Painted Panels from the 17th century

Dirck van Delen
Iconoclasm in a church
1630
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"As contrasted with architecture and sculpture, painting, we may say, makes us once again feel at home with ourselves, since its principle of finite and yet inherently infinite subjectivity is the principle of our very own life and existence . . . The principle of painting, as distinct from the principles of the other arts, is the determinant factor here. We have said before that painting must take for its content primarily that which, as contrasted with sculpture on one side and music and poetry on the other, it is best able to express in external form. This, as we have seen, is that characteristically romantic self-concentration of spirit which must remain forever inaccessible to sculpture and for which music and poetry (though they too take it for their content) can no longer provide a visually objective corporeal image. According to its own principle and concept, in other words, painting holds the middle ground between the three-dimensional arts of architecture and sculpture and the spatially dimensionless arts of music and poetry."  

– from Aesthetics, or, The Philosophy of Fine Art by G.W.F. Hegel (posthumously published during the 1830s), translated by Henry Paolucci

Dirck van Delen
Five ladies in an interior
ca. 1630-52
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Rembrandt
A musical company
1626
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

David Teniers
Scene in a tavern
1640
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

David Teniers
Smokers in a tavern
1644
oil on panel
private collection

David Teniers
Smokers in an interior
ca. 1637
oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jan Miense Molenaer
Woman at the virginal
ca. 1630-40
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Gerard ter Borch
Woman playing a theorbo-lute, with cavalier
ca. 1658
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Mozes van Wtenbrouck
Finding of Moses
ca. 1625-27
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Marten Ryckaert
Landscape with a farm
1627
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Sebastian Vrancx
Harvest
before 1610
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Isaak van den Blocke
Visitation
before 1626
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Gerrit Dou
Portrait of a couple in a landscape
before 1675
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Aert Jansz Marienhof
Artist in a studio
1648
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Santo Loquasto Designs on Screen and Stage

The ballet and opera designer Santo Loquasto was production designer for Woody Allen's 1992 film, Husbands and Wives, set in Manhattan. The dark-green wooden benches (above) in Central Park were made to serve Loquasto's palette of bruised, early-nineties colors. Juliette Lewis wore oversized woolen blazers and hugged them around herself like blankets. Woody Allen was consumed by his greatcoat.

Wine-stained reds combined with earthy greens (forest, arsenic, mud) – that one dissonant and singular combination dominated almost every frame. However, the colors suddenly turned hot for an instant (below) when Mia Farrow discovered the love interest that would allow her to escape from one boring marriage and start another. This was the actress's thirteenth and final film with Woody Allen. The scandal that caused their real-life split became public shortly before Husbands and Wives appeared in theaters.

Below, a few of Santo Loquasto's theater designs, for comparison.

Finishing a Novel

From Faithful and Virtuous Night, the new book of poetry by Louise Glück, comes a new poem written for a world that no longer reads  much. The starting point of this new poem (which has no line breaks and might be taken to resemble a short paragraph of prose) is the experience of reading fiction –

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be. 

A Heart So White

Javier Marías published Corazón tan blanco in 1992. The English translation by Margaret Jull Costa came out in 1995 as A Heart So White.
  

The participant-narrator of this story knows several European languages well enough to make a living as an interpreter for large political bodies and powers. Themes of translating – of listening and repeating – dominate this novel. Marías has himself translated numerous books of English literature into Spanish. Perhaps for this reason, the interpreter's fictional voice never sounds very fictional.

"Despite the fact that I translated all the speeches and texts I spoke of before, I can barely remember a single word, not that I ever did and not because there's a limit to how much information the memory can retain, but because, even at the moment I was translating I could remember nothing, that is, even then I had no idea what the speaker was saying nor what I said subsequently or, as one imagines happens, simultaneously. He or she said it and I said or repeated it, but in a mechanical way that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellection (more than that, the two activities are completely at odds), for you can only repeat more or less accurately what you hear if you neither understand nor assimilate any of it (especially if you're receiving and transmitting without pause) and the same thing happens with written texts of this type, which have no literary merit whatsoever and which you never get the chance to correct or ponder over or go back to. So all the valuable information to which people might imagine we translators and interpreters working in international organizations are privy, in fact, escapes us completely, from beginning to end, from top to bottom, we haven't a clue about what's brewing or being plotted and planned in the world, not the slightest glimmer. And even if, sometimes, in our rest periods, we stay behind to listen to the great men without translating them, the identical terminology used by all of them is utterly incomprehensible to anyone in his or her right mind, so that if occasionally, for some inexplicable reason, we do manage to retain a few phrases, the fact is that we then deliberately forget them as quickly as possible, because keeping that inhuman jargon in your head for any longer than the time it takes to translate it into the second language or second jargon is an unnecessary torment, positively harmful to our battered equilibrium."  

As one reviewer observes, "The flawed, truncated nature of all human contact and efforts to reach it has rarely been given such remorseless stress." 

(Photo of the author with bookshelves by Gianfranco Tripodo)

Prince Jérôme & Nan Goldin

The famous Napoleon Bonaparte had several brothers. The youngest was called Jérôme-Napoléon and lived from 1784 to 1860. He is pictured above after losing the puppet-title, King of Westphalia. His second son (below) entered French politics after the Revolution of 1848. He was named Napoléon Joseph Bonaparte and he lived from 1822 to 1891. Once in power, he was often referred to as Prince Jérôme Napoléon like his father.

What affinity links Napoleons's dead relatives to living American photographer Nan Goldin? Only the roulette of juxtaposition that characterizes all the mighty world's stock of visual artifacts. Nan Goldin was the subject of a recent documentary. Immediately below is a still from that film, along with two recent images created by Nan Goldin of herself with her own camera.

And for an ending, one example (just one) of the work that – starting experimentally in the 70s and taking off ferociously in the 80s – secured for Nan Goldin her membership in the small group of international fine-art celebrity photographers able to command five-figure and even six-figure prices for their prints.

Jens & Clemens embracing in my hall 

La Truite

Joseph Losey released his next-to-last film in 1982. His artistic reputation was high, but he also had a reputation for eccentricity and a difficult temperament. Once Isabel Huppert agreed to star in a French-language feature called La Truite, Losey was able to raise the necessary production money. He died in 1984.

Losey (below) with Jeanne Moreau. The venerable director cast the venerable actress as a discontented rich lady wearing 1980s power shoulders.

Marie-Hélène Arnaud

French actress Marie-Hélène Arnaud served the House of Chanel as its official "public face" starting in 1958 at the age of 24.

Below, Arnaud on non-Chanel projects as photographed by Georges Dambier in Paris and Cannes. Clothes by Pierre Cardin and Guy Laroche. Arnaud modeled for Laroche early in his career, sometimes accepting payment in clothes rather than cash. She died in 1986.