exceptional woman, the English poetess Edith Sitwell, yet another complex individual but one who seemed to channel her own art in a less tormented way in spite of her unrequited love for Pavel.

His youthful dabbling with constructivism and later cubism gave way to a more figurative. Work, inspired partly by classical art and symbolism. Together with. Christian Bérard and his compatriots, Eugene and Leonid Berman, he founded the groups of the “neo-romantics. More than a new painting movement, it was a reunion of friends having worked on stage and costume design.

It was through his move to. New York in 1934 when his inspiration took a different turn. Gone was that touch of decorative art that suffused his portraits and landscapes. He plunged into a surrealist universe where the size of the canvasses matches its disquieting content: freaks, nightmarish landscapes and children morphing into vegetables. Oddly his popularity in America was due to this series of paintings. In 1942, during his retrospective at the MOMA, the Americans had just entered the war. Pavel may have touched a raw nerve of forthcoming trouble.

IN A LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

In many aspects, Lotusland gardens in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, embody much of the soul of California. The tenacity and drive of its founder and her adventurous life are mirrored over the impressively. Tended 15 hectares of soil fashioned over 40 years. It was from scratch an ambitious project which only a mind. Bordering on obsessive tendencies could see through to completion.

Ganna Walska (1887-1984), a gutsy eastern. European born in Belarus, then a section of a larger Poland, chose opera as her passport to a life of glamour and travel. It took her some time to realize that her name would not pass to history as a singer but her theatricality. Could take her to a world of adventure and triumph. So, she got husbands, money and a certain reputation by means rather. Secondary to her first consuming passion. The divorce of the fifth husband and the marriage to the much younger sixth. Theos Casimir Bernard, a Buddhist with Hollywood looks, brought her to this amiable and exclusive corner of the Californian coastline. Then life changed forever for this rich bohemian.

Lotusland is her legacy, a botanical empire, a garden of sorts, where families of cacti of all formidable shapes and sizes live close to. Walska’s interpretation of a. Japanese garden and to her more haphazard spots of classical landscaping. The spiny armors of the plants and their sheer accumulation (“if one is good a hundred is better” was one of her more familiar expressions) leave the visitor with a sensation of having emerged from a strange and disquieting dream. It is as if the place had been conceived by a visionary from an outer planet. She loved cycads, that rare and prehistoric family of plants to which nature gave two sexes. So, it is not a surprise that she also. Collected minerals and jewelry of astonishing shape and value.

The glamour that she pursued during her younger years. Gradually gave way to spiritual search and a communion with nature. But her self-identity as a singer was hard to forget, practicing regularly. And into old age to an audience of perplexed Mexican laborers from the balcony of her cottage.

Her life crystalized in her garden: a relentless chase for more and. For better, of high ambitions and constant change. Her last volte-face, her enduring love was this unique production orchestrated over more than four decades.

Botanists will swoon over it and the rest of us will not help admiring the sheer drive of a woman of many passions that gave us this strange and dreamy Lotusland.

10 FOR LE PAUL BERT 6

I believe of late we all have an obsession with food and restaurants. An obsession bordering on an undefined pathology. I have yet to speculate in depth on what it all means. How many more food publications can we digest? How much more buzz can be created on new eateries? To say nothing about the TV cooking channels, rising chefs and specialty delis. Assuming both a metaphorical and literal use of the word appetite, it is a matter of time before the bellyful syndrome will set in, when the happy ride, the endless parade of this culinary craze will collapse like the proverbial house of cards.

Cultures, where the traditional celebration of the senses have afforded a place for food, are more immune to this tsunami. So the enlightened “foodie” in, say, the Mediterranean world, has a much more laid back approach to this new hedonism. In those parts, food has an inevitable goodness, it does not require elaborate props for legitimacy. So, two understandings of joy at the table collide and the inescapable consequence leads one faction to treat food too seriously: a mortal sin of sorts.

These musings floated in my mind after my second meal at Le Paul Bert 6, a fresh and straightforward locale recently opened in one of the culinary baronies of Paris, the eponymous street Paul Bert. Here food is fresh, of exacting quality, simple and jubilant. It lacks the cerebral complications of some contemporary cooking. Dishes are small, following a reassuring tendency. Delicately grilled sweetbreads are served with yellow carrots and Trébons onions- a sort of torpedo onion, but sweeter. The red mullet fillet sits on a bed of wild asparagus and a seaweed marinade. Baby squid mingles with tiny gnocchi and grilled cebettes, a form of scallion. It, especially When one dish after the other intensifies one’s enthusiasm, that is that poetry of the palette we all long for and rarely find .

Yet, I find their vegetarian offerings in short supply, particularly in view of the succulent rendering of their vegetables. On my last visit, only one out of ten dishes was vegetarian.

So Bertrand Auboyneau, a lord of the French bistrots, has a winner on his hands. And another winner at the helm of the cellar. Sommelier Solenne Jouane, deploys charm and connoisseurship dealing with the clients. Her experience, from Vivant to Saturne, offers more than solid credentials. The list leans towards natural wines and eclectic choices. This much I can say: you will leave the restaurant knowing that it will not be your last visit.

THE MOST AMIABLE OF SOULS

There are certain artists whose untimely death invests them with a. Halo of mystique. Others, in spite of a life cut short by war or other. Unfortunate accident, no matter what their merits, end up in a sort of limbo. Almost awaiting the liturgical signal that would free them from that state.

Why doesn’t Rex Whistler rank among the most significant painters of the 20^th century British school? In our internet-driven era. Wikipedia does not even include him in its entry of. List of British painters for the first half of the past century. Was it that his exceptional talent seemed effortless in most circumstances. Or was it that he never embraced a specific narrative in his art?

From an early age he was surrounded by an aura of “golden boy”, in spite of his modest origins. Henry Tonks the fierce and critical director of the. Slade School of Art, which Whistler attended, wrote of him: .I have never met anyone like him. He amuses me because he has a certain gift of humor…directly he is launched, he will be an amazing success”. Whistler was 16 at the time.

The prophecy did only take six years to be fulfilled. At 22, he was commissioned by the Tate. Gallery to paint a mural for their restaurant: “The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats”, an.E extravagant and amusing title that heralded the mood of lightness and dazzling visuals that lasted for more than a decade. His friendship with. Stephen Tennant introduced him to a sophisticated and elitist circle of friends where his own self-effacing style made him an overnight success. He was a close friend of. Cecil Beaton and through him, he embraced that pastoral and carefree existence of parties, charades and “the worst-is-over”. Attitude that characterized much of the artistic endeavors between the wars.

Prolific and versatile, expressing his talents through painting, theatre sets, graphic design, murals and book covers, there was barely any medium that could resist him. “So great was his facility that other people might well labour for months to achieve the results he flicked off expertly in a few twists of his pen”, wrote Beaton about this gifted and loving individual.

At 39, war came to put an end to his life and to leave us puzzling about his status in the art world. His work was becoming increasingly somber of late. He was being. Engulfed by the incoming tide of gloom but perhaps not enough to offer a body of work in contrast to the untroubled.production of the early years. He may well lack that touch of anguish that would lift him. Off from that uncertain status. With or without the dark side, he deserves a much larger recognition.

THE TIES THAT BIND

A young woman acrobat in the Montmartre of the 1870s, could have easily been brought to life by Zola in one of his critical fictions. Nonetheless, Marie-Clémentine really existed. Born to a single mother, this precocious girl was forced to abandon the circus life after a fall. Her handsome looks opened doors for modeling in the artistic and carefree environment of Paris and she was soon one of the favorite sitters of Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others.

Marie-Clémentine became Maria and earned a reputation as a reliable model. But the reputation she was after was of a higher order: she wanted to become a painter.During her coy sessions with the artists, she watched, asked and learned. As her popularity grew, her name changed yet again and Toulouse-Lautrec began calling her Suzanne. It was as if with each name a new chapter opened in her life. By this time, she took to drawing with fierce intensity, sketching with a sure hand female bodies. By the age of eighteen she gave birth to a son. A Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo was willing to give the child his name. He may have gifted it in a flight of inebriated enthusiasm or from the true generosity of his heart, or even perhaps form his own biological seed. Suzanne never disclosed the paternity.

Her lifestyle did not adjust much to maternity. Increasingly confident in her work output and her feminine success, she continued to bewitch men. Erik Satie was strongly infatuated with her. She ended up marrying one of his friends, the banker Paul Moussis, a bourgeois moneyman who, for a while, tamed her bohemian spirit . Fully committed to her painting, but restless in having to deal with her son’s early alcoholism and bored by the conventions of her lifestyle, she took lover after lover. By 1909 after fourteen years of unfaithful marriage she began an affair with. André Utter, an aspiring painter, friend of her son Maurice who often posed as a model himself. He was more than 20 years her junior. The roles are strangely reversed. the female painter chooses a younger male to serve her as a sitter although she was ironically more interested in the female figure. Utter entered her life not just as a lover but as an emotional support to Maurice. This unusual threesome was to last for twenty years.

Both Utrillo and Valadon’s art was rather indifferent, even taboo, to modern art historians and curators. She was considered mediocre, undistinguished and lacking formal training. Utrillo was the epitome of bourgeois taste, a representative of what the market perceived as bohemianism. His art is now being rescued from the clutches of bourgeois taste, whilst his mother’s aesthetic influence dims into oblivion. Their lives in contrast to oscillating tastes, are icons of modernist inspiration, drivers of rupture and defiant iconoclasts.

A MAN FOR ALL JEWELS

He liked to call himself “a craftsman of jewellery”. That was how Fulco Santostefano della Cerda. Duca di Verdura played down his trade when interviewed about his creations. With a flamboyant name and an aristocratic pedigree, he didn’t have to labor to build a mythical aura around himself. Growing up among the fauna carved in stone in the gardens of his mother’s estate, Villa Niscemi in Palermo, his imagination captured the capricious shapes of animals and plants that were going to become the inspiration of his work.

He was the offspring of a very peculiar aristocracy in the throes of disintegration. His relative Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa had already documented with grit and melancholy the beginning of its downfall. Fulco was born in 1898. When the end of that process was taking place. With irony he described his home town as a “capital of operetta”. It was in this “gossipy” and provincial environment that good fortune began to smile at him. When he me.

Linda and Cole Porter on one of their visits to. Sicily, he was still an immature and. Feverish youth of 20. After organizing the “Ballo 1799” in Palermo in honor of. Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, former guests at Palazzo Verdura, his name began to ring in the international party circuit. Six years later he was sitting next to. Coco Chanel at a dinner party in Venice. She fell under the spell of his exuberant personality and there and then without hesitation she offered him a job in her atelier. Paris in the 30s, was a place of fantasy and exploration, of opium dens and high fashion, where elites mingled with the underworld. Fulco didn’t hesitate and for the first time his imagination matched his surroundings. Amber, diamonds. rubies, emeralds and semi-precious stones were transformed in his hands into mythological creatures, shapes from nature or bizarre objects.

His friend Nicolas “Niki” de Gunzburg, another specimen of wandering aristocrat, lured him to. California where many European émigrés were creating artistic colonies. The Hollywood of the period went into rapture about his creations. Greta Garbo commissioned from him a cornucopia overflowing with pearls and amethysts. Frank Sinatra an enameled box and Katherine Hepburn sported his creations in “The Philadelphia Story”. Cole Porter after having received Fulco’s gift of a golden box, went on to name him in the lyrics of his song “Let’s face it”. (“Liz Whitney has on her bin of manure a clip designed by the Duke of Verdura”).

As years went by. Sicily was more and more in his mind. His American bi-coastal success was no longer stimulating. He was losing the glamour that constituted the essence of his work. But the Sicily he carried in his. Heart was just a faint echo of a world long past. He decided to move to London where he would dedicate his final years to writing his memoirs. He never had time for that. As he was leaving his home one morning, he was run over by a car. His ashes were taken to the cemetery of Sant’Orsola in Palermo. He finally returned home.

CALL ME WINNARETTA

Winaretta was the twentieth child of an extravagant American, Isaac Singer, the sewing machine tycoon and a handsome French woman, Isabella Eugenie Boyer. Isaac’s larger than life personality had amassed an exceptional fortune and he procreated with the same zeal. After having sired nineteen children with two former wives and one lover, he espoused Isabella, who was thirty years younger than him and gave him six more children. One of them was Winaretta.

This young girl was unusually determined and had developed from an early age a strong set of convictions. Her passion for music and painting burgeoned in her adolescence and never left her. With the financial wind blowing her sails, she navigated the sophisticated elites of Parisian life and married a presumably wealthy prince, Louis de Scey-Monbeliard. Two years later, after his continuous demands for money and suspicious of his fabrications, she sued for divorce. A white marriage followed another. This time to a much older gentleman, prince Edmond de Polignac, composer, holder of one of the most aristocratic French titles, and an avowed homosexual. Was there any calculation on Winaretta’s part? After all, the new prince was 59 years of age when the bride just had turned 28. Was she attempting to disguise her sexual preferences? All Paris knew of the leanings of Polignac so society could be excused if it speculated about her innocence or her alibi. Either way, the couple came to share her passion for music, the bond upon which their feelings solidified.

The new princess de Polignac helped the career of composers and interpreters. She engaged intensely with Ravel, Fauré, Hahn and Stravinsky. In her memoirs, she recalled that moment when “it was decided that I was not to study music but to learn painting at an atelier in the Rue de Bruxelles, conducted by a Monsieur Félix Barrias”. In spite of negating her formal musical training, her fierce and determined personality propelled her to become the most discerning musical hostess in Paris.

Posterity had been kind and respectful to her, a special individual, patron of the arts, splendidly generous. Yet some questions remained as to who she really was. Her conceit and haughtiness was not making good bedfellows with her apparent generosity. When asked why she had not invited Chanel at the first hearing of Stravinsky’s “les Noces”, she replied tartly: “I don’t entertain my trades people”.

In her eagerness to please and be acknowledged, as a young woman she wrote to Virginia Woolf after meeting her at a party: “Dear Mrs. Woolf, when will you allow me to call you Virginia, and when will you call me Winnaretta?”. In later years Woolf wrote about her: “to look at her you’d never think she ravished half the virgins of Paris”. Needless to say, there was never a chance that Virginia Woolf would call her Winnaretta.