The (Partially Aborted) Munch Lecture: Part 4 (The Scream)

“Did you ever hear the cry of heaven?  No?  Well, let me tell you I did, I saw heaven crying;  It seemed as if the whole sky opened its thousands of mouths and hurled down molten colors into space.  The whole sky, an endless expanse of stripes ranging in color from from dark red to black.  Congealed blood – no, a pool reflecting a purple sunset, and then dirty gold.  Ugly, disgusting, but superb.”

-From Munch’s friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s 1896 novel Overboard,  in a direct response to The Scream

“But Mother, dear Mother, please tell me,/Before I  go up to bed,/ Why are my yellow curls falling,/Falling off my head?/And why is the sky so red?/Why is the sky so red…”

John Cheever, The Wapshop Scandal

The Scream

It is important to stress that many of the events I describe in these postings on Munch occurred concomitantly, and that linearity is tricky.  It has also come to my attention that my blog posts are quite long – too long – severely diminishing the chances of anyone reading them to completion, to which, astonished, I look up from my coffee and say “You mean people read these?  Even the beginnings?”  This post deals entirely with The Scream and its predecessors from the Munch oeuvre.  It has been my intention to work within a reasonable chronological trajectory, but having visited MoMA last week to see the newly auctioned pastel version, and with an awareness that this is by far the artist’s best-known work, I am giving it a post all of its own, trusting that the reader is aware that this is at once a general history interspersed with personal observations and opinions, none of which delve deep enough to do the work full justice.  And so:

During the late 19th century and into the 20th century Munch gave a title to his emerging body of work which encompassed the overarching themes of love, death, life and (re)birth.  The title was The Frieze Of Life.  It was meant it to embody his intentions set forth in the Saint Cloud Manifesto, wherein he aspired to an art that would be viewed with a reverence usually reserved for reverence, as worship in church, to draw viewers into a quasi narrative of the human drama.  It was also his way of ensuring that the work hung together, frieze-like, in order for the drama to unfold before the viewer as a would life itself.  Excepting portraits and some landscapes, almost all of his work done before 1910 fits into this body.  He never made a definitive list of the intended work, but Melancholy, Despair, Death in the Sick Room, Ashes, and most all of the other post 1893 work we have thus far examined were included.  When one of the pictures sold, Munch would hastily re-paint it so that it could re-assume its place in the physical narrative.  This penchant for redoing work is indicative of his intense, almost fanatical attachment to his paintings, which he referred to as his children, and could not bare to be parted from (the repainted versions are sometimes inferior replicas, although many exhibit a vigor and haste which are striking in their move towards a purer Expressionistic style).

Last week I visited the MoMA’s small Munch exhibition touting the recently auctioned pastel version of The Scream.  I’ll discuss this particular version in a moment, but we would be remiss not to begin with Munch’s first and most famous painted version of The Scream, as it is not only his best known work, but has come to symbolize (cloyingly so) the existential anxieties of the modern age.

It never gets old.  The original 1893 version painted on canvas.

Even reproducing it here is jarring (and despite the endless string of inflatable Screams, screaming Homer Simpsons and Scream-shaped foam stress balls, I am certain it has surpassed Grant Wood’s American Gothic as the most egregiously parodied painting of all time sometime in the last 15 years).  It still accomplishes everything it set out to do, and even if Munch was indeed pandering to the morbid trends of his day, there is no question that this could only have been painted in a fit of anxiety by an artist with a deeply troubled mind.  The figure is wholly unique in its utter lack of sex/gender – a wraith-like stand-in for every individual plodding through the modern, ever-changing landscape of life and progress.  The setting is Ljqbroveien, an elevated walkway on the hill of Ekeberg in east Oslo overlooking the Oslofjord and Hovedøya.  This was in close proximity both to Oslo’s slaughterhouse and the lunatic asylum where Munch’s sister Laura (whose portrait we saw in an earlier post) was incarcerated.  It is said that from this location, the screams of the patients mingled with shrieks of dying animals could be heard on occasion, so the title may have some literal connotations.  Nevertheless, the famous commentary written by Munch on this piece reads as follows:

“I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun set.  I felt a tinge of melancholy.  Suddenly the sky turned a bloody red.  I stopped, leaning on the fence.  I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.  My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with fright – and I felt an loud, unending scream piercing nature.”

There is little one can say about a work of which so much has been written (see Reinhold Heller’s book on the work from the 1980s, or any of the several recent monographs, of which there have been many), but one can comment on the different versions of the piece and, in a timely fashion, the record-breaking sale of the “2nd version” which sold at Sotheby’s in May of 2012 for $120 million.  This record price topped what had previously been the highest priced painting ever sold, Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which went for $106.5 million.  Pablo Picasso might never have been called an asshole, but I wonder what he’d think about Munch outselling him?

The recently auctioned, record-setting pastel version drawn in 1895, two years after the original.

I cannot but assert that this is a far inferior version, both to the original painting shown above, and to the black and white lithographic version shown below.  What makes it a true rarity, aside from its one-of-a-kind status as a pastel (it is not a painting, but a drawing), is that it is still housed in its original frame containing the plate upon which Munch scratched in the gloomy paragraph quoted above.  The head here seems detached, or as if the figure is about to lift it from its neck.  There is a frenetic, swirling energy in the lines: both the swirling skies and curving figure and fjord, and the dashed strait horizontal lines comprising the walkway that contrast so well with the undulating shapes of the former.  Alas, the richness of the original is gone, and the crayon-drawn head is so faint as to withhold the direct confrontation with the viewer that make the other versions so arresting.  It should be added that this is also the only version wherein one of the other two figures leans against the railing (rather than walking on, as described in Munch’s writing), bringing to mind Despair of 1892:

“Despair”, painted one year before the original version of “The Scream”

or this version done in 1893-94:

A second version of “Despair” done around the time of the first “Scream.”

The dates of these two versions of Despair barely preclude The Scream, and while it is possible that Munch was working on all of these at once (as he was known to work on several paintings simultaneously) they are more likely precursors of The Scream, which became a kind of shorthand, in-your-face culmination of the subject.   The figure has been paired down to the skeletal shell of a human so as to embody the sentiments of fear and terror, communicated in the most direct way possible.  It is not surprising, then, that he continued to use the walkway on the hill of Ekebergalong in subsequent works, as its sense of terror from the screams of animals and patients, along with its vertiginous heights and claustrophobic space, embodied a setting rife with paralysis, paranoia, and hints at agoraphobia.

“Anxiety” of 1894, done between versions of “The Scream”, brings a different sense of isolation to the viewer: that of agoraphobia and the detached, ghost-like automatons that we count among our fellow human beings.

Before ending on the glorious, bare-bones black and white lithographic version, we should touch for a moment on the theories surrounding Munch’s use of color in The Scream (and the other, similar versions/variations we have looked at) and address the (bullshit) theory that the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in the west Indies in 1883 had some influence on Munch’s color choice.  During the months spanning from 1883 to 84, the eruption tinted many of the skies around the Western hemisphere, and it has been posited that this comprised part of Munch’s memory and was put into the work in the form of literal representation.  Now Munch did write from time to time that he did in fact see the sky turn this color, but he would have been twenty years old at the time of the eruption and possibly traveling – in any case still battling it out with Realism and Norwegian Impressionism.  So while it is a quaint theory, the fact remains that Munch was a painter artist so innovative in his use of form, line, mark-making and subject matter that there is every reason to believe his artistic trajectory was moving toward a new, bolder palette.  Furthermore, he was familiar with other artists (particularly Paul Gaugin) who took great liberties with color in landscape.  It is with subtle roll of the eyes that I dismiss this theory entirely, as fun as it may be to play amateur art-historian-cum-historical meteorologist.

The Lithographic Version

The lithographic version of the same year as the pastel (1895) with full borders and what translates as “The Cry” written on the stone under the image.

The lithograph was created the same year as the first version of The Scream, in 1893.  More woodcut-like in its use of stark contrast and painted with liquid touche on the stone, it gave Munch a forum to focus exclusively on the tension of the severe horizontal line and undulating shapes.  Once again the figure confronts us directly.

The process of editioning prints (that is, making a set of identical prints and numbering them as is conventional in the art world today) held no interest for Munch.  Printed in Berlin in the Liebmann shop, he experimented with a wide variety of papers, and hand-painted many of these.  Of the black and white versions, about 25 are known to exist.  Rarer still are the versions with the printed German text as shown above, which read “I felt the great scream through nature.”

This work marked a turning point in Munch’s career, as many of his fellow countrymen, upon his return to Norway from Berlin, were decidedly and once-and-for-all convinced of his insanity (largely based on this piece).  A small handfull of his contemporaries (most notably the critic Sigbjorn Obstfelder and the Symbolist critic and avant-garde publisher Thadée Natanson) recognized the work(s) as a turning point for modern art, giving Munch both the means and courage to return to Paris to begin one of his most productive periods of constant work and frequent travel.

The 3rd and final version, painted in 1910 (17 years after the original) in tempera on cardboard, indicative that Munch never abandoned a subject.

Coda

For the record:  this is the only piece of Scream swag I can stomach (just saying, my birthday’s coming up fast – June is right around the corner.  The bleak, icy corner).

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Greg Cook’s Review for The Boston Phoenix of “I Wouldn’t Worry About It.” Verbatim.

I don’t know if this is like re-tweeting (but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with re-tweeting – hell, I’ve done it!), but in the interest of keeping the posts on this blog regular (and perhaps showing off?) I reproduce Greg Cook’s review of my show from the November 21st edition of the Boston Phoenix.  Without further ado:

David Curcio: needle point

“This show is about as personal as I can be without sitting down and telling the story,” David Curcio says of his ruefully titled exhibit “I Wouldn’t Worry About It.”

His folksy drawing-and-embroidery What Will Survive of Us Is Nothing shows a man and woman in 19th-century garb crying, surrounded by a border of animal traps, shackles, knives, flaming lighters, and pills arranged like flowers. More Than You Know offers decorative patterns of pills that frame a heart, a woman’s reproductive system, and women’s butts. Script across the bottom reads, “Before I go I need to be something more than skin & bones, you see.”

The 40-year-old Watertown artist’s delicate, endearing pictures are like scratched-out diaries of a heart laid bare. His symbols — pills, razor blades, tears, flowers, Abraham Lincoln, scantily clad ladies — channel his losses over the past year or so: divorce, having to sell his home and close his Ningyo Editions gallery.

“The show’s about [antidepressant] drugs. The show’s about depression. The show’s about self-loathing. The show’s about sex,” Curcio says. “It’s a way of making something beautiful out of something awful.”

Top: More Than You Know

Above: What Will Survive of Us is Nothing

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/arts/147798-david-curcio-needle-point/#ixzz2EuADBj00

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A Brief Interview for “I Wouldn’t Worry About It” at Laconia Gallery

Q.

A.  I want the work to serve as a mirror to everybody’s inner conflicts and demons.  Al art is in the end subjective.  Just because one person deals with anxiety and depression does not mean that the sharing of these ordeals through their art cannot, hopefully, bring comfort to those dealing with a different set of ordeals, be they other mood disorders or the general existential ennui that life dishes out on a regular basis.

Q.

A. Of course the work is personal – deeply – but the quotations (both my own and those culled from songs, literature and other sources) are not meant to be so cryptic/personal so as to exclude the viewer.  On the contrary, they are meant to draw the viewer in with their mystery.  Taken out of context and paraphrased (or butchered completely), pop song lyrics take on new, sometimes ominous meanings, and I wanted to exploit that.  The same can be said for scraps taken from literature or overheard conversations).  In the case where the writing is my own, I readily admit that I am a terrible poet, but that in these rather clunky rhymes a struggle comes through which I hope does something to convey the difficulty inherent in creating these works.

Q.

A.  I’d rather not answer that, and not because it is too personal or any big secret, but because I don’t want the viewer’s perception of the work to be altered with such knowledge.  A large case has been provided within the exhibition containing several personal artifacts from which an even mildly astute viewer can draw reasonably accurate conclusions.  This has to be enough.  There is such a thing as over-explaining, and then what is the point of showing the work at all?  It would then be a case of simply so much whining.

Q.

A. Abraham Lincoln is (obviously) a fascinating figure in many respects, least of all to me was his ability to live with severe depression (or melancholy, as it was called in his day), and still carry out achievements based on his beliefs and convictions – achievements that changed the course of history.  In many respects it is a wonder he made it through his twenties at all as he was so depressed that at times he was put on suicide watch, with all sharp objects removed from his house.  He was a multifaceted thinker, prone to changing his views as he gained information, which in today’s political forum would have found him dismissed as a great flip-flopper.  This stands as a testament to his honesty, both with himself and with his constituents.  He was not afraid to admit he was wrong and to change his mind if he thought it wise, and at times he was quite comfortable wearing his ambiguity on his sleeve.   In any case, the fact that he survived his troubled life with a sense of humor and endured a marriage fraught with a great deal of strife is a wonder for any human.  The fact that he accomplished what he did on top of all of this is just miraculous.

Q.

A. Without the asses and the panty-clad bottoms in various stages of disrobement, the work would come across as perhaps too serious, and too heavy.  I believe with the razors, pills, tears and other objects of pain or unnatural coping mechanisms, it is heavy enough.  But the bottoms are not there to add levity for its own sake.  The roles of love and lust play a great role in living with (and recovering from) a serious bought of depression, and help to keep the anxiety at bay, at least temporarily.

Q.

Well, the symbols can be broken down into three categories – pills, sharp objects and objectified, isolated female anatomy.  All of these serve as some type of emollient in one way or another: the pills are a double-edged sword of relief/comfort and potential harm and addiction; the sharp objects offer a morbid comfort as a means of self-harm during the worst of my moods; and the behinds offer a comfort in the form of carnal desire and amorous release.  In this respect I suppose they relate to each other in differing degrees of their roles as safety valves.  I do want to be clear that the knives and razors are never meant to seem directed at the female forms (as a few viewers have suggested).  The fact that they may appear alongside objects of potential harm does not equate them with harm in themselves, or with any wish to direct harm at them. I am aware of the act of objectifying the female form – isolating, fetishising and hyper-sexualizing a particular body part, and the slippery slope that introduces to many viewers.  However, I reject claims of  misogyny or lazy objectification as we are once again discussing a personal symbolism that conveys an ameliorating antidote to anxiety and despair.  This takes the form of abbreviated hieroglyphs.  Of course, as I stated at the beginning, the work is really a mirror to the viewer’s own anxieties and hang-ups, so I will not argue with anyone’s interpretation, no matter how far it may stray from my own intentions.

Q.

A.  The title for the show was chosen from a handful of possible titles that I proposed.  The first was Pro Re Nada (as in PRN, a medical term meaning “take as needed” or literally,” as required”).  Another was The Hour of Defeat, which is the name of one of the pieces in the show and part of the the first paragraph of a Hawthorn short story (and for the life of me I cannot remember which).  The former was rejected as it was too medical, speaking only to one aspect of the work.  The latter was rejected as too gloomy.  I suggested I Wouldn’t Worry About It as it seems to speak, albeit glibly, to the body of work as a whole and the concerns it seems to arouse in others, as well as to my own anxious nature.  It seems like a good mantra or catch-phrase for the anxiety prone, just as Philip Marlow (as portrayed by Eliot Gould in Robert Altman’s film version of The Long Goodbye) would frequently say “It’s okay with me.”  I took the phrase from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.  The scene is played out verbatim in the film version as well:  When the villain, Anton Chigurh, comes to kill the wife of the protagonist , she says to him “…I had about seven thousand dollars all told and I can tell you it’s been long gone and they’s bills aplenty left to pay yet.  I buried my mother today.  I aint (sic) paid for that neither”, to which Chigurh says “I wouldn’t worry about it.”  The suggestion is that none of our earthly, day-to-day concerns matter at all in the face of death.

Q.

A.  I leave that entirely in the hands of the viewer.

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The (Partially Aborted) Munch Lecture: Part 3

In continuing the discussion of Munch as either a) paranoid misogynist, b) panderer to the rising trend of woman-bashing or c) a bit of both, it is notable to stress  again the paradox between his genuine paranoia; his frailty arising from his several heartbreaks and deaths of his mother and sister;  and his keen perception of cultural and literary trends instilling misogynistic fears in the (primarily male) public.  It is probably most accurate to accept that there was a bit of both at play: his delicate emotional constitution certainly gave him reason to hold the opposite sex with a certain degree of fear, but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that (as has already been discussed) he had the capacity to portray the females in his life individuals and not types; with affection and sympathy rather than fear and contempt.  His more inimical portrayals were of a generic, archetypal nature: the dominant, devouring female not modeled directly on any individual, though inspired by several.  A particularly poignant image from 1893 of his sister Laura – unusual in its sad, individualistic portrayal of a woman – shows one of his last surviving family members succumbing to the family trait of madness.

. 

Melancholy (Laura Munch)

Here he portrays his sister within a claustrophobic but warm and womb-like interior, sheltered (at least temporarily) from the frigid Nordic winter outside.  Hope seems to creep into the picture as life blood spreads across the table from a spring-time flower, emphasizing the theme of regeneration and metabolism.  Whatever was to happen to Laura, it seemed to say, it was all a part of the larger cycle of life and death.  She was ultimately hospitalized permanently in the asylum Gaustad.  Located near Oslo’s main slaughterhouse, the screams from both could be heard from the same elevated walkway depicted in The Scream and several other works (and yes, we will be getting to The Scream in the next installment).

After Munch’s death in 1944 many Americans, to whom Munch’s work was still relatively new (he’d had only one US show in his lifetime – in Pittsburgh of all places), applied the stringent Freudian readings so popular during the mid 20th century.  The first English language publication appeared in The Journal of Psychiatry in 1954 by Drs. Stienberg and Weiss, who bandied about such Freudian platitudes as “deprivations in childhood” due to the losses of his mother and sister, “fear of women” and “castration anxiety” (just look at those phallic moonbeams.)  While there is no doubt that the literature presenting Munch to the American public for the first time was an overly simplistic, narrow-minded product of its time, further examination of the writings of his day show a slant that does lend some credence to these mid-century Freudian readings.  The reason for this is that Munch himself was well acquainted with the ideas as they emerged (and which were old hat in 1954 America), and in many respects was chronicling the theories of his time along with his own life and the anxieties that made up his milieu and zeitgeist.

In The Kiss from the mid 1890s, Munch portrayed what appears to be the tender embrace of a couple before an open window.  He reworked this image many times, both in paintings and as prints.  It is pertinent here to examine a woodcut version, done only a few years later, in which the couple seem to have fused into a single entity.  There is no longer a him and a her, but a single being.

There are different means of interpretation here: the romanticized fusing of a man and a woman losing themselves in the act of love, or the negative side of the same coin -love as the dissolution of the self and loss of individuality.  It is unclear which version it was that August Stridberg wrote his fabulously loathsome interpretation of the scene “…the fusion of two beings, the smaller of which, shaped like a carp, seems on the point of devouring the larger, as is the habit of vermin, microbes, vampires and women.”  The reference to germs and disease was not a random allusion.  The horrors of venereal disease played tremendously into the contemporary archetype of woman as a harbinger of death, and syphilis in particular was being equated (with great panic and urgency) with women’s emerging sexuality.

Felician Rops (whose “The Greatest Love of Don Juan” we saw earlier), created his etching “Satan” in 1865, which depicts syphilis as a towering, skeletal prostitute laying waste to Paris.

The fear surrounding syphilis that gripped Europe in the 19th century cannot be overemphasized.  In addition to pouring gasoline on the flames of misogyny, it came to be equated with xenophobia, antisemitism and, in America, with foreignness in general.  D.H. Lawrence wrote that the rise of syphilis reshaped entirely any form of sexual expression and engagement for men, replacing its pleasures with fear.  Of course, at the risk of stating the obvious, it was a two-way street, and although its spread was due mainly to prostitution, it was transferred by both sexes.  Untreated, it resulted in leprosy-like deformation and disfigurement, and ultimately madness (none of which stopped Munch’s friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski from squarely placing the blame in writing “The tragedy of mankind is to be destroyed by women”).  While the diseased, sunken features in Munch’s Madonna are suggestive of the affliction,  Munch’s interpretations were numerous, varied, and diplomatic.  The painting Inheritance of 1899 carries his common concern with rebirth and the endless cycle of life, death, and new life, depicting the seeds of the disease as passed on to a new generation.  While it speaks to Munch’s writings on his own fear of inheriting both a weak physical constitution and insanity, the painting reads as universal: a syphilitic repicturing of the Madonna and Child wherein both sexes and generations are shown as victims.

Admittedly, it is not surprising that Przybyszewski wrote such a harsh, one-sided indictment of female-kind, and we certainly know that he was not alone in his thinking (especially with all of the cockamamie Darwinian theories sprouting up that threatened women’s equality would result in an enervation of the species).  It was at this time that the femme fatale became a popular archetype in bohemian society – the highly sexualized woman whose volition and appetites devoured the hearts of men unprepared for such bold, confident prowess.  It is an archetype that lasted through the mid 20th century, appearing in the noir novels of David Goodis, Dorothy B. Hughs and Raymond Chandler, right through to modern films like Body Heat, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.

Perhaps the most celebrated femme fatale of fin de siecle Berlin was Pzybyszewski’s wife Dagny Juel.  By all accounts a force of nature, she was reported to be otherworldly and ethereal in her beauty and insatiable in her appetites, moving from man to man and leaving heartbreak, jealous rage and even suicides in her wake.

A photograph of Dagny Juell and Przybyszewski from 1897.

In 1893 Munch met Dagny, and painted her portrait with great tenderness.  There developed a love triangle between himself and the Przybyszewskis, and it has been posited that Munch’s famous Self Portrait with Cigarette was meant as a companion piece to his painting of Dagny.  Both are presented below:

Both show their subjects firmly in the milieu, as if emerging out of the mist of smoke and lust that pervaded Zum Swarzen Fergel.  No raw or blatant sexuality on display, Dagny is shown in a black dress that covers her body.  There is, however, an implicit seduction in her teetering pose and sweet, insouciant smile.  Munch, on the other hand, portrays himself as the consummate tortured bohemian.  Caught as if by surprise, he confronts us with bewildered but calculating eyes – a business-like, accomplished artist hiding behind the rising smoke while emerging from a scratchy blue fog of an alcoholic haze.  Much has been made of this masterful self-portrait, and for an artist who painted himself hundreds of times throughout the course of his life, it remains one of his most arresting images.  Dagny, on the other hand, exudes a projected, disingenuous innocence, the very picture of sexual decadence and the new woman.  The Finnish writer Adolph Paul described her as vagina dentata, or the vagina with teeth, capable of un-sexing a male through the very act of copulation.  He wrote of a “smile that made you wish for kisses but inspired fear of the two rows of pearl-white teeth which waited behind her thin lips for a chance to strike.”  Dagny and Munch indeed consummated their mutual attraction, and he painted several versions of the jealous Przybyszewski – the cuckold husband barely enduring his wife’s infidelities.  It is worth recalling here that this jealous grief  comes from the man who was free love’s most staunch advocate, and remained so.  Espousing polygamous relations to the end, he bore his grief to uphold his beliefs.  Two examples of the jealousy theme depicting Munch, Dagny Juel and Przybyszewski are presented below:

In “Jealousy” of 1896, Pzybyszewski confronts the viewer while an iconic, highly sexualized woman in red resembling an opening vagina (faceless, but meant to represent Dagny as an archetype) engages a faceless man (presumably the artist himself) in the background.

In “Red Virginia Creeper” of 1900, Przybyszewski, quite literally green with jealousy, flees from a house covered in Virginia Creepers representing dripping blood where there is presumably a tryst between his wife and another man taking place within.

Dagny and Przybyszewski eventually moved to Przybyszewski ‘s native Poland, where  they joined the bohemian society there and helped popularize Munch’s work with the Polish literati (obviously no hard feelings over the whole fucking-your-wife-thing).  Perhaps t was inevitable that Przybyszewski soon abandoned Dagny for another woman, and she in turn began an affair with the son of a mine owner named Wladyslaw Emeryk.  In a jealous rage Emeryk shot her in the head (in front of her five year-old son) before killing himself in a hotel in the Caucuses in 1901.

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Cheap Eats: The Cafeteria At The Short Term Unit At McLean Hospital

Food: Dining Out In*

A glorified version of food served in a hospital, which has absolutely

nothing to do with this entry other than by way of contrast .

The first thing you think of when dining in Belmont is generally boring but serviceable “family” restaurants (“family” in the sense that they are filled with screaming brats who presumably have families somewhere in the restaurant); a few mediocre ethnic restaurants; or overpriced Italian fare (some good, some not – you know who you are).  Always eager to try new up-and-comings, and then blog (or even Yelp!) about them as if we have some sort of qualifications (all the while writing in the first person plural when it is really just me sitting alone in bed with my cats), we decided to venture ever deeper into the sylvan, autumnal outskirts of this bedroom community to the renowned McLean Hospital.

The once-temporary home to Sylvia Plath (killed herself, oven), Zelda Fitzgerald (died in a fire awaiting shock treatment), Ann Sexton (killed herself, vodka and CO2 poisoning), David Foster Wallace (killed himself, hanging); and Livingston Taylor (recorded an album in 1988 called Life Is Good), McLean is situated across the street from a vast community garden abundant in organically grown produce, a fact totally irrelevant to this review and the in-house fare.

The wait at The Cafeteria At The Short Term Unit (or STU) can be upwards of 2 hours, but this does not seem to deter the droves of hungry denizens that line up outside, having no other choices.  We, however, wisely arrived exactly upon it’s opening at 5 PM (though we were not surprised to see a few of the faithful already mulling around its doors to fill up on the daily special before filing up on evening meds).  After all the hype surrounding the Main Cafeteria, which has firmly secured its well-deserved reputation, boasting a passable salad bar, an (admittedly small but carefully selected) variety of Chobani yogurt, Smart Water; and “proudly serving” Starbucks coffee, we were surprised that the chefs/industrial-food-service employees behind this tried-and-true staple would venture even further off the ‘eaten path to the inpatient units, all to serve up pre-prepared meals to those unable to dine – supervised or no – in the Main Caf.

Unlike its cosmopolitan counterpart, ordering and paying is infinitely easier in the cafeteria at the STU. (N.B. STU is an acronym for Short Term Unit. The staff and patients freely employ the quip “In the STU” – pronounce: ‘stew’ – believing that the devilish double entendre never gets old.  Unfortunately, it also comes across as a desperate stab at levity in its attempt at making light of something that is in fact gravely serious and extremely depressing.)  The selection process is rustic and no-nonsense, inspired by small 20-seater trattorie or Parisian bistros.  When it comes to ordering, you don’t actually order jack shit, but take what is available. If you are smart you will indicate a “special diet” upon your arrival.  We did, telling them we were a vegetarian.  In such cases one can but hope for hummus, pita, and raw vegetables while accepting the equal likelihood of being presented with a pasta of suspect origin dreadful enough to make you reconsider why you checked yourself in here voluntarily.  As to paying, you’re not! Your insurance is (after your deductible, which was likely wiped out within an hour into your intake, so mangia!).

It’s seat-yourself-first-come-first-serve,  reminiscent of  the casual seafood restaurants hidden within the shadowy back alleys of Venice or the sushi bars that line the teeming side streets of Osaka.  After being seated, we started with a fried fish accompanied by french fries.  In the interest of clarity, I should stress that when I say we “started with,” we also “finished with”, as this was the sole offering for the evening.  The tables generally seat four, although we squeezed in five by dragging another chair to the head of one of the tables.  The initial plan was to pull two tables together and make one longer table so as to facilitate group dining, but alas the tables are ingeniously affixed to the floor, simultaneously underscoring the institutional charm of the dining room while preventing anyone from creating a makeshift battering ram.  After one of us tried the fish, it was pronounced shit.  Very few of us ate it at all (myself included – I would not have  touched it wearing rubber gloves and a condom).  Spending a full minute and a half contemplating the a la carte green beans in a blissful but puzzled Seroquel haze that probably made the server a bit uncomfortable, I opted instead for one of the Nature Valley granola bars (Oats ‘n’ Honey flavor), always available in the drawers with the salt, pepper, and sugar packets (sorry Ladies, no Sugar In The Raw, so be sure to bring in a hand-full from the “outside” or pocket some from the Main Caf. if and when your privileges are raised and you are allowed to go on supervised walks).  The granola bars I topped, using plastic knives that could not cut through jelly, with peanut butter, available in single serving packets one drawer down.

The shiny, shitty entree was  pronounced “shiny” and “shit” by the one person who tried it and who, despite the fact that this is a mental hospital, we all believed unconditionally.

We attempted to finish with dessert, which turned out to be the very fruit left over from breakfast (I recognized the exact placement of the sticker on a particularly small and sad apple, having studied that as well for an uncomfortably long period of time).  Recalling that the whole batch seemed rather tired and mealy eight hours ago, we instead investigated the plastic coffee carafe for any dregs of what is, at its freshest, bad coffee mixed with equally bad decaf and hot water.  Alas, no joy.  (Sad emoticon face.)  The carafe had been empty for the larger portion of the afternoon.  At this point many turned to the Salada Orange Pekoe tea for caffeine sustenance, or Diet Pepsi brought back from the Main Caf. during a supervised walk.  I instead opted to engage in desperate, pathetic bargaining with an emotionally and physically compromised patient suffering nausea and stomach pain after ECT treatment for one of her Starbucks Via packets, marking a low point in my life as it pertains to coffee (or vice versa).  The negotiations and supplications proved successful upon promising her I would score her a genuine Grande Skinny Latte from The Green Mermaid herself the following afternoon, to be brought in from the outside (which I did, and which she didn’t end up wanting due to continued stomach pain, and which I then drank, and which caused me stomach pain – I just can’t involve skim milk in anything).

While service was cut off a bit abruptly – the gentleman with the food trolly wheeled it away before any of us could have stopped him, were we to have tried, which we didn’t.  In fine spirits, we left the Cafeteria at the STU eager for our evening meds and PRNs (whether we really needed them or not, the pro re nata is a desert in itself).  Reflecting upon our dining experience that evening at The Cafeteria At The STU, we were indeed confident of one thing: we would be back – first thing in the morning.

I insert this picture solely in the interest of further depressing the reader. A quick Google search for “hospital food” yielded  this very image several times.  I did not  investigate further.

*(David Curcio has no qualifications for writing about food.  Nor, for that matter, does any food writer.)

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The (Partially-Aborted) Munch Lecture: Part Two

“My fear of life is necessary for me.  Without anxiety and illness I would be a ship without a rudder”

Upon his return to France in 1890 Munch received news of his father’s death.  Far from inured to deaths within his family, he nevertheless must have felt this loss as something of a relief.  He knew the old man had suffered terribly since the death of his wife Laura (Munch’s mother), and that his religious mania had driven him quite literally insane.  As a doctor, Christian Munch was a man familiar with human suffering (indeed, he used to bring the young Edvard on his rounds, further familiarizing the boy with pain, illness and death), and his own was perhaps the least bearable for his inability to acknowledge it.  Christian’s death must also have released Munch from the burden of guilt he lived under while his disapproving father was still alive.  Aware of his son’s growing fame, he was shocked and horrified by the bohemian ideals that his son embraced and promoted through his paintings and writings.  His son was a purveyor of immorality and atheism, and it broke the old man’s heart.

Munch spent that year in Saint Cloud, a western suburb of Paris, where he began to consider seriously not only his role but his responsibilities as a painter.  It was all well and good for his reputation and growing fame to shock the public as he had in Berlin, but the paintings he produced must have continuity in meaning to keep with the work he had already produced.  He strove for an art that was entirely pure and honest – where concern for detail and realism would succumb to his own forceful, direct type of Impressionism, creating scenes at once unique (as if seen in a moment of intense, personal emotion) and at the same time universal.  It was at this time that he wrote in his journal what has come to be known as the Saint Cloud Manifesto, an excerpt from which reads: “No longer would interiors, people who read and women who knit be painted… There should be living people who breath and feel, suffer and love… People should understand the sanctity, the grandeur of it, and would take off their hats as if in a church… I should paint a number of such pictures.”

“Night in St. Cloud”, 1890, depicts the artist in a moonlit reverie, on the cusp of defining his artistic goals.

Rather than returning  to Norway, Munch want back to Berlin in the early 1890s, the scene of his first large exhibition and succès de scandale .  Here he began his exploration of another germane contemporary theme: the portrayal of urban life as conducive to a sense of alienation; the displacement of feelings resulting from anomie (or the breakdown of social bonds between the individual and community); and the de-personalization and loss of individuality within cities  and resulting from the Industrial Age.  The term Neurasthenia had been coined as early as 1829 to label a mechanical weakness of the nerves, but was made popular in 1869 by the American psychiatrist George M. Beard and re-branded to refer specifically to “the compromised urban body” with symptoms including nervous exhaustion, chronic fatigue and physical complaints resulting in over-population – the price paid by the human soul to eke out life in the urban jungle, wherein the conveniences of modern living and thousands of fellow humans brought on a deep sense of anonymity and loss of self.

“Evening on Karl Johan Street”, 1892

Such a theme was not only new to visual art, but gave voice to a new generation of city dwellers reaping the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.  It also foreshadowed what were to become some of Munch’s most popular and common subjects depicting the horror vacui of existence (the two examples of “Melancholy” of the previous post quietly evince this).

In Berlin, Munch fell in with a new group of literary bohemians knows as Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (translated as “The Black Piglet” for the image that adorned the cafe’s wooden sign).  Headed by the Swedish play write,  novelist, and sometimes-painter August Strindberg(whose own paintings caused some uproar in Berlin) and the Polish novelist Stanislav Przybyszewski, this group was even more dogmatic in its ideals, particularly those pertaining to free love.  As Sigmund Freud was developing his ground-breaking  theories of sexuality and the unconscious, Zum Schwarzen Ferkel was also placing great importance on sex, dreams and irrationality along with interest in alchemy (particularly in Strindberg’s case) and Satanism (with Przybyszewski).

A lithograph by Munch of August Strindberg from 1896

Munch’s watercolor and charcoal drawing of Stanslav Przybyszewski, amidst human bones symbolizing death, from 1895

Concomitant to these trends of fee love (or as a result of them), a new strain of Feminism was emerging in Northern Europe during the turn of the century.  The social and economic effects of the Industrial Revolution actually further solidified women’s roles as unemployed housewives while improving the overall financial situations for the average middle-class family.  While many new jobs were created through industrialization, much of the work was preformed by men: mining, machinery, factory work – even farm work, once shared with women, was becoming mechanized and the labor being turned over to men.  As a result of job creation, the average family’s income grew, allowing for the woman of the household to focus on domestic work and child-rearing.  Amidst this relegation of women to lives of domesticity; amidst stirrings of the free love movement; and amidst Freud’s new theories of women as independent sexual beings with individual needs and volition, women began to challenge their sexual dependence on men.

Much of Freud’s interpretations were nevertheless highly sexist in tone: with some exceptions (see Freud’s case studies of The Rat Man and The Wolf Man), hysteria was seen as a Victorian by-product of sexual repression specific to women – a female disease cured by hospitalization and masturbatory techniques such as the use of primitive vibrators.  The women of the Chistiania and Berlin bohemian societies sought total sexual liberation through their behavior and lifestyle.  Although initially supported by the artists and writers within these counter-cultural groups, the open relationships and polyamorous  arrangements of free love proved challenging to even the staunchest of its male supporters, pathologized by the very men who initially advocated it.

The etching “Under the Yoke” of 1896 depicts an insouciant woman – bold and free in her nakedness – as a male approaches her “under the yoke” (meaning “under a great burden”).

The male backlash against women’s free love was swift and desperate, carried out through feeble, quasi-scientific arguments.  Strindberg saw an acute threat to males in regards to social stability and emasculation (this coming from a renowned misogynist and an even more renowned cuckold).  Darwinian theory stressed the role of women as vessels of reproduction, hypothesizing a risk of a weakening of the species resulting from women’s equality and sexual liberation.  Among other artists, Munch especially gave voice to the eternal conflict between the sexualized and de-sexualized woman as perceived by men.  The phenomenon was defined in psychoanalytic terms by Freud as “The Madonna-Whore Complex” which, in short, dictates that while  it is the virgin – pure and untouched by another – that man wishes to marry, it is the whore (or the sexually experienced woman) that he wishes to fuck.  Munch did a painting (and then several other versions in lithographic form) titled “Madonna” which acknowledges this conundrum from both sides: woman as a sensual lover, seductress, and possible bearer of disease (note the corpse-like eyes and deathly pallor – venereal disease will be discussed at length in the next entry), while emphasizing her role as reproductive vessel  and conduit between generations, all the while wearing a halo (in the painted version) to underscore her divinity as suggested by the title.

The 1895 painted version, with its emphasis on the divine, virginal halo, despite the woman’s being in the act of copulation.

The lithographic version (of which there are many variations) stresses the woman as a conduit of life, love and death with her corpse-like eyes, the border of spermatozoa, and the unhappy outcome of of the act of copulation in the form of a pathetic fetus on the lower left.

Around this time Munch became acquainted with the German Zoologist Ernst Haekel’s “Law of Substance”,  or Monism.  The theory of Monism dictates that there exists only one basic substance that comprises all things, that reality consists of a single element.  In this way, all matter is indistinguishable: organic and in organic, living and dead, matter and energy, body and soul.  This is to say that there are elusive, erudite, abstract theories (i.e. the soul) that are as real, and made from the same stuff, as any physical object.  Munch took to this atheistic view of immortality, as it implies that the soul lives on in another form.  He saw much of our (and especially his own) matter as “nervous mass” that will pass into new combinations upon decomposition (matter becomes new matter, energy becomes new energy, and the cycle is endlessly repeated).

This theory is illustrated in many of his works of this time, including the lithographic version of Madonna above, with its depiction of the endlessly repetitive cycle of life, death and birth.  Below, in the drawing Metabolism, skulls and bones lying just beneath the ground hover over a woman’s corpse which in turn sprouts new life forms, culminating in a tree (an important symbol of life for Munch) and a young woman who, belly big with child, continues the cycle.

A telling diary entry from 1892 describes Munch’s  resonance with the theory of Monism, and is worth quoting at length:

“It would be a pleasurable experience to sink into, to unite with… that everlasting, ever-stirring earth… I would become one with it, the plants and trees would grow up out of my rotting corpse… I would live on… That is eternity… A body does not vanish.  Its substance is transformed, converted.  Nobody can say where the spirit goes to.”

While the theory of Monism remained for Munch a comforting possibility for a vague, organic sort of afterlife, it did little to abate his very mixed feelings surrounding women during this tumultuous time of sexual upheaval, and works incorporating Monistic theory (such as the Madonna lithograph) were also fraught with anti-feminist, Darwinian notions of women as simple vessels of reproduction, despite their tremendous sexual pull.  In The Three Stages of Woman (1894), Munch attempted to illustrate the distinct milestones within a woman’s life: the budding virgin in the process of sexual awakening; the free, fertile, sensual being, naked in her glory and capable of giving life as well as taking it away; and the dried-up widow, her sexual organs now useless, awaiting death.

Note the virginal woman facing the sea, frequently interpreted as a vast womb, while the widow seems resigned to a sexless fate.  The male on the far right seems defeated,  quietly exiting the picture frame.

“The Voice” of 1893 depicts the first of Munch’s stages of woman.  A young woman, set within Norway’s Borre Forest during the early summer’s midnight sun, stands at the cusp of sexual awakening. Dressed in white, she at once leans forward and pulls back, as lovers set out on a moonlit boat ride behind her and the moon casts a phallic beam that further emphasizes her awakening desire.

The Three Stages of Woman is an example in a symbolic format of man as a passive victim tossed hither and thither by by the inception, fruition , and decline of woman’s sexuality.  In contrast to woman’s changing  sexual role, that of the male in Munch’s work remains constant – delicate and subject to bitter jealousy and lonesome abandonment.  Two examples are shown below:

Of Ashes from 1894, Munch wrote “I felt our love lying on the ground like a heap of ashes.”  Love is like fire, he maintained, and it consumes until nothing is left.  Here he depicts the end of an affair with both parties in some state of suffering, though the male is clearly taking it much harder.  He is reduced to an ignominious, defeated shape on the lower left, unable to face the world (note the ‘jealous’ tinge of green in his skin) while the woman, also distraught, rises from this heap in full possession of her sexual powers (the long red hair retains its grasp on the man while the triangle of red symbolizing desire runs like a slit up to her breasts).

In Separation of 1896, a similar scene takes place.  This time, the woman (now in a virginal white as if to absolve her from all blame) leaves a man as she walks toward the sea.  Again, it is her hair that retains its hold on him.  It should be noted that Munch painted several versions of both of these paintings, as he was to do with the majority of his imagery over his lifetime (including printed versions).  We will discuss this propensity for obsessionally re-painting an image in a later entry.

Arguably the greatest example of Man’s utter capitulation to Woman’s sexuality is the 1895 painting Vampire, of which Stanislaw Przybyszewski wrote:

“The man spins around and around in infinite depths, without a will, powerless.  And he rejoices that he can spin like that… without volition.  But he cannot rid himself of the pain, and the woman will always sit there, will bite eternally with the tongues of a thousand vipers, with a thousand venomous teeth.”

Munch originally titled the painting (which was followed by several lithographic and woodcut versions) both “Love and Pain” and “Man Kissing Woman on the Neck.”  It was at Pryzbyszewski’s urging that he retitled the work.  That Munch willingly changed the title (which gives the painting a more malevolent air, wherein there can be no argument who is the aggressor and who is the victim) is a clear example of Munch’s pandering to the fashions of the day – in this case misogyny and fear.  Years later he shrugged the incident off, writing “It is in reality only a woman who kisses a man on the neck…  (but) it was the time of Ibsen…  if people were really bent on reveling in Symbolist eeriness and called the idyll Vampire, why not?”  It is also clear that Munch was pandering to something of a vampire craze that was sweeping Europe in the mid to late 19th century (much like we have our own ebb and flow of vampire literature to this day, from Anne Rice to Twilight) with the publication of Carmilla by Sheridon le Fanu in 1870 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.

That Munch so often presented these woman-destroyers with red hair both tapped into ancient myths and contemporary depictions of redheaded women as evil or destructive (e.g. the titular vampire in le Fanu’s Carmilla, or the ancient Greek myth that, upon death, redheaded women return to life as vampires).  It was also an eerie foreshadowing of his most destructive(and in many ways last) serious affair a decade later.  We can conclude that Munch was never totally reactionary nor was he totally misogynistic, but somewhere in between, and only too comfortable to pander to his milieu in regards to the vilification of women within his imagery, or to the spirit of morbidity in general.

Munch could depict women as both inimical sexual predators or humbly, as gentle, dignified individuals (especially in his portraits).  Contrast Beast of 1901 with Woman in Blue (Frau Barth) of twenty years later below:

The Beast, 1901

Woman in Blue (Frau Barth), 1921

Nevertheless, his leanings toward the former depictions of women in a more fearsome (if not fully misogynistic) light during the turn-of-the-century took hold with the wildly popular concept of the femme fatale, originating in the climate of free love and sexual liberation, and exacerbated exponentially by fears of venereal disease in general and syphilis in particular.  This will be discussed at the beginning of the next post, wherein a new, smouldering beauty emerges on the scene in Zum Schwarzen Ferkel.

This is the end of part two.  If you actually made it this far, I am hugely flattered and beg you to leave a comment (even if it is negative).

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The (Partially-Aborted) Munch Lecture: Part One

On Monday, August 27th, I gave a (partial) lecture entitled “Edvard Munch: His Life and Work in Context” for the venerable Nerd Nite lecture series at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge.  (It was even written up on the blog Four Letter Word.  While I didn’t think I was “timid”,it was a very complimentary write up, so an breezy island-style mahalo for that.)  I had planned on speaking for about an hour and a half, and less than 24 hours before the event was informed that the talks generally last 20-30 minutes.  “You should have found out ahead of time how long it was supposed to go!”, the sapient reader shouts at the screen.  Well, no shit.  I blame-a-myself.
After covering about a third of the material during the lecture I was politely informed that I had been speaking for 40 minutes, at which point I apologized, took fifteen minutes worth of questions, and with a mixture of heartfelt remorse and gratitude shared my hopes that the little taste comprising the first 36 years of the octogenarian’s life might at least offer a taste that would encourage further exploration within the audience on their own.
So, with the ningyo editions gallery gone and my usual depression and lethargy in momentary abatement, why not use the forum of this blog to deliver the lecture in writing (in 3 or 4 sections  – maybe more)?  Much of this you may get from any monograph or Wiki search, and for those of you looking for a thorough immersion I recommend Sue Prideaux’s excellent 2007 Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream.  The advantage (or disadvantage, as some may see it) in the case of reading about Munch on this blog is that you get it in my own voice.  If that annoys you, you’re probably not reading this anyway.  In any case, let’s begin.

“Poor Pale Edvard” and his mother, Laura Munch

In this somewhat free-form written lecture/quasi-educational diatribe (replete with ramblings only blogs will allow) I will try to point out some common misconceptions of the great Norwegian known primarily for his iconic, much-parodied The Scream of 1896.  Any schoolboy in knee pants who has read extensively on Munch will be familiar with much of what I’m saying, but the rest of you may hopefully learn something about the man, his work, and the trends, obsessions and fears that plagued his cultural milieu.  You will also come to see that while history has certainly made his legacy that of a tormented genius, he was also an astute business man, very much attuned to the above-mentioned trends and fashions and capable of incorporating them into his work and thus capitalizing on turn-of-the-century preoccupations with sex and morbidity.

“Two of mankind’s most horrible enemies were granted to me as an inheritance… tuberculosis and mental illness.  Sickness and insanity were the black angels that guarded my cradle… (They) stood at my side, followed me out while I played, followed me in the sun in springtime and in the glories of summer.  They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation.”

Munch was born in 1863 as Norway was coming out of its “Night of 400 Years” (the name given to a period of a lack of national solidarity and ever-shifting rule).  The glory days of the Vikings vanished during the Middle Ages, and his was a country in search of an identity.  It remained under Danish rule, shared a king with Sweden, and did not become its own country until 1905.  Art was an important means of establishing (and maintaining) identity, and in the mid 19th century a pastoral, agrarian Realism was the order of the day.  Artists traveling to Paris were returning having absorbed Impressionism and Symbolism, while Romanticism was shunned for its Teutonic stigma (Norway aligned itself with France during political turmoil with Germany at this time).  However, all art was grist for the mill for the young Munch.

A lot has been written on Munch’s family life and upbringing: the son of an Army corps doctor and full-time mother, Munch had 3 younger siblings (Peter, Laura and Inger) and an elder sister (Sophie).  In 1868, when young Edvard was five years old, his mother Laura died of tuberculosis.  While there is little evidence to support that the young Munch could remember very much about the death, he writes a great deal about his dying mother’s attempts to gently instill the fear of God into her children, and to have them understand that they would meet again in heaven.  Alas, in his later years he writes “but they did not understand, and they wept.  Wept bitterly.”  The image of the dead mother was one that he would continue to produce throughout his life, and is the first life-event that would become a major staple in his biographical oeuvre.

While there are dozens of images to choose from, this painting from 1897-99 is apt for its incorporation of both the gloomy setting of the sick room and the much used clutching of the head with both hands as a universal gesture of despair and horror.

On the heals of his mother’s death, his elder sister Sophie assumed the role of a maternal figure for Munch.  His father, Christian Munch, was becoming increasingly unhinged and given to violent fits of religious fervor, as depicted three decades later in the woodcut Man Praying, shown below:

It was when Munch was 14 years old that the most traumatic blow struck.  His sister Sophie died (like his mother, of tuberculosis), leaving him the eldest sibling in an increasingly unstable home life due to financial concerns and a fanatical and at times maniacal father.  It was at this time he started painting seriously, and soon gained the attention of what was referred to as the Kristiania Bohème (Christiania being the name given to Oslo from 1877 to 1925) for his precocious talent.

An 1885 etching of the Christiania Boheme

The Kristiania Bohème was a circle of artists and writers who met regularly at cafes to discuss art and philosophy and to disparage the false morals of the bourgeoisie.  It’s then-leader was a relatively well-to-do writer and patron of the arts named Frits Thaulow (I would insert a picture here, but am going to have to start being a bit selective in the images I show or this will run a mile long.  Anyone wishing to view any of the images I skip over is free to use the Google).  It was Thaulow who gave the young Munch his first break in sending him on a scholarship to Paris in 1882 when the artist was 19.  It was here, amidst interminable classes drawing “boring nudes” and plaster casts, that Munch created his Impressionistic scenes imbued with an uncharacteristic psychological depth, as well as his first great masterpiece, The Sick Child of 1885.

Seen as through a veil of tears with its relentless horizontal strokes and obsessive scraping and reworking, it is safe to employ the banal, well-worn expression that no one had ever seen a painting like this before.  Upon his return to Norway and to the Bohème, his work was hailed by his peers and colleagues as a masterpiece – the future not only of Norwegian painting, but of painting itself, with its revolutionary use of line and form to express emotion in ways that Van Gogh and Gaugin were only beginning to touch upon in France, and that the German Expressionists were still close to a quarter century from exploring.  It placed the heightened, febrile emotion of the Symbolists within a domestic, biographical setting and used the application of the paint itself as an emotional device.

In 1886 the 23 year-old Munch, having traveled to Berlin, returned again to Norway and to the Kristiania Bohème.  The next five years saw him gain further admiration within his ilk and continuing to travel to Paris and Berlin while concomitantly gaining the scorn and harsh disapproval of his maniacally pious father, not only for his choice of career, but for his style and subject matter.  At this time he began producing revolutionary paintings on themes of adolescent sexuality.  Two of canvases of this period bear reproducing here.

“The Morning After” of 1894 depicts the sordid aftermath of drunken sex. Whether the result of a simple lapse in judgement on the part of the woman, or a more sinister violation remains ambiguous.

Puberty, 1894

The pose in Puberty presents the universal body language for shame, fear, and the covering of oneself as Eve after the fall.  It depicts the sudden, terrifying realization of the sexualized nature of nakedness that comes with late childhood and adolescence when the confusing awareness of the body’s potential sexual functions begin emerge.  The drama of the scene is exacerbated by the menacing phallic shadow cast behind the girl, whose arms Munch painted to exaggeratedly absurd lengths in her attempt at protection.

In this early work we can see that Munch was not without his influences, and the girl’s pose here can likely be directly traced to an etching entitled The Greatest Love of Don Juan (1879) by the French etcher Félicien Rops, whose work Munch was almost sure to have seen during one of his trips to Paris (where erotic themes – adolescent and otherwise – were common, especially when compared to the still-puritanical Norway).  In Rops’ tableaux, a young girl finds herself having inadvertently sat in a puddle of the great lover’s semen.  Fears of disease, impregnation and premature virginity loss were Rops’ focus, themes that prove far more blunt and prurient next to Munch’s more subtle (but far more disturbing) image of awkward sexual awakening and vague phallic threat.

Since we’re looking, it’s always worth taking a moment to marvel at the splashes of cum on either side of the hapless girl as she seats herself.

At this time, the Kristiania Bohème had a new honcho, the write Hans Jaeger who had been imprisoned for his novel From the Kristiania Bohème in which he described many lurid details of the Norwegian counterculture (again, this was Norway, not France, where it was common for books such as Octave Mirbeau’s violently sexual novel The Torture Garden, Geoges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, or the poems of Charles Baudelaire to be widely read, not to mention the ongoing popularity of the centuries-old works of the Marquise de Sade).  The book adhered to certain strains of thought emphasizing the importance of masturbation as a means of avoiding insanity.  It described the story of a woman who was raped by a cop and forced to become a prostitute.   It called for the liberation of women’s sexuality.  Jaeger was more dogmatic than the mild patron Frits Thaulow, and laid down a series of maxims to which all members of the Bohème were expected to adhere, the first being “sever family ties” (a particularly sore spot for Munch, who had a deep concern for his father’s well being, vestiges of financial dependence from his family, and an awareness of his younger sister Laura’s incipient insanity).  The other dictates included “write your life story”, “embrace free love”, and “commit suicide.”

When it came to “write your life story”,  Much was a diligent, sedulous transcriber of his emotions, and his extensive writings read like poems, vignettes, dialogues and declarations alternating in the first and third person and the past and present tense (for a near complete collection of the English translations of these writings, see The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are the Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth).  We should bear in mind that while Munch’s writing served as a supplement to his work and a means of giving voice to his imagery, it also served as a verbal shock tactic meant to be read by a public increasingly hungry for lurid accounts from the bohemian underground.  This is to say that the writings, in addition to being a secondary means of purgative self-expression, were a carefully thought out means of self-promotion.  The dictum “embrace free love” was somewhat more complicated, and not only for Munch.  In an age where the concept of women as beings with their own sexual volition was fast emerging, the concept of free love was common in most artistic, literary and bohemian circles.  In accordance with the dictum, Munch promptly fucked Millie Thaulow, the wife of his initial benefactor – a short-lived affair that left the young artist on the outside of the first of many ill-fated love triangles.  Several more followed, proving that Munch had little stomach for the heartbreak and uncertainty bound up in ménages à trois and brief affairs.  For the young, sensitive artist, the time-proven, no-nonsense exchange of money for sex – devoid of emotional attachment – was infinitely easier on the nerves.  Alas, like the proverbial moth to the the proverbial flame, avoiding affairs within bohemian society was easier said than done.

“Melancholy” of 1892 shows a lone figure (the artist’s friend and literary associate Jappe Nillsen) alone on the Norwegian coast as two lovers – undoubtedly the other two thirds from an unsuccessful ménage à trois in which the figure was once one third – embark on a boat together, leaving our protagonist to suffer the agonies of jealousy, rejection and isolation.

A second version of “Melancholy” done the following year presents a slightly more resigned man in the same circumstance.

In 1892 Munch had his first major solo exhibition at the then-extremely conservative Association of Berlin Artists.  Along with his brothers-in-arms within the Kristiania Bohème, Germany was the first country to embrace his talent and prescient vision, as though it bypassed the vague, more or less meaningless term “Post Impressionism” and anticipated the rise of an emotive new art that would come to be known as Expressionism.  As Munch remained somewhat apolitical during his earlier years – he had no allegiance to the style of any particular country, and the rivalry between France and Germany meant nothing to him.  All artistic styles and trends were grist for the mill.

The show was, in many respects, a flop, though perhaps scandal would be a more accurate term.  Exhibited works included The Morning After, Puberty and The Sick Child.  The general public was clearly not ready for Munch’s loose style, harsh, acidic colors and blunt sexual overtones (though it was the decidedly un-sexual The Sick Child that caused the most outrage for its endless scraping, reworking, and anatomical vagaries- at once “unfinished’ and “overworked”).  What’s more, in a move of staggering audacity, Munch charged admission to the the show – a first not only for a gallery exhibition, but for any art-viewing establishment.  This is perhaps the first real indication we get of the Tortured Genius as equal parts Shrewd Businessman.  Of course, who could resist seeing such scandalous pictures? The public readily shelled out the fees to see what all the fuss was about.  They came in droves if only to hiss, ridicule and shake their heads in scorn.  As a result of public dissatisfaction (an understatement), the exhibition closed weeks ahead of schedule, but at this point it was too late.  Munch’s reputation as a provocateur was sealed, and the massive amounts of publicity brought about by every aspect of the Berlin exhibition catapulted the 29 year-old artist to fame.

end of part one

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Closing of the ningyo editions Gallery and Thoughts on the Boston Globe Review

The Closing of ningyo editions’ Gallery Space

Now the Captain he was dying/ But the Captain wasn’t hurt
The silver bars were in my hand/ I pinned them to my shirt.

-Leonard Cohen

I realize my quotations that preceed these entries are becoming increasingly cryptic, but this one feels appropriate, and I leave it to the sapient reader to make heads or tails of it.  And so… It is with with a bang and not a whimper that I announce the closing of the gallery space of ningyo editions.  The original half of the building will remain open – I will be keeping the etching studio and continue to sublet the front space to Drive-by Gallery.  The other half of the building, however, has proven itself too great a burden on many levels.  I originally opened the space with the help of Ed Monovich as a showcase for editions published by ningyo editions (you can read about these prints in this blog’s older entries).  Working with artists under the best circumstances is taxing, and I had the opportunity of working with amazing people and producing, in my estimation, some sublime prints that embody the nature of collaboration.   As satisfying as this was, the amount of labor involved was staggering (for every project I carved the blocks myself; dozens of hours are spent proofing and printing before editioning even begins; and in most cases we blew through tremendous amounts of material (paper, wood, ink, etc) in experimentation to get the desired effect.  Speaking to the last point, it should be noted that this costs a great deal of money.

Sales were dismal.  I remain forever grateful to Fidelity Investments for their purchases, and the occasional private buyer.  However, I don’t mind admitting that there was not a single show that did not prove a financial loss.  Upon closing I sit on reams of inventory (the prints will still be available for purchase, and I will continue to look for homes for all of the work), along with debt incurred.  I freely admit that some of this must speak to my weakness as a dealer, or at least a lack of complete dedication to that task.  It truly is a full-time job, and one I am not cut out for.  The creation and curating of shows is exciting and rewarding, but when it comes to selling I have my shortcomings.  I can only send so many follow-up emails before I feel like a desperate salesman out of Glengary Glen Ross.  I take comfort in the fact that I hear that sales are scarce at most of the small local galleries (even those situated in areas with far more traffic than the suburbs of Watertown).  I suppose misery loves company, and while I am always disheartened and saddened to read of yet another gallery closing its doors, it does take some of the sting out of what I comfortably accept as a failed enterprise.  I have a deeper awe and respect for our Boston gallery owners who continue to make it work through their passion and persistence.  At this point I could easily insert a venomous rant about Boston’s virtually non-existent collector base, or its pitiful dearth of arts writing (so keep it up, Mr. Cook).  However, bitterness is a pointless emotion of which I have disabused myself solely through my decision to close.

I should add finally that the pressure of coming up with intriguing, creative (in short, good) shows every 8 weeks while continuing to create my own work was a conflict to put it mildly.  I have never stopped making new work, but a gallery with a respectable turnover of shows does take time away from other creative pursuits.

“But what will happen to the space?”, the reader screams at their computer.  Fear not, for it is with joy and relief that I announce it will be taken over by the talented, wonderful Wendy Jean Hyde, a fantastic video/photographer and installation artist (and an MFA Traveling Scholar to boot) who will maintain the original format of a studio in back and a gallery in front.  I look forward to what she will do there as I have no doubt it will be a welcome addition to the local gallery scene.

I hope to continue to do occasional curatorial projects at satellite spaces, but I think my days of editioning with any regularity are behind me.  I will miss the wonderful openings and the enriching experience of working with such great talent, and I extend a warm thanks to everyone who attended our exhibitions and parties.  It made the whole experience truly worthwhile, and devoid of any regrets.

And now on to other matters.

The Boston Globe Review of (I’m a) Stranger to Kindness: The Drawings of Norma Hoffmann.

On Wednesday, July 11th, a review of our final exhibit, written by Cate McQuad, appeared in the Boston Globe (at this point few people knew it was the final show).  The day before, the entirety of the Globe’s For the record section on page 2 ran as follows:

“Correction: Because of false information supplied to the Globe, the exhibit “(I’m a) Stranger to Kindness: The Drawings of Norma Hoffmann” at Ningyo Editions, in Watertown, was incorrectly described in several editions of “g” starting June 7 as well as BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com events listings.  Norma Hoffmann is a fictional character.”

I couldn’t ask for better advertising, though I counted only one mention in the g section.  I’m not sure if I am running into copyright issues here, but I reprint the review below in a truncated version, with the addition of my own commentary in parenthesis:

‘Artist’ was gallery creation

“Printmaker David Curcio (am I to be forever saddled with this classification?), who runs the print studio and gallery Ningyo Editions, sent out notice in the spring of an upcoming show, “(I’m a) Stranger to Kindness: The Drawings of Norma Hoffmann.’’ The artist, it said, lived in Concord and died in 1905…

“When I e-mailed Curcio that I planned to stop by, he wrote back that in fact, Hoffmann didn’t exist. He had found old, anonymous drawings in an antique store, and thrown himself into creating the artist, writing about her life…

“I was miffed” (italics mine).  “I had singled out the exhibit for a Globe listing of gallery-show recommendations based on Curcio’s elaborate story… without knowing it was all fiction.

“In the art world, taking on aliases and shifting identities is trendy” (as it has been for a century or so), “and Curcio has essentially made a contemporary conceptual art piece from a handful of amateur drawings…

“…The works, handsomely mounted against dark gray walls, are unaccomplished but poignant” (this is exactly why I chose to show them).

“’The more I wrote, the essay took on a life of its own, and I came to believe in this person and her struggles,’ Curcio told me. He then decided, he added, “to present the show as a mock documentary.’” (NB: I referred to the mock documentaries of Christopher Guest and many others, stressing that while the show could be viewed this way, it was exactly how I did not want to present it.)

“At the show’s opening, Curcio says he told viewers the true back story of his work” (I did), “and he says he has been forthcoming with people who have called inquiring whether a new outsider artist… has been discovered. The work is not good enough for that classification” (while I readily acknowledge that it wouldn’t be considered a major discovery even if the artist were real, in my own estimation it is thoroughly captivating stuff – “poignant”, even). “… But the tale is thorough, effective, and sad.” (I appreciate this last bit, for it is the story I set out to achieve.)

“On Monday, the gallery added a disclaimer to the exhibit description online,” (it’s still up on the website) “noting that Hoffmann’s story is ‘completely fabricated.’” (I did this as a compromise for Cate’s editor who, perhaps upon perceiving a deliberate ruse which I had little or no interest in addressing, was at this point hesitant about printing the review at all.)

_____

In all I was satisfied with the review in that it was ultimately complimentary, despite a somewhat scolding overtone (possibly indicating some embarrassment at not inquiring more about the show beforehand?).  But I was disappointed in Cate’s failure to address the rich history of aliases, invented artists and manipulated imagery presented as real and without explanation or disclaimers.  From Marcel Duchamp to Peter Garfield (whose “Harsh Realities” photo series of 1998 presented fake miniature houses as real and were described as such in a New York Times review), deception has always been artistic license.

Of course, outright fraud is something else altogether, which is why I was diligent in explaining the invented back story to any and all visitors to the gallery or email inquiries about the work.  Under no circumstances would I sell a piece to anyone without revealing the truth behind the work.  Cate told me more than once that the newspaper world is very different from the art world (confirming what I had long suspected).  Her point, however, was that the show had appeared in the listings section a few weeks before and was presented as true – and in fairness to her, why would she question it?  Is such fact-checking the job of a reviewer for a simple listing?  The answer to this is not obvious.  What is clear is that her editor was very displeased at the prospect of the Globe having listed the show without knowing the full story, and that some readers may see the paper’s credibility as compromised for this reason (though I don’t flatter myself that this type of deception would make even a baby step towards damaging the reputation of a major newspaper).  At the risk of sounding disingenuous, I had no intention of messing with anyone’s head (including Cate’s) and sending them off believing the story, much less outright lying.  I sympathized with her conundrum, and with apologies for any awkwardness this caused her in the newsroom, explained to her the two very different artistic natures of the show.  The first being the work itself, and the second its fictitious presentation.

A few days after I sent out the press release and show announcement containing a link to my previous blog entry which contains the biographical essay on Hoffmann, I was contacted by a man named Frank Tosto.  Frank had the good fortune of  discovering a truly remarkable trove of sublime drawings of farm houses by an itinerant 19th century artist named Fritz Vogt.  The website contains a biography of the artist (of whom little is known), along with images of his known extant works.  As the artist’s primary champion, collector and lender of his work, Frank also published a beautiful book on Vogt.  In the email, Frank expressed his excitement at the “discovery” of the “Hoffmann” drawings, and I was naturally compelled to set the record straight.  In response, Frank wrote: “Regarding your invented life, I have always felt that a person’s life is far less interesting than what they leave…”  This was the most concise assessment of the Hoffmann dilemma I had heard, for is it not the work upon which we ultimately focus and that outlives the creator and their story?  Or does an artist’s biography inevitably color the way in which we look at their work (I remember John Berger’s observation in Ways of Seeing that we see Van Gogh’s Field of Crows in a different light when we learn that the canvas was completed minutes before the artist shot himself in the head).  This product vs. history vs. biographical conundrum falls solely upon each individual viewer.  For my part, the process of inventing an artist based upon found work and laboring over a biography involving both research and pure fiction was a (majorly) therapeutic endeavor that forever takes precedence over any passing confusion, perceived deception, or miffed-ness on the part of a viewer.  While I am tremendously grateful to Cate for taking the time to visit the show, to struggle with the concept from a journalistic standpoint, and to write and print a review, the fact remains that we ultimately do our art for ourselves.  To this end, it is our responsibility to  present it with the surest, most powerful force we can muster.

You are gone but (finally) not forgotten, Ms. Hoffmann

Breaking News: An 11th Hour Update and Discovery

On Friday July 13th I had the pleasure of meeting Diana Korzenik, who dropped by the gallery to see the show.  The author of Objects of American Art Education (Huntington Library Press, 2004), Diana was certain that many of these drawings are earlier than my fiction places them – closer to the mid 19th century than the turn of the century.  More importantly, she recognized them as drawing exercises copied from drawing cards, small cards made by professional artists during the 19th century for the purpose of teaching fledgling art students how to draw by means of assiduous copying.  It had been initially posited by the antique dealer from which I bought the work that they may have been from a drawing class, done by “women of means” who could afford private or group lessons and who may have traveled abroad to render buildings and ruins on site (this phenomenon was discussed in my original essay on Hoffmann and her exclusion from this ilk due to her low social standing).  However, after spending some time researching drawing cards, it became clear by the style, subject matter, and by certain compositional elements (straight lines framing the drawing to allow for margins; the grouping of isolated architectural details three to four on a sheet) that the drawings of “Norma Hoffmann” were almost certainly done as such exercises.  (While I have come almost come to believe in this woman who never existed, I will occasionally find myself using apologetic quotes around her name in this section of serious inquiry into the work’s true origins.)

Shown below are two examples of drawing cards, made by the Boston artist and educator B.F. Nutting (1803 – 1887) during the 1840s.  The second example I juxtapose with a drawing by “Hoffmann” and should allay any doubts as to the source of most or all of the work comprising the current and final exhibition at ningyo editions’ gallery,

Drawing Card by B.F. Nutting (1848)

One of the “Large Drawings” of Hoffmann featuring the above-mentioned vignette compositional presentation.

Instructional drawing card by Nutting done in the 1840 featuring the same vignette compositional presentation.

And so we can finally end on a note of genuine investigation into what, to my eyes, will forever remain mysterious and enigmatic creations by an artist who, to my heart, most certainly lived and breathed at some time in some form.

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(I’m a) Stranger to Kindness: The Drawings of Norma Hoffmann

Go, pencil! Faithful to thy master’s sighs!

   Go-tell the Goddess of the fairy scene…

-Anne Radcliffe

Cabin, 3.75 x 5.875″

Like an apparition out of a Victorian Gothic novel, Norma Hoffmann’s fey, unsettling presence haunted the farmlands and banks of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts during the last decades of the 19^th century.  Aside from an occasional police report for trespassing and public drunkenness (erroneously – in reality her erratic behavior was due to her emerging psychotic breakdown and possible schizophrenia), and a single line obituary in the Concord Enterprise from 1904, there is very little on record to confirm that Norma Hoffmann ever existed.  What we are left with is a small, remarkable trove of drawings done in graphite, none of which exceeds 8 x 10 inches in size.

Although there is no extant birth certificate, town records show a “Nora Hoffman” born in 1872 to German-Austrian parents who probably arrived as part of the large influx of German immigrants during the second half of the 19^th century. By 1870, German-born farmers made up about one third of agricultural industry in the Northeast.  These included the Hoffmann family (an extremely common name literally meaning “landed farmer”).  Her parents were probably among the hundreds of thousand Germans who endured long, circuitous, but cheap routes through Great Britain to the US in the years following the German Revolutions of 1848, ultimately landing at Castle Garden Immigration Depot in lower Manhattan, just across the bay from what was to become Ellis Island a few decades later.

Comprised almost entirely of Protestants, these German immigrants came to embody the disposition today referred to as the New England work ethic.  This can be loosely characterized by staunch, physical labor combined with a dour, Yankee piety (originating with the humorless fervor of the Massachusetts puritans nearly two centuries prior), and with the first generation immigrant’s wariness of domestic politics and public involvement.  It was for the latter reason, combined with a fairly lax system of record-keeping on the part of the town for servants and farmhands, that Norma’s birth was not recorded until she began attending school in 1881.  Along with her two brothers, Moritz and Hermann, and a sister Lotte, Norma is listed as being born to Dörthe and Hermann Hoffmann in 1872.  The date’s accuracy is dubious.  It is highly unlikely that all four children were born within the same year, as recorded nine years later.  For one, the arrival of quadruplets in the small county would almost certainly have been noted in local papers or highlighted in town records.  Furthermore, it was not unusual for city clerks, overwhelmed by the boom in immigrant births, to lump children of the same family, or even different families from the same farms together under one birth date as a time cutting measure.  At best, the date helps place Norma’s birth somewhere between 1869 and the “official” date of 1872.

Photograph thought to be Norma Hoffmann, circa 1898 (courtesy Concord Town Archives)

Nothing is known of Norma’s childhood or early adulthood excepting the death of her sister Lotte from Pneumonia in the winter of 1880 as recorded in town records.  Most likely she lived and worked on one of the six active farms in Concord together with her entire family.  No written records of her exist before 1896, when she was somewhere between 24 and 27 years old.  At this point a few small notes in the constabulary broadsheets of the Concord Enterprise and the Middlesex Patriot appear recording the above-mentioned complaints of trespassing and “drunkenness” by local landowners.  None of these led to arrest, however, as it seems she would always retire when asked.  She soon became a local fixture, and was generally regarded as a harmless, if unsound, eccentric.  Her presence was generally tolerated or ignored altogether.

The turn of the century saw a rapid decline in her mental health.  By her late twenties her increasingly unkempt appearance and erratic behavior (including incoherent rants, and a penchant for walking barefoot in all weather) began to arouse wariness – if not outright fear – in her neighbors.  So too did her habit or appearing unexpectedly in private yards and farmlands at any hour, day or night, with pencil, paper, and a small wooden box on which she would sit and diligently sketch for hours on end. According to one complaint, she was seen sketching outside a private residence on a November evening “past the stroke of midnight wearing nothing but a filthy white gown and no shoes to cover her feet.”

In examining her drawings, it is worth dividing them into categories, as her style, and later her subject matter, shifted over the course of her short-lived output.

The Small Drawings

By far the most numerous examples of Hoffmann’s work are small drawings, ranging in size from 3 ½ x 6” to 5 ½ x 8”.  Many of the scenes can be positively identified as landscapes and homesteads within Middlesex County.  These include houses, cabins and streams; pastoral views of Walden Pond, and hybrid landscapes featuring humble local architecture adorned with decidedly non-native, likely invented craggy mountainous growths and backgrounds of massive rolling hills. Hoffmann probably began these drawings in situ, adding the adornments both for compositional effect and to gratify her own taste for Romantic landscape (a popular subject at the time).  The scenes are sometimes peopled with farmers or household servants in moments of repose and communion: a woman stands in front of a family farm holding her infant, accompanied by another young girl; a man stands outside his modest log cabin and regards a flock of geese with familiarity; a mother and daughter walk along the yard of a lakeshore home holding hands.  As an unmarried and by all scant accounts solitary (and possibly celibate) woman, these scenes of familial bliss take on an added poignancy, imbued as they are with a distant tenderness where even lone figures find company with wildlife outside their door.

Cabin with Man and Geese, 5.125 x 8.25″

Landscape with Pond and Chimneys, 5.125 x 8.25″

The drawings in this group vary both in style and quality.  In some cases a hard, sharpened pencil yields tremendous detail and depth through an economy of silvery marks.  In others a soft, dull tip produces dirty, uniform patches.   Hoffmann’s sense of depth and perspective can be misleading and frequently faulty, such as in Villa, where a lone figure stands in such relation to the house as to suggest he is not more than three feet tall, while the wispy grass in the background towers to the height of small trees.  It cannot be known whether such inaccuracies were done intentionally in service to composition, or are the result of a naïve hand with little grasp on perspective.  Though untrained, Hoffmann was a tireless practitioner, and the former seems the likelier possibility.  In the same piece, a lapse of continuity occurs where the faded – and definitely invented – mountain moves from right to left across the background and suddenly vanishes when it reaches the tall tree behind the house, leaving an empty void where reality dictates that it should continue. Does this visual hieroglyph suggest that Norma thought its compositional purpose adequately served, or just a clumsy oversight?  Much of the charm lies in that viewers are left to determine these inconsistencies for themselves.  However, so effortlessly do they serve the harmony of the overall pieces that they may go unnoticed altogether.

Villa with Mountains, 5.5 x 7.125″

The Large Drawings

The larger drawings measure 8 x 10” and are dated around 1902 (the year preceding Hoffmann’s breakdown and commitment to the Danvers State Hospital).  Here she eschews the strait forward landscape for visual vignettes consisting of three or four landscape or architectural elements lovingly arranged with a keen attention to composition.  Present also is a newfound confidence and ability in the use of graphite, with sharper, harder pencils producing finer, surer lines and a controlled touch yielding wider tonal ranges. Gone are the direct, occasionally clumsy architectural portraits.  They are replaced now by isolated, often elaborate details fairly dripping with the Gothic and Romantic devices of austere stonework, arches, knotty trees, secluded knolls, gloomy ruins and abandoned shacks.

Rocks on rocks piled, as if by magic spell;

Here scorch’d by lightnings, there with ivy green.

Large Drawing: Cottage Studies, 8.375 x 10.5″

As an untrained “outsider”, it is worth noting that for much of the 19^th century, drawing was considered an essential part of a female education among the upper classes (along with numerous other skills such as piano and embroidery), honed in order to charm potential suitors. Fashionable ladies’ social clubs in which drawing was taught (usually under the tutelage of a mediocre male instructor) provided a social forum under the pretext of practicing line and perspective.  This was a world completely alien to Hoffmann. Her anti-social behavior, to say nothing of her low social standing and impoverishment, excluded her completely from any opportunity to join such society, let alone a formal art class.  She was, however, familiar with many of the customs and mores of the Victorian upper class through her fanatical obsession with literature.  She was a great devotee of Radcliff, Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins.  The latter, of whose lesser-known novel No Name about a young woman unfairly disinherited of her fortune upon her parents’ deaths who sets about to regain it from the very lowest social strata was (not surprisingly) among her favorites, and her copy of the 1873 edition still survives.  We can only imagine the frustration and painful sense of insignificance she must have felt as she diligently taught herself to draw while learning the manners and customs of the upper classes in solitude through Gothic Bildungsromans.  In these popular, sometimes-formulaic novels, destitute and persecuted heroines undergo a series of trials and setbacks to ultimately rise triumphant over their tormentors.

A keen observer of nature, Hoffmann was also highly attuned to reproductions and the contemporary work being done by the very circles from which she was excluded.  Examples of these were often on view in windows of social clubs or gallery-style boutiques.  Without exception they were copies of classic European works or staid landscapes.  As European vistas become fashionable with the proliferation of tours abroad, the European landscape became a wildly popular subject for its combination of the familiar and the exotic.  Hoffmann was quick to pick up on this trend, purchasing both cheap lithographic reproductions of European scenes and novels by European authors, at that time being translated en mass.  From the formulaic best-selling parlor novels that have vanished over time to the gritty realism of Emil Zola and the penetrating moral and religious existentialism of Dostoyevsky, Hoffmann read whatever she could acquire.  By such means she could in some sense absorb these various sites of Old World decay along with a cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture. While parts of the large drawings depict details observed through local observation, there is no question that many were copied from reproductions of the European vistas she would never see firsthand.  Some were likely invented altogether.

Large Drawing: Lewes Castle, 8.375 x 10.5″

It is worth noting that while she followed these trends with a careful eye, she generally eschewed the predictable and fashionable illustrational approach to the subject matter. Instead she focused on unusual, fragmented compositions and separate, isolated elements.  Excepting a few examples, including a rendering of Lewes Castle in Sussex, England, (certainly copied from a reproduction), or a somewhat clumsily drawn mounted cavalier strait out of Alexandre Dumas (probably invented), these works are all presented in this odd but harmonious manner.  They occupy the sheet not as sketches or disparate studies, but as finished drawings in their own right.

Large Drawing: Fences and Windows, 8.375 x 10.5″

Large Drawing: Romantic Rider, 10.5 x 8.375″

It is the larger work, full of invention and wanderlust that seems to have preceded a mental breakdown for which she became hospitalized in the now-infamous Danvers State Hospital.

Danvers State Hospital

“It’s a pretty simple layout, if you consider a giant flying bat. The main staff building in the middle, the bat body, and slanting off to each side are these crooked bat wings: one for female patients, the other for male.

-Session 9

In 1902 Hoffmann suffered a bout of what would today be likely recognized as severe Bipolar Disorder (typically alternating manic periods consisting of sleepless, euphoric mood elevation followed by periods of suicidal depression).  This condition was complicated by violent fits that, at the turn of the century, were categorized under the blanket moniker of hysteria (or specifically, in her day, “secondary dementia”, roughly akin to schizophrenia).  Contemporary psychiatry would probably apply the label Conversion Disorder to Hoffmann‘s case, where symptoms included loud, violent sobbing and frantic, incessant pacing coupled with the above-mentioned sleeplessness. These episodes were interspersed with near comatose periods during which she confined herself to her bed for days at a time.  In late November Norma’s brother Moritz had her committed.  It is difficult to say if she would have been shielded from this confinement had she come from a more privileged background.

Danvers State Hospital was opened in 1878 in what was then a rural city thirty miles north of Boston.  The town where most of the drowning, stoning and torture took place during the Salem Witch Trials two centuries prior, Danvers is now home to giant shopping malls and endless stretches of retail chains.

In its day the hospital was the largest psychiatric facility in the Greater Boston area, treating extreme psychotic cases such as schizophrenia and catatonia as well as milder forms of mental illness including depression, mania and “hysteria”.  The monstrous red brick Gothic structure is reputed to have inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum (which in turn became the model for the asylum-prison that held the deranged villains of the Batman comics.)  Built in 1874 and opened in 1878, the hospital is famously credited as the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy in the 1930’s. In the 1960’s, amidst reports of inhumane treatment and overcrowding, the facility was permanently closed.

Historical attitudes toward depression and mental illness in general underwent a massive shift at the turn of the century. Since the late 1700’s depression (or melancholy as it was termed until the first decades of the 20^th century) had been associated almost exclusively with brilliant men – the burden and curse resulting from an over-abundance of intellect, creativity and sensitivity. In the late 19^th century, the theory shifted to a view of the malady as a hallmark of the “instability of the fairer sex” (It is worth noting that the word hysteria, dating from the early 17^th century, has it’s roots in the Latin term for “of the womb.”)  In Vienna during the late 1880’s Freud was developing his inflexible doctrine linking all cases of hysteria to sexual trauma, repression, and inhibition. While this may speak more to the patriarchal zeitgeist of the Victorian era than to an accurate sexual demographic of mental illness, it was nonetheless for this reason that over two thirds of mental hospital patients – both extreme and mild cases – were female. As the 19^th century came to a close (almost three decades before the advent of Electro Convulsive Therapy), the most common treatment for females suffering from hysteria was genital massage – either by the physician’s hand, vibrators or water sprays.  The goal was to cause orgasm in the patient in order provide a release from pent-up sexual repression thought to be causing the psychosis.  Alas, we have not a single detail pertaining to Hoffmann’s sexual life outside of the fact that she never married. If there were any sexual relationships, early traumatic encounters or repressed sexual urges, they are forever lost to history and open only to pointless, dubious theorizing based solely on the work.  It is safe to say that such speculation would be a futile exercise.  Further adding to the mystery is that we know nothing of Hoffmann’s stay at the facility.  In 2002 an asbestos removal crew inadvertently disposed of thousands of pages of patient records, eradicating the stories, experiences and treatment histories of thousands of individuals (including Hoffmann). With the disappearance of these records the world has also lost an invaluable insight into the history of American psychiatry seven years before Freud unleashed his theories to an astonished American public at Clark University, permanently altering the course of psychiatric treatment.  We can take heart that the hospital’s superintendent at the turn of the century, Dr. Charles Page, famously declared the routine mechanical restraint of patients cruel, unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness.  We can only hope that this assured Hoffmann’s (and countless other individuals’) relatively humane treatment during her confinement.

The Last Drawings

“Bats, rats birds, insects will as soon nest inside a house as out; it is to them a normal growth of the eternal jungle…”

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Upon her release from the Danvers State Hospital in 1904, where she had stayed for about 18 months, Hoffmann turned almost exclusively to renderings of animals and plants, her days roaming Concord’s farmlands with pencil in hand forever behind her.  Whether this was due to debasing, traumatic treatment at the hands of hospital staff or exposure to physical illness from other patients we will never know.  Her body significantly weakened and her health failing rapidly, she died in June of the following year.  No cause of death is given on her certificate.  Her last drawings consist of subjects she could observe exclusively within the confines of her home:  insects and small rodents (including a rat who seems to have been a pet as she scrawled the moniker “Doc” under his image), tree stumps, rabbits and squirrels (probably observed through her window).  Also among these drawings we find sea lions, penguins and polar bears striking majestic poses, or fossils of extinct paleographic species complete with a budding scientist’s notations of scale.  Without doubt these were copied from books.  The gap in stature between the common, diminutive animals she observed first hand and the foreign, wholly unfamiliar creatures she would never see in her lifetime is dramatic, presenting vast extremes of the exotic and the commonplace.  A shakiness of line and a loss in her ability to render are apparent as well – we are miles away from the controlled shades and sensitive tones of the Large Drawings only two years earlier.  Sadly, this brings strong evidence to a deterioration of motor functioning.  Whether this resulted from administrations preformed during her hospitalization, or a dependence on now outdated psychiatric palliatives such as laudanum or morphine we will never know, although one or both of these possibilities seems likely.  The subject of each drawing is diligently written under its image in a child’s careful hand or a distressingly unsteady scrawl.  Her penchant for compositional organization as seen in the Large Drawings now combines both subject matter and the labeling devices of an amateur naturalist using frequently loopy, demented, or child-like penmanship.  Nevertheless she imparts the same care – complete with fastidious line and a high level of concern with placement on the page – to these drawings as to her earlier work.  For these drawings both sides of the paper were utilized – Hoffmann appears to have became ever more parsimonious in her use of materials.  Of these late drawings, not more than ten examples are known to exist.  They are charming in their earnestness, but present a heartbreaking record of the severe dissolution of motor and mental facilities.

Late Drawing: Paleolithic Creatures, 6.875 x 7.75″

Late Drawing: Paleolithic Creatures (verso)

Late Drawing: “A Sea Lion”, 6.875 x 7.75″

Late Drawing: “A Sea Lion” (verso)

One can talk circles in an attempt to explain Hoffmann’s shift from diligent landscapes and Romantic, pastoral studies to these varied creatures – sniffing and buzzing with life outside her window, or millions of years extinct.  It is tempting, in light of her painfully solitary existence, to ascribe this shift to a yearning attempt at communion with the animal world after having been rejected, ostracized and mentally brutalized by the human one.  But it is equally plausible that these final drawings are the product of a soul weakened, injured, and broken by life, wherein her final energies were employed in service to the habitual, automatic depiction of worlds – however miniscule, insignificant or long-since vanished.

House by a Lake, 5.5 x 8.25″

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Black Valentine

“Love comes in spurts/in dangerous flirts/and it murders your heart/they don’t tell you that part.”

-Richard Hell

“Pleasure has already killed me, transformed and translated me… I am the drunken bee wandered into your household.  You may with courage eject me through the window; or by accident step on me.  Be assured, I’ll feel no pain.”

-Patricia Highsmith

At the beginning of this year I was commissioned by the excellent team of Anne Barrett and Todd Dunton of 30E Design to create a series of works to be sent out as Valentine’s Day gifts for clients, design firms, curators and magazines in New York.  This has become something of a tradition for them and is in its third year (with as many artists having participated – each year they choose someone new).  Suffice it to say that my first impulse was flattery to be chosen, and I readily accepted.  My second impulse was bemusement, as I see little in my work that could inspire the perfunctory, knee-jerk sentiments associated with love demanded of the day.  Of all “holidays”, there is no other that so inspires guilt and shame (in the single or coupled) and throws people (mostly men) into last minute panics of preparation around a day named for some saint (I say somesaint because there were dozens of St. Valentines and it is unclear which holds the honor of the eponymous day, though of all of them were known far more for their sacrifices and martyrdoms than for romantic love).  However, the late 18th century (and there are earlier references in The Canturbury Tales and Hamlet) saw the day gradually associated with sentimental romanticism, and by the 20th century has been shamelessly propagated by the greeting card and candy industries.  Of course it is very fashionable to deride Valentine’s day as a “Hallmark Holiday”, but I believe the derision is well founded.  There are activities surrounding the 14th of February more depressing in their ability to rouse half-hearted yet maniacally compulsive acts of appeasement than the worst commercial aspects of Christmas.  Here are a few examples:

• On-line floral delivery arrangements which always cost more than promised as the vase included in the “deal” is unacceptable in any circumstance – to say nothing of the numerous hidden charges associated with ordering flowers this way (I admit I speak from experience here).   Additionally, most of the flowers come from Central American sweatshops where a job as a drug mule swallowing condoms full of heroin to be digested later seems like the better gig (see the 2004 film “Maria Full of Grace”).
• Restaurants contending with pleading men for last minute reservations and scrambling to divide the entire house into a series of dueces, each adorned with the token rose (or worse, a carnation) and creating annoying desserts for two.  (On the upside, for the restaurant industry at least – the men are quite free with their money on this night.)
• Public radio making insidious but transparent attempts at tricking listeners into believing that a torturous, guild-laden fund drive is actually a lucky opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by ordering flowers for an exorbitant rate to “help support the news.”  (I think they pull this shit on Mother’s Day as well.)
• CVS and Wallgreen’s lining their shelves with heart-shaped boxes of candy and offering buy-one-get-one-free deals (which seem especially puzzling given the circumstance, although a friend suggested that one is for the intended sweetheart, while the other is for the slob who bought them to consume on the car ride home).

No patrons of insipid sentimentality, Anne and Todd made it clear that they had no intention of sending out anything containing the traditional drek associated with a normal Valentine.  I give them great credit for the idea itself: a Valentine as a professional gift is far more clever, unexpected, and likely to be viewed than the perfunctory Christmas card (with which most companies find themselves inundated each December with words and gifts carefully skirting any denominational references and simply offering good tidings for the new year).  As to Valentine’s Day and my obvious contempt for the holiday, I should admit – so as not to be too disingenuous – that I make free use of hearts, flowers, and other trappings of Victorian schoolgirl embroidery, folk art and benign, simplistic symbols or icons associated with love and pretty-ness throughout my work (can I argue that this is ironic?  Probably not).  For this reason, perhaps their choice in me as their artist was not so far off.  In the interest of clarity, however, one of the first things I asked Anne was if she was aware that my work was becoming increasingly laced with imagery including razor blades, bear traps, womens’ asses and prescription drugs (mostly of the Benzodiezapine and SSRI variety), as well as healthy doses of profanity (including the occasional reference to pussy hair and girls peeing).  She told me she was, and that that is why she chose me.  It was in this way we came up with what we began to refer to as the anti-Valentines.

I realize that there is little that is groundbreaking or original in this idea.  A quick browse on etsy will yield endless offerings that cleverly turn any and all traditional sentiments on their heads – throw pillows with phrases like “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me” (my hands are trembling in the temptation to insert a winking emoticon here) or tea-towels eschewing embroidered floral patterns for spread-eagle centerfolds.  There is no dearth of enterprising card companies creating sentiments for jilted lovers, jealous boyfriends, and a variety of sad, frustrated singles to be sent by smug coupled friends (the very same people who go to the restaurants with the carnations, surprise each other with FTD deliveries at work and exchange  pajamagrams) who may or may not realize that the whole idea of a gag card of this sort is a cruel means of reaffirming their own tenuous bond.  Nevertheless, on the heels of a divorce, my current mood wavers between general misanthropy and and a bristling confidence in the future (I say this so as not to come across as a complete cynic – I am not).  However, I can say emphatically that as I have and always will shudder at a designated day to acknowledge romantic feelings using chocolate or stuffed animals (often stuffed with chocolate), I could not resist the opportunity to create my own small series for this odious day.

I began with a walk through the pink card isles of Target and Walgreen’s, where I was saddened but not surprised to see the usual simpering declarations in rhyme along with odd cards featuring puppies (no doubt neutered, conveying a kind of desperate, non-sexual fidelity) and old-timey photos of small children kissing (also calling forth an incongruent portrayal of asexual innocence).  So, finding only disgust as fodder for my project, I set down to work by creating an ultra-traditional border of roses made from etching and woodcut to serve as the framing device for each piece.  Then I set my mind to the content.

Most of the quotes are either paraphrased or ripped off directly from various sources.  My days of writing rhymes are not over, but they are long, irrelevant to the occasion, and also quite bad.   Figuring prominent among the chosen phrases are bits culled mainly from Leonard Cohen and Phillip Roth.  The general vibe I sought out was initially crude (bordering on the pornographic) and wholly cynical.  Anne put the kibosh on the former but not the latter, and it is true than some clients might be put off by a few of my proposed phrases, for which I wouldn’t blame them (Henry Miller’s phrase “I feel like the little boy who had to stop the break in the dike and had nothing but his finger” was a bit too suggestive, to say nothing of “Your whore’s mouth whispers words you have said a thousand times before to a thousand men.  But that doesn’t matter.  Before me there were no men, and after me there will be none.”  However, “It is enough that you feel”, taken out of context, managed to make the cut*).  Other choices of authors were dismissed early on (by me) for various reasons: Baudelaire seemed too predictable and histrionic.  The bits from plays by Socrates I was reading at the time had too many incest references, and no one wants to be reminded of any aspect the Oedipus saga when carnal or romantic love is on the table.  Sappho and, as I mentioned, Henry Miller, I expected to be shoo-ins, but found in both such an exuberant, unbridled love of life that it detracted from a cryptic mood of gloom and Weltschmerz I wanted to bear down upon the recipients.  And now to the specifics:

Q:  How were they done?  How big are they?  etc.

A: These pieces – I show five examples below – were done using etching and woodcut to create the above-mentioned flower border on 9 x 6″ sheets of gampi “double-sided” paper.  The imagery was embroidered, and I stuck exclusively to bear traps, shackles and hand cuffs, and pharmaceuticals – objects one might (or should) associate with danger, bodily harm, bondage (not necessarily of a sexual variety), and quiet, passive addiction.   Some of the text was embroidered, while some was written in ink over banners painted with gouache.

Oh Innocent Beloved, you fail to understand and I can’t tell you… but within a year my passion will be dead.”

“Sometimes our secrets are all we got (our lies we must defend).”

“Love is the admixture of the merciless with the tender.”

“Give me absolute control over every living soul, and lie beside me, baby, that’s an order.”

“Are You The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?”

So as the leaden skies and cimmerian gloom of February hangs over us, the hot pinks and reds that build up to February 14th may be Hallmark’s way of reminding us of our real priorities in life.  Whether these are love, spending money, or the mollifying of our own lonely souls with a dinner for two remains up for a debate I suppose will not be resolved (or really questioned for that matter).

*The quotes by Henry Miller were taken from Opus Pistorum, also called Under the Roofs of Paris, published in 1941 by a Los Angeles bookseller and pornographer who paid Miller a dollar a page to write “an erotic novel.”

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