Douglas Ord: "Milne Duncan Jarvis. An introduction"

mit Bezug zu: Kurt Wagenseil (Henry Miller), Paris, Rue Campagne-Première, Merve-Verlag (Gilles Deleuze)

In: Journal of Canadian Art History, Annales d'histoire de l'art Canadien, Vol. 38/39, No. 2/1 (2017/2018), pp. 38-78.

Fig. "Münchner Künstlerhaus am Lenbachplatz", Munich 2015, by Kmuc under Creative Common Licence CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified).

p. 38: "In 1970, Alan Hepburn Jarvis (1915-1972), who had served as the third director of the National Gallery of Canada from 1955 to 1959, wrote following description of his and Douglas Moerdyke Duncan's (1902-1968) first visit to the isolated South Muskoka cabin of the painter David Milne (1882-1953), after seeing his work in Toronto: [']We were sufficiently capitivated by the Milne painting that we resolved to see the mythical character in the flesh, and so we made our way, by car and canoe, to Six Mile Lake in the summer of 1935. [...']".

p. 41: "2. Photographs

The photograph itself, cropped to its own boundaries, merits description (Fig. 3). It shows a young Alan Jarvis (then age twenty-four), [...]. In his right hand he holds, at an angle and turned toward the camera, a painted canvas stripped of its wooden stretchers. He would appear to be about to add this canvas to a pile of other canvases already lying on the rock face in front of him and hosting on their surfaces clusters of flames. It can be simply stated, for this is not in doubt, that the painting displayed by Jarvis in this way was by David Milne, as were the paintings lying on or propped along the rock face. [...]".

p. 46: "This is reiterated in the catalogue raisonné of Milne's œuvre, prepared by Silcox [the biographer David Silcox: 'Painting Place. The Life and Work of David B. Milne', Toronto: University Press 1996] and David Milne Jr., Milne's son with Kathleen Pavey: [']In the fall of 1939, in the process of closing the cabin for the winter (in fact he never returned) Milne sorted through his Six Mile Lake work with Alan Jarvis and Douglas Duncan, and burned a lot of pictures [...']".

p. 47: "[H]e [David Milne] lived in a hand-built cabin from 1933 to 1939".

Fig. "A wood cabin in the snow", Muskoka, Canada, 2015, by Unsplash, Public Domain (modified).

p. 49: "Considered in terms of this larger scale, 30 October 1939 was also sixty days into the European conflagration and fifty days after Canada's own declaration of war on Nazi Germany on 10 September [...]".

p. 50: "'Jarvis and Duncan intended to identify and destroy sub-standard works...' A program of aethetic eugenics could hardly ask for a more succinct description. [...] These sentencesd alone contain three words - 'selection', 'inferior,' and 'sterilized' - that had already, in their eugenic association, been applied in Nazi Germany to 'life unworthy of life' (Lebensunwertes Leben) in both sterilization and euthanasia programs [...]. What sense might be made of such overlaps of vocabularity and of such a pattern, within a narrow time frame, of gestural resemblance in regard to the 'inferior'? A reply will be assisted by 1) the suggestion of a way of reading, as provided by Gilles Deleuze ['Logique du sens', Paris: Éditions de minuit = Jean Bruller, Vercors & Pierre de Lescure 1969, p. 264: 'met en jeu des images', 'the serial form puts images into play'], and 2) a further set of archival discoveries. [...]".

p. 52: "4. Postcards

The questions posed by the existence of the photographs acquired added dimension with research into Jarvis's papers from the period, held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto".

p. 53: "[Fig.] 8 (above) and 9 (below) | Front and back of postcard, Claude Monet, Sommertag, Alan Jarvis Papers, MS Coll 171, box 1, folder 3. Thomas Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. (Photos: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library) ['Dear Alan, the photographs of the picture from the Würzburg University Galberg is unfortunately unavailable; but they will nevertheless try. - I would like so much to meet the Canadian girl, as I feel very lonely here. I do hope, Douglas will come over in spite of all war preparations and new conquests this weeks. Yrs. K.', stamped 'München 1.5.39 Hauptstadt der Bewegung', adressed 'Alan Jarvis, Esq. / University College, / Oxford, / England']".

p. 55: "[Fig.] 11 (above) and 12 (below) | Front and back of postcard, the battle fleet of Schleswig-Holstein, 1849, MS Coll 171, box 1, folder 3. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. (Photo: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library) ['March 27[,] Georgen Str. 40 / My dear Alan, please let me know, If I may expect you and when, and please bring us two 1 Pound fins of ›Earl Grey's Mixture‹' tea (for Anita Einsiedel & myself). We give you the money on your [overstamped]. Yours Kurt', stamped 'München 27.3.39 Hauptstadt der Bewegung', 'Übersee Telegramme', adressed 'Please forward / Alan Jarvis, Esq. / Chez Borwick / ~~University College~~ / 81, Ave. Niel / ~~Oxford, England~~ / Paris XVII'].

p. 56: "Examination of what remain of Duncan's papers as well as Jarvis's would show that the sender of both these cards was Kurt Wagenseil (1904-1988), Duncan's long-term companion of the 1920s, who lived in Munich, who was in 1935 briefly incarcerated in the concentration camp at Dachau, and who would, according to his obituary, translate into German works by George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, Jean Cocteau, André Maurois, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others [Footnote 26 with this webpage]. Horrall, misspelling his name as 'Wagensiel,' describes him as, in 1938, 'a thirty-four-year-old writer, translator, and art dealer who had been Duncan's Paris lover a decade earlier.' [Footnote 27: Andrew Horrall, Bringing Art to Life. A Biography of Alan Jarvis, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2009, p. 59]. The existence of these cards is nowhere mentioned by Horrall or, for that matter, by Silcox. Horrall does, however, mention, in a few sentences, that Duncan and Jarvis visited 'Wagensiel' [sic] in the summer of 1938: of which more shortly. For here, further summary detail is called for. 'Chez Barwick,' as per the addition on the earlier card, was the Paris address, in the Right Bank XVIIth arronidissement, of Duncan's sister, Frances Barwick, and her accountant husband, Jack".

p. 56f.: "[...T]o use the language of Deleuze: two photographs, two postcards Jarvis knew Wagenseil through Duncan (making for the paired postcards); Jarvis was photopraphed burning Milne paintings by Duncan (making for the paired photographs). Each pair constitutes a series, linked by elements not of casuality but of resemblance and contiguity of time and place. Both cards were sent to Alan Jarvis, from Munich, in the spring of 1939, and both photographs were made along the same slope of rock in South Muskoka, Ontario, Canada, in the fall of 1939. What happens when these are put together?".

p. 57: "5. Series paired", "[Fig.] 13 | The black and white photographs [...] and the back of the postcards [...]".

p. 62: "6. Nagold to Munich, July-August 1938

No mention of a visit to Nazi Germany, never mind to Munich, by Jarvis and Duncan appears in David Silcox' biography of Milne when he alludes to this period of relations among the three men. [...]".

p. 62f.: "'Duncan,' Silcox tells the reader, 'was gallivanting around France with Alan Jarvis in the summer of 1938' [Footnote 32: Silcox, Painting Place, 261]. This leaves out a lot. Horrall, understandably, given that his subject is Jarvis, is a bit more frank and expansive, describing over several pages a pre-Oxford trip to Europe that Duncan paid for and for which he chose the route in his family's convertible touring car as 'an advanced course in the history of European art and architecture that passed through Chartres, the Rhone Valley, the Riviera, Munich, Assisi, and Siena' [Footnote 33: Horrall, Bringing Art to Life, 59]. Regarding the visit to Munich and Nazi Germany, Horrall provides a paragraph that again merits quotation as the only hitherto publicly available account: [']Idyllic notions about Europe and its history did not survive a short stop in Germany. In Munich the pair stayed with Kurt Wagensiel [sic], a thirty-four-year-old writer, [...]. Duncan and Wagensiel shared a passion for opera, and together with Frances [Barwick] they had travelled and attended music festivals. There is no evidence that Jarvis was aware of these earlier trips or felt threatened by Wagensiel and Duncan's past, but confidence in a lasting peace was dissipated by the sea of Nazi uniforms, saluting, and anti-Semitic slogans that pervaded Hitler's Bavarian power base. The feelings were reinforced by Wagensiel's desire to emigrate with his small collection of canvases by Picasso and Matisse and books by Jean Cocteau and Marie Laurencin, which he feared the Nazis would seize for being degenerate. While Wagensiel lacked the permits needed to leave to country, he and Duncan decided that the items would be saver in Paris, where they could be reclaimed when the situation stabilized. So Jarvis and Duncan smuggled several of Wagensiel's pieces out of Germany in the first week of August. The threat that a technology-obsessed Nazi regime posed to art, literature, and sexual freedom contrasted starkly with the pre-modern marriage of science and art about which Lewis Mumford wrote['] [Footnote 34: Ibid, 60]".

p. 63f.: "A fact that also bears note in passing is that the epistolary record, when examined, proves not as friendly to Duncan as this account suggests, in that letters from Wagenseil to Jarvis over the following year contain the complaint that Duncan had never written: 'he is very naughty' [Footnote 35: Kurt Wagenseil to Alan Jarvis, 1. Mar. and 29. Mar. 1939. Alan Jarvis Papers, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Box 1]. An exchange of letters between Duncan's sister Frances, who was his executor, and Kurt Wagenseil in 1968-69 after Duncan's death, in which Wagenseil as much as begged for return at least of a Picasso etching, reveals that the several 'pieces' where never returned to him. Nor was the etching, with Barwick sending him a cheque for $750 instead [Footnote 36: Kurt Wagenseil to Frances Barwick, 28. Jan. 1969; Frances Barwick to Kurt Wagenseil, 6 July 1970; Frances Barwicks Fonds. National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives]".

p. 64: "Horrall's haste to get past this episode is suggested in his repeated misspelling, throughout the paragraph, of Kurt Wagenseil's name as 'Wagensiel'. [...] The questions beg to be asked: What did Jarvis and Duncan see in Nazi Germany and Munich? And how did it 'influence' them?".

p. 67: "With Duncan, Jarvis made the acquaintance of this club, writing to his mother and stepfather late on 1 August 1938 about how the two of them [']went to dinner with his [Duncan's] German friend - not Kurt - to the ›Artists‹ House [Künstlerhaus]. [...] D's friend got us ins because his father painted the murals in one of the rooms.['] [Footnote 50: Alan Jarvis, Papers, Box 17]. [...] Of this 'friend', Jarvis says only that is was 'not Kurt,' a distinction perhaps understandable in that Wagenseil's obituary indicates that he spent time in the concentration camp at Dachau, northwest of Munich, in 1935".

p. 71: "Perhaps so precise a symmetry in the two sequences of events - the first involving Duncan's and Jarvis's actual physical immersion in Nazi Germany in multiple ways and the second involving a performative and stylized destruction of David Milne's artwork in a way distinctly mimetic of Nazi practices - was just coincidence. But it exists. And out of this 'system of echoes, of reprises, and of resonances,' this 'expressive quasi-causality,' {Deleuze] as established now by all four series - photographs, postcards, sequence of events in July 1938, sequence of events in Octover 1939 - spin a host of questions, as is not only appropriate but called for, what which, to be kind, the hitherto deflective treatment of this material".

p. 74, Footnote 25: "A curious contiguity of place concerning application of Deleuze's terms to these particular series is that 81, Avenue Niel, as the added addresss on the earlier postcard sent to Jarvis from Munich in 1939, is almost directly across the road from 84, Avenue Niel, as the address in the 17th arrondissement where Gilles Deleuze lived in his later years and from whose upper storey window he plunged to his death on 4 November 1995 while suffering from debilitating lung disease. The entranceways to the two buildings are architecturally almost identical. This can only be noted here".

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