Chagall
by Jean Cassou
Frederick A. Praeger, 1965
Translated by Alisa Jaffa
$3.95, 286 pp

Chagall traces the life and professional milestones of Russian-born painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985). Written by his personal friend, Jean Cassou, formerly Chief Curator of the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, it is a psychoanalytical biography of the artist and his works. It opens with an engrossing description of the world Chagall was born into - the world still of his soul - and its affect on the artist as an adult:

In people like [Chagall] there is an inborn identification with the condition of childhood, as if this were their homeland . . . For them childhood is a stream in which they delight to feel submerged. They have had a special relationship to their childhood and this will always remain.

Chagall's paintings - save for a few of his earliest works - at first glance appear full of whimsy. The images he fills his canvas with seem disconnected, a hodgepodge of memories from his childhood in Vitebsk, Russia. A common motif, and one he employed throughout his life, are of figures seemingly floating or flying above the landscape, often upside down. It's a topsy-turvy world he conveys through his brush, begging of symbolism. But as Chagall himself said of his paintings, "I don't understand them at all. They're not literature. They are merely a pictorial arrangement of images that obsess me . . ."

Fight or Flight
Chagall spent much of his adult life fleeing political unrest. Bounced from Vitebsk to Saint Petersburg in pre-revolution Russia, to Paris, Berlin, and back to Vitebsk, just in time for the onslaught of world war and the revolution it in turn spurred across his homeland. It was a productive time for Chagall, and a period that brought him notoriety within Russia, winning him an appointment as Commisar for Art in the post-revolution government of Vitebsk, a position he served enthusiastically. Newlywed, he began a family with his wife Bella, mustering the same enthusiasm with which he administered the arts. Life was good. In due time though, the optimism of the revolution faded, replaced by the totalitarianism of Stalin with no use for free-thinking artists, and Chagall found himself once again in Berlin.

The Berlin Chagall relocated his family to was not the Berlin he'd left. It was "an inflation-ridden chaotic Berlin, a caravanserai of fugitives and lost souls, the scene of every kind of literary, artistic and social turmoil." He bid Berlin farewell in the autumn of 1923, returning to Paris where he was met with open arms by a burgeoning Surrealist movement. Which was strange in itself since Chagall rejected the notion of art as a movement, especially one as dogmatic as Surrealism. A decade and small change later, the Chagalls relocated to Poland, arriving just as Hitler's aspirations were becoming clear to the world. On the go again, their next stop - and for Bella, final (she passed away in 1944) - was America, where they carried on with life in exile until the end of the war in Europe.

Cosmic Flashes
While the influence of an artist's life seems inseparable from his art, for Cassou it's just window dressing. Typically, an artist's biographer connects the life events of his subject with their artistic inspirations and works, but Chagall is anything but typical. Cassou shuns conventional standards when it comes to Chagall, complaining that interpreting artistic expression based on an artist's life turns the biographer into a prophet after the fact. Rather, he approaches Chagall's works with a combination of Freudian and Jungian psychology. He writes of Chagall's childhood with a Freudian regard to those formative years, while using terms like "cosmic chemistry" and "psychic space" to describe his art; terms straight from the Jungian playbook. As for Chagall himself, Cassou refers to him throughout as a poet, even calling his paintings "poems." Which probably isn't far off the mark. Chagall admittedly didn't understand them himself, and only referred to them as "documents." Though documenting what, he couldn't say.

With Chagall, Cassou has delivered an insightful, compelling look at the Russian painter's life. Covering a long career, from his earliest paintings, to his set and costume designs, with etching, sculpting, and ceramics thrown in the mix, there's a lot to unpack. It concludes with Chagall's achievements in the sunset of his life, most notably commissions to create twelve stained glass windows for the Hadassah Clinic synagogue in Jerusalem (1962), and the ceiling of the Paris Opera (1964). Although filled with land mines (Cassou has a penchant for psycho babble), if you don't mind navigating them, Chagall makes for a provocative read. But if navigation's not your bag, there still may be hope. Chagall contains 186 reproductions of the artist's work, 47 of which are in color (and visually stunning). A short bibliography, chronology of life events and career milestones, and complete list of illustrations are also included.

Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso
edited by Arnold and Marc Glimcher
Grove Atlantic, 1986
ISBN: 0-87113-072-6
$65.00, 349 pp

The name Pablo Picasso is synonymous with twentieth century art. Perhaps no other artist of the last century has garnered as much attention as he. That he achieved that level of fame and notoriety while still alive to bask in it, is not only rare for an artist, but practically unheard of.

Etch n' Sketch
Upon his death in 1973, Picasso's sketchbooks were discovered among his personal belongings, paintings, sculptures and the like which he had roomfuls of. The sketchbooks numbered 175 in total, and offer a map of his creative life. An artist's diary, if you will. Filled with sketches that were never seen to fruition as completed paintings; sketches that were done of paintings afer the fact; studies for some of his most celebrated pieces; notes for working out particular problems he was having with composition; some doubling as appointment books; with ideas upon ideas, they offer a rare glimpse into the working genius of the man who has been called the greatest artist of the twentieth century.

Compiled for an exhibition of his sketchbooks at New York's Pace Gallery in 1986, Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso was a massive undertaking with stunning results. As a peek into Picasso's process, it's fascinating; as a historical document of twentieth century art, it's indispensible.

The cover, lifted from sketchbook No. 40, has "Je suis le cahier" (translated, "I am the sketchbook") scrawled in Picasso's own hand. The pages inside feature six complete sketchbooks, each selected for the seachanges they reflect in Picasso's personal and professional life; development of a new style, or completion of a major piece. All are presented with detailed introductions, each written by a different contributor.

Family Circus
Sketchbook No. 35 (1905) contains early tests for Picasso's major work Family of Saltimbanques, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Upon x-radiographing the completed piece, it was discovered it had three distinct iterations, revealing painted-over components, the outlines of which the sketchbook harbored, some as rough line drawings, others with washes, and still others - looking more like completed pieces than mere studies - in full-color.

Sketchbook No. 42 (1907) has a brilliant introduction by art historian Robert Rosenblum (New York University). The sketchbook was created at the time Picasso was working out details for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Its pages are filled with line drawings of human figures, some of which he incorporated into the final piece. The drawing style is consistent throughout No. 42, in sharp contrast nine years later with sketchbook No. 59 (1916), in which simple line drawings are intermixed with early efforts at cubism. Unfortunately, the sketchbook is not fully intact, with eight pages missing, some sold to private collectors by Picasso himself, while evidence suggests others were sent off to be published in the art industry catalog Zervos, and never returned.

In 1926, a particularly lean year in terms of creative output for Picasso, the artist re-imagines collage (sketchbook No. 92). Credited as having been influenced by the surrealist painter Miro, he pushed cubism a step closer to reality by eliminating the ambiguity of its subjects. The result were three collages (Guitare I; Guitare II; and Collage) in which he used wood, cloth, newspaper, string and nails arranged to closely resemble the subject at hand (guitars). Picasso was taking the guesswork out of collage. At this time he was also tweaking cubism on the canvas, developing a style of portraiture that would become his trademark; lauded for its originality, while simultaneously questioned on its sanity.

War Paint
With sketchbook No. 110 (1940), Picasso makes a monumental shift in style. This period coincides with Nazi invasion in Europe, and the artist's creation of Woman Dressing Her Hair. The subject of Woman is a grotesquery of womanhood. The figure more resembles a monster - with huge feet, sitting in a twisted position, all elbows, knees and breasts - than it does a woman.

Though gruesome, the studies in sketchbook No. 110 are some of Picasso's most intriguing. Several pages alone are dedicated just to skulls; identical visages of death repeated over and over again. Picasso's pursuit of grotesque deformities in form during this time has been credited by more than one critic to the influence the war and subsequent Nazi occupation had on his life. Woman Dressing Her Hair is grotesque because war is grotesque. In response, Picasso denied the allegations that the catastrophe of war had influenced his style and artisitc choices, ultimately leaving it to history to determine:

"I have not painted the war," Picasso was quoted as saying in 1944, "because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done. Later perhaps the historians will . . . show that my style has changed under the war's influence. Myself, I do not know."

While Picasso may have insisted in 1944 that war was not an influence on him, by 1962 he was actively pursuing it as a subject. Sketchbook No. 163 contains the studies for his celebrated Rape of the Sabines. Combining the themes of Nicholas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents (1628, Musee Conde', Chantilly, France) with Jacques-Louis David's Sabines (1799, Musee du Louvre, Paris), he proposed to make a statement against war. The world was freshly reeling from the Cuban missile crisis, and Poussin and David provided the appropriate foundation on which Picasso could base his own anti-war statement.

Begun in October for the sole purpose of creating Rape, sketchbook No. 163 marks a departure far afield of his contemporary work. Its pages are filled with Greco-Roman style studies of women, horses and soldiers; a bevy of characters to select from for inclusion in the final composition. By mid-November, he'd created no fewer than six versions of Rape of the Sabines, culminating in his final rendition on February 7, 1963, which hangs today in The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

MIA
Out of the original 175 sketchbooks, today only 170 remain. The five that went missing were probably sold a page at a time, although Picasso did sell a few in their entirety to his dealer to be disassembled and the pages sold individually, the wherabouts of which are anybody's guess. The sketchbooks that remain are a treasure. They offer the world a rare glimpse into the sublime; the creative process of a visual genius.

"I don't understand them at all. They're not literature. They are merely a pictorial arrangement of images that obsess me ..."

Je Suis le Cahier - though light on biographical details - makes for an excellent introduction to Picasso. The text is interesting; the illustrations, engaging. In addition to the six sketchbooks covered in their entirety (with full reproductions of their contents), Je Suis le Cahier contains a section of select pages reproduced from other sketchbooks the editors thought important to include. In the back, a listing of all the sketchbooks, from No. 1 to No. 175, with detailed descriptions of each, inside and out. In addition, each listing includes a drawing, selected as an overall representation of that particular sketchbook. It's this kind of attention to detail that makes Je Suis le Cahier not just visually beautiful, but a valuable addition to Pablo Picasso's legacy, arguably the greatest artist of the twentieth century.

Dali
edited by Max Gerard
Harry N. Abrams, 1968
Translated by Eleanor Morse
ISBN: 0-8109-0063-7
244 pp

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) took pride in being a weird cat. He was the most renowned - maybe even the finest - Surrealist painter of the last century. His embrace of Surrealism went way beyond his artwork. Surrealism was the guard rail that kept the artist on track; a way of life, from the moment he roused in the morning, 'til his head hit the pillow at night. Even his dreams - the details and interpretation - were skewed to the language of Surrealism. Surrealism, for Dali, was a holistic philosophy that encompassed every aspect of life. If that sounds constraining, think again. Dali's life - his approach to creating, eating, loving, seeing - was anything but constrained. He was a wild man in a world where contradiction ruled the day. A prisoner of the tower in an asylum where the inmate doubled as gatekeeper. Dali was the Cheshire Cat personified, grinning down a rabbit hole of his own making.

Eye Candy
The cover of Dali looks like a candy box, and for good reason. According to its editor, while visiting the printing plant that was to produce Dali, the artist spotted a candy box covered in gold foil:

"That's how the cover of our book should be!" With one glance he had just devised the most Surrealist and yet the most commercial of dust jackets. That is why you have in your hands a book sumptuously covered with the gold foil usually reserved for candy boxes . . . thus it is that the imagination of our ingenious friend satisfied with one stroke two passions dear to his heart: art and gastronomy.

Produced under the supervision of Dali himself, Dali is a superb introduction to the Spaniard whom his editor calls "The gladiator of enchantment." Divided into subjects near and dear to the artist's heart, the bulk of the book is neither biographical, nor critical. Gerard introduces the topics, dedicating a few paragraphs to each, intermixed with quotes from Dali, lest we forget the artist's penchant for contradiction. Following these brief introductions are page upon sumptuous page of the artist's work, randomly interspersed with quotes often lacking any association with the artwork at hand; deliberate and pointedly lacking association. One can only call this arrangement "Dalinian," and it's not going out on a limb to say there is no other book formatted quite like it in the world.

The first subject Dali examines is war. Included here are, predictably, depictions of war. While some are straightforward (Battle of Tetuan, 1962), others take a more Dalinian approach to their messaging (Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 1936; Atomica Melancholia, 1945).

Under the banner of Landscape, an early foray into Impressionism is included: Orchard Lane, Cadaques, 1922. Its impressionist style distinctly sets Orchard Lane apart from later landscapes, Pharmacist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing (1936), for example. Here Dali applies his brand of modern-classicism to the surreal subject matter, and achieves a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Dalinian mathematics!

It seems all great artists have their muse. A source of inspiration, they often find themselves making repeat appearances in their paintings. Chagall had Bella; Picasso, Dora Maar; and Dali had Gala, the face of all Dalinian women. Her many incarnations are exhibited in, but not limited to, the section titled Gala, as her face was so popular with Dali it appears just about anywhere the female form is called for. Gala as an angel; Gala as a peasant; Gala as the Madonna. Like Elvis, Gala is everywhere.

Art in Motion
"The entropy of a still life is a way of amending nature," Dali said. Ever the gladiator of enchantment, Dali's still lifes tend to fling themselves far afield of what we normally consider still life. His still lifes have no limits. They include objects, people, and animation. Under the heading Nature Morte (Still Life) Dali mixes the traditional (Jug, 1922-1923) with modern, non-traditional attempts (Nature Morte Vivante, 1956; Resurrection of the Flesh, 1940-1945). Filled with movement, they're anything but still. But that's part of the magick of Dali; his mastery of contradiction.

Eroticism, as a topic, commanded Dali's interest. By his thinking, all humans are, by nature, erotic. It's in our DNA, an argument he pursued and depicted on canvas long before Krick and Watson's discovery of the double helix.

Eroticism is the monarchal principle, which cybernetically 'flows' through the molecular structures of deoxyribonucleic acid.

Dalinian eroticism is a function of pure joy; the joy of being and the joy of loving. Although the images included in the section on eroticism hardly convey that. Dali's erotic paintings - in particular his nudes - are reminiscent of Egon Schiele's (1890-1918), corpse-like and bludgeoned. Not a pretty picture. Whereas beauty is but skin deep, eroticism (at least in Dalinian theory) runs much deeper, producing a reaction that occurs deep within the anatomical structure of our biological building blocks. Not only are we hard-wired for eroticism, it's a chemical necessity. Without it, life ceases to exist.

I am friendly with death. After eroticism it's the subject that interests me the most.

On the topic of mysticism, Dali reaches beyond the obvious connotations of religion. Dalinian mysticism encapsulates the whole of life, similar to eroticism, and like eroticism, at least for Dali, it comes in many forms and is entirely unavoidable.

My mysticism is not only religious mysticism, it is also nuclear mysticism, hallucinogenic mysticism, the mysticism of gothic cubism, the mysticism of gold, the mysticism of the Perpignan railway station, and the mysticism of the soft watches.

While Dali lays out a lot of "mysticisms" for our consideration, in the section on mysticism, largely only paintings in the vein of religious mysticism are included. An exception is Dali's Cubist Self-portrait of 1926, included, we presume, to satisfy his claims to cubist mysticism, making it a standout. Also of note is his painting titled Gala Looking at Dali in a State of Anti-gravitation in His Work of Art "Pop-op-yes-yes-pompier" in Which One Can Contemplate the Two Anguishing Characters From Millet's "Angelus" in a State of Atavistic Hibernation Standing Out of a Sky Which Can suddenly Burst into a Gigantic Maltese Cross Right in the Heart of the Perpignan Railway Station Where the Whole Universe Must Begin to Converge (1965). This piece, notable for its religious mysticism and the mysticism of the Perpignan railway station (not to mention hallucinatory mysticism), also has the longest title of any piece in the book. For a painter known for wordy titles, that's a feat.

Optical Volleyball
Dali dedicated much of his time attempting to capture on canvas the fourth dimension. That is, trying to represent time and the influence it has on space. Or, more to the point, the effect it has on physical space when removed from the equation. With Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) he achieved what he was after. By using background elements in the piece to build the illusion of a bust of Voltaire in the foreground, Dali demonstrated that without the background elements (in this case representing time), there is no bust. Vice versa, with the illusion of the bust removed, the background is incomplete. Space, as demonstrated here, is reliant on a fourth dimension for its existence. It's a trick he plays with to great effect in other pieces too, notably Old Age, Adolescence, and Infancy (The Three Ages, 1940), and Enchanted Beach with Three Fluid Graces (1938).

The fact that I myself at the moment of painting do not know the significance of my pictures does not mean that these pictures are without meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent and spontaneous that it eludes the simple analysis of logical intuition.

Dali was concerned with the direction painting was headed. It bothered him that modernism lacked a classical foundation. In his opinion, without a good foundation of tradition, moronic slop might be mistaken for genius; plagiarism for originality. He envisioned himself the savior of modern art, destined to rescue it from the nihilism in which it wallowed, something he insisted only a return to classicism - by himself included - could achieve.

I had to struggle toward more important goals, of which the first would be to make each experience of my life classical, to endow it with a form, a cosmogony, a synthesis, and an eternal architecture.

While Dali desired classicism, he recognized modernism was an unavoidable pitfall of the contemporary art scene. "Don't worry about being modern," he advised, "it is the only thing that unfortunately no matter what you do, you won't be able to avoid being." He also said, "Don't be alarmed about perfection, you will never attain it."

On the future of painting, Dali predicted, "The painting of the future will be classical, imperial, and existentialist." Whether he was serious about this statement, or just throwing it out there for a reaction, is hard to say. His was a creatively mad existence, always on the lookout for a new riddle to mesmerize us with. A shape-shifter by choice, taking refuge in his surroundings, absorbing everything, revealing nothing, vanished in a flash. Now we see him, now we don't. A Cheshire Cat of his own invention.

Everything modifies me but nothing changes me.

With a biographical timeline, and more than 270 illustrations (whole and detail), 80 in full-color, Dali is the quintessential book on the famed Catalan and self-proclaimed savior of twentieth century art. While his musings are as cryptic as his creations, they reflect the fascinations of the artist, his thoughts and views, laid out beside some of his most acclaimed pieces. A fount of beauty and originality, Dali's a keeper.

Encyclopedia of Living Artists, Ninth Edition
edited by Constance Smith
ArtNetwork, 1995
ISBN: 0-940899-24-8
$15.95, 95 pp

ArtNetwork began publishing their annual Encyclopedia of Living Artists in 1986. A tool for matching talented artists with industry professionals, during its lifetime it served its purpose well, filling a host of publishing, museum, and exhibition offerings with new talent.

Encyclopedia of Living Artists, Ninth Edition, features sixty-six artists across 95 pages. Sixteen pages in the back of the book are dedicated to biographies of each artist, hailing from all corners of the globe and working in a wide range of mediums.

Distinctly missing from Living Artists is any explanation as to what the selection process entailed. An unnecessary detail, perhaps, but if an artist wanted inclusion in the book, you'd think that's something they'd want to know.

Today, ArtNetwork's encyclopedia is a thing of the past. Though no longer serving its original function, it remains an important historical record of sorts of the world's up-and-coming artists of the late twentieth century. With over eighty full-color plates, Living Artists continues to showcase talent, just not with the purpose it once did.

posted 10/05/23

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