Tag Archives: Travel

All American Road: Scenic Byway 12

 

 

We woke up and ate breakfast in our hotel and stopped briefly in town to take a couple of photos from Kanab. Then we headed north along highway 89, continuing our exploration of the extravagant Colorado Plateau. Driving in the morning was an exquisite pleasure.  Driving I have decided, while looking at mountain creeks and forests is the perfect place for happy little clouds and happy little thoughts. It was clearly a place to do what DeWitt Jones says we should do: “celebrate what’s right with the world.” Here that was easy.  I thought of Azar Nafisi and her two wonderful books, Reading Lolita in Tehran and Republic of Imagination which I read. One last year; one this year. Brilliant and inspiring. I thought of Marilyn Robinson in her Gilead trilogy. Minsters in a small Iowa town bringing much-needed gentleness to religion. If I had read this series before I lost my faith who knows how different my life might have been. But above all I thought about what a beautiful day it was. A beautiful day in the neighbourhood as Mr. Rogers might say.

 

Highway 12 connects Highway 89 with Capitol Reef National Park about miles away. According to my guide book, “This road boast what may be the most spectacular and diverse array of landscapes found along any road in the country.” This, I found, was no exaggeration.

The road starts south of Panguitch where Highway 89 intersected with highway 12. Our first stop just a couple of miles into the journey was at Red Canyon State Park immediately beside the road. I have already posted photos from there.             Red Canyon State Park is cut into the fantastic red mountains of the Paunsaugunt Plateau sprinkled with dark green coniferous trees. It has weirdly carved erosional rock forms that form a stunning array of turrets, hoodoos, pinnacles, or spires. Such features are found at many places along this magical road, but perhaps most sensationally right at the beginning of the road (from the west) or near the end (from the east). I took many photographs of this amazing place. It was very difficult for me to tear myself away while there was still room left on my camera’s memory cards.

We also drove through Cannonvillea quaint Bryce Valley town. It was settled by Mormons in 1876 and named after one of those settlers George Q. Cannon. They have an annual Old Time Fiddlers and Bear Festival. Now that is a strange combination. Fiddlers and bears?

 

There are constants in this country: red stone, flawless silence, impossible blue skies, and beauty without end. It often looks lifeless. But if there is water, there is life.

Sadly, this is one of the National Monuments that Donald Trump wants to desecrate. He says it is too big. So he wants to cut it down to size. 20% is all that will be left. This is national disgrace, but that won’t stop Trump.

A short drive off of Scenic Byway 12 took us to another special place—Kodachrome Basin State Park. I hesitated about driving 9 miles out of the way from Cannonville past the sign at a forsaken gas station that read, “Too Pooped to Pump”. How foolish that would have been not to take that diversion. I would have missed the splendour of this astonishing park. One of the little gems of Utah, often missed by those in pursuit of the “Big 5.”  Just like tourists in Africa often miss out on Africa in pursuit of their Big 5.

Not only that, but once we arrived we considered not going into the park since we had to pay the park fee even though we would be here just a short time. I think it cost us $15 or something like that. We were about to drive back when Chris, ever the wise one, said “lets pay”. It would have been criminally negligent to have gone. It was astoundingly beautiful, like so much in Utah on the Colorado Plateau.

Kodachrome was named in the 1940s after a revolutionary slide film prepared by Kodak. Some people think it is stupid to name a park after a film. As a photographer who loved to shoot Kodachrome for years, until its supremacy was dethroned by Velvia produced by Fuji. What is wrong with naming a park after a brilliant film? Maybe nothing.

 

Visitors to the park are drawn to it by it unusual geological forms such as a series of upright cylindrical forms. There is a series of them called sand pipes. They vary in height from 6 to 170 feet.  More than 60 of them have been identified in the park and we had a picnic very near to one of them.

Geologists are not in agreement about how the pipes were created. One theory goes sort of like this: What is certain is the pipes provided a unique landscape that we enjoyed immensely, especially as we had a lovely picnic. A stellar jay came to visit us, expecting we might be willing to hand out food to a poor supplicant. Sadly, when it perched on a branch right beside our table, like an incompetent photographer, I scared it away when I went to get my camera from the car, much to Chris’s disappointment. She had her camera ready, but it was gone. A competent photographer, like Chris, would have had the camera at the ready. Nonetheless we had a wonderful picnic and Chris did not maim me for my ignorant stumbling away from grace.

 

The story of the park is the story of geology which is the story of the earth. The one thing that is constant with the earth is change. That sounds paradoxical but it is not. Nothing stays the same; even massive rock. Everything changes and over time reveals the secrets of its history to observant seekers. Each layer of rock is like a new chapter of a book. Some layers tell a story of when the land was covered by a large inland sea. Other layers speak of raging rivers long since becalmed. Some layers speak of the unspeakable—immensely violent forces of nature that often seem so benign. Each layer tells the story of relentless forces of erosion—wind and water that can carve the hardest surface. All they need is time and gravity and then nothing can stand in their way. And this story never ends. New pages are added literally every day. We just have to learn to read those fascinating pages.

The towering chimneys of Kodachrome Basin change in color with the day’s changing moods. Against a clear blue sky like today, they look tinged with red, like so much of the American southwest. This contrast led the National Geographic Society to get the permission of Kodak to name the park after their film.

The stone sand pipes protrude from the surrounding sandstone out of which they have been carved like one  of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures that we saw in Florence. They seem to stand like guards over the park. It was indeed a great day in the neighbourhood.

 

San Tan Valley Arizona: I am not St. Jerome

 

I am not like St. Jerome. He was one of the earliest Roman saints. He believed that heaven would not be perfect unless the saved could see the sinners roasting in hell. Since God was all powerful he would make sure the good guys get to see the bad guys paying for their sins. This is an incredibly nasty sense of heaven and hell, but he was made a saint.

Some travellers from the north are like that. As soon as they get here they check to see what the temperatures are like back home. The colder the better they feel. They feel gleeful thinking about their friends suffering back home.

You will be happy to learn, we are not like that.

Hereford Texas to San Tan Valley Arizona: The arc of the Moral universe is long

Today we wondered when we woke up, if we could make it all the way to our rented home in San Tan Valley. We were both sceptical that we could do it, but we got up early and headed out. Our practice is to leave after first light (this is easy) and to stop before dark. Many of our friends travel with much more diligence. We are slackers. We meander.

At first Sarah (the GPS) was asleep again. She just does not like the cold. Like us. But Chris made a spectacular discovery. She pulled out a small disk from the GPS and warmed it up in her warm hands. Sarah sprung to life! There was as much rejoicing in our car as there was in heaven when the prodigal son returned. We made a radical decision. We said Sarah could pick the route. Let the GPS select the fastest route. That is precisely what we did. And it worked.

It did not take long and Sarah led us right back to Interstate 40. Sadly, we missed Cadillac Ranch as a result. We stopped for gas where I saw a green T-shirt with a John Deer Tractor emblazoned on it and the simple words: “John Beer.” Can you get more profound than that?

On the way we continued to listen to NPR. They had some kind of a New Year’s Eve show. It was very interesting. They played a small part of a famous speech by Martin Luther King.  We listened to the speech and marvelled at King’s abilities as an orator. His images were compelling. His cadences were hypnotic. His phrasing slow, letting his words sink into the hearts and minds of the hearers. His message was riveting. Even though King knew there was no direct path to freedom. He knew the road was crooked. There were turns and cutbacks that only a meanderer could traverse. I don’t know if there could have been a better way to launch a New Year. What a great thing to hear on a New Year’s Day in Texas!

Here is part of that speech (I apologize for not getting every word right as the recoding was not as clear as it could be):

I must confess my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rotten places of frustration, meandering points of bewilderment (that hit home for me the meander!) There will be inevitable setbacks. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered, and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear drenched eyes have to stand beside the burial of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs, but difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future and as we continue our charted course we may gain some consolation in those great words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod. Better the chastening rod we cast felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sigh, we  have come over the way that with our tears has been watered. We have come treading our pass through the blood of the slaughtered out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast.”

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry, it will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights let us remember there is a creative force in this world working to pull down the giant mountains of evil. A power that is able to make a way out of no way, that can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right, “truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right, ‘Be not deceived.’ God is not lost. Whatsoever a man soweth, that, he shall also reap. This is our hope for the future with this faith we will be able to sing in some not distant tomorrow with a cosmic past we have overcome; we have overcome; deep in my heart I did believe we would overcome.”

I actually listened to the speech again courtesy of YouTube. Sometimes I love technology. Martin Luther King like all of us fell short of perfection, but  he was a truly great man.  I could not help comparing his speech to tweets I have read about the current occupant of the Whitehouse. The comparison is shocking. King spoke without belittling anyone. He did not attack anyone. He did not brag about himself. He did not spew out ill thought out political Pablum. He just spoke to encourage  people to continue the good fight no matter what the obstacles, no matter what backward steps they have to take. He knew the road to justice was not straight and true. But the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. He believed that. I want to believe that.

We also listened to CBC radio by virtue of some new technology–a CBC app. We could listen to highlights streamed to our car speaker. It was fantastic. The discussion of modern work was extremely interesting. I loved the quote from Bertrand Russell the hero of my youth (and old age too come to think about it): “The end of civilization is to fill leisure time intelligently.”

At Holbrook Arizona, Sarah told us to turn south and we obediently complied. The roads were in excellent shape. Chris put on my fantastic playlist of songs–the best ever playlist. We listened to 3 hours of wonderful music.

The only problem was the winding mountain road at night. As long as it was light it was all right, but it got dark before we were done. In our eagerness to make it all the way to San Tan Valley we forgot about this winding road. That gave us more stress than we liked. Old people don’t need stress.

We arrived in San Tan Valley Arizona about 8 p.m. tired and stressed out but happy. I did not take long to crash.

 

 

Fargo North Dakota to Belleville Kansas: Spiritual Vigilantes

         Today there was no meandering for the meanderer. What a pity. We decided we wanted to get as far south as we could in one day. That meant bearing down and not getting off course. Getting off course is what I do best. This was hard. It was not the way we like to travel, but we thought it was necessary.

It was fiercely cold over night. We woke up and temperatures were about -31°F. I think it had been colder during the night. I had plugged the car in for the first time ever. In the morning the GPS was frozen solid. Nothing could wake Sarah from her icy tomb. We thought she was dead. We were very sad. We need that GPS and had not brought a spare portable GPS. We would have to navigate on our own.

Today we drove across the Great Plains of North America. Many consider this a boring drive. Not I. In fact, I consider a comment about this being boring to be a comment on the shortcomings of the viewer, not the plains. First of all, you cannot appreciate the plains by driving through them at 100 kph (or more) as we did today. The beauty of the prairies is subtle. It requires discernment. It demands attention. The prairies, unlike the mountains for example, are not “in your face.”.

The Great Plains or prairies is one of the most stressed ecosystems on the planet and also among the least protected. It is not protected for two reasons, in my opinion. First of all, because the plains have a subtle beauty people are not as inclined about getting involved in their protection. That is why the nature organization I belong to is called Native Orchid Conservation and not Liverwort Conservation. The great beauties–whether human or botanical–get all the attention. That is a pity.

Added to that, humans see the plains as their own. They have taken them over to such an extent that they are entirely part of the human landscape. Very little of the prairies have not been disturbed. It seems to many humans that we can do with the prairies whatever we want.

As a result of these two factors the plains just don’t the respect that they ought to get. That is unfortunate, not just for the plains, but for us too. 50% of North America’s ducks are produced in the Prairie Pothole Region. It has been estimated that 100 million ducks live in this region. And many of these birds are in trouble. The problem is not just lost of wetlands, thought that is a big problem here, but the problem is severely compounded by the degradation of the what still remains. If wetlands don’t contain grass there is no place for birds to nest. That is  also a huge problem.

The Plains changed dramatically when people started tapping into the Ogallala Aquifer. The Ogallala Aquifer is a shallow water table aquifer that is surrounded by silt, clay and gravel located beneath the Great Plains in the United States. It is one of the world’s largest aquifers and underlies an area of approximately 174,00 in portions of 8 states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas). It took us the better part of 2 days to drive through it at 75 mph.

  • If spread across the U.S. the aquifer would cover all 50 states with 1.5 feet of water
  • If drained, it would take more than 6,000 years to refill naturally
  • More than 90 percent of the water pumped is used to irrigate crops
  • $20 billion a year in food and fibre depend on the aquifer[1]

The most important fact of course is that the aquifer would take 6,000 years to replenish if it were drained as some fear we are now doing.

The water that permeates the buried gravel is mostly from the vanished rivers. It has been down there for at least three million years, percolating slowly in a saturated gravel bed that varies from more than 1,000 feet thick in the North to a few feet in the Southwest.

Industrial-scale extraction of the aquifer did not begin until after World War II. Diesel-powered pumps replaced windmills, increasing output from a few gallons a minute to hundreds. Over the next 20 years the High Plains turned from brown to green. The number of irrigation wells in West Texas alone exploded from 1,166 in 1937 to more than 66,000 in 1971. By 1977 one of the poorest farming regions in the country had been transformed into one of the wealthiest, raising much of the nation’s agricultural exports and fattening 40 percent of its grain-fed beef.

As Jane Braxton Little joined out, “the miracle of new pumping technology was taking its toll below the prairie. By 1980 water levels had dropped by an average of nearly 10 feet throughout the region. In the central and southern parts of the High Plains some declines exceeded 100 feet. Concerned public officials turned to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has studied the aquifer since the early 1900s. As Jane Braxton Little said, “It was found that in some places farmers were withdrawing four to six feet a year, while nature was putting back half an inch. In 1975 the overdraft equalled the flow of the Colorado River. Today the Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted at an annual volume equivalent to 18 Colorado Rivers. Although precipitation and river systems are recharging a few parts of the northern aquifer, in most places nature cannot keep up with human demands

As William Finnegan pointed out, “In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer, which reaches from Texas to South Dakota and is indispensable to farming on the Great Plains, is being drained eight times faster than it can naturally recharge.” In southern Kansas, 180 miles west of Wichita, is one of the High Plains areas hardest hit by the aquifer’s decline. Groundwater level has dropped 150 feet or more, forcing many farmers to abandon their wells. The cause is obvious, says Mark Rude, executive director of the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District: overuse. With a liquid treasure below their feet and a global market eager for their products, farmers here and across the region have made a Faustian bargain—giving up long-term conservation for short-term gain. To capitalize on economic opportunities, landowners are knowingly “mining” a finite resource.[2]

None of this is pretty. All of this is dangerous.

I was surprised to learn that between 2001 and 2008, a mere 7 years, 32% of the cumulative depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer occurred. I was also surprised to learn that in addition to agriculture, 2 major sources of depletion were the oil and gas industry and coal industry–all industries that the current President is doing to much to prop up while so much of the world believes we should be cutting back. Trump wants to make things worse!

As we drove along Interstate 29 into South Dakota I saw an old building I had seen 3 times before.   Each time I wanted to photograph it, but noticed it too late to stop on the Interstate. Today it happened.

 

I love old buildings. Old buildings bring to life a philosophy that arose in Japan called Wabi-Sabi. I will post a separate blog about this interesting Japanese philosophy.

After driving all day without meandering we arrived in Belleville Kansas. We checked in to a modest inn and proceeded direct to a local dining establishment. It was a classic small town Midwest restaurant on a Saturday night. All the men wore cowboy hats or John Deer caps or facsimiles. We enjoyed a good sold meal of hamburger steak and curly fries for me, while Chris had mashed potatoes and gravy. It was simple American fare. It was good. It did not hurt that I had a Busch Light Beer to go with the meal. They even served opossum pie. I feared this was what it was. I asked the waitress and she explained there  were no opossums in the pie. It was chocolate cream and pecans. It actually sounded good, but my heart was set on coconut pie. Later I regretted this. Even though the pie was great how many times will I have a chance to eat opossum pie?

There was a treat waiting for us in our hotel–a book called Spiritual Vigilantes. I kid you not–vigilantes! The book claimed to tell the truth behind the attempted destruction of God’s law in America. It asserted that the Christian Church is in the midst of “extreme spiritual warfare with its members being taught lies with every word of false doctrine.” It added, “the left will not stop until their mission to remove any evidence that God exists in the United States is completely removed.” Is this where religious freedom has led us?

[1] Jane Braxton Little, “The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S.” Scientific American, March 2009

[2] Jane Braxton Little, “The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S.” Scientific American, March 2009

August 24, 2017 London: A walk along the Thames

A Panorama of Thames by Tower Bridge

It was our last real day in London. It was the last real day of our holidays. The sun was peaking through clouds in some places. You would still not call it a sunny day, but it was better than yesterday.

Our guidebook said that cruising down the Thames was one of the most interesting ways to experience London. We decided to accept that advice. We also got advice from our Monogram guide on how to do exactly that. He suggested we should take a boat that we could get onto just outside our hotel. We were one block away from the river, so we took that advice as well. As a result we hopped on to the Thames Clipper

The Thames River has been the main artery for London since about the time the Romans invaded. The river is jam packed with historical sites and the wonderful reconstruction of the Globe Theatre. Added to that there are numerous famous bridges, each with its own stories.

The most popular and best served area for boats is between Westminster Bridge and Tower Bridge. That is exactly where we sailed. On the way we tried to sign up for a ride on the London Eye but it was all booked up. That was a shame for we heard the view from there was wonderful. Next time.

We hopped on the boat watched the river, building along the bank, and most important, the people. Until World War II the north side of the river was the side of wealth and the south side belonged to the lower classes. After the war, the festival of Britain in 1951 began the resurgence of the south bank, which now has some of the most interesting modern buildings.

The south side had some fine looking pubs, County Hall, Tate Modern, the Globe theatre, and a stunning new City Hall. The north side has the Parliament Buildings, The Ministry of Defence, Somerset House, Temple and Inns of Court, Fishmongers Hall, Custom House and the world famous Tower of London near the Tower Bridge.

The Thames River looked murky, but it is clean. 100 species of fish have returned to the river since it was cleaned up. In fact, salmon have returned to the Thames and they are picky fish that only come to clean water. That is a remarkable cleanup considering how polluted the river was before. A whale even came up the river and was beached. The hearts of many children were broken when that happened. Even dolphins have even been spotted in the river.

We disembarked the Clipper near the Tower of London. It is not really a tower at all. The Tower of London was deeply feared for most of its 900-year history. William the Conqueror built it. People who committed treason or threatened the crown were held and often tortured in its dank dungeons. A few lived in luxury in the Tower, but most were abject prisoners. The crown jewels are housed in the Jewel House of the Tower of London. The largest diamond there is 530.2 carats (106 g.). Nearby was a sign that extolled the days when Kings and queens kept lions at that spot. The royal beasts roared at people entering the tower. We did not spot any such beasts.

We also took a number of photos of the Tower Bridge. This bridge was built in 1894. It is a flamboyant bridge with a roadway that can be raised. When the bridge is raised it is 135 ft. (40 m.) high. It has pinnacled towers with a linking catwalk. It is a sensational bridge. Apparently the American who bought the London Bridge and moved it to Arizona, thought he was buying this much more spectacular Tower Bridge.

After a brief visit to this area we found a restaurant/bar for dinner. The Waiter mistook us for Americans and we strongly rebuked him for his mistake. We enjoyed a gourmet burger because it was Burger Day. I enjoyed a burger with a Northcote beer.

After that we took a leisurely walk along the north shore of the Thames. We crossed the Millennium Bridge and caught the boat back to near our hotel.

For supper we returned to the Red Lion because we heard it was Churchill’s favorite. Not really. We were getting lazy. Tired and ready for the end. I again had fish n’ chips sans crushed peas. Chris had steak and Stilton pie. A double Jameson was enjoyed as well. The meal was completed by banoffi pie.

So ended a fine short stay in London.

August 23, 2017 London: A Magical Mystery Tour

 

Today we went on a city tour of London.  I won’t try to describe everything we saw; just a few highlights.  Our guide was Carlotta a fiery English commentator with a sharp tongue and liberal with her opinions. We enjoyed that. We did not get many stops to take photographs.

London is a fascinating city. All museums in the city can be entered without charge. Now we have found civilization! Sadly, we visited none of them. Next time for sure! On the other hand, London contains more billionaires living in it than any other city in the world. So it cannot possibly be the home of civilization. I will have to look elsewhere.

 

This was the Tower Bridge.  The American who bought London Bridge and moved it to Arizona, mistakenly thought he was buying this bridge, which is a lot more interesting than the one he bought. Caveat Emptor.

There is of course a lot of history here. German bombing in World War II destroyed 60% of London. In particular 80% of the old part was destroyed.

 

The Parliament Buildings and Big Ben are seen on every city tour. The Victoria Tower on the left end (when facing from the river side as in my photo) contains 1.5 million acts of Parliament enacted since 1497. Maybe the neoliberals have a point about big government. That is an awful lot of laws. At least they have provided employment for armies of barristers and solicitors. There is only one part of the old building (the original Palace of Westminster) that was built in 1097. This is Westminster Hall. So it is nearly 1,000 years old. Its roof is much younger. It was built in the 14th century.

 

Big Ben is the most famous site of London together with the Parliament Buildings. The day before we got here Big Ben’s clock was shut down and the structure was already being covered for renovations.

We also drove by Westminster Abbey where Prince William and Kate were married. It is a grand church that took 500 years to be constructed. This is the final resting place (or as some believe the second last resting place) of the monarchs of England. It has been the setting for coronations and other pageants. Again we did not go inside. Again I am disappointed in myself. We should have gone inside.

We also drove by Buckingham Palace. This is both the office and home to the British monarch. Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Anne, and the Duke of York live in the building with 50 staff residing there. It is also used for some ceremonial functions such as banquets for heads of state. No one invited us  to dine.

Next we passed Pall Mall (pronounced pal mall) a dignified street filled with men’s clubs that were created to give men refuge from the scurrilous attacks of women. Apparently the interiors are well appointed but peasants like us need not apply. Of course only members and their guest are permitted to dine. Some of these clubs have a 25-year waiting list. Many rich people want to line up to become  card-carrying snobs. It is sad that they have nothing better to do with their time and money. Like everywhere else, standards though have been slipping. Some of the clubs even accept women now.

Next we saw Piccadilly Circus. This is a circle (hence the name). It is actually quite small. According to Carlotta, “Where? There. Gone.”  Nowadays it consists mainly of commercial shops, so really is nothing special. The circus has London’s gaudiest displays of neon. Trump would probably like it.

We finally stopped at the grand St. Paul’s Cathedral. After the Great Fire of London in 1666 the old wooden church that had been built in 604 was left in ruins. John Donne’s memorial, built in 1631, was the only sculpture that survived that fire. The church was rebuilt on the same site.

One of the most spectacular features of the Cathedral is the dome that weighs 64,000 tons yet is held high and secure by the genius of architecture. It is actually 3 domes on top of each other. The domes are supported by enormous flying buttresses. The dome is the second largest in the world after St. Peters in Rome.     We stood underneath the Dome and were stunned it was so beautiful.          The church does not contain pews or chairs. Parishioners are expected to stand for the services. This is worse than Roman Catholic churches with their constant up and downs. The church still has 4 services a day.

There are crypts of many famous people and even some commoners in the basement. Sir Christopher Wren, the architect o the Cathedral, has a very simple crypt i the basement . He said, “if you want to see a memorial to me, look around you.” This is a people’s church. It is a home to commoners and not just nobility.

The church was bombed 78 times in World War II. 27 bombs in one night alone. Some of the bombs failed to explode. So much for German competence! 4 bombs did destroy the high altar and none of the walls were damaged and most importantly, the Dome did not collapse. Pretty good English engineering! The men and women of Saint Paul’s–all volunteers–heroically saved the church from fires.

Like all magnificent cathedrals St. Paul’s is difficult to clean. The cleaning job takes 11 years. That is about as long as my basement man cave. They can’t use sand blasting or detergent either. Only steam will clean and protect the building. If you want to keep a church for a thousand years you have to be careful. Our visit to the Cathedral alone was worth the city tour. At least we got to see one of London’s magnificent cathedrals from the inside.

After we left the wonderful Cathedral we drove by the Bank of England and Lloyds of London. The other religion of London is money.

We drove across the Millennium Bridge. Carlotta informed us that the bridge used to wobble because engineers should design bridges not architects. It cost £8 million to repair. Ouch. That is worse than the Bethesda Hospital debacle. At least I think it is worse. The architect apparently is now known as Lord Wobbly.

One thing we noticed on our drive through town is that London has a lot of pubs. Not that this is a bad thing. Carlotta told us London has 7,000 pubs. Some of them really looked interesting too. I wish I had had time to try more of them. There just was not enough time to see all the pubs or cathedrals.

We drove by a ritzy area where Putin had bought some property for $14 million. Apparently he never uses it, just his friends and family. Putin was a career military man before he became a politician. I guess that work pays well in Russia.

 

After the Cathedral we got back on the bus and continued our magical mystery tour of London. We drove by Trafalgar Square London’s most important site for public meetings. It was here that the crowds entered cheering wildly when World War I was declared. Can you imagine wild cheering for the start of a war?   Many thought the soldiers would be home by Christmas. In fact the soldiers had a motto, ‘Home or homo’ by Christmas.

We drove by the famous Ritz Hotel that was named after the Swiss hotelier César Ritz who was the inspiration for that wonderful expression ritzy. I never knew where it came from. The chateau style building was designed to be fake news. In other words the owners wanted to give people the false feeling that they were in one of the grand hotels of Paris where world fashion leaders would ensconce themselves. Even the rich like to pretend they are grander than they really are. Don’t come here to dine unless you are properly attired. No straw hats and fading cords for the men.  Apparently it takes 3-6 months to get a reservation for afternoon high tea with scones.

 

We drove rapidly by Hyde Park for fear we might hear one of the radical opining. Of course they are only allowed there one day per week and this was not it. So they have to bang away incessantly and annoyingly on their blogs instead. Bloggers don’t have to listen to hecklers but they do have to read.

We got a passing look (that was enough) of Harrods founded in 1849. Apparently Prince Charles buys cat food there. Some cats insist on the best. Harrods, it was said, could supply darn near anything from a packet of pins to an elephant.

The last rich area we got a glimpse of was Chelsea. This used to be a bohemian area filled with writers, artists, and other rebels. As so often happens with such areas, eventually the rich realize this is a cool area. Then they become an invasive species driving out the poor locals who can no longer afford to live there. Then it becomes a dead zone with no life, only shopping. That is what has happened here.

After our tour we had dinner at Luccina restaurant near our hotel. Again our Monogram guide recommended it. Eating Italian in London that makes sense right? As soon as we walked in we thought we had made a disastrous mistake. It was too warm inside and it was too cool outside. Unlike Goldilocks we did not find a place that was just right. The red wine was not room temperature; it was soup warm. An ice bucket helped to cool it, but other patrons looked down their long noses at us. A small price to pay we thought. Chris’s meal of penne conpollo came without the promised garlic sauce. There might have been a dribble of sauce. What self-respecting Italian waiter would serve this? Chris asked for “extra” sauce and it was delivered without fuss so after that the meal improved. We really believed it was the only sauce. How can a chef forget the sauce? I enjoyed spaghetti Bolognese. After enough wine we cheered up dramatically. We finished our meal with tiramisus and coffee.

 

 

I left Chris at the hotel and ventured out with my camera gear and a tripod to photograph the Parliament buildings and city skyline across the river Thames. I wanted to photograph the city at night As Joni Mitchell sang, “Night in the city looks pretty to me.”  I had a great time and it made me feel that dragging the tripod along was worth it. My travelling companion was not so convinced.

I crossed Westminster Bridge with its massive barriers against truck terrorists. Later that night we watched the television news about truck terrorism in Spain. That is what modern life is all about. We could stay home. It is fairly safe in Steinbach, provided you avoid the radicals at Main Street Bread & Butter, but it is not quite as interesting. Sometimes we have to take some chances or life can get pretty insular and dull.

The people of London, like the people of Paris, are certainly resilient. I remember watching a television comedy news show, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight where he showed a Brit fleeing his bar during the terrorist bombing on Westminster bridge, but he was not scared enough to leave his pint of beer behind. He was shown running down the street carrying his glass. The bridge tonight was jammed with people. No one was scared. People taking photos; enjoying life. The terrorists can’t scare us. Only Trump can scare us.

It was a fine day in London.

August 22, 2017 Paris France to London England: Too stupid to be scared of terrorists?

Today we began the last leg of our journey. Again we were traveling by train. We began by hurrying up so that we could wait. Sarah Jane our Monogram rep woke us up to get our luggage down early so it could be loaded onto the car for our drive to the train station. At the station we stood and waited with our luggage for the cart to take it to the train. Meanwhile an extraordinarily loud group of workers banged their tools against anything that would make a loud noise. As they did so, a cart came by with the word “STILL” emblazoned on it in hopeless irony. There was nothing still here except our thoughts that could not be heard. It all seemed pointless, unless the point was to annoy us and disturb us from our tranquil journey.

That was soon followed by something even more disturbing. As we went to line up for our train on the 2nd floor of train station the gate was closed. In fact, the entire floor was closed and we had to leave. We had not idea why or where we should go. Thankfully, Sarah Jane was still with us. Monogram believed in accompanying its babies right to the end and we were grateful for that. She led us to another place on the main floor. Sarah talked to an official who explained that there was a bomb scare and the entire 2nd floor had been evacuated. There was no one there other than the bomb squad. There had been a terrorist threat. Someone had left an unattended bag in the station. “It could be a bomb”, we were told.

The weird thing though was that we did not leave the train station. We were immediately underneath the 2nd floor. If there was a serious explosion would the building not collapse on us? I nervously looked at the entrance/exit to the station. There I noticed the Police Car I had not noticed before. How long would it take me to dash to the outside? How long would it take Chris? Neither of us were up for an impressive 100 yard dash. Adrenalin would like improve our chances but I doubted not enough to make a significant difference. Yet no one moved. We all stood there underneath the danger. Were we too stupid to be afraid of terrorists? This was Europe. There had been recent occasions where fear was justified.             No one moved outside. None wanted to leave their place in line. We heard no announcements. Was this folly on steroids? All I know is we survived.   After about an hour of standing there waiting for doom or progress, we were allowed to move on. The brave bomb squad had neutralized the threat. I hoped they were brave, and not as stupid as us.

Our trip to London on the train was interesting. To begin with I learned an important lesson in economics and politics. That is that things are better for the rich. This time we road 2nd class. This was not as comfortable as the 1st class trip from Amsterdam to Paris. It definitely pays to be 1st class.  We did not know why we had been relegated to 2nd class. Were we again being punished as we had been last night? What bad things had we done?

As a result of our diminution we sat in a seat facing another couple our knees knocking against each other. Well, at least my knees knocked against the woman from Ohio facing me. I had no leg room at all. Chris was more fortunate. Sometimes it pays to be short. This was one of those times.  The train ride was not entirely unpleasant. It was still much more luxurious than air travel. I tried my best not to grumble.

We crossed the English Channel as the English call it through the darkness of the Chunnel. That was interesting. When we hit English soil we saw the light.            This was the land of civilization. So I thought. On this trip 2 books had guided me. One was Sir Kenneth Clark’s magisterial Civilisation. The other was Eric Hobsbawm’s magnificent The Age of Capital. These books had added immeasurably to my journey, as good books always do.

We arrived in London where once again a Monogram babysitter met us to lead us to a car that took us to our hotel the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel right beside that famous hotel. Although its location was its best feature, the hotel was extremely luxurious. How much did we pay for this? We did not know. After being second-class citizens it was nice to be elevated to 1st class. We can always dream can’t we? It was a very luxurious suite. This was no typically small European hotel room. It had a separate room with a couch and huge television set. The bedroom had a smaller set. All of the décor was modern extreme. Usually I don’t like that, but today I did. We felt like luxury to boost our flattened egos.

The lighting system was much too complicated for us to figure out how to use, so we largely acquiesced with what we got when we switched it on. We figured out how to do that only after a tedious trial and error process. There was a convenient chair with side table for reading that I appreciated. We lounged and relaxed for an hour or two before we did anything that might tax our brains or bodies.

Eventually we went out to eat. To do that, we walked cross the famous Westminster Bridge right across the street from our hotel. That bridge had very recently been the site of a terrorist attack exactly 5 months earlier on March 22, 2017. The attacker was a 22-year-old Briton Khalid Masood who moved down the pedestrians who were idly walking on the bridge injuring more than 50 people and killing 4 of those. After he left the car that had crashed into near by New Palace Yard where he fatally attacked an unarmed police officer and shot an armed police officer and died at the scene.

This was treated as a case of Islamic terrorism. Trump would be proud of this refusal to be what he considered  politically correct. It seemed that Masood had sent a final text message that he was waging jihad in revenge for western actions in the Middle East. Some claimed he had been a member of ISIS, but the British police have found no link to any terrorist organization. It really appeared that he was a home-grown British terrorist. Every country now has these in this globalized world. Every country has too many of these. There were signs of anti-terrorism everywhere. The bridge now had massive iron and steel barriers to prevent any more automobile terrorism. More construction was on-going. We felt completely safe on the bridge. When we got off no so much.

The bridge was crawling with tourists. This would have been easy pickings for a terrorist. We were surprised “only” 50 had been injured. It was even more crowded than Paris.

We really did very little sight seeing today. Our made goal was dinner. Our Monogram guide, Augustine, had recommended a nearby restaurant that we enjoyed. She said it had been Churchill’s favorite restaurant. That was good enough for us, even though it looked modest. It was called the Red Lion. Later we learned many politicians frequently the place because it was very close to Parliament. Thankfully none were in attendance today. We had the place more or less to ourselves.

When we got back I got sick. I thought it was the result of a chocolate bar I had half-eaten. Chris refused to try an experiment to determine if that was the cause. She refused to eat what was left. So the mystery remains. I was hoping I would feel better before our lengthy flight home.

 

August 21, 2017 Paris: The Romantic Cruise from Hell

Charles Dickens described Paris and France about as well as anyone before or after him. As he said in his novel a Tale of 2 Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

That really described the city and our time in it very well.

But today was radically different from yesterday. Chris decided, and I supported her entirely in this decision, that today she should stay behind and rest her ankles. They looked awful. We hoped she could recoup. This turned out to be a very good decision. It worked!

So I ventured out on my own with absolutely no knowledge of French. I considered this a bold move, but the choice was to stay back at the hotel, which I really did not want to do on our last day in Paris, or boldly go forth.

After breakfast I pulled out my maps of Paris and set out. I love Impressionism, but on maps not so much. In maps I prefer realism. Unfortunately, the Paris maps were created by Impressionists or perhaps, even worse, by abstract impressionists who see no need for art to even resemble reality, let alone represent it.

I know that Hop on/Hop Off buses are a bit expensive but they sure are convenient for someone like me who does not speak the local language and who has no real conception of how far apart places are and is not even sure what he wants to see. So finally I hopped on and started my adventure.

I saw a large part of Paris and had a wonderful time all on my own. My first stop was near the Hôtel des Invalides where I was approached by a family from Nazareth who needed help finding their way around Paris. This seemed ridiculous since I had already demonstrated a startling capacity to get my directions wrong in this fair city, but they seemed intent on asking my advice despite my warnings. Had I been better prepared I would have got them to sign a written release of liability. So this was how I led a family from Nazareth out of the wilderness. Can you imagine? Now you know why we are all bound for hell.

 

 

 

 

Today I got seriously distracted. What else is new? I got distracted, of course, by flowers. There were a series of gardens here one right after the other. It was too much for me to resist. The distraction was more unavoidable, because the skies were gray. Photos of things like the Eiffel Tower looked drab. Flowers in such light on the other hand shone. I took a number of photographs of flowers outside Petit Palais and in the Jardin des Tuileries

 

Some of the walkways are lined with lime and chestnut trees and I took some snap shots of those as well doing my best to create an Impressionistic image. Skies were grey, so they were perfect for flowers. When the world gives you lemons, make lemonade.

 

My mind was filled of course with thoughts of Impressionism. I was infused with Impressionism. How could that have been avoided after yesterday’s afternoon at the D’Orsay? So I kept thinking of how I could show the lovely flower gardens in an Impressionistic style. To do that, I thought I would create what photographers call the “Orton effect”. This style, just like Impressionism, is not for everyone. I love it, just like I love the Impressionist paintings. So I kept planning some of my images for applying this technique later. I include some of the photographs with this effect and some more naturalistic for those who might get sick seeing too many Ortons. The technique involved combining 2 copies of exactly the same image. One image is over-exposed so it looks very light. The other image is sometimes also over-exposed but just slightly. The second image is then blurred drastically. Then the two images are combined.

 

I find the resulting image sometimes is magical. Other times it just does not work. Some think the technique never works. Why would you ever deliberately blur it some ask? I would say, for the same reason Impressionists often did not want a sharp image. A Sketchy image to them sometimes seemed preferable. The image can be more “real” than a clear representation. This is sort of like that.

 

 

 

Eventually I got back on the bus until near Notre Dame. Of course, the grounds were awash with tourists, so I did not stay long. I wanted to take a little more time for photos. I ducked down low to have a hedge hide as many of them as possible.

 

After I was done, I walked across the Petit Pont Notre Dame across the Seine to the Left Bank. I took some more photos of the famous cathedral from that angle. This was near where I found quite by accident the famous bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. James Joyce and his pals made this bookstore famous. Sylvia Beach originally owned it. During the 1920s, Beach’s shop was a gathering place for many then-aspiring writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, and particularly James Joyce. Beach published Joyce’s controversial masterpiece Ulysses in 1922 when no one else dared touch it.

Beach moved the store from its original location to a large location at 12 rue de L’Odéon where it remained until 1941 when it was closed on account of the Nazi occupation. Some said it was closed because Beach refused to sell the last copy of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. During this period of time it was the center of Anglo-American literary culture. Joyce nicknamed the store “Stratford-on-Odéon.” Joyce actually used the store as an office for a while. Hemingway mentioned the various attendees of the store in his memoir A Moveable Feast. Patrons could borrow books if they could not afford to buy. She also carried controversial books such as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was banned in both the US and UK.

Beach was welcoming to a vast array of writers and artists who had no other place to stay. It was an island of civilization, particularly for struggling writers and artists. The shop’s motto, “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise,” is written above the entrance to the reading library. I think this is the civilization I have been seeking.

By the time I was finished there I thought it was time to go back to the hotel to see how Chris was doing. After some running around (literally) I managed to find the bus again and hopped on for the final leg of my solo city tour back to our hotel. Chris was feeling quite a bit better. The day off from touring and walking did her a world of good. The rash was considerably reduced.

Tonight we were going to celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary. We had made reservations back in Canada for a “romantic cruise” on the Seine River at night. We were very excited about that. It turned out to the be romantic cruise from hell.

We started off right. This time we did the sensible thing; we took a cab to the pier where the ship was docked. When we finally got on the ship for our “romantic” dinner we were sorely disappointed. In fact we concluded that we were being punished for bad behaviour though we had no idea what we had done. That is not uncommon for me.

To begin with, we got absolutely the worst seat in the restaurant. We were near the front of the ship but could not see anything of the city from there. We were near the middle of the ship so could not see out the sides either. The view of the city we had been promised was almost non-existent from where we sat. We did have a clear view of a toilet and the kitchen. The sound of the promised musicians was nearly drowned out by the sound of banging of pots and pans. We were clearly in steerage.

The meal was also a disappointment. We were served Rose wine instead of champagne. The appetizer was as tasty and nutritious as last week’s laundry. Most importantly the steaks were not hot. Had they been hot we believed the sauce Bordelaise would have been excellent, but really we were guessing. We sat right next to a young Asian woman and her mother who spent most of the time looking at their phones. We wished we would have their seats with the great views that they did not need. The service was attentive, but not for us in steerage. It was a disaster of a romantic cruise.

Through sheer force of will, we managed to enjoy the evening. The music was subdued but not bad. Strong drink helped ease the pain. The company was great! I dashed to the back of the boat frequently to get photos of the city and Eiffel Tower at night. The views from outside the restaurant were sensational. In fact, they were worth the trip. Most importantly, we still love each other.

 

It was the best of times.

Impressionism

 

Many of you looking at this immensely long diatribe may see this as convincing proof of my loss of mind. That might be true. But I would encourage those inclined to think this way to skip over this vastly overlong piece on the art of Impressionism. I was not intending to do this. Something made me do it.

When I looked at my photographs of various paintings at the Louvre and then at the Musée d’Orsay I had a vague recollection of reading about Impressionism years ago. I am talking about 30 years ago. I dusted off old art books from my bookshelf and got engrossed all over again. I read lengthy passages and tried to tie them to the paintings we had seen that day in Paris. I felt compelled to write these thoughts down based on that reading. I am no expert on art and do not claim to be. Yet for some reason these thoughts and vague recollections were floating around my brain and I had to try to organize them. This is the result. Like Dylan once said, its all just “worthless foam from the mouth.” Please do not feel compelled to read any of this unless you must.

So based on the better part of a day in 2 of the greatest art museums in the world and my re-reading of old texts on art, mixed up with some equally vague thoughts about philosophy as well to create a veritable strange brew, I set my thoughts down. For what very little they are no doubt worth.

Impressionism is often considered the starting point for modern art. This art movement began in France and many of its practitioners were French. It is a quintessential French art tradition. Though it certainly did not start out as traditional. Far from it in fact. It was reviled at first.

In Paris in the middle of the 19th century the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) was considered the centre of the world. It was one of many influential arts schools in France. In those days there were many written and unwritten laws of French art and life. Compliance with those rules was an absolute necessity if an artist wanted to achieve “success.” Art was a career in France. In fact in France it was one of the most important careers. In France art was not as important as life, it was much more important than that.

In France in many ways the life of an artist was comparable to a military career. It was governed just as strictly by rules that had to be followed scrupulously in order to advance. In the end the rewards were impressive. Many artists eventually achieved wealth, status and social standing after following those rules diligently for a lifetime.

The Academy of Fine Arts (particularly the Institut de France) governed the arts like the dictator of a banana republic. It was pure enlightened despotism. From the Academy the leaders and teachers of art were chosen to lead the next generation of artists. The Academy also controlled the jury admissions and rewards for the biennial Salons. This gave them the power to exclude from the exhibitions any artist who did not respectfully comply with their requirements.

The Director of the Academy also participated in decision making for various museums in the selection of art for purchase or earlier for acquisitions by the Emperor. They also strongly influenced the awarding of commissions for the production of new art in various institutions, both governmental and private. As John Rewald explained, “In all these questions the Academy naturally favored its most docile pupils, who in turn were favored by that public which sees in medals and prizes the proof of an artist’s talent.” [1]

It is true that the school now located on the Left Bank across the Seine from the Louvre had an astonishing history of 350 years during which it trained some of the greatest artists in Europe. Its style was “classical.” That was a great style modeled on the classical antiquities from Greece and Rome and it helped to preserve those idealized forms and to pass that style on to future generations. It was a vital institution, but like so many vital institutions it became encrusted with routine, rules, and dogma. We know many institutions in which the same thing happened. As a result by the middle of the 19th century it had earned its revolution. And it got one. The revolution was delivered by the so-called impressionists.

The artistic style that guided the Academy at the time was that put forth by Jean-Jacque David, whose painting we had admired at length in the morning. David lived from 1748 to 1825. He was a painter of the Neoclassical style and was widely considered the preeminent painter of his time. His cerebral brand of history painting marked a change away from Rococo frivolity that many were starting to lose their taste for. A the time this was fresh change in art. It was revolutionary at the time. It was a return to the classics. This style was known for classical austerity and severity and heightened feeling that harmonized with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancient Regime that met its defeat in the French Revolution.

David actually later came to become a supporter of the revolution and was even appointed by Robespierre as a virtual artistic dictator under the French Republic. He was imprisoned by Robespierre and later changed his allegiance to Napoleon. David had a large number of pupils and became the artist with the strongest influence on the art of the 19th century. In particular he was the darling of the Salons of Paris.

David’s most famous student at the Academy was Jean Dominique Ingres. In 1855 Camille Pissaro from St. Thomas in the West Indies came to see the great Exposition Universelle in Paris. This was the first exhibition to include a large contingent of international art. This huge exhibition was the product of France wanting to show the world how great it was. Art was shown from 28 countries and someone said it was the greatest collection of paintings and sculpture ever gathered in one building at one time. France’s share of art was of course by far the largest.

Artists were chosen for that exhibition with more care than they normally were because so many international artists and critics and connoisseurs would see the collection. After all the French artists would have to compare favorably with artists from around the world. Delacroix for example, whose art we had also admired in the morning at the Louvre, had chosen for display some of his finest works.

Ingres had actually refused to send works for past 20 years because he felt he had been slighted. He was big enough that he could afford to do that. But for this magnificent exhibition he made an exception. It did not hurt that the government had promised him special honours.

Ingres had advised young painters to copy their models stupidly. [2] He said that an object well drawn is always well enough painted. Ingres always emphasized line over color. As a result many of his followers thought of paintings as “colored drawings.” Ingres and his group considered as ‘badly drawn’ landscapes of Corot or the composition of Delacroix because in these every object was not carefully delineated by a minute contour. To Ingres’ pupils correct drawing finally became an end in itself, and a ‘noble contour’ was a sufficient excuse for a lack of inspiration, dry execution, and dull colouring. In the absence of any personal link with the classical ideals admired by their master, they simply blended with the classical tradition with cheap genre style. It was this mixture of empty craftsmanship with anecdotal platitude, that, at the Salons caused the delight of the picture-reading public…Yet, as Delacroix put it, their works did not contain that “dash of truth, the truth which comes from the soul.” [3] 

It is interesting that even Ingres “frankly admitted that the Salon stifles and corrupts the feeling for the great, the beautiful; artists are driven to exhibit there by the attractions of profit…Thus the Salon is literally no more than a picture shop, a bazaar in which the tremendous number of objects is overwhelming, and business rules instead of art.” [4] Of course this has always been the problem with art—its unholy union with business that all too often brings forth monsters from the deep. Monsters that many nonetheless clamour for, like braying donkeys of idiocy. Many others since then have laid similar charges. For example, Walter Januszcjak one of the first art critics I started to read when I first subscribed to the Guardian in 1982 said, “the art world has become an industry supplying spiritual knick-knacks to the rich.”

Pissaro who later became one of the leaders of the Impressionist movement, was a bit mystified by the exhibition. For one thing, he noticed that great variety of styles. He was also puzzled at how little space was given to some painters, in comparison to Delacroix and Ingres, even though he felt they were outstanding too. These included Corot, Daubigny, who were early Impressionist. Others were entirely excluded and Pissaro could not understand it. A number of canvases now considered masterpieces were rejected or refused.

The men and women who became the Impressionists were the rebels against the calcifying Academy and its Salons. Unlike Ingres, they refused to comply with the requirements of the Salons. They were accused of producing ugly art because it did not conform to the rules of the Salon. So they revelled in that. As one of the artists Denoyers proclaimed, “Let’s be a little ourselves, even though we might be ugly…Let’s not write, not paint anything except what is, or at least what we see, what we know, what we have lived. Don’t let us have any master nor pupils! A curious school it is, don’t you think, where there is neither master nor student, and whose only principles are independence, sincerity, individualism.” [5]  The rebels were excluded from the Salons but not the cafés of Paris. Rewald described those boisterous cafés like this;

 

The noisy atmosphere of these cafés, where idols were created or demolished within a few minutes, where no title to glory was well enough earned to prevent insults, where logic was often replaced by vehemence and comprehension by enthusiasm—this atmosphere was in violent contrast to that of the official art circles. Here, were life and tremendous will to conquer, and even if many erred or exaggerated, there was in their fight against prejudice and tradition a positive element, the desire to prove the value of new beliefs through the quality of new works. Pissarro’s often proclaimed opinion that the Louvre ought to be burned may well of had its root in these discussions where the heritage of the past was considered harmful for those who wanted to build a world of their own. [6]

In 1863 the jury was even more extreme in its refusals owing to the intransigence of some of its members. Many artists were turned down, like Manet. Many of those artists complained to the Emperor. They took their art seriously in France at that time. Napoleon III declared that he would arrange for another exhibit for those who had been refused by the jury. All artists would be welcomed. All they had to do was apply. It was called the Salon des Refuses, the “most rejected of the rejected.” One artist proudly proclaimed that he had been refused on moral grounds.

Of course many members of the public thought these artists who had been refused were refused because their art was inferiors and they were only complainers. Many members of the public mocked the refused artists, as whining losers. Yet these young artists were not to be stopped.   One of the critics noted that Manet demonstrated that he was very “sensitive to intense impressions.” Many members of the public though saw his art as vulgar. That was partly because of his revolutionary techniques.

It may be doubted whether Manet’s paintings would have provoked such criticism had it not been painted in broad contrasts and frank opposition, with a tendency to simplification. His “vulgarity”, in the eyes of the public, lay probably even more in in his execution than in his subject matter. It was his renunciation of the customary slick brushwork, his fashion of summarily indicating background details and of obtaining forms without the help of lines, by opposing colors or sketching his contours, if necessary with decisive brushstrokes in color (which helped to model volumes instead of limiting them), that were responsible for the almost universal disapproval he met. [7] 

One of the critics called the Salon des Refuses a war on beauty.” [8] Future Salons generated similar refusals, though not total rejections. Some of the artists were permitted a few exhibits only. Some of their colleagues reacted badly when someone like Manet exhibited one painting at the official exhibit in 1874.

The artists had little respect for the bourgeois audiences who they believed did not understand art even though they did not mock all the paintings.

Years later Zola was to describe in a novel the atmosphere of an exhibition resounding with the guffaws of curiosity-seekers: “These laughs were no longer smothered by their handkerchiefs of the ladies, and the men distended their bellies the better to give vent to them. It was the contagious mirth of a crowd which had come for entertainment, was becoming excited by degrees, exploded apropos of nothing, and was enlivened as much by beautiful things as by execrable ones… They nudged each other, the doubled up… every canvas had its appreciation, people called each over to point out a good one, witty remarks were constantly being passed from mouth to mouth… expressing the sum of asininity , of absurd commentary, of bad and stupid ridicule that an original work can evoke from bourgeois imbecility. [9] 

In 1874 Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro and others launched an exhibit on their own. They were the young rebels of Paris. Like existentialism, they did not have a coherent program. They painted train stations, cafés, gardens, and surprisingly to me, places of industry. They did not ignore the modern world; they challenged it.

After that exhibit an influential Parisian art critic was highly critical of their work. He said it was often incomplete, and sketch-like. He ridiculed it calling their art “impressions.” So the term at first was an insult. Eventually the artists adopted the name, just as Hillary Clinton hater adopted the term “Adorable deplorables.” People who are insulted like to do nothing more than turn the tables on their tormentors.

Eventually people realized that it take great skill to render an image not as a sharp reproduction, but an “impression.” This was the beginning of the movement to sever the umbilical connection of art to representation. For the first time, artists realized that it was not necessary to present an accurate representation of the world. This was the precursor of modern art. They captured its imperfections. This is one of the things I like about the Impressionists. They embraced imperfections realizing that the ideal was not real.

Monet and Renoir, two of the leaders of the Impressionist movement did not deny that they painted in a rough manner. Both made extensive use of vivid brush strokes. They also used a technique with rapid strokes, dots and commas (strokes in the brief swirl of a comma) to capture glistening atmosphere. As Rewald said, “what officials would have considered “sketchiness”—the execution of an entire canvas without a single definite line, the use of the brushstroke as a graphic means, the manner of composing surfaces wholly through small particles of pigment in different shades—all this now because for Monet and Renoir not merely a practical method of realizing their intentions, it became a necessity if they were to retain the vibrations of light and water, the impression of action and life. Their technique was the logical result of their work out-of-doors and their efforts to see in subjects not the details they recognized bu8t the whole they perceived.” [10]

Stéphane Mallarmé who wrote a monthly article for the Art Monthly probably understood the originality of the Impressionists better than most. He wrote about the movement this way,

As no artist has on his palette a transparent and neutral color answering to open air, the desired effect can only be obtained by lightness or heaviness of touch, or by the regulation of tone. Now Monet and his school use simple color, fresh, or lightly laid on, and their results appear to have been attained at the first stroke, that the ever-present light blends with and vivifies all things. As to the details of the picture, nothing should be absolutely fixed in order that we may feel that the bright gleam which lights the picture, or the diaphanous shadow which veils it, are only seen in passing, and just when the spectator beholds the represented subject, which being composed of a harmony of reflected and ever-changing lights, cannot be supposed always to look the same but palpitates with movement and light, and lifeThat which I preserve through the power of Impressionism is not the material portion, which already exists, superior to any mere representation of it but the delight of having recreated nature touch by touch. I leave the massive and tangible solidity to its fitter exponent, sculpture,. I content myself with reflecting on the clear and durable mirror of painting, that which perpetually lives yet dies every moment, which only exists by will of Idea, yet constitutes in my domain the only authentic and certain merit of nature—the Aspect. [11]

According to the perceptive art critic, Jules Antoine Castagnary, who spent a lot of time with the Impressionists and learned a lot from them,

 

The common concept which united them as a group and gives them a collective strength in the midst of our disaggregate epoch is the determination not to search for a smooth execution, but to be satisfied with a certain general aspect. Once the impression is captured, they declare their role terminatedIf one wants to characterize them with a single word that explains their efforts, one would have to create the new term of Impressionists. They are impressionists in the sense that they render not a landscape but the sensation produced by a landscape. [12]

 

I really believe that this describes their technique as well as anything. It reminds me of those who reject perfection. They give up before perfection has been achieved. Perfection is not necessary. It may in fact be opposed to the goal of the artist.

As a result the artists came to accept the designation of “Impressionist” that started out as a term of ridicule. Of course, some of the artists denied that they were part of the group. Artists are an unruly lot. That’s one of the reasons they are so loveable. The name was interesting, as Rewald said,

 

The term “impressionism,” coined in derision, was soon to be accepted by the friends. In spite of Renoir’s aversion to anything that might give them the appearance of constituting a new ‘school’ of painting, in spite of Degas’ unwillingness to admit the designation with regard to himself, and in spite of Zola’s persistence in calling the painters ‘naturalists,’ the new word was there to stay. Charged with ridicule and vague as it was, ‘impressionism’ seemed as good a term as any other to underline the common element in their efforts. No one word could be expected to define with precision the tendencies of a group of men who place their own sensations above any artistic program. Yet whatever meaning the word might have had originally, its true sense was to be formulated not by critics but by the painters themselves. Thus it was that from among their midst—and doubtless with their consent—came the first definition of the term. It was one of Renoir’s friends who proposed it, writing a little later: ‘Treating a subject in terms of the tone and not of the subject itself, this is what distinguishes the impressionists from other painters.”[13]

It is also noteworthy that the essence of the painting was no longer “the subject itself,” but rather its tone. That harkens out to a subsequent movement in art—abstraction that deep-sixed the very subject entirely concentrating entirely on tones. It would not take long and representation in art would be superseded. The Impressionists had liberated themselves from traditional principles of art and traditional subjects of art. The group was known for its “intense sensibilities,” [14] as Rewald called their skills. And they employed those sensibilities to lead to a revolution in art that was as extreme as any change in the history of art. As Rewald said, “And in doing so they had openly renounced even the recreating reality. Rejecting the objectivity of realism, they had selected one element from reality—light—to interpret all of nature.” [15]

So the Impressionists found a new subject their own impression of light. I believe that one of the paintings we saw today illustrated that as much as any. This was Claude Monet’s sensational painting of the English Parliament that he painted in 1904. It has just the most vague outline of Parliament but the glory of the painting is the light of the sunset (or sunrise) and its reflection in the Thames. I did not realize it but a couple of days later I photographed more or less the same image. But the wonder of the painting is the wonder of the light. There is only a hint of a subject beyond that. The light is all. And light, as the Gothic Architects realized, is divine.

Of course painting light is never easy. In England that genius John M. W. Turner had tried to that with astounding skill and bravery. Turner was a Romantic who followed the lead of the English romantic poets like Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. These poets emotionalized nature. As Helen Gardner said, “These poets, interested in describing nature’s looks, and moods, read the natural landscape closely and sympathetically, until they came to see it almost as a projection of themselves; in a word, they subjectivized it.” [16]

This reminds me of what Northrop Frye said, “ the poet’s job (he could have said the artist’s job) is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.” [17] In the same book, Frye said, “The poet too is an identifier, everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.” [18] Literature, like all art, according to Frye is doing the work that mythology does—it gives the world a human face. “There’s a difference between the world you’re living in and the world you want to live in. The world you want to live in is a human world, not an objective one.”[19]

So Turner expanded the role of light “greatly increasing the role of pure color…in his later paintings he increasingly reveals his awareness that color and light are so closely related as to be the same, and he brings his art to a point where it foreshadows Impressionism.”[20] John Constable continued this trend in English art, but it took the Impressionist to bring it to a spectacular conclusion.

Rewald, an acknowledge expert on the art of the Impressionists has a lengthy explanation of the group. As he reported,

 

Their new approach to nature had prompted the painters gradually to establish a new palette and create a new technique appropriate to their endeavour to retain the fluid play of light. The careful observation of colored light appearing in a scene at a particular moment and led them to do away with the traditional dark shadows and to adopt light pigments. It also led them to ignore local colors, subordinating the abstract notion of local tones to the general atmospheric effect. By applying their paint in perceptible strokes, they had succeeded in in blurring the outlines of objects and merging them with the surroundings. This method had further permitted introducing one color easily into the area of another without degrading or losing it, and thus enriching the color effects. But, above all, the multitude of obvious touches and the contrasts among them had helped to express or suggest the activity, the scintillation of light, and to recreate it to a certain extent on canvas. Moreover, the technique of vivid strokes seemed best suited to their efforts to retain rapidly changing aspects. Since the hand is slower than the eye, which is quick to perceive instantaneous effects, a technique to permit the painters to work rapidly was essential if they were to keep pace with their perception. Alluding to these problems, Renoir used to say, “out-of-doors is always cheating.” Yet their cheating merely consisted in making a choice among the multitude aspects which nature offered., in order to translate the miracles of light into a language of pigment and two dimensions, and also to render the chose aspect with the color and the execution that came closest to their impression. [21] 

I really believe this sums up Impressionism as well as can be done with the puny power of words.

Like the existentialists that followed them, in time and in spirit, the Impressionists tried to capture the moment—here and now. They tried to reveal a personal and subjective impression of the fleeting world of moments. As a result their brushwork was often rapid and visible. They saw the moment as more real than the duration. Here and now is all. As Baudelaire said, “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, one half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable…This transitory, fugitive element, the metamorphoses of which are so frequent, you have no right to despise or do without. By suppressing it you forcibly tumble into the emptiness of an abstract and undefinable beauty.” [22]

The French art critic Odilon Redon perceptively recognized this important aspect of the Impressionists. As he said of, Corot, “He is the painter of a moment, of an impression.” [23]

Impressionists often were inspired to paint by the sea, or ponds, or rivers. Antonin Proust said this about an important French painter, “Courbet once gave a superb reply when Daubigny complimented him on a study of the sea. ‘This is not a study of the sea,’ he said, it represents an hour.’ That is what people do not sufficiently understand, that one does not paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure—one paints an impression of an hour.” [24] That is what Impressionism is all about.

Existentialism the quintessential philosophy of the early twentieth century had the same focus. The here and now was its concern.

Degas understood this. He had been deeply affected by a long passage from a novel by the Goncourt brothers Manette Saloman in which one of the main characters give a long soliloquy in which he expressed the credo of the authors of the book,

 

All ages carry within themselves a Beauty of some kind or other, more or less close to the earth, capable of being grasped and exploited—It is a question of excavation—It is possible that the Beauty of today may be covered, buried, concentrated—to find it there is perhaps need of analysis, a magnifying glass near-sighted vision, new psychological processes.—The question of what is modern is considered exhausted, because there was this caricature of truth in our time, something to stun the bourgeoisie: realism!—because one gentleman created a religion out of the stupidly ugly, or the vulgar ill assembled and without selection, of the modern—but common without character, without expression, lacking what is beauty and the life of the ugly in nature and in art: style! The feeling the intuition for the contemporary, for the scene that rubs modern shoulders for you, for the present in which you sense the trembling of your emotions and something of yourself—everything is there for the artist. The nineteenth century not produce a painter!—but that is inconceivable—A century that has endured so much, the great century of scientific restlessness and anxiety for the truth—There must be found a line that would precisely render life, embrace from close at hand the individual , the particular, a living, human inward line in which there would be something of a modelling by Houdon, a preliminary pastel sketch by La Tour, a stroke by Gavarni—A drawing truer than all drawing—a drawing—more human. [25]

 

The Impressionists loved the atmospheric conditions that they found about them outdoors. As a result their images are often very light—the very color of light. The framing is often off centre. Photographers later used the same technique. They call it ‘the rule of thirds.’ They don’t like things in dead centre as to them the image feels dead that way. Photographers learned this from Impressionists whether they realize it or not.

For the first few years the Impressionists were very poor. The critics largely rejected their work, as did people. At first. In time the critics and public both came to appreciate them. In fact, eventually their art sold for millions. In my opinion that is as absurd as paying them nothing.

The Impressionists also had important insights for what I have called the philosophy of affinity. This is the philosophy of Indigenous peoples of North America in particular. It is a philosophy towards which I am very sympathetic. It holds that all life on earth is connected. We are a part of the world. We are embedded in it. We are not separate from it.

The European version of this philosophy was enunciated (sort of) by Martin Heidegger who used the interesting concept of everything that exists is being-in-the-world to use an apt phrase from Martin Heidegger.

It is also interesting to me at least, that this philosophy is implicit in the views of Northrop Frye.

Rewald talked about water in the art of the Impressionists. This is what Rewald said on that subject,

 

The subject of water played an important role in the development of the style of Monet and his friends. In 1868 Monet painted a picture of a woman seated on a riverbank in which the reflections on the water became one of the main features. Just as snow scenes had permitted the artists to investigate the problem of shadows, the rendering of water offered an excellent opportunity to observe reverberations and reflections. Thus they could further develop their knowledge of the fact that so-called local color was actually a pure convention and that every object presents to the eye a scheme of colors derived from its proper hue, from its surroundings, and from atmospheric conditions. Moreover, the study of water gave pretext for the representation of formless masses livened only by the richness of nuances, of surfaces, whose texture invited vivid brushstrokes. [26]

 

Monet had discovered that these so-called local colors varied according to their surroundings and this was a decisive step in art and not only that was “a decisive step toward the full understanding of nature.” [27] That means, I believe, a full understanding that everything is connected. As John Muir said, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to everything.” This is an understanding derived from art. Not just philosophy.

 

 

[1] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 19

[2] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 20

[3] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 20

[4] quoted by John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 20

[5] quoted by John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 28

[6] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 29-30

[7] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 86

[8] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 326

[9] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 328

[10] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 230

[11] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 372

[12] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 330

[13] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 338

[14] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 338

[15] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 338

[16] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 684

[17] Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination, (1963) p. 11

[18] Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination, (1963) p. 31

[19] Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination, (1963) p. 4

[20] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 684

[21] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 338

[22] quoted in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 128,

[23] quoted in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 188

[24] quoted in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 224

[25] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 174

[26] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 228

[27] John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, (1973) p. 116

A Morning at the Louvre

 

This was at the largest and probably most spectacular museum in the world—the Musée du Louvre. It contains 35,000 works of art—many of them priceless. It is an immense treasure.

The Louvre was built by King Philippe-August as a fortress in 1190, but Charles V the Holy Roman Emperor made it his home from 1364 to 1380. In the 16th century Frances I replaced it with a Renaissance-style palace and started the royal art collection with 12 paintings. All of them were from Italy. In those days Italy, not France, was the centre of the art world.

In 1793 the revolutionaries opened up the collection for the masses. When Napoleon took over, soon after that, he converted the palace into a museum. For the people of course. Napoleon knew how to suck up.

We had a short but marvellous tour of the Louvre. This was our hour or two of art—great art. What a pity that we did not have more time. That is one of the problems with tours. They decide what you will see and for how long.

We were accompanied by the guide from our city tour, who turned out to be very good. We enjoyed her commentary a lot. I took some photographs of the art not to get a good replica, just to remind me what I had seen. I include them for what they are worth. Not much.

We started with Egyptian and then moved quickly to Greek art. After that we saw Renaissance art and the art of pre-Impressionists.

It was wonderful to see the amazing development from the solidity and stiffness of the Egyptian art to the Greeks sculptures that seemed to come to life. We stopped to admire the transformation of the ideal into flesh and blood beauty.

We next looked at Greek and Roman art. In describing the truly awesome Venus de Milo (Aphrodite Melos) created in about 150-100 B.C. Helen Gardner put it this way, “Here…the ideal is taken out of the hypersensible world of reasoned proportions and made in to an apparition of living flesh… The feeling as stone has quite surrendered to the ambition of making stone looking as thought it were the soft warm substance of the human body.” [1] Unfortunately we don’t know the name of the great artist who created this masterpiece.

We also saw The Winged Victory of Samothrace. This wonderful statue consists of a statue of a winged female figure—thought to be the goddess Victory on top of a base in the shape of the prow of a ship. The base in turn stands on a low pedestal. The garment flows with grace and seems to almost fly over the skin as light as a butterfly. The sculpture was created about 220-185 B.C. It is a masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture.

From the Greek section we went to the Renaissance Art. Unfortunately I have forgotten the title and the artist. What I did remember was the principle. At first in early Renaissance art the portraits showed the models all with the same face. And they were all perfect. No blemishes were shown. They thought that was how it was supposed to be. Eventually artists started to show differences. They showed people with imperfections. That really ushered in the art of humanism. For humans are nothing if not imperfect. Perspective also became important in Renaissance art. Eventully9 they created marvels of perspective. That was something the Greeks and Romans failed to achieve.

One of the masters of Renaissance art was of course, Leonardo Da Vinci. Between 1495 and 1527 the center of the art world moved from Firenze (Florence) to Roma (Rome). That was accomplished by a series of powerful and ambitious Popes Alexander Vi (Borgia), Julius II (della Rovere), Leo X (Medici) and Clement VII (Medici) who together established Rome as the power of Europe. And with that great power came great art. They often go together like love and marriage. Rome became not only the religious capital of Europe, but the artistic capital as well.

Naturally the Popes lived in magnificent splendour. They lived like secular princes in other words. Yet they embellished the city with great art and great opportunities for artists. It was the golden age of the Renaissance, or the High Renaissance as it is sometimes called. This was the age of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While these artists had learned from the masters of the Middle and early Renaissance they were creative geniuses, who did not shy from breaking away. They were outstanding rebels.

Yet there was also a spiritual element to the High Renaissance. As Gardner said, “The High Renaissance not only produced a cluster of extraordinary geniuses, but found in divine inspiration the rationale for the exaltation of the artists-genius.” [2]

Leonardo was a rebel—like so many artists before and after him. He was gay, left-handed, handsome, and athletic. He was one of the greatest artists in history.

Walter Isaacson, who wrote a recent biography of Da Vinci, called Leonardo “the most curious person in history.” [3] As Helen Gardner said, he was, “A man who is the epitome of the ‘universal man.’ Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) has become a kind of wonder of the modern world, standing at the beginning of a new epoch like a prophet and a sage, mapping the routes that art and science would take.” [4] He documented the human heart, created a portable bridge, an adding machine, solar power, and a double hulled vessel, worked on a flying machine and studied human anatomy. Some have credited him with inventing the parachute, the helicopter and the tank. Besides inventions and art he was interested in mathematics, sculpture, architecture, astronomy, biology, science, music, engineering, history and cartography. Clearly he had enough interests for a legion of people.

Yet only about 15 of his paintings survive but with that small number he has achieved more influence on future art than perhaps any artists other than his contemporary Michelangelo. As Isaacson said, “He died a poor man but left us a world of lessons.”[5]

He was a genius of both science and art. No one achieved such lofty status in both disciplines. It was astoundingly implausible. He used his science to improve his art and his improve his science.

Specifically, he used his knowledge of the science of light to understand how he could use that knowledge to reveal not just the physical condition in which the subject is found, but “the lights and darks of human psychology as well.” [6] Anthony Blunt, described the same process this way, “A good painter has two chief objects to paint—man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard, for it must be expressed by gestures and the movements of the limbs… A painting will only be wonderful for the beholder by making that which is not so appear raised and detached from the wall.” [7]

Painters have to contend with the uncomfortable fact that “Light simultaneously veils and reveals the forms of things, immersing them in a layer of atmosphere between them and our eyes. The ambiguity of light and shade—familiar in the optical uncertainties of dusk—is in the service of the psychological ambiguity of perception.” [8]

The Renaissance is famous for introducing into painting the concept of perspective. In the Renaissance everything was perspective and no one mastered it more profoundly than Leonardo Da Vinci. This is clear from his world famous Last Supper (which is not shown in the Louvre but in Milan). Perspective however is more than the famous converging lines, but includes subtle use of light and shadow.

Instead we got to see the Mona Lisa. As Gardner said, “If Leonardo’s Last Supper is the most famous of religious pictures, the Mona Lisa is probably the world’s most famous portrait.” [9] Some art critics have focused on her mysterious smile or what Nat King Cole called “her mystic smile” in his well-known song. Gardner pays more attention to the play of light and shadow in the painting. She says it shows his scientific knowledge. He added to Masaccio’s concept of chiaroscuro—the subtle play of light and dark and how they can obscure each other and illuminate each other at the same. The painting is the product of their effect on each other. The penetrate each other. And that creates the miracle of great art. Leonardo was a master of this concept.

Like the Impressionists that came 4 centuries later, Leonardo was enthralled by ambiguity and uncertainty. He was repelled by certainty. That was why he avoided harsh lines in his art, preferring soft gradations of color and even form.

We also saw a painting from another great Renaissance artist that Chris and I got to appreciate from our 3 weeks in Florence. This was Tiziano Vecellio or Titian as we call him in English. Gardner says of him that “He is among the very greatest painters of the Western world, a supreme colorist and, in a broad sense, the father of the modern mode of painting.”[10] He is particularly credited with adopted canvas and its rough-textured surface as a replacement for wood as the typical medium for paintings.

According to Marilyn Stokstad contemporaries said that Titian “could make an excellent figure appear in four brushstrokes.” [11] She also called hi “a true magician of portraiture.” [12] He was most famous for his colours and his paintings of nudes like the Venus that we saw in Florence at the Uffizi Gallery. Stokstad characterized his art this way, “No photograph can convey the vibrancy of Titian’s paint surfaces, which he built in layers of individual brushstrokes in pure colors, chiefly red, white, yellow, and black… His technique was admirably suited to the creation of female nudes, whose flesh seems to glow with an incandescent light.

One of the first works of art we stopped to appreciate, was one by Eugéne Delacroix—one of the supreme artists of France. He was nothing if not extreme. He did not believe in moderation. Instead he delivered the patron on a “a whirlwind journey through the deepest troughs of suffering, fear, despair and to the highest peaks of intense rapture and energy.” [13]

Delacroix, who lived from 1798 to 1863, once wrote, in his dairy “I dislike reasonable painting.” That is why many of his paintings depict extreme scenes of suffering, fear, and despair, while others are filled with a sense of boundless rapture and energy or even tranquility. Reminds me of modern action films with their over-the-top oeuvre.

His art draws on themes from mythology, literature, the mysterious East, and contemporary history, all treated with the same emotional intensity. He was always an extremist.

Delacroix was not a man of the Enlightenment. He was one of the original romantics. To the romantic the “real” is wild nature. It must be untamed. This is how he described the romantic zeal, “It is evident that nature cares very little whether man has a mind or not. The real man is the savage; he is in accord with nature as she is. As soon as man sharpens his intelligence, increases his ideas, and the way of expressing them, and acquires need, nature runs counter to him in everything.” [14]

The romantics were constantly in search of the sublime and the terrible, awe and wonder. They did not seek divine proportions, order, and tranquility as the Classicists did. Delacroix said specifically that he sought “delights in the terrible.”[15]

This art form thought that art should try to stir things up. They wanted art that would electrify. His art was designed to appeal to the populous. Sort of like Donald Trump.

The work of art we saw was one of his greatest namely Death of Sardanapalus that he painted in 1826. It shows grand opera on a colossal scale. The painting is 9’7’’ wide and 6’ 4 1/2’’ high. Delacroix showed the last hours of the king in a tempestuous and crowded setting. Since his armies were defeated he had his most precious possession destroyed. These included his concubines, his slaves, horses, and treasures. If he could not have them, no one could have them. With impressing gloom he watched them die. Who would not be depressed with such a sight? According to Gardner, “the king presides like a genius of evil over the panorama of destruction, most conspicuous of which are the tortured and dying bodies of his Rubenesque women, the one in the front dispatched by a slave almost ecstatically murderous. This carnival of suffering and death is glorified by superb drawing and color, the most daringly difficult and torturous poses, and the richest intensities of hues and contrasts of light and dark. The king is he center of the calamity; the quiet eye of a hurricane of form and color. It testifies to Delacroix’s art that his center of meaning, away form the central action, entirely controls it.”[16]

Another work of art by Delacroix that we enjoyed a lot was his Liberty Leading the People, which he painted in 1830, long after the revolution and long after he was aware that liberty had died in the Revolution. The painting is, according to Gardner, “an allegory of revolution itself. Liberty, a partly nude, majestic woman, whose beautiful features wear an expression of noble dignity, waves the people forward to the barricades. The familiar revolutionary apparatus of Paris streets. She carries the banner of the republic, the tricolor, and a musket with bayonet and wear the cap of Liberty. The path of her advance is over the dead and dying of both parties.” [17] Revolution climbing over the dead bodies. Is this not exactly how revolutions work?

You can barely see the towers of Notre-Dame rising through the smoke. Those same towers we saw a couple of hours ago. This painting does really show the temperament of revolution all right.

Delacroix started the abandonment of the ideal that preceded impressionism. This became important in the afternoon when we visited the Impressionist. Delacroix like the Impressionists that followed him was not afraid to show imperfection. Both wanted to abandon perfection for the real. And the real, is the product of the mind.

Nearby in the museum we also gazed at a painting by Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) called Raft of Medusa. According to Gardner this paining was influenced by Michelangelo and Rubens. [18] This painting had a very modern theme for it showed the French ship Medusa laden heavy with Algerian immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. The actual incident like many we have heard about in Europe in the last few years was a tragedy of mismanagement or exploitation and abuse. It caused a scandal in its day. Much more so than many such disasters trigger these days. These days such misery is old hat. It raises not a stir. It only raises cries for bigger and stronger walls. Gardner described the painting this way, “The figures are piled upon one another in every attitude of suffering a despair, and death recalling the foreground figures in Gros’s Pest House. Powerful light and dark contrasts suits the violence of the twisting and writhing bodies. Though Baroque devices are everywhere present, Géricault’s use of shock tactics that stun the viewer’s sensibilities amounts to something new, a new tone of intention that distinguish the second and “high” phase of Romanticism. [19] Apparently Géricault studied actual bodies from the scene to “get the facts” right. He did not want to present any fake news.

 

[1] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p.176

[2] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 476

[3] Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (2017)

[4] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 476

[5] Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (2017)

[6] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p 478

[7] Anthony Blount, Artistic theory in Italy 1450-1600 (1964) p. 34

[8] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p 478

[9] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p 480

[10] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p 524

[11] Marilyn Stokstad, Art History, (1995) p. 709

[12] Marilyn Stokstad, Art History, (1995) p. 709

[13] Musée du Louvre Guide,

[14] quoted in Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 673

[15] quoted in Louise Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 673

[16] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 674

[17] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 675

[18] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 670

[19] Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, (1975) p. 672