30 June 2012

Leonid Andreyev, Photographer






















"Everyone talks about their love of nature.  Any dacha-dweller in white trousers will maintain that there is nothing in the world to compete with nature.  I remember seeing someone like that sitting on the sea-shore reading a book.  It was sunset, one of the most beautiful sunsets that you could get on the shores of the Gulf of Finland - and he was reading,  In the sky the clouds were engaged in a monumental battle, crashing into one another, changing their shapes and colors every minute, dying and coming back to life again, lit by a sunray which would unexpectedly break through them - and he carried on reading." - Leonid Andreyev

There is nothing idyllic in the writings of the Russian Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919). Censorship and the absence of civil liberties that we take for granted were pervasive under the Czars. By default the arts provided the only conduit for moral and intellectual impulses, political activity being foreclosed by a repressive regime. Andreyev's work is characterized by an oscillation between exuberance and depression, the corrosive wit and sense of the superiority of his vision was not only applied to himself.  "He wished to be enormous - not for his own sake: he wished to reflect in his transitory tread as a writer - the march of the Century.." - Andrei Bielyi.  To that end, Andreyev wrote not only the stories and plays he is remembered for, but painted and sketched and photographed.





















Andreyev's temperament led him to predict the disasters of world war, revolution, and even something akin to nuclear weapons.  Born in the country, Andreyev moved to Moscow to study law, but becoming instead a court reporter for a Moscow newspaper.  His first collection of stories was published to great effect in 1901, attracting the attention of Maxim Gorki.  He careened through women and vodka until his marriage to Aleksandra provided him with as much stability as he could tolerate

Two sons were born, Vadim and Daniil, before Aleksandra died of puerperal fever in 1906.  Andreyev then married Anna Denisevich in 1908, and made the quixotic decision to separate his two little boys, keeping Vadim with him and sending Daniil to live with Aleksandra's sister.  Vadim has written about the boys'  alienation from their father, visible in photographs.



The picture of Daniil with his father and step-father,  taken  on a rare visit to his father's home in Vammasluu, is far removed from the idyllic images of his contemporary Heinrich Kuhn.



















Andreyev, whose connections with the revolutionaries of 1905, led to his exile after he published The Seven Who Were Hanged (1909).  He built a large wooden house on the Gulf of Finland at Vammasluu.  The house was impractical from the start, in need of constant repair, and after Andreyev's death Anna sold it for demolition.  But its saving grace was that it was only forty miles from St. Petersburg. 

The Seven That Were Hanged was Andreyev's protest against the executions the Russian government used to destroy  the 1905 revolution.   Through harrowing interior monologues we  follow five revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals as they come to terms with their fates.  He turned away from the expansiveness of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in depictions of confusion, distortion and hallucination for something we recognize as distinctly modern.

Exiled from Russia, Andreyev turned his prodigious energies to photography.  Never inclined to hold back the intensity on any project, he brought his fierce energy to bear documenting his new life and surroundings.








"It was as if he himself were a whole factory, working ceaselessly in shifts, preparing all those masses of large and small photographs which were stacked up in his study, contained in special boxes and chests, overflwoing on every table, mounted on the window panes.  There was no chroner in his house which he had not photographed several times over.  Some photographs were extremely successful, for instance spring landscapes.  It was hard to believe that they were photographs at all, they were suffused with success elegiac musicality, reminding one of  Levitan." - Kornei Chukovsky, scholar and children's author, was a frequent visitor to Vammasluu.  He refers here to the painter Isaac Levitan. 

Leonid and Anna made the first of many trips  to the Mediterranean in 1910, attracted by the  sun and warmth of the south.  
Andreyev died in 1919 as he was preparing for a speaking tour of the United States, to warn Americans about the dangers of the Bolshevism.  At age forty-eight. he was dead of a brain hemorrhage. Andreyev's American connection came in 1924 when MGM's first feature film was He Who Gets Slapped based one of his plays.  The film starred Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer and was produced by Lous B. Mayer himself.

  
For further reading:
Stories And Photographs by Leonid Andreyev, translated from the Russian by Olga Andreyev Carlisle, San Diego, Harcourt Brace & Jovanoich: 1987.
Photographs of a Russian Writer by Richard Davies, London, Thames & Hudson: 1989.

Images: Autochreme photographs by Leonid Andreyev are in the collection of the Leeds Russian Archive, UK.
1. Sunset at Vammasluu - Finland.
2. Leonid and the Devils - Andreyev in front of copies he made of Goya sketches in his study at Vammasluu.
3. Vadim Andreyev, c. 1909.
4. Daniil Andreyev, c. 1912.
5  Anna Andreyeva - Leonid Andreyev, Filip Dobrov & Daniil Andreyev at Vammasluu, c. 1912.
6. A Road near Vammasluu. 
7. Anna Andreyeva in Marseilles, 1910.

08 June 2012

Vittorio Zecchin & Stile Liberty


Looking at Vittorio Zecchin'a work, the obvious reference point is Gustav Klimt.  We've been prepared to see an affinity between the two artists by legions of art historians who present a linear narrative that tells us that Zecchin was a lesser artist influenced by the famous Viennese Secessionist.  But is that all there is to the story?

Looking more intently at Zecchin,  we see a Venetian artist using  the art history of Venice as it was all around him for his textbook.  The arrangement of human figures in procession would have been familiar from Venetian churches and  the elaboration of abstract designs was characteristic of the Byzantine architecture of the Doge's Palace.  Zecchin combined design elements typical of Murano glass, corollas, stars, and flowers  with geometrical forms. 

What makes Zecchin different from Klimt is what makes Venice different from ViennaKlimt's patterns also drew on historical sources but what scandalized his contemporaries was the sex in the mosaics as much as in the naked human figures.  Ovoid shapes intermingled with spermatozoa circulating on a sea of avid  eyes could hardly go unnoticed by a public that greeted each new monograph from Sigmund Freud with shocked fascination.  Everything seemed to be reducible to the sexual impulse in Freud's worldview and in Klimt's art sexuality had even penetrated  the shell of abstraction.

Vittorio Zecchin (1878-1947) was  sixteen years younger  than Klimt and his career got a late start due to to the conservative teachers he encountered at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia.  The son of a glass maker on Murano, Zecchin grew up surrounded by the stylized use of color in  design.  The gold-leaf mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco  earned it the nickname Chiesa d'Oro (Church of Gold) soon after it was consecrated in 1094.  Klimt, who didn't travel much, visited Venice specifically to see the mosaics.

As we saw in Giacomo Balla's The Madwoman, the Divisionist style of painting, popular during Zecchin's youth,  employed discrete dabs of color,  a move that created a painted surface similar to a mosaic or a glass bijoux.   He attended the Venice Bienniales each year, including the large Klimt show in 1910, but exhibited his own work with  the  rejected artists  in a tent city on the beach in 1914.

Reviewers for  the daily papers were not always kind to Zecchin, but that changed in 1913 when he was commissioned to execute a series of panels based on The Thousand and One Nights for the Hotel Terminus.  The finished work is a masterpiece of  Italian art nouuveau  or Stile Liberty as they called it and, although the panels have since been dispersed to various collections, the Ca' Peraso where Zecchin himself exhibited is presenting a reunion of the eleven panels during an exhibition in 2012 dedicated to the art of Zecchin - under the guise of the "Klimtiano"  150th anniversary year.

Images:
1. Ca' Pesaro exhibition poster - Panel from The Thousand and One Nights, 1914, Musei Civici, Venice.
2. Le Stelle (The Stars), undated Wolfonsian Museum, Miami.
 3...Perle, undated, Wolfonian Museum, Miami.
4. title attributed -  and overlapping hills, Musei Civici, Venice.
5.  Deer The Three Wise Man, 1913, Musei Civici, Ve
nice.

05 June 2012

Alda Merini: There But For Fortune

"Hours wasted in vain
in the asylum gardens,
Back and forth along the walls
made fierce with flowers,
All of us lost in a fleeting
dream of reality,
Which some cleric
tossed behind our backs.
And after meeting
some patients smile
at the fake friendliness.
Time wasted in whirling thoughts,
hedged in behind the bars,
liked naked swallows.
Then we listened to the sermons,
we multiplied the fishes,
Down near the Jordan,
but Christ was not there:
He had uprooted us from the world,
Like dreadful weeds."
 - Near the Jordan by Alda Merini, tranlsated from the Italian by Stephanie H. Jed & Pasquale Verdicchio.

If you don't read Italian your chances of stumbling on the poems of Alda Merini are slight.  Merini (1931-2009) lived most of her life in her native Milan.  She showed a talent for poetry at an early age and, in spite of enormous internal turmoil, she eventually published more than one hundred volumes.  In photographs we see her wavy brown hair and a cigarette always in hand .  She had the additional misfortune - if you want to call it that - to be nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1996, the same year as the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, who went on to win the prize. 

Merini's thoughts never skated over the surface of life like a water beetle.    Near the Jordan is an exemplary poem of Merini's,  holding opposing ideas in balance - or at bay -  in a state of disequilibrium. Between incarceration and freedom she lived with a double consciousness,  experienced at times as a gift, at other times as a burden.  If this seems dark, Merini's poetry also conveys a light touch.  I like to think of Merini's aphorisms when I think of the ponderousness of church fathers who condemned her.

"I am completely
Asexual
Not counting
Errors and omissions."
 - from Six Aphorisms, 1999,  Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Douglas Basford.

Images:
 Giacomo Balla - La Folle 1905, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome.
For further reading:
The Holy Land by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Stepahnie H. Jed & Pasquale Verdicchio, Buffalo, Guernica Books: 2002.
I Am A Furious Little Bee by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Carla Billitteri, Oaklamd, Hooke Press: 2008.
Love Lessons by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Susan Stewart, Princeton, Princeton University Press: 2009.
 You may also be interested in:
 The War of Nerves: Peter Altenberg & Emily Holmes Coleman, posted here November 3, 2011
All the Planets in Heaven, All the Stars: Gaspara Stampa, posted here August 28, 2010.
Visit the Alda Merini website (in Italian)