Luigi Ghirri: An Anthropologist of The Metaphysical

This is the kind of tromp l'oeil picture that many an amateur has accidentally produced, but in this instance the result is so perfectly achieved that you want to know who the photographer is - and where exactly is he in relation to the other elements in the picture?  Has he risen like Neptune from some watery deep just beyond the frame?  And when you learn that his name is Luigi Ghirri, do you wonder why his name is not more familiar?

Luigi Ghirri began as a photographer with the sense that everything that could be done with the medium had already been accomplished.  Undaunated, ee spoke often of how deeply he had been moved by the view of Earth as photographed from the Apollo 11 spacecraft.  "It was not onlh the image of the entire world, but the image that contained all other images of the world."   From this idea, Ghirri extrapolated the idea of the image-within-image, a framing technique that became a signature motif of his.  He brought the eye of an anthropologist to bear on the seemingly unremarkable sights of everyday life but with an intensity that has been described as metaphysical, a word often applied to artists of his native Emilia-Romagna region, such as Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi.    Ghirri called these works  his "sentimental geography" but that only scratches the surface the image  those yellow traffic lights bobbing in the fog

Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) grew up in northern Italy, a temperate area of broad fertile plains fed by the Po River, created millennia ago  when the sea retreated, leaving  marshlands behind.  The aspiring artist moved to Modena, a small city but no  backwater, located near Bologna, the regional capitol and proud home to the oldest university in the world.   Ghirri's studies in land surveying and graphic design coalesced when he found a new hobby -  taking pictures - that quickly became his chosen profession.

Conceiving his photographs mostly in series, Ghirri presented them in books more often than in exhibitions, which may have limited their initial impact on the public.  His first book Kodachrome, published in 1978,  featured the tightly cropped images that would become a signature.
Ghirri's last home was at Roncosesi, not  far from where he was born.  Although he traveled,  he found all that he needed for his work there.   Formal, cerebral, witty, Ghirri always intended his photographs to explore rather than  represent what he saw  before him.

 “Everything has a blighted, faded quality about it now. Still, if you look at it for a long time, the old charm reemerges. And that is why I can see that I will lose absolutely nothing by staying where I am, even by contenting myself with watching things go by, like a spider in its web waiting for flies. You need to look at things for a long time…” – Vincent van Gogh 
 Ghirri copied this quotation from a letter written by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo in his own journal.  

Although admired during his lifetime, Ghirri's work has only grown in importance since his untimely death from a heart attack at the age of forty-nine.  "...(N)ow, in their faded and aging present state, Ghirri’s prints from the 1970s and ’80s signal themselves as relics of the first wave of the then-new colour photography, carrying with them both prescience and nostalgia.." Christy Lange wrote for Frieze in 2011.

In 2009, the Aperture Gallery in Manhattan hosted the retrospective It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It?, devoted to the work of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992).  Then, in 2013,  Matthew Marks Gallery, also in New York, devoted an exhibition  to Luigi Ghirri: Kodachrome.  This exhibition coincides with the republication of Ghirri's much admired book Kodachrome, by MACK, London, UK: 2012., a book he originally published himself in 1978.

Images: The estate of Luigi Ghirri is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC.
1. Paris (self-portrait in reflection), 1976, reprinted from Kodachrome, 1978, reprinted London: 2012.

2. Fagnano Olona - elementary school designed by Aldo Rossi, 1985, Pompidou Center, Paris.
3. Reggio Emilia, 1973, Pompidou Center, Paris.

The Prodigious Michele Cascella

He was a prodigy, there was no doubt; certainly his father believed in him from the beginning.  He did poorly in school, being the kind of student that teachers described as being adrift with the clouds.  When one of his art teachers humiliated him in class, Michele Cascella stopped going to school entirely.  This caused a crisis in the family;  the boy's mother wanted him to make a religious vocation but the father, who supported the boy's artistic ambitions, won out. 

As an adult, Michele Cascella (1892-1989) credited Vincent van Gogh and Raoul Dufy as his artistic influences and, while it makes a good parlor game to tease out the visual bits he took from each of them, no influence is sufficient to explain his skills in painting, drawing, lithography, and ceramics.   When I look at Orangerie, painted when Cascella was just eighteen, I see the lines used to describe the girl's skirt as coming straight out of Dufy, the lines and the colors working together but not in the usual academic way.  Cascella is fearless in using bright colors (his debt to Van Gogh) without ever letting them overwhelm this tranquil, workday scene.  The house in Abruzzo,  clad in stucco, is shown here in stark white, probably an indication of the midday sun.  The country house and the orange grove were often Cascella's subject but seldom more effectively than in Orangerie.  He usually depicts orchards as pure landscape, absent their human gardeners.   Here he shifts the focus to a young girl at work, staking and pruning, his subject, underlining the domestic element that makes a  landscape out of nature. Her pose appears, appropriately,  reverential in this Edenic setting. 

Caseclla was born in  Ortona, a city on the Adriatic Sea,  in 1892.  His father Basilio, a polymath, was an engraver, ceramist, lithographer and illustrator, was the boy's first teacher.  Basilio's career was given a boost when he given  a plot of municipal land to build a laboratory and art studio for his lithography business.  Michele's first job at his father's business was the painstaking task of filling in backgrounds on lithographic stones.  But his father also gave him more traditional art projects such as copying  drawings of the old masters.  Unable to draw well himself from nature, Basilio sent Michele and his brother outdoors, supplied with a box of pastels, chocolate and cheese, to paint.  That Michele far outstripped his younger brother appears to have caused not too much rancor.

    

When Basilio judged that the boy was ready to exhibit in public, he arranged a show  in Milan for the fifteen year old (this was in 1902), followed by a show in Paris the next year where Michele sold his first painting.    At eighteen Michele Cascella was ready to take his place among the cultural set in the city.   

In another prodigious move, the twenty year old artist began an affair with thirty-eight year old Sibilla Aleramo, one of Italy's most famous writers and already the author of the feminist classic A Woman (1906). (I read the novel in college but confess to only a vague memory of it at this point.) 

Cascella's career would be long and varied, not a footnote to youthful achievement as are those of some who succeed early. He won a gold medal for painting at the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle, where Raoul Dufy created a sensation with his multi-panel mural La fee electricitee.  Cascella made his first visit to the United States in 1959 and thereafter spent six month of each year at Palo Alto, California. In 1977 the City of Ortuna re- dedicated their art museum  to Cascella; more than five hundred works by three generations of the family are included in its collection.  When he died at age ninety-seven in Milan, he was buried in his hometown of Ortona.

Image: Michele Cascella - Orangerie, 1912, Cascella Museum, Ortona.

The Cottagers: Camillo Inocenti

Poor Camillo Inoocenti (1871-1961).  Unlike some of his fellow painters, Innocenti gets no entry in the Grove Dictionary of Art, even in the wake of the ground-breaking 2008 exhibition Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters, 1891-1910 at London's National Gallery.   One reason often given for the neglect of the Italian painters is their lack of group cohesion, sometimes also know as self-promotion.  Of course, some of the cohesion attributed to other  groups of artists has been applied from the outside by critics, the artists themselves being busy with more pressing concerns like where to apply the paint brush.

In The Cottagers Innocenti painted something he had seen frequently while growing up.  Before air-conditioning,  it was the custom among the bourgeoisie for the wives, children - and even pets - to decamp during the heat of the summer months in the cities to the countryside in search of  cool air  and relaxation. Still,  women and girls  were careful to shield their skin from the effects of the sun, hence the hats and stockings; relaxed though their postures may be as they lounge on lawn chairs, to our eyes they are dressed for company more than for  an intimate family tete-a-tete.  Innocente  was known for his  portrayals of women,  turning from the conventional female figure in elegant déshabillé, to more sensitive and nuanced images.  The Cottagers, an inter-generational gathering, is one of Innocenti's finest meditations on the stages of women's lives, captured in the doldrums between  the defining seasons of education and marriage.  An element of that fineness is how the artist managed to rise above his own rather conventional ideas about women with his brush: " ...woman is  mysterious,  fragile,  mutable,  impassioned and also artificial ."(translation by JL).

Like innumerable other aspiring artists, the young Innocentei was encouraged to pursue a less uncertain career.  His father thought the classics would be a more suitable field for the son of successful architect but,  at age twenty-four, Camillo realized that he preferred drawing while working as an assistant  to  the decorator of the Candelabra Gallery at the Vatican. Three years later he was admitted to the Rome Institute of Fine Arts.   Disappointed by his academic studies, he began searching for a fresher style.  In 1901 in Spain, he encountered the paintings of Goya and Velazquez,  but it was as much  popular scenes and landscapes that attracted him as the old masters.

Back home in 1903, Innocenti gravitated to the divisionist painters, their youth and their sense of liberty from the old academic rules.   Following World War I, he did set decoration in the up and coming Italian film industry on such projects as Cyrano de Bergerac and Ben Hur.  Had he not detoured to Cairo for a fifteen year stint as director of its School of Fine Arts (from 1925 to 1940), he might not have been so easily forgotten by his countrymen.  His work is the collection of   the National Gallery of Modern Art, and in several other Italian museums. 

Image:

Camillo Innocenti - The Cottagers, 1912, National Gallery of San Luca, Rome.

How To Be Lazy - Even in Translation

 "I could have a job, but I'm too lazy to choose it;

I have got land, but I'm too lazy to farm it.

My house leaks; I'm too lazy to mend it.

My clothes are torn; I'm too lazy to darn them.

I have got wine, but I'm too lazy to drink;

So it's just the same as if my cup were empty.

I have got a lute, but I'm too lazy to play;

So it's just the same as if it had no strings.

My family tells me there is no more steamed rice;

I want to cook, but I'm too lazy to grind.

My friends and relatives write me long letters;

I should like to to read them, but they're such a bother to open.

I have always been told that Hsi Shu-yeh

Passed his whole life in absolute idleness.

But he played his lute and sometimes worked at his forge;

So even he was not as lazy as me."

- Po Chu-I, 811 C.E., from The Importance Of Being Idle by Stephen Robins, Prion Books, Ltd., London: 2000

Laziness (La Paresse) by Felix Vallotton, 1896.

Neil Philip of Idbury Prints comments: "This is great, isn't it? The translation is by Arthur Waley, though the last line has been altered, to its detriment. Waley's line reads as follows, with the "he" in italics which I can't do:

So even he was not so lazy as I.

Hsi Shu-yeh is the Taoist poet Hsi K'ang (223-262 C.E.). No doubt the transliteration of all these names has changed since Waley's day. "

And I replied:  "The editor of the anthology didn't include any source credits, but I was so taken with the poem that I hoped the spirit of Po Chu-I wouldn't mind."

Image: Vincinzo Balocchi  - Young Girl Sleeping In A Chaise Lounge, 1960, Museum of the Story of Photography, Florence.

Alice Coltrane's Spiritual Eternal

I first heard the music of  Alice Coltrane when I was a student, doing my homework by the radio; she had recorded several times before and I had certainly heard the music of her (by then) late husband, saxophonist John Coltrane, but until I heard her album Eternity I had no idea what Alice did.  As varied and impressive as the music was - from the Afro-Cuban percussion propelling Los Caballos, Coltrane's musical tribute to the elegance and playfulness of a horse's movements, to Spring Rounds, her orchestral version of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring  with   shimmering washes of harmony - nothing affected me like the opening piece Spiritual Eternal.  

Here Coltrane  plays the Wurlitzer organ, an instrument that, until she adopted  it, got even less respect from  jazz musicians than the Hammond B-3 does.  The music begins with a series of modal arpeggios that move seemingly at random until they are resolved by a large orchestral entrance whereupon they all join in playing a jazz waltz.  No Dixieland band this, the orchestra's  blend of brass and strings takes some inspiration from the Society Orchestra of James Reese Europe (1891-1919), the man Eubie Blake christened "the Martin Luther King of jazz."   Coltrane's solo playing soars with the jagged drive of bebop, a music she heard growing up in Detroit, deployed in her quest to make  universal music, along the way incorporating  Indian classical raga, blues, and the occasional Viennese twelve-tone row.   This is definitely not dance music but by the time  the last glorious long-drawn out note fades, I am never sitting, I am standing in awe and joy.

I never wanted to miss the Wednesday evening  program on WAER-FM,  the  Syracuse University radio station.  Hosted by a woman, something unusual in 1976, the hour was crammed with music I still love:  harpist Dorothy Ashby, (heard on Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key Of Life), pianist and composer Jessica Williams (then in her San Francisco phase recording as Jessica Jennifer Williams), and vocalists Esther Satterfield (The Land Of Make Believe with Chuck Mangione) and from Brazil, Flora Purim (Open Your Eyes, You Can Fly, Nothing Will Be As It Was Tomorrow).

From Spiritual Eternal, I worked my way backward to Alice Coltrane's first recording as a leader, A Monastic Trio (1968) and the transcendental Journey In Satchidananda (1970), discovering along the way her other instruments, the harp played with feather-weight glissandi (remember those arpeggios), so different from the strong and straight melodic lines of Dorothy Ashby, and the piano.  Coltrane, I learned, had replaced the titanic McCoy Tyner in John Coltrane's quartet  the year before his death, something that certain Coltrane fans equated with the snake in the garden. For this, and for her experiments with the note-bending capabilities of modular synthesizers, she remained outside the jazz mainstream for the rest of her life.  That Alice Coltrane needed to become a leader in order to have a group to play with after her husband's death in 1967, seemed unworthy of comment at the time.  It makes me think of an exchange between contemporary trio leader Michele Rosewoman and  an unnamed male musician who, when he asked her  "What's with this all-woman thing?" as her group was setting up for a performance,  Rosewoman turned and gestured toward his band with the reply "What's with this all-man thing?". 

A strong spiritual element of one sort or another had been in Alice's musical life from childhood.  Born Alice McLeod in Alabama in 1937, she joined  her mother in playing pinao and organ for their church choir after the family moved to Detroit.  At the same time,  Alice  played jazz dates in local clubs.  Sister  Marilyn McLeod became a songwriter for Motown Records; her hits have included Love Hangover for Diana Ross and Same Ole' Love for Anita Baker.  

When Alice met John Coltrane, the two joined together in searching  for  transcendence in non-Western religious books such as  the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and in writings on Zen Buddhism.  Alice would ultimately find a home in Hinduism and founded a Vedantic Ccnter in California, where she lived until her death in 2007.   Musicians Herbie Hancock and Sun Ra pursued a similar quest for a system of belief that could free black people from the oppression they were subjected to in America.  This is what Su Ra meant when he declared, "Space is the place."

After 1978, and the move to Los Angeles, Alice Coltrane seldom recorded but, thanks to the encouragement of her son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, she recorded one final album, Transilinear Light.

Listen to Alice Coltrane - Spiritual Eternal from Eternity, 1976. 
World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda 2017,  has just been released  by Luaka Bop Records

Images:
1, unidentified photographer - Alice Coltrane, from Journey In Satchidananda, 1970, Impulse Records.
2. Jeff Dunas, photographer - Alice Coltrane, from Translinear Light, 2004, Impulse Records.

Marisol, Our Contemporary

When the current Whitney Biennial opened on March 17 in Manhattan after three years of preparation, its theme  "(the) creation of the self" seemed  hermetic and out of touch, especially coming from people who think of themselves and their preoccupations as driving the culture.   This moment, as it turns out, calls for engagement with the world.

A month before, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood had asked  What Art Under Trump? in The Nation, reopening an old debate.  Artists, she pointed out,  have often been lectured on their moral duty.  Atwood didn't invoke The Metamorphosis Of The Gods by Andre Malraux, but she could have.   Malraux traced the path taken by the divine aura from the ancient world to art museums as our relationship to the divine has been transformed into a a veneration of objects. And so, the sacralization of contemporary art is about money.   Paintings, books, theater, and films, are not inherently sacred, no matter what price  they command in the marketplace, although they have in the past served religious  functions, in ancient Greek theater and medieval cathedrals, to name two instances.  

A recent bequest to the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo is good news at a bad moment.   When Marisol Escobar died last year, she left  more than 100 of her sculptures, some 150 works on paper, thousands of photographs and slides, and a small group of works by other artists that she collected to the Albright-Knox. The bequest also includes the artist’s archive, library, tools, and the artist's New York City loft apartment. The sale of the apartment, worth an estimated $4 million to $5 million, will bolster the art gallery's operating endowment.

Why the Albright-Knox Gallery, located some 450 miles from New York City, the place where Marisol lived for decades?  It was the first museum to acquire Marisol's work for its collection when Seymour Knox purchased The Generals in 1962.  The artist and the museum director became  friends, with Marisol making frequent appearances at  openings and events there. "She was incredibly grateful to Mr. Knox for his purchase of The Generals and Baby Girl" said Carlos Brillembourg, Marisol's longtime friend and co-executor of her estate with Mimi Trujillo.  Baby Girl  also  became an instant hit when the museum purchased it in 1964.  The little girl (who is very big) dwarfs her tiny doll-like mother.  And Marisol had another link with the Queen City: throughout her career,  Marisol was represented by the gallery of Sidney Janis, a Buffalo native.

I have had to crane my neck to get a good look at Simon Bolivar and George Washington  whenever I visited The Generals;  it stands seven feet three inches tall.  The brightly painted wooden sculpture evokes a smile and memories of toy soldiers, but there is serious business going on here.  Washington and Bolivar were both leaders of independence movements in the Americas, but their imagined appearance together suggests a  satirical viewpoint; these mounted leaders with their feet hanging in air may be out of touch with reality.  A Marisol sculpture, I soon recognized, is always about more than one thing at a time.

About Marisol there is the lingering sense that her successes as an artist were never commensurate with her achievements.  Born Maria Sol Escobar in Paris in 1930 to Venezuelan parents, she grew up in a cosmopolitan setting, on three continents, possessed of   unusual talent, encouraging parents,  and great beauty.  When her mother committed suicide the eleven year old Marisol stopped talking.  "I really didn't talk for years except for what was absolutely necessary....Iwas into my late twenties before I started talking again - and silence had become such a habit that I really had nothing to say to anybody."

Marisol arrived in New York to study painting with Hans Hofmann in 1951, but she soon turned to making three dimensional figures as "an act of rebellion."  She  found the props she needed for her sculptures,  "I did my research in the Yellow Pages."

Sizing up the male art world of Abstract Expressionism, she learned to navigate its prejudices, her silence protecting her in some way.  "Everything was so serious.  I was very sad myself, and the people I met were so depressing.  I started doing something funny so that I would become happier - and it worked.  I was also convinced that everyone would like my work because I had so much fun doing it.   They did."  As for her glamorous public persona, Marisol claimed disinterest. "I don't feel like a myth. I spend most of my time in my studio."

However, 1956 was a year that called on her deepest reserves.  In August Marisol, along with Alfonso Ossorio, Clement Greenberg, and Conrad Marca-Relli  were called from the city to East Hampton to identify the body of Jackson Pollock who had killed himself and a young woman in a  daredevil  stunt that turned into a drunken driving accident.   Then, after the Hungarian uprising against a communist government was ruthlessly crushed by Soviet tanks as the world watched on television, Marisol had created a series of wooden sculptures she named The Hungarians; when it was featured in Life magazine, the  artist sitting surrounded by the wooden figures struck a raw nerve.  The figures seemed to interrogate the viewers, asking 'Why did they see but not help us?'

At her left was a family on a wheeled platform that could have been a train or perhaps a bus.  An image of attempted escape is implied; a mother cradles an infant while the father stands behind a toddler, but where will they go?  The Soviet Army had recently invaded Hungary and  the world  watched in horror but failed to respond to tanks rolling through the capital city Budapest, crushing bodies and spirits as they went.  Surely it is no accident that in Marisol's work, the people who are trapped are looking at us.

Because the art world caught up with Marisol in the 1960s, her work has often been pigeon-holed with pop Art - and left there when styles changed - but her work has not dated.  Her astute mimicry of human behavior was much deeper than any silk screen of a soup can.   Dubbed a "Latin Garbo" for her beauty, the feminist nature of her social critique has  become clearer with time. 

“Marisol was an important figure, subtly affecting change by her silence and the particularity of her position … She was the female artist star of pop art, [but] she dramatized it in a very subdued way, through her intensely quiet manner.” – Carolee Schneeman

“Marisol was among the most highly respected artists of the 1960s. As the decades passed, she was inappropriately written out of that history. My aim was to return her to the prominence she so rightly deserves.” – Marina Pacini, curator, Memphis Brooks Museum

In 2014, the Museo del Barrio was the first New York museum to present a solo  exhibition of Marisol’s work.

Images:
1.  unidentified photographer - Marisol touches up The Generals at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, 1963, courtesy Albright-Knox Gallery.
2. unidentified photographer -  Marisol and a guest with The Generals, November 18, 1963,  courtesy Albright-Knox Gallery.
3. unidentified photographer, Marisol - The Generals, c.1961-62, courtesy Albright-Knox Gallery.
4. unidentified photographer -  Marisol - Baby Girl, 1963, courtesy Albright-Knox Gallery.

Chaud Lapin !

"To the carrot, the rabbit is the perfect incarnation of Evil."  - Robert Sheckley. 

Add marigolds to that thought and start a list.  When I was little I was taken aback by my mother's frustration at finding her newly planted marigolds serving as lunch for the neighborhood rabbits.  "Why can't they eat the dandelions instead?" she wailed to no one in particular, certainly not the rabbits who continued nibbling contentedly until she chased them away.  The rabbits would often  hide under the family sedan parked in the driveway and stare up at us with what, to my six year old eyes, looked like mingled sorrow and reproach.   Why else plant those luscious, low-growing flowers, if not for them?   I was so upset by this early encounter with adult insensitivity and importuned so loudly that eventually my mother promised to plant more marigolds in spite of the predictable results.   And there were other little adversaries in the garden.  From my mother I learned that squirrels dig up spring bulbs; they eat the sweet tulip bulbs but disdain the bitter taste of  daffodils,  replanting the bulbs in incongruous locations.  My mother was so attached to her gardens that each time we moved we had to drive by houses where we had once lived just for her to see how the flowers were being cared for.

Chaud lapin translates literally from the French as 'hot rabbit' but its meaning is metaphorical, something along the lines of 'randy devil.'

The late Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) was that rare exception among science fiction writers, one who had a sense of humor, albeit sometimes a dark one.  He gave one of his books the title Bring Me The Head Of Prince Charming;  I can imagine the outrage if a woman dared to use that title.

Image:
A detail from The Lady And The Unicorn, wool and silk tapestry, c.1495-1505, (Musee nationale du Moyen Age) Musee de Cluny, Paris.
The tapestries were deisgned in Paris and woven in Flanders.  They disappeared from puiblic view, only to be found by Prosper Merimiee, author of the novel Carmen, in 1841.  Merimee, it should be noted was an archeologist, among other things, when he discovered the tapestries moldering in a castle in central France.  Three years later, after George Sand saw them she began to publicize their existence.

Jacques Prevert: A Celebration

Forty years have passed since the death of Jacques Prevert on April 11, 1977.   Prevert, a lyric poet in a country that reveres its masters of song going all the way back to the medieval troubadour Francois Villon (1413-c.1463),  is marking the occasion with numerous celebrations.  Although Prevert's name may be somewhat vague in North America, French children learn Prevert's songs as soon as they begin school. 

Like Villon,  Prevert's poems were passed around on handmade copies and by word of mouth during the German Occupation, much as the peripatetic Villon's verses  were sung in taverns by people who probably could not read them.   When Prevert's poems were  collected in book form for the first time  in Paroles (Songs, 1946)  they caused a sensation.  He had experienced something similar the year before when he collaborated with the refugee Hungarian composer Joseph Kosma on the song Les feuilles mortes.  Autumn Leaves, as it is known in English, has become the most recorded song of all time.  For their part, Parisians and all the French, even those who had escaped the Occupation, were   ready to celebrate and Prevert gave them what they needed - romantic nostalgia, in song with Les feuilles mortes and in the film Les enfants du Paradis, a romance among theater people set in the 1820s.

Fortune smiled on the boy Jacques, giving him a loving mother and an unconventional father.    After leaving school, Prevert served in the French army during World War I, getting as far from home as Constantinople.  Returning to Paris,   he was introduced to the Surrealist circle, and their leader Andre Breton, by his friend Raymond Queneau in 1925.  Their abhorrence of war and the utter absence of what the French reverently refer to as la gloire  drew the circle together.    But within three years Breton expelled Prevert from the group; the younger man's anarchic sense of humor was no match for Breton's heavy-handed leadership.  For his part, Prevert considered Breton too "grave."  In what counts as a surrealist move, Prevert went to work for an advertising agency and began to write the poems that eventually became Paroles.

Prevert's gallery of usual suspects included clerics ("Poetry is everywhere as God is nowhere") and the military  but, unlike others he named names, never hiding behind abstractions.  That was the kernel of his "anti-intellectualism,"  his scorn for the typical scholar  who would "expend his life erecting a self-glorifying  monument of theories."   Prevert called out the "religious insincerity" of the Popes, especially during war times, and social injustice in the persons of Marechal Petain and the French colonials in Vietnam.  His youthful encounters with the poor, introduced through his father, led  Prevert to join the October Group, a troupe of amateur actors in the 1930s.  The plays they put on may not have been much more than "agit-prop" but Fabian Loris, a Prevert biographer says, "It was not a theater, it was a way of life,  with Jacques Prevert as its strong foundation, his humor corroding like acid on a plate."   The Communist Party was not amused but the public was and this kept the group members safe.  Meanwhile Prevert also put his politics to work in  screenplays, among them Le crime de monsieur with Jean Renoir (1935), an idyllic story of a publishing cooperative in the days of the Popular Front and Quai des brumes with Marcel Carne (1938), the story of an Army deserter.

Abstraction, in words or images, meant little to Prevert who believed that "everything starts from something."  According to Prevert, if you paint a bird and the painting doesn't sing, "it's a bad sign."    In Gilbert Poillerat's  Portrait of a Bird that Doesn't Exist   bird song is made visible, a sunny version of the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.   Remember that Plato believed sensations are the vehicle that allows us to experience what is universal: ideal forms he called them.   A fanciful picture of a child at the beach on a summer day is anchored, so to speak, by ontology.

So who was Gilbert Poillerat, an artist who never seems to get more than two paragraphs to himself in any written forum?    Poillerat was a maitre- ferronnier, a specialist in metalwork who studied for eight years, from 1919 to 1927 with the Deco master, Edgar Brandt.  According to journalist Mariana Paul-Bousquet, it was his graceful iron balustrades that made Poillerat's name and fortune.  In 1943, she wrote: "They are like a winged language,  crossing from the present to sweet visions from childhood."  (translation JAL)   There are those wings again! 

Paris-Prévert by Danièle Gasiglia-Laster was just  published by Editions Gallimard in Paris.

Images:
1. Israel Bidermanas - Jacques Prevert in Paris, 1954,Pompidou Center, Paris.
2. Gilbert Poillerat (1902-1988)  - Portrait-de-l'oiseau-qui-n'existe-par, 1979, Pompidou Center, Paris.

Music Under the Radar: Melanie De Biasio

"I'm gonna leave you, yes I'm gonna
I'm gonna leave you  'cause I want to
And I'll go where people love me
And I'll stay there 'cause they love me"

For anyone familiar with the outlines of singer Nina Simone's biography, it would be easy to imagine that she wrote these lyrics but, in fact, they were written by her guitarist who, on the evidence, was a keen observer of the artist who was well on her way to becoming the 'high priestess of soul" by the time they began working together.   An angry, wounded song from the 1960s has recently been given new currency from an unexpected quarter - a Belgian singer and songwriter who knows a good song even when it arrives in arrangement smothered by a Broadway pit orchestra.

Rudy Stevenson, who wrote "I'm Gonna Leave You,"  joined Nina Simone's band in early  1964 while  Simone was recording I Put A Spell On You, her finest studio album for Phillips Records, in New York City.   Stevenson, also a  composer and arranger, wrote a song ("One September Day") and an instrumental number ("Blues On Purpose") for the occasion.  Buried on Simone's next release High Priestess Of Soul was another Stevenson song "I'm Gonna Leave You."  It sounds as though it was recorded in a hurry, without much thought or care, in an  uptempo Broadway-style arrangement.   Simone herself was famous for introducing her own incendiary civil rights anthem "Mississippi Goddam" with the comment, "This is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet."  Still, the song has presentiments of a more intimate meditation laced with payback than what usually gets belted out across the footlights.

Melanie De Biasio (b.1978) is a Belgian jazz singer who writes many of the songs she sings, so her inclusion of a song recorded by Nina Simone  five decades ago is makes the listener perk up.  De Biasio knew she would not be able to afford much studio time to record the cd No Deal, which she produced herself,  so she spent weeks working out the ambiences she wanted for each track and then recorded them all in three short days.

I'm Gonna Leave You
  Melanie DeBiasio, 2013
I'm Gonna Leave You
  Nina Simone, 1966.

Image:
Melanie De Biasio, courtesy Worldwide FM, Gilles Peterson.

Music Under the Radar: Josh Roseman

"There's a man dreaming

on a beach, there's another

who never remembers dates.

There's a man running away

from a tree, another missing

his boat or his hat.

There's a man who's a soldier,

another who acts like an airplane,

another who keeps forgetting

his time, his mystery

his fear of the word veil.

And there's yet another who,

stretched out like a ship, fell asleep."

 - Windows (Janelas) by Joao  Cabral de MeloNeto

It may be a long way from Brazil to New Jersey, but not so far as you might think and the trail leads through an undeservedly overlooked song by Burt Bacharach, Long Day, Short Night.  

The words "music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David"  describe a  type of song that was  sui generis,  and surprisingly commercial given its complexity, in the 1960s, Ravel-ian melodies driven along by abrupt  meter changes (from 5/4 to 9/8 in Anyone Who had A Heart, for instance), harmonies  modulated in ways seldom found in American popular music, and insidious rhythms.  All  are present in Long Day, Short Night. 

Bacharach wrote the song for the Shirelles in 1965, with every expectation that it would be a hit as his song Baby It's You had been for them in 1962.  Both songs make use of the baião, a style originating in the rural states of northeastern Brazil, less familiar than the urban bossa nova but older and just as mesmerizing Once you know that the baião is characterized by percussion-driven melodies dominated by a bass drum, the link between The Shirelles' Baby It's You and Josh Roseman's ingeniousness interpretation of Long Day, Short Night becomes obvious.

Trombonist Roseman has been a sideman with too many jazz musicians to name but his recordings as a group leader suggest a strong connection with some of them in particular: Art Ensemble of Chicago member and trumpeter Lester Bowie in his Brass Fantasy phase and Roseman's collaboration with Don Byron on the clarinetist's klezmer project.

Burt Bacharach studied composition with French composer Darius Milhaud whose Le Boeuf sur le Toit (1920) is a melange of popular  tunes lifted from  well known Brazilian musicians, and then put through a French press of Parisian urbanity.   For more on this subject - lots more! -  check out the website of Daniella Thompson, a jazz programmer at KPFA, 94.1 in Berkeley, whose Boeuf Chronicles is just one of her many explorations of Brazilian music.

The composer found his mother lode in the early 1960s, working with African-American vocalists Jerry Butler (Make It Easy on Yourself), Chuck Jackson (Any Day Now) Tommy Hunt (I Just Don't Know What to do with Myself). And we can't forget the fabulousmess of Shirley Allston and the Shirelles. The  vocal group from Passaic, New Jersey  won a high school talent contest in 1957, attracting the attention of Florence Greenberg, a record producer who eventually brought them to Scepter Records where they had the good luck to work with Burt Bacharach, before his collaboration with Dionne Warwick captured the pop public's attention and a large share of Bacharach's songs.

Long Day, Short Night
 Josh Roseman Unit, trombone, Treats For the Nightwalker, 2003, Enja Records

Baby It's You
  The Shirelles

To read more : Education By Stone: selected poems by Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith, New York, Archipelago Books: 2005.  One of the finest poets writing in Portuguese in the 20th century, Melo Neto (1920-1999) was a native of Permanbuco, one of the Brazilian states that make up the 'nose', the country's most eastern outpost on the Atlantic Ocean, a hard, dry land.

Image: unidentified photographer for BBC - Josh Roseman