Dina Vieny, Maillol And Matisse
When posing for Maillol she looked quite obese,
since Aristide thought fat is fine,
but having been drawn by his good friend Matisse,
she left him reduced to a line.
Inspired by an obituary of Dina Vierny, Aristide Maillol’s model, by William Grimes (“Dina Vierny,89, model for Maillol’s sculptures, ” NYT, January 27,2009) :
Ms. Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father’s, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums. “Mademoiselle, it is said that you look like a Maillol and a Renoir, ” Maillol wrote to her. “I’d be satisfied with a Renoir.” For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Ms. Vierny was Maillol’s muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic….Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, “a living Maillol, ” memorialized in works like “The Seated Bather, ” “The Mountain, ” “Air, ” “The River, ” and “Harmony, ” his last, unfinished sculpture. Maillol also turned to her as a subject for drawings and painted portraits, like “Dina With a Scarf, ” now in the Maillol Museum.
In 1939, Maillol took refuge at his home in Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, Ms. Vierny, who had already begun working for a Resistance group in Paris, was approached by the Harvard-educated classicist Varian Fry, whose organization in Marseille helped smuggle refugees from occupied France into Spain. Unbeknownst to Maillol, she began working as a guide, identifiable to her fleeing charges by her red dress. The work was doubly dangerous because she was Jewish. Ms. Vierny soon began dozing off at her posing sessions. The story came out, and Maillol, a native of the region, showed her secret shortcuts, smugglers’ routes and goat paths to use. After several months of working for the Comité Fry, Ms. Vierny was arrested by the French police, who seized her correspondence with her friends in the Surrealist movement but failed to notice stacks of forged passports in her room. A lawyer hired by Maillol won her acquittal at trial, and to keep her out of harm’s way the artist sent her to pose for Matisse in Nice. “I am sending you the subject of my work, ” Maillol told Matisse, “whom you will reduce to a line.” Matisse did several drawings and proposed an ambitious painting that he called a “Matisse Olympia, ” after the famous painting by Manet. When Maillol heard that the project would take at least six months, he hastily recalled her to Banyuls. She also posed for Dufy and for Bonnard, who used her as the model for “Somber Nude.” In 1943, Ms. Vierny was again arrested, this time by the Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six months in prison when Maillol appealed to Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.
1/27/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Related quotes
I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet.
quote by Aristide Maillol
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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In the Dim Light at the Threshold of a Parisian Bar!
Cezanne and Renoir
At a corner table
Younger Artists
Matisse and Picasso nearby
Finishing a bottle of Rum!
I want to ask them
About 'The Girl with green eyes'
Henry Matisse's best work for me
And 'Guernica' Pablo Picasso made me a mad!
My beloved switched on the ceiling lamp
And said; 'Hey! Honey it's Mother's day'
Then I thought of my two Mothers!
My poor Mom & Beloved!
And I collect my scattered pastel sticks,
Then wife says; 'You finish it next year that I am sure.'
'Certainly I want to send a painting for an International Art competition
And If I win darling I'll piggyback you up to the Eiffel Tower
As I heard in my dream poor deceased Mom works there in a Cafeteria!
(To all the Mothers of the World who contributed their tears in vain for the Oceans. Brother killing of each other not yet finished?)
poem by Nimal Dunuhinga
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Posing
She ignores the oil painting, pretends to read,
she knows she's there, of course
flaunting herself, naked,
but the fat lady's posing days are over.
There were times, years ago
when she'd posed, secretly of course.
Oh yes, by herself in her boudoir, pouting,
hoping someone might walk in!
She'd pretend she was an artist's model
laying draped across her bed,
careful not to wobble
just in case somebody did.
Now of course she's far too big
she wouldn't even dream
but likes to show her stocking tops
when she's lounging, reading books.
As for her up on the wall,
she's a beauty, such a doll!
An oil painting of a queen,
above us all majestically.
poem by Ruth Walters
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Paris, Please Accept Me, As A Human Refugee
paris................
o paris................
Y paris................
the patience, eating the happiness
the pain, eating the patience
and the pain, eating the pain
I AM SICK, paris
treat me, sister
paris................
o paris................
Y paris................
exile, on my papers
restrained, ..
in my lines
so free me, paris
treat me, paris
I BELONG TO YOU, ..
sister
my home, the colours of MONET
my room, is a water flower
my air..
is the scent of FRANCE
and my refuge..
is a place by RENOIR shrine
so take me paris..
as your..
renoirian..
REFUGEE.
poem by Ahmed Khaled
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Swashbuckling
Demanding either ahs or chuckles,
I am an artist who swashbuckles,
performing before ears that hear,
and eyes that read, what is most dear
to the magician in me, sleight
of mouth with which I gravitate
above the ground of common sense,
beyond the past and present tense,
by twisting words like wires Calder
once twisted, and the authors Alter
has found in many Bible tales
twist words as if they were entrails,
serious topics that with whimsy
fligh high with fancies that sound flimsy.
Without ifs or ans or buts
my poems, aiming for the guts,
have spirals echoing the mobiles
of Calder, with phonetic foibles
I hope the reader will enjoy
as if they were a mobile toy
whose batteries won’t fall apart
unless they’re battered by your heart.
Holland Cotter reviews an exhibition of the work of Alexander Calder (The Paris Years,1926-33) in the Whitney Museum (“Calder at Play: Whimsy in Simple Wire, ” NYT, October 17,2008) : :
Calder didn’t start out with ambitions to be an artist; if anything, he was pulled in the opposite direction. He watched his father, a professional sculptor, fret over commissions and struggle with money. So when it came time for college the young Calder chose an engineering school in New Jersey over art school. But of course he was an artist, a natural. He may just not have known at first what that meant. Even as a child he was astonishingly inventive. The tiny figure of a rocking-horse-style bird shaped from brass sheeting is, for economy of form and conceptual daring, one of the more radical works in the show. He made it when he was 11. He made stuff all the time. He was one of those people with nonstop eyes and hands: every scrap of stray matter was a candidate for transformation. Give him some wire, clothespins and a scrap of cloth and, presto chango, you had a bird or a cow or a circus clown: nothing, then something, which is what magic is. There’s a hyperactive pace to his early career. While working at engineering jobs after college, he was also drawing like crazy and designing toys. In 1923 he enrolled at the Art Students League to study painting; John Sloan and George Luks were his teachers. At the same time he took on illustrating gigs for publications like The New Yorker and The National Police Gazette. His academic drawings from the time are gauche and ordinary. The staying-still-in-a-studio they required obviously cramped his style. Much fresher is the dashed-off, manic-looking magazine work. And his Ash Can School-type paintings of New York scenes — a drunken party; a trip to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — have a gawky spark of life. Then there are his pen-and-ink drawings of zoo animals. They’re in a different category, almost by a different artist, one more relaxed and assured. Often done as one continuous line, they are like an effortlessly sophisticated form of penmanship. So are some of the openwork sculptures of bent and twisted wire that he began to experiment with at this time. In 1926, with all these balls in the air, he suddenly moved to Paris, because motion for him was a stimulant and because he felt that Paris was the hot place to be, which it was. With its crowded cafes, charged thinking, endless talking and jumpy personalities, the city was hyperkinetic. Calder fell in love with it. And, although he continued to return to New York for long stretches, he made Paris his home base for seven years. His wire sculpture took off there. Several examples in the form of portrait heads are the first thing you see when you step off the elevator on the Whitney’s fourth floor. They’re an arresting sight, in a gently wow-inspiring way. Wows were what Calder was after, along with chuckles and satisfied ahs. He was a showman, a performer. “See what I can do, right before your eyes, without even trying? ” his art seems to say.
10/17/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Model Citizen
Be an Arab
Be a Jew
Be a boxing
Kangaroo
Beat yourself
All black and blue
I don't care
Be a bleeder
Be a Cancer
A hemophiliac
Romancer
Be a crippled disco
Dancer
Oooh... What a pair
He's a model citizen
I think I've got them fooled them again
He's an ultra-sweety guy
And a master of disguise
He's a model citizen
Just keep believing that my friends
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm an all American!!!
I'm a hostage
In a city of creeps
They've got mercenary guards
That watch me sleep
They'd like to kill me slow
Bury me deep
In the heart of Texas
I'm a martyr
I'm a sadist
I might be the Saviour here to save us
I'm a friend of Sammy Davis, casually
He's a model citizen
I think I've got them fooled again
He's an ultra-sweety guy
I won't let down my disguise
He's a model citizen
Just keep believing that my friends
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm an all American
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm a model citizen
I'm an all American
song performed by by Alice Cooper
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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0282 A Necessary Art
There's art history, and there's the history of art.
Art history, you can learn anywhere these days;
the history of art's some other, thrilling thing, a life-blood
pumping its heart intensely as if it were a matter
which it is of course, of life and death..
and who will tell you, except those who lived it through,
who will tell you - except perhaps old men;
while the students yawn, stop taking notes,
and wonder if the chick back there
is up for it?
Who will tell you that the truth is savage,
and the world hard earned,
and art, painting, poetry,
a matter of life and death?
Who will tell you, for instance, how after 1945,
when war ended, and 'peace'
was the threat of nuclear annihilation,
the great French artists, who had made
their various accommodations with the occupying power
brought out near ten years' work the world had never seen?
As if archaeologists, searching for the past,
had found instead, the future?
Picasso, Matisse, Leger, Braque - you know the names...
and how Picasso, who never allowed any other artist
to see him at his work, opened his Paris studio
to hordes of American servicemen? Interviewed
in the great French magazine, Cahiers d'Art, in I think
the late 1940s, he said his art was
'une somme des destructions' - a sum of destructions;
and Wallace Stevens, in a lecture at the Met, in 1951,
remembered the phrase, made it his text, and
told the post-war world that painting, as with poetry,
was man's great chance to seek his self - for each of us
to find out who we really are - in ways, we listening
were to assume, which might not always be heard in churches
or from philosophers' petty squabblings..
now today, this may seem a truism put out by slick PR
from auction houses; who can tell you
what it was like to hear that said?
and by so great a poet man?
There's art history, and the history of art.
Who will tell you that the truth is savage
and the world hard earned,
and art, painting, poetry,
a matter of life and death?
poem by Michael Shepherd
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Unashamed Art
The artist who hides the model's beauty
won't allow others to see
the beauty of the model who poses
hidden by drapery.
But the artist who describes the beauty
allows the model to be
adorned in the garment given by God
which is painted naturally.
poem by Edwina Reizer
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Le Bateau Is Hanging Upside Down
'Isn't it recondite' said the patron
Who observed the Matisse for inspection
As if he were an expertise General
Protecting culture on his mantel
'Yes it is' I squirmed with breath
Perspiration was in my brain
Hoping to come out with the wisdom
Of knowing what I didn't know
Sensing my every twitching askance
He looked at me with half a scrawl
Dalmatian conceit in his posture
Wagging his lips of disapproval
'Of course you don't understand
I can see it writen in your face
Let me enlighten you to what this means-
This artist is embracing symbolic transformation
Utilizing reductionism for grand complexity
Notice how the azure refracts the duplicate
As the mauve lines are edging simulated movement
This is revolutionary of modern art
We are seeing the principle subject
Disposed of the auxiliary minute
It's mesmerizing what he's done truly
It understandable you don't see it most people don't'
Just as he finished his sermon
Two men in overalls came for the painting
They flipped the painting upside down
And one of than men looked at us and said
'Now it's on the right side'
They walked away and I smiled
My companions face was stoned
He never spoke another word
But I guess most people understand
That the Le Bateau was hanging upside down
poem by Kevin Patrick
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Superman
[Dina Rea:]
Mmmhh
[Eminem:]
You high baby?
[Dina Rea:]
Yeahh...
[Eminem:]
Yeah?
[Dina Rea:]
hahaha..Talk to me...
[Eminem:]
You want me to tell you somethin?
[Dina Rea:]
Uh huh...
[Eminem:]
I know what you wanna hear...
'Cuz I know you want me baby I think I want you too...
[Dina Rea:]
I think I love you baby...
[Eminem:]
I think I love you too...
I'm here to save you girl
song performed by by Eminem from The Eminem Show
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking on a tightrope.
quote by Henri Matisse
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Work cures everything.
quote by Henri Matisse
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
quote by Henri Matisse
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.
quote by Henri Matisse
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.
quote by Henri Matisse
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.
quote by Lee Krasner
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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En Paris Ces't Ma Maison
En Paris Ces't Ma Maison
The Paris Skylight
Shines upon your rose room in the early morning.
Portraits of the sea
portraits of Monet and Renoir...serene
boating scenes
You saunter to your full-length mirror
you comb your soft silky hair.
Joy is in your heart...You have found
Paradise.
Your morning walk begins
You pass the Luxemborg Gardens
Le Belle fleur de jardin
A smile glistens off your face
The Arc De Trimphe...The symbol of Liberties de France
The beauty continues
with the Champs Elysees
and the Concorde
In Paris you have found your heart
your love
your home
Peter LeBuhn
Copyright ©2005 Peter B. Lebuhn
poem by Peter LeBuhn
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Cutting into color reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving.
quote by Henri Matisse
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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How It was
That is how it was that is how
The painting got painted with
You in it and the artist telling
You how to sit and where and
How to have the hat positioned
On your head and at what angle
And don’t smile too much girl he
Said or look too dour and so you
Sat there in that antique chair with
Your hands held together on your
Knees and your legs crossed ladylike
And your feet on a small stool with
The shawl wrapped about you to
Keep out the cold you felt that day
You posed and looking back years later
You think what a hat to wear and what
A bored expression to have upon your
Face and you note he painted that small
Glass vase of flowers and that round
Mirror on the wall to capture the others
Who stood across the room posing in their
Childhood play only now you recall that
It all was fiction on the artist’s part there
Were no others there across the room
To play their games that cold spring day.
poem by Terry Collett
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Fair Exchange
Two soldiers sat in the rubble
Out by the Berlin autobahn,
Schulz had once been an artist, while
Ludwig came from a farm,
They huddled down as the allied planes
Roared over, dropping their bombs,
The war was pretty well done with,
They were going back to their homes.
Their Units long had been shattered
As they retreated over the Seine,
While Hitler raved in his bunker
That they should hold out, just the same,
They knew their lives would be forfeit
If they were seen there, out in the street,
So only moved in the darkness,
Prayed for the peace that came with defeat.
They each of them carried a shoulder pack
Of things they were taking back,
Some bread, a twist of tobacco
Something to barter for Cognac,
Ludwig's pack seemed to wriggle about,
To Schulz it was awful big,
And so, to allay curiosity,
He told Schulz, it was a pig!
‘I'll need it back on the farm,
Something to breed from in the peace,
The army took all our livestock,
And the farm is still on a lease.
My wife is probably starving
And the kids won't know me at all,
I found it in a deserted farm
And I plucked it over a wall.'
‘And what have you got in your pack, '
Ludwig asked, ‘a chicken or two? '
‘Or maybe a slice of bratwurst,
Give me a look, I'm hungry too! '
‘Nothing that you could eat, ' said Schulz,
‘I've a painting by Matisse,
Part of the plunder of Goering,
Fell off a truck that was heading east.'
The ground was shaking with falling bombs,
They had to cover their ears,
‘I've had enough of this war, ' said Schulz,
His eyes were filling with tears,
Then out of the firestorm came a man
Stumbling through the gap,
With an SS badge at his collar
And a Death's Head badge on his cap.
He pulled out his Luger, covered them,
And sneered at the uniform,
‘Another couple of cowards, eh?
You'll wish you'd never been born!
The Fuhrer says I should shoot you now,
So tell me, why should you live? '
‘The war is done, if you let us run,
We may have something to give.'
So Ludwig opened his pack a shade
And showed the soldier his pig,
‘You can have yourself a mighty roast,
You won't find another as big.'
‘And you, what prize can you offer me? '
‘I've got a real Matisse…'
‘I'll take it all, ' said the SS man,
‘It'll sit on my mantelpiece! '
He took the packs and he backed on out
Went stumbling out in the blitz,
When suddenly there was an awful blast
And the man was blown to bits.
‘The pig must have wriggled and pulled the pin
Of the hand grenade in the pack;
We can thank the gods, or providence,
That could have been me in the hat! '
The SS cap was covered in blood
Had landed at Ludwig's feet,
He grinned at Schulz, said: ‘Fancy that!
I hope you can be discreet.'
‘There goes a priceless Matisse, ' said Schulz,
‘But fair exchange, if we live,
I'm sorry about your porker, but
There are several types of pig! '
16 November 2012
poem by David Lewis Paget
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