Saturday, October 06, 2012

The Lovesick Man



Saturnine blues, this time in the form of an early work by the German artist George Grosz's The Lovesick Man (circa 1916),  a painting which reflects dominant themes in Grosz's art - human nature and individual weaknesses, themes which have lost little relevance today.

George Grosz (1893-1959) was born in Berlin and grew up during the prelude to World War I (1914-1818).  In protest against the nationalist fervour and rabid anti-British sentiment vocalized on Berlin’s streets in the build-up to war, Grosz and fellow artist Jon Herzefelde (1891-1968) provocatively changed their names to an Anglicized form of spelling and pronunciation. Incidentally, there's a stylistic affinity between the pioneering photo-montage developed by John Herzefelde for political propaganda, one or two examples of which I've discussed before and the surreal humour of Terry Gilliam (b. 1940) the creator of cut-out, animated montages which were an integral part of the British TV series Monty Python's flying Circus (1969-71). 

In his tense and unsettling portrait of a lovesick young man, George Grosz alludes to the Ursprung tragic hero of German romanticism, Werther, a character created by Johann Goethe in his Der Leidenschaft der Junge Werther (1774) known in English as The Sorrows of Young Werther

In Goethe's phenomenally popular novella of the day, the sensitive and romantic hero Werther is unable to come to terms with the fact that his sweetheart has married another and that his love can never be consummated. He borrows a pair of pistols, and after writing a confessional letter and drinking a bottle of port, shoots himself. Goethe’s semi-autobiographical tale of unrequited love was accused of  encouraging copycat acts throughout Germany, and of making a cult of suicide, accusations which the author strongly denied. 

It's been suggested that the spate of suicides which occurred in Germany following the publication of Goethe's Werther were in fact the result of an increased awareness of educated individuals of the inflexibility of bureaucratic institutions in Germany; this extreme frustration with the deeply-rooted conservatism of German society, effectively prevented the possibility of following  in France's revolutionary path.

Although differing in artistic objective Grosz's symbolism in The Lovesick Man differs little from that of the medieval tradition of Vanitas motifs. In Grosz's early painting not only can a near palpable red heart be seen, but also a revolver in the breast-pocket of the sitter. The empty room with a vacated table and chairs heightens the solitary sitter's loneliness. On his table there's the indulgences of a pipe and cigarettes along with a bottle, probably of alcohol. There's also paper and a pen on his table, suggestive that a confessional, or urgent communication is to be made. The anchor tattooed on his head hints of sinking or wallowing in unloved despair. The bones in the bottom right corner and fish bones symbolically allude to death. In the far background beside a blood-red sickle moon, the rib-cage of a skeleton can be seen. The theme of dissipation and death is developed further with a plant at the top corner which lacks either leaves or flowers. The gun placed next to the sitter's visible heart has strong symbolic associations, hinting that either suicide or a crime of passion is about to be committed.  

Wrapped up in self-absorbed gloom Grosz's anti-romantic hero is capable of senseless acts. The message of Grosz's Marxist morality art- lesson seems to be - self-centred individuals who care only for their own happiness condemn themselves to a solitary madness; they do so at the expense of the well-being of society in general.

George Grosz witnessed the return of the defeated nation's troops to civilian life, the near breakdown of moral order and the subsequent violent conflict between the extreme left and right-wing in street fighting in post-war Berlin. The trauma of hyper-inflation added fuel to the social problems of crime, prostitution, drugs and the black market, endemic on Berlin's streets following World War I.

In January 1919 he was arrested but escaped imprisonment by producing fake identification documents which he'd forged himself. He joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the same year; however, unlike the Russian communist revolution of 1917, the German communist revolution of 1919 failed, due to various factors too complex to discuss here, not least, the assassination of Communist party leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg in January 1919.

In 1921 Grosz was accused of insulting the army and fined 300 German Marks. The court also ordered his satire on German society Gott mit uns (God with us) to be destroyed. Although Grosz left the KPD in 1922 he subsequently spent five months in Russia, meeting Lenin and Trotsky.

By 1924 economic and social stability in the newly established Weimar Republic allowed the opportunity for the creation of radical new art - Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927), Hermann Hesse’s novel of crisis and re-integration of identity, Steppenwolf (1927) the new music of Jazz and Kurt Weill spring to mind. The decadent, pleasure-loving years of the Weimar era and the rise of fascism are also the setting of Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939) which was later was adapted as the film Cabaret (1972).

By 1920 George Grosz had mastered his artistic powers to make powerful statements on the social instability and chaos of post-war Berlin. His art gives a glimpse into a society sharply polarized between rich and poor, and of a Berlin resembling a Dante-like inferno where individuals of varying degrees of power and corruption enact Berlin's social maelstrom on the streets of the metropolis.



Grosz's low opinion of humanity is epitomised in the title of his 1946 autobiography A little Yes and a big No which he wrote once a naturalized American citizen. In a salutary lesson of how serious economic and social upheaval can affect the qualities of empathy with others and encourage selfish behaviour, the embryonic origins of fascism no less, he describes Berlin after World War I- 

"Everywhere, hymns of hatred were struck up. Everyone was hated: the Jews, the capitalists, the Junkers, the Communists, the army, the property owners, the workers, the unemployed, the black Reichwehr, the control commissions, the politicians, the department stores, and the Jews again. It was an orgy of incitement, and the republic itself was a weak thing, scarcely perceptible. … It was a completely negative world, topped with colourful froth that many imagined to be true, happy Germany before the onset of the new barbarism."  

Tragically, although in 1954 Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts he continued to be home-sick and returned to Berlin, where he died in 1959 in an alcohol-related accident.

Wiki-Link - George Grosz

Monday, October 01, 2012

Osvaldo Golijov



Earlier this year I was introduced, courtesy of a friend, to the music of Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960). The music of Golijov, who was born and grew up in Argentinia of East European and Judaic descent, draws upon a wide spectrum including experimental and electronic, Jazz and Pop, Klezmer music, the Tango and the folk traditions of World music. In addition to these varied musical influences Golijov has been well-qualified to absorbing world-wide music languages in his career. He moved from Argentina to Israel in 1983 to study music at the Rubin Academy at Jerusalem. In 1986  he relocated to America where he has taught music at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts since 1991.  

The music-making of the Latin-American world, the city of Jerusalem and medieval Spain are of special inspirational value to Golijov. Each of these locations were once seminal places at the crossroads of overlapping cultures, where Christian, Muslim and Jew once peacefully co-existed.

I was probably in a highly-charged emotional state last winter anyway when first hearing the electrifying incantation by singer Dawn Upshaw which opens Ayre (2004). Golijov's song-cycle was influenced by a creative urge to create a companion work to Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs (1964) which draws upon traditional melodies from America, Armenia, Sicily, Genoa, Sardinia, the Auvergne and Azerbaijan. Golijov’s song cycle is no less eclectic and diverse than Berio's. It features the music of southern Spain and the intermingling of Christian, Arab and Jewish cultures with texts from the Sephardic, Arabic, Hebrew and Sardinian languages.

The influence of Berio’s folk-song cycle is most evident in the gentle and traditional Sephardic song which follows the incandescent opening. The next song Tancas serradas a muru in stark contrast is defiant and aggressive, near punk and urban rap-like in style, comes as a complete shock to those who imagine the performing persona of classically-trained singer Dawn Upshaw to be confined to the demure. Her reciting of Be a string, water, to my guitar a calm, reflective, unaccompanied poem is insightful, while the song Yah , annah emtza’cha, aurally and vividly depicts the era of medieval Spain in which Muslim, Jewish and Christian cultures once lived harmoniously. Golijov explains why Medieval Spain and the era of peaceful inter-relationship of religious faiths is close to his heart when commenting upon his song-cycle-

'With a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian. How connected these cultures are and how terrible it is when they don’t understand each. The grief that we are living in the world today has already happened for centuries but somehow harmony was possible between these civilizations’

The song-cycle Ayre is one of several Golijov compositions written specifically with the qualities and interpretative insight of the mezzo-soprano Dawn Upshaw and her gorgeous singing voice in mind. The subject of the strengths and weaknesses of composers writing with specific voices in mind may well re-surface in musical discussion next year when the centenary of the British composer Benjamin Britten (b.Lowestoft 1913) occurs. Britten wrote many song-cycles and opera parts specifically with the voice of his longtime partner the tenor Peter Pear in mind. Whether or not vocal works written for one specific voice in performance and interpretation can be completely replicated by another, remains an open question. 

Dawn Upshaw’s recording of the song-cycle Ayre concludes evoking Greek mythology with the tale of Ariadne in the labyrinth, a tense, mysterious and coiling musical theme which highlights the instrumental playing of the chamber ensemble, the Andalucian Dogs, as it slowly fades into silence.  Golijov’s final song in the cycle perfectly highlights the cross-fertilization of  musical cultures within the Mediterranean basin far better than words ever can. Golijov himself spoke of the creative motivation of composing his song-cycle-

The idea is to create a forest and for Dawn to walk in it. There is no real sense of ‘form’ –in the sense of Beethovian development – but rather lots of detours and discoveries’.

The title alone of the opera Ainadamar (Arabic: Fountain of Tears) appealed to me as the next work by Golijov work worth hearing. The opera’s title alludes to an ancient well near Granada in Spain where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered by Spanish Fascists in August 1936. First performed at the Tanglewood Festival in August 2003 Ainadamar is primarily based upon traditional Spanish music, in particular the Flamenco style.  Once more the hypnotic voice of Dawn Upshaw is featured, this time performing as Margarita Xirgu,  a Catalan tragedian and Lorca's lover and muse, who collaborated with him on several of his plays. Without wanting to post spoilers there's a very startling moment in Golijov's opera about Garcia Lorca’s murder. In recent times the terror and trauma of the Spanish civil war is the backdrop for film-director Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) a harrowing account of an episode in the Spanish civil war interlinked with a fantasy world of magical realism.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Kepler and Sir Thomas Browne



There are a surprising number of hitherto undetected connections between the German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to the English physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).

Kepler’s life, like Browne’s, spanned a watershed in scientific thought. Kepler not only advocated  rational inductive science and the astronomical discoveries of Galileo but also augmented his scientific enquiries with Neoplatonic and Pythagorean ideas. Kepler’s astronomical discoveries were as much structured upon precise mathematical calculation as deeply held theological beliefs and God-given revelation; his scientific perspective, not unlike Browne’s own scientific perspective a full half century later, were an admixture of Christian awe of the Creation, precise mathematical analysis and Platonic and Pythagorean concepts of the ancient Greek world.

Listed as once in Sir Thomas Browne’s library is an edition of Kepler’s first published book, Mysterium Cosmographicum (Prague 1596) [1]. Kepler's ‘Mysteries of the Cosmos’ is the direct result of a vision the young mathematician experienced in which he believed God’s geometrical plan of the universe had been revealed to him. In his mystical revelation Kepler discovered the geometric solids as first described by Plato, the tetrahedron (4 sided) cube (6 sided) octahedron (8 sided) dodecahedron (12 sided) and icosahedron (20 sided) could each be uniquely represented by spherical orbs; each solid nesting within and encased in a sphere, would in total produce six layers, corresponding to the six known planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. By ordering the Platonic solids in their correct numerical sequence Kepler also discovered  that the spheres could be placed at intervals which corresponded to his own calculations of the relative size of each planet’s path, as each planet circled the Sun.

                                                    

Kepler’s great patron was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552 -1612). During his long reign Rudolph II gathered at his relocated court at Prague, some of the most remarkable figures in the world of art and science. He was a generous patron to artists of the Mannerist school such as Archimboldo, Bartholomeus Spranger and Adrian de Vries, and to the astronomers Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Indeed, Rudolph II's pairing of the observational genius of the Dane Tycho Brahe to the mathematical gifts of Kepler has been considered his major contribution towards the advancement of astronomy.

Kepler’s residence at the court of the Holy Roman emperor from 1600 to 1612 resulted in his naming and dedicating his major work of scientific notation of planetary motion, the Rudulphine Tables, to Emperor Rudolph. Other visitors to the court of the melancholic, alchemy-loving Emperor and connoisseur of the arts include the Elizabethan mathematician and major figure of esotericism, John Dee (1527 -1608)  and the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston.  

The division between astrology and astronomy in Kepler’s day was quite blurred and not as sharply delineated as nowadays. Throughout his life Kepler supplemented his income by regularly publishing calendars which predicted future events from astrology. For the year 1595 he prophesied a particularly cold winter, an attack by the Turks from the south and a peasant uprising: all of which occurred.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Norwich 1912 Floods




The summer of 2012 in England has been a bit of a wash-out, not just the wettest ever April to June since records began in 1910,  but in fact the wettest summer for over one hundred years.  However, no  matter how dismal this summer's been, no loss of life has occurred from the weather, unlike events in Norwich a century ago. 

After 7 inches of rain fell over several days in late August 1912, the river Wensum which flows through the City finally burst its banks, resulting in floods radiating over a 40 mile area. It's estimated that the rain fell at the rate of one inch of water an hour and in total four people lost their lives. Those who remained in their homes had food and other supplies delivered to them by boat or horse and cart. The city's rail-links to the outside world were  temporarily blocked by flood-water, fallen trees and debris.

On August 31, Henry John Copeman, Lord Mayor of Norwich at the time, wrote to all the nation's leading newspapers - “Following a rainfall unprecedented in the records of the Meteorological Office, whole streets in the low-lying part of the city have been flooded, houses rendered desolate, the furniture and bedding destroyed, and their occupants homeless and resourceless".

But as ever, such a disaster united people and brought out the best in them. Members of the Royal Family donated £300 and the King and Queen of Norway gave £21, but the biggest donation came from the local industrial entrepreneur J. J Colman who donated £1,000,  an enormous amount of money a century ago. The total amount of money given to the people of Norwich came to £24,579 14s 7d. A report outlining how every penny was spent was duly published.

Nowadays we tend to attribute natural disasters to climate change, but in fact natural disasters, in particular flooding in this region, have occurred throughout history. The worst case being the 1953 North Sea floods, which, due to a fatal combination of winds, atmospheric pressure and high tides, affected not only East Anglia, but also Scotland and Holland, resulting in the loss of over 80 lives on the North-West Norfolk coast alone. The 1953 floods claimed over 2,500 lives, the low-lying Netherlands being by far the worst affected nation. 















Wiki-Link - 1953 floods

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Mermaid


The seductive figure of the mermaid has a fascinating place in world art and literature. 

An early western literary account of the mermaid legend occurs in a medieval Romance which tells of Melusine, a fairy of extraordinary beauty who sometimes changes into a serpent. A popular fifteenth century Romance recounted the tale of Melusine, a fairy who promises to marry Raimondin of Lusignan and make him a rich king if he agrees to marry but never to look at her on a Saturday evening. They marry and Raimondin grows wealthy, while Melusine with her magic builds him a castle. Raimondin however, is also consumed with jealousy, suspecting his wife of unfaithfulness. One Saturday evening he gouges a spy-hole through a wall to watch Melusine when she retires to her room. While she is bathing he sees that his wife has become half woman, half serpent. Melusine, distressed at being seen transformed flies away with frightful screams. Associated through marriage with the Lusignan family, Melusine appears over the centuries on the towers of their castle, wailing mournfully every time  a disaster or death in the family is imminent. 

In the utterly charming novel The Wandering Unicorn (1965) by the Argentinian author Manuel Mujica Lainez (1910-64) the legend of Melusine is developed further. Set in medieval France and the holy Land of the Crusades, Lainez’s novel is a rich serving of fantasy and romance. Narrated from the perspective of the shape-changing Melusine, the early events of the original legend are soon recounted before she embarks upon an adventure and unrequited love-affair with Aiol, the son of Ozil, a crusader knight who bequeaths a Unicorn’s lance to his son. Together the young knight Aiol and Melusine travel across Europe to eventually arrive in war-torn Jerusalem of the Crusades. The reader is drawn into Lainez’s neglected gem of magical realism with growing empathy towards Melusine as she recollects her adventures and love of Aiol, only to experience the full emotional impact of the tragic and sad ending of the love-affair between a mortal and an immortal.


18th century Melusine with the four Elements

The Renaissance alchemist-physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) also fell under the potent spell of the mermaid Melusine. It’s worth remembering that Paracelsus, above all others, was the foremost alchemist who influenced the psychologist C.G. Jung. Both men were physicians of Swiss-German nationality as well as radical protestant theologians. In the darkest year of World War II, 1942 C.G. Jung delivered a conference paper on the Swiss physician at Zurich for the quatercentenary anniversary of Paracelsus's death in 1542, which analysed the symbolism of the mermaid, stating in his essay Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon -

Melusine comes into the same category as the nymphs and sirens who dwell in the watery realms. In his De Pygmaeis Paracelsus informs us that Melusina was originally a nymph who was seduced by Beelzebub into practising witchcraft. She was descended from the whale in whose belly the prophet Jonah beheld great mysteries. This derivation is very important: the birthplace of Melusina is the womb of mysteries, obviously what we today would call the unconscious. Melusines have no genitals, a fact that characterizes them as paradisiacal beings, since Adam and Eve in paradise had no genitals either……Adam and Eve “fell for” the serpent and became “monstrous”, that is, that they acquired genitals. But the Melusines remained in the paradisal state as water creatures and went on living in the human blood. Since blood is a primitive symbol for the soul, Melusina can be interpreted as a spirit, or some kind of psychic phenomenon. Gerard Dorn confirms this in his commentary on De Vita longa , where he says that Melusina is a “vision appearing in the mind.” For anyone familiar with the subliminal processes of psychic transformation, Melusina is clearly an anima figure. She appears as a variant of the mercurial serpent, which was sometimes represented in the form of a snake-woman by way of expressing the monstrous, double nature of Mercurius.[1]

C.G. Jung defined the alchemists of the medieval and Renaissance era as none other than embryonic psychologists who recognized the very real existence of the psyche but lacked a terminology to describe the psyche’s workings. According to Jung-

Paracelsus seems to have known nothing of any psychological premises. He attributes the appearance and transformation of Melusina to the effect of the “intervening” Scaiolae, the driving spiritual forces emanating from the homo maximus.[2]

The four Scaiolae or spiritual powers of the mind of Paracelsian alchemy have a distinct affinity to C.G. Jung’s preciser four nominated functions of the psyche, namely, thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Jung defined the Paracelsian Scaiolae and their relationship to Melusina thus-

Since the Scaiolae are psychic functions….as functions of consciousness, and particularly as imaginato, speculation, phantasia and fides, they “intervene” and stimulate Melusina, the water-nixie, to change herself into human form….Now this figure is certainly not an allegorical chimera or a mere metaphor: she has her particular psychic reality in the sense that she is a glamorous apparition who, by her very nature, is on one side a psychic vision but also, on account of the psyche’s capacity for imaginative realization is a distinct objective entity, like a dream which temporarily becomes reality. The figure of Melusina is eminently suited to this purpose. The anima belongs to those borderline phenomena which chiefly occur in special psychic situations. [3] 

In this context the anima figure's role in the individuation process is of great significance. Paracelsus apprehended this fact when identifying the 'difficult' nature of Melusine in her relationship to the Scaiolae of the homo maximus or  the greater man within.

Illustration by Charles Robinson 1937

J. Jacobi in a glossary to selected works by Paracelsus, defines Melusina as -

A legendary, magic being, whose name Paracelsus also uses to designate an arcarnum. He conceives of it as a psychic force whose seat is a watery part of the blood, or as a kind of anima vegetativa (vegetative soul.)


In a fine example of how male fantasy invariably  either under-values or over-values the anima figure (although often considered of a helpful, guiding nature there's also malevolent aspects of the femme fatale in the mermaid) and how Christian misogyny conspired to condemn the mermaid as symbolic of sinful sensuality, the Paracelsian scholar and lexiconographer, Martin Ruland in his Dictionary of Alchemy (1612) asserted -

Mermaids were Kings' daughters in France, snatched away by Satan because they were hopelessly sinful, and transformed into spectres horrible to behold...They are thought to exist with a rational soul, but a merely brute-like body, of a visionary kind, nourished by the elements and, like them, destined to pass away at the last day unless they contract a marriage with a man. Then the man himself may, perish by a natural death, while they live naturally by this nuptial union.

Invariably portrayed as solitary and beautiful with long-flowing hair, not easy to become acquainted  with, changeable in mood and elusive, often fleeing from human presence when approached, with an ability to inhabit an alien element, namely water, the mermaid represents the archetype of the anima in Jungian psychology. The anima is born from unconscious contents associated with, and projected onto ‘the other’  which in the male psyche is the female sex, gender being the greatest divide of nature which includes human nature. 

C.G.Jung considered fish to be perfect symbols of the contents of the unconscious psyche and the element of water itself as a symbol of the unknown and therefore also of the unconscious psyche. In essence the mermaid is a composite symbol of alluring virgin attached to an alien and repellent fish-form. From this tension of opposites, half seductress, half fish, C.G.Jung recognised the mermaid as another symbol connected to the shape-shifting deity associated with reconciling the opposites in alchemy, Mercurius.

During the romantic era of the nineteenth century  the mermaid became an object of sentimentality. Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale The Little Mermaid (1837) inspired Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of the Carlsberg brewery who had been entranced by a ballet he'd seen based upon Anderson’s fairytale at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre. In 1913 Jacobsen commissioned a bronze sculpture of a mermaid by Edward Ericksen which was placed in the entrance to Copenhagen harbour. Ericksen’s sculpture, though often sadly frequently vandalized, has become emblematic of the city of Copenhagen. The capital city of Warsaw in Poland has had a mermaid as part of its heraldic coat-of-arms since the 14th century.

Fascination with the slippery and wet fantasy of the mermaid became increasingly eroticized in paintings of the late romantic era. In British artist Frederic Leighton’s The Fisherman and the Siren (top picture) for example, the sheer unashamed erotic content of the mermaid is celebrated as in many other late 19th century paintings in which the mermaid is an object of  male fantasy and elusive desire.

The mermaid could not possibly slip away into the sea of obscurity and escape from the sharp-eyed scrutiny of the 17th century British scholar of comparative religion Sir Thomas Browne. In his encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica, he noted of the mermaid's resemblance in the ancient world to the winged siren, and to Dagon, an ancient Assyro-Babylonian fertility fish-god, noting-

Few eyes have escaped the Picture of Mermaids; that is, according to Horace his Monster, with woman’s head above, and fishy extremity below: and these are conceived to answer the shape of the ancient Syrens that attempted upon Ulysses. Which notwithstanding were of another description, containing no fishy composure, but made up of Man and Bird; ........

And therefore these pieces so common among us, do rather derive their original, or are indeed the very descriptions of Dagon; which was made with human figure above, and fishy shape below; whose stump, or as Tremellius and our margin renders it, whose fishy part only remained, when the hands and upper part fell before the Ark. Of the shape of Atergates, or Derceto with the PhÅ“niceans; in whose fishy and feminine mixture, as some conceive, were implyed the Moon and the Sea, or the Deity of the waters; and therefore, in their sacrifices, they made oblations of fishes. From whence were probably occasioned the pictures of Nereides and Tritons among the Grecians, and such as we read in Macrobius, to have been placed on the top of the Temple of Saturn. [4]

Japanese hentai anime of the anima figure of the Mermaid.  

Notes
[1]  C.G.Jung  Collected Works vol. 13. 180 
[2]  Vol. 13:220
[3]  Vol. 13:216-217
[4]  Pseudodoxia Epidemica book 5 chapter 19

Wiki-Links - Mermaid 

Posted for Emily Josephine Jackman on her birthday with love.