Painted Impressions of British Public Spaces (Interiors)

Peter Tillemans
Queen Anne in the House of Commons
ca. 1709-1714
oil on canvas
Parliamentary Art Collection, London

William Hodges and William Pars
Interior of the Pantheon, London
ca. 1770-80
oil on canvas
Temple Newsam House, Leeds, Yorkshire

William Frederick Witherington
A Modern Picture Gallery
1824
oil on canvas
National Trust, Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire

James Digman Wingfield
The Bank Parlour
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Bank of England Museum, London

John Fulleylove
All Souls College Library
ca. 1880
oil on canvas
All Souls College, University of Oxford

Anonymous British Artist
Interior of the Aquarium, Scarborough
late 19th century
oil on canvas
Scarborough Art Gallery, Yorkshire

The Realists

Hope that you may understand.
What can books, of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land;
Paintings, of the dolphin-drawn
Sea nymphs in their pearly waggons,
Do but wake the hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons.

– William Butler Yeats (1912)

Steven Spurrier
Little Restaurant
ca. 1905
oil on canvas
Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, Scotland

Cyrus Cuneo
The Diners
1913
oil on panel
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Frank O. Salisbury
The Entrance Hall of the Victoria & Albert Museum
1915
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

William Bruce Ellis Ranken
Interior of the Great Hall, Greenwich
1919
oil on canvas
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

George Percy Jacomb-Hood
Guest Night, Merchant Taylors' Hall
1922
oil on canvas
Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull

Malcolm Drummond
The Stag Tavern
1929
oil on canvas
Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries

Thomas Cantrell Dugdale
Underground
1932
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Gretta Bowen
Library
ca. 1953
oil on paper
Ulster Museum, Belfast

Bernard Dunstan
Sale at Christie's
ca. 1960
oil on board
Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Wales

The Forties: New York - Lisette Model

Lisette Model
Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York
ca. 1940-46
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York
ca. 1940-46
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

"Take the society women eating.  In Vienna, I saw millions of miserable, high-class people eating this way.  The New Yorkers were all dressed up.  Loaded with jewelry.  To their smug selves, they were complete.  To me they were more miserable than the poor on the streets of Paris or the Lower East Side.  Why did I wait till the mouth of one was wide-open before I pressed the shutter?  Not to bring her down.  Not to show how ugly she could be with her tongue sticking out.  Eating, the smug socialite became something else.  Authentic!  Hungry.  Full of desire.  Her grasping tongue exploded the facade.  I froze the discordance.  Emancipated it, as Schönberg would say.  It was another side of her.  A new feeling.  Incomplete.  Unresolved." 

Lisette Model
International Refugee Organization Auction, New York
1948
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Gallagher's, New York
1945
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Murray Hill Hotel, New York
ca. 1940-47
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Washington Restaurant
ca. 1943
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Restaurant, New York
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

"By 1940 or so I was a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar.  On assignment, you're a race horse.  The bell rings – you're off and running!  Straining.  To see what's there.  Because there's always something, even when you don't know what the hell you're doing.  Later, teaching was the same thing.  Ansel Adams pushed me into teaching in San Francisco.  In 1949, I was teaching Minor White's course, without any preparation!  I'd never taught before.  I detest being pushed.  You don't change your character overnight!"

"Steiner, Brodovitch, Steichen, and that lot assumed from what they saw as authority, in my pictures, that I was in complete control.  It was false.  I was a fraud.  I couldn't explain this to ignorant boors.  Even wonderful writers, like Elizabeth McCausland, and devoted photographers, who loved my work from the beginning, who saw its uniqueness and violent strength, to whom I shall be forever grateful, were mostly ignorant of the world culture that created me.  They only knew their own.  The Great American Rat-Race!"

Lisette Model
Fritzie Scheff
ca. 1948-49
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Valeska Gert - 'Olé'
1940
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Valeska Gert - 'Olé'
1940
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

"Not to sound overly analytical, but the archetype doesn't proceed simply from physical facts.  It's the result of how your psyche experiences those facts.  Jung said the psyche not only interferes.  It becomes autocratic!  Flies in the face of the facts to produce the archetype.  I isolated my subjects.  I printed them large to show that photographed, they became grander, as ideas, than they had been in life.  I revealed something mythical and ancient, what Jung called the natural mind, the two-million-year-old being buried in us all.  Not everyone wanted to see it."

Lisette Model
Valeska Gert - 'Death'
1940
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Albert-Alberta, Hubert's Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Albert-Alberta, Hubert's Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Cafe Zanzibar, New York
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

"They recorded what I said.  I let them!  I lied about my age, muddled the details of my education and how I got into photography.  God knows, what else.  Later, those Americans (I call them Americans – there were others), those children figured it out.   Some of what I said was true, but I'd told my story so many times I couldn't remember what was real and what I'd invented in the panic of the moment.  When I saw the stuff some of them wrote, I was in shock!  They said it was what I told them.  How could anyone speak or write about me when they kept getting it wrong?"

"I sound like a mad woman.  A paranoid.  Wouldn't you?  Their questions made me too aware of a thousand certainties I never possessed: sound visual training, perseverance, hard work in the dark room, thousands of great, technically perfect photographs spanning a lifetime.  That's what Americans admire.  Of the 25,000 negatives I shot (another fact I concealed), the few hundred picture I call good are a drop in the bucket.  Wouldn't it make you abrasive and hyper-critical?  Wouldn't you break book contracts?  Despise exhibitions?  Wouldn't your hair stand on end if you were famous, but all too aware of expectations you hadn't met?"

– quoted passages are from Lisette Model: A Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)

Eighties Treat

My daughter made this thank-you card in the early 1980s. She had three great-aunts who lived together in a nearby house and sometimes took her out for treats. For every treat there would follow a thank-you note, usually illustrated.

Summer Instagrams

Mabel and her parents are out of town visiting friends this week, where there is another little girl to play with plus a new baby. Away from San Francisco Mabel is able to enjoy warm-weather pastimes mostly impossible at home.

Pamphlet

Mabel and I loitered in this lobby for a few minutes after swimming. She discovered a free pamphlet about an upcoming film festival. At the table, she decided to pick which movies she wanted to see, based on the tiny still that illustrated each one. She found just two she liked the looks of – one about a mouse in a bubble and one about a special little boy.