hopper probably would have eaten at the orange garden

Every time I see Edward Hopper's 1929 Chop Suey (pictured here) I think of an old-school Chicago Chinese restaurant called The Orange Garden, which was retro before retro was even a concept. The painting has more windows and light than The Orange Garden does, but there's still a shared days-gone-by Chinese restaurant atmosphere, with lots of rich red tones in the decor. And chop suey on the menu, along with the classic CHOP SUEY sign out front.

The Journey of the Magi -- James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1894 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)

painting of the month

Snow in New York -- Robert Henri, 1902 (National Gallery of Art)

art and ophelia

Ophelia, the tragic young beauty of Hamlet, has been painted many times in art, with the Pre-Raphaelites finding her particularly fascinating and John Everett Millais using Elizabeth Siddal as the model for his circa 1851 portrait. This required Lizzie to spend a great deal of time in a tub of water while posing for Millais and eventually caused her to catch a bad cold. Beyond that, Lizzie’s Ophelia costume was a second-hander, described by Millais in a letter as being "a really splendid lady's ancient dress--all flowered over in silver embroidery…You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds."

Odilon Redon did some ethereal and haunting portraits of Ophelia, and two I haven’t seen as often as those of Waterhouse and Millais are late 19th century works by Scottish artist Frances MacDonald MacNair and French artist Paul Steck (pictured). Click here too for an article detailing more info about the plants and flowers in Ophelia’s famed garland and her “fair and unpolluted flesh.”

painting of the month

Large Dark Red Leaves on White -- Georgia O'Keeffe, 1925 (Phillips Collection)

kaffee and koloman

A recent visit to one of Julius Meinl’s coffeehouses brought to mind another Austrian who made the planet a more creative and interesting place: Koloman Moser. Moser was born in Vienna in 1868 and died in 1918, and throughout his varied career was a painter, graphic designer and printmaker who also worked with ceramics, tapestries, textiles, jewelry and stained glass. Moser was one of the driving forces behind the Wiener Werkstätte movement and was a founding member of the Vienna Secession with Gustav Klimt and various others. This Moser painting is from around 1913 and titled Waldwiese, which seems to translate to something like Forest Meadow in English.

precisely paul

Neo-Impressionist artist Paul Signac was born November 11, 1863 in Paris and during his career would help define the style of Pointillism—or precise and chromatic placements of paint to form smoothly arranged scenes. Another major Pointillist and colleague of Signac was of course Georges Seurat.

Signac was an avid sailor, and one of his boats was named Olympia, in honor of Manet’s scandalous nude painting of 1865. Signac’s portrait of his friend, art critic and visionary Felix Fénéon, was done in 1890, but it’s so progressively composed and uses such dynamic colors that it looks almost like a work by Peter Max or some major classic 1970s album cover.

Signac died in 1935 at the age of 72. Click here to see the beautiful range of his work and for more biographical information.

(Pictured: Portrait of Felix Fénéon [Against the Enamel of Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angels, Tones and Tones and Colours] -- Paul Signac, 1890)

taxi driver

When I drive cab
I am the hunter.
My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures

When I drive cab
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do

When I drive cab
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air....

Taxi Suite, Lew Welch (1926-1971)

(Pictured: The City from Greenwich Village, 1922 -- John Sloan, National Gallery of Art)

louis rémy mignot

The son of French immigrants and Napoleon Bonapartists, Louis Rémy Mignot was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1831. After study at the Hague, he began to make a name for himself as a landscape painter, with a particularly notable work around that time being Sources of the Susquehanna, tracing the path of the mighty river. Mignot was elected a member of the National Academy of Design and headed off on an Ecuadorian expedition in 1857, and all seemed to be going well for him professionally—or at least until the tragedy of the American Civil War. Mignot had his studio in New York at the time, but he did not opt to publicly support the Union or the Confederacy. He went to London instead, befriending James McNeill Whistler and also trying to establish himself there with the same success that the expatriate Whistler had managed.

Mignot’s epic painting, an 1866 churning view of the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, was done during his London years. War again upset his plans in 1870 when he was forced to abruptly leave Paris—where he was then staying—upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian conflict. Mignot caught smallpox and died soon after at the age of thirty-nine, evidently unable to outmaneuver Fate and Death any longer. Niagara is at the Brooklyn Museum, and it really is a forgotten masterpiece that seems to be receiving more worthy attention lately.

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.

Sylvia Plath, Journals

painting of the month

Autumn Leaves -- John Everett Millais, 1855-56

the october city

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring. -- Nelson Algren

(Painting by Thomas Moran -- Chicago World's Fair, 1894)

the random page

Facade.com is a website that offers free on-line Tarot card readings from a variety of decks, along with rune readings, I Ching and other features. One of those other interesting features is their Stichomancy option, which spotlights an old form of divination wherein a person flips open to a random page of a book and tries to gain insight from wherever he or she happens to turn to. There are categories like Biblical, classical or historical texts, along with passages from mysteries, plays or poems – or you can just allow a computer-generated extra-random choice.

A random whirl of the pages today brought up this excerpt from Honore de Balzac's Juana:

Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The profile of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing which he, an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen.

I don't know that this particularly divined anything in my life but the story sounds intriguing, what with the jaded libertine and all. It also brought to mind the featured 1855 painting Portrait of a Spanish Lady by Gustave Courbet, who was something of a libertine himself.

vegetable loves

My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow. (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

Pictured: Vegetable Still-Life -- Frans Snyders, ca. 1600

oak park moments

This quote (sort of) etched in stone by Italian poet and writer Cesare Pavese was glimpsed at Oak Park's Eastgate Cafe, which even seems like a place where you might have once found Cesare Pavese drinking coffee and contemplating life. His first name is off by one small letter but otherwise those are definitely his words. Oak Park is well-known for former citizens Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway, but another Oak Parker worth noting is Philander Barclay. Philander rode his bicycle around the town back in the early 20th century and left behind a cultural and historical legacy of close to a thousand photographs of Oak Park as it was then. Click here  to read more about Philander, and here  to see some of his photographs.

painting of the month

Still Life with Tahitian Oranges -- Paul Gauguin, 1892

the bridge

"Over the great bridge...with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world." (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Image: The Bridge: Nocturne -- Julian Alden Weir, 1910 (Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden)

last day of summer feast

Figs, Pomegranates, Grapes and Brass Plate -- George Henry Hall (1825-1913)

dr. williams

Today would have been the birthday of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), the doctor and poet who lived and practiced medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey for most of his days, when he wasn’t sneaking over to Manhattan or points thereabout to consort with other creative minds. Williams gave us the rain-glazed red wheelbarrow and the white chickens, and the great opening line of “To Elsie” -- The pure products of America go crazy....

Williams has always been one of my favorites among the dead poets' society, and if you ever have a chance to read his autobiography, it offers an interesting glimpse of what it was like to attend medical school in the early 20th century. And these Renoir plums are in honor of Williams' so-sweet, so-cold icebox ones from "This is Just to Say."

the self-made man

Image -- Portrait of Whistler with Hat (James McNeill Whistler, 1858)

"Whistler had become The Artist: dressing differently from ordinary mortals, speaking differently, his every word and gesture as much a critique of philistia as his clothes...He was famous, gifted, notorious, charming and impossible by turns. If you wanted to be an artist, that was the way you behaved." (Text from Robert M. Crunden's American Salons, Oxford University Press)

Mauve is just pink trying to be purple. -- James McNeill Whistler

repin's russia

Looking at the works of artist Ilya Repin (1844-1930) is a great way to learn about Russian history and culture, ranging from Repin's depictions of the Volga Boatmen to scenes from Eugene Onegin to portraits of major literary, artistic and political figures of his time. Repin also had a true gift for capturing the essence of his portrait subject, such as his wonderful impressions of author Leo Tolstoy and his appealingly lost-in-thought painting of composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Even if you don't initially recognize the person in one of Repin's portraits, you're likely to be intrigued enough by the visual image to want to know more. This painting of Vsevolod Garshin seems really striking, and further research revealed that Garshin was a writer whose father and brother had committed suicide, and that Garshin eventually committed suicide himself in 1888 at the age 33. He showed considerable literary promise in his short life, and he also posed for Repin's Czar Ivan the Terrible With the Body of His Son (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) as Ivan's son. In that particular painting, we learn how Czar Ivan unintentionally murdered his own son Ivan in 1581 during an argument by beating him with his staff. Ivan's son was reportedly upset because Czar Ivan had argued earlier with the son's pregnant wife, and in defending her the final fight between father and son came to pass. They were an intense pair of Ivans, so it seems like some kind of tragedy was inevitable. It's eerie and sad to see Garshin in that pose as the dead son, however; Garshin's portrait by the way is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

be yourself...with effort

Quoting Camille Pissarro: "Don't forget only to be yourself. However this cannot be achieved without efforts."

(Pictured: Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich -- Camille Pissarro, 1871)