Wednesday, April 27, 2011

dolling it up

It wouldn’t seem likely that the names Gustav Klimt and Barbie would ever be used in the same sentence – but then again, why not? In the Barbie® Museum Collection due out this summer, distinctly designed Barbies wear outfits fashioned after such classic paintings as Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Da Vinci’s La Gioconda and Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Starry Night Barbie is strapless and swinging, Mona Lisa Barbie is more demure and subtly elegant, and the Klimt Barbie is quite the stunner in her resplendently detailed and shimmering wrap, choker and long gown.

I hope they continue the series and personally would very much like to see a DalĂ­ Barbie, with maybe a melting clock necklace or some busy little ants crawling up and down her legs? The Gauguin Tahiti Barbie, or the Jackson Pollock-style hipster, with a multicolored splattered minidress and black Abstract Expressionist sunglasses. It also might be nice to see Barbie as the artist herself with an easel and smock, rather than the exclusive object of beauty.

Monday, April 25, 2011

national poetry month!


To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too....

You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there-
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom....

(From "To Be in Love" -- Gwendolyn Brooks)(Pictured: Cardinalis cardinalis, Wikimedia Commons)

Sunday, April 24, 2011


Russian Empire Easter postcard, circa 1900 (from Wikimedia Commons)

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

whistler's special sauce


Our Suite101 Feature Writer blogs are being removed from the site as of May 1, so I'll repost some of the entries that got the most traffic here....

For many artists, the creation of a unique persona and lifestyle is often as interesting as creating the art itself. Never one to quietly accept what he’d been handed, the great James McNeill Whistler rejected the notion of being born in sensible Lowell, Massachusetts and instead invented alternate backdrops for his coming into being. ("I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell….") While Whistler's actual and not fabricated childhood was in Europe, he found himself putting in an incongruous stint at West Point Academy following the death of his father. He then headed to Paris to pursue the whole bohemian artist experience before eventually making London his home base.

Robert M. Crunden’s book American Salons features fascinating characters like Whistler who reinvented themselves between the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the process changed the course of art, fiction, poetry, music and life in general. Here's an excerpt regarding Whistler’s painting method:

Nature gave him its inspiration, while the Japanese gave him intuitions about what to do with it…He had a large palette, a board two feet by three with a butterfly inlaid at one corner, on which he laid out his colors, the pure at the top. He then mixed large quantities of the prevailing color in the intended picture, producing results so juicy that he called it “sauce”…[h]e had to lay his canvas on the ground because the sauce would run if the canvas were in any way tilted -- sometimes it did anyway, and he often accepted the accidental results….

"If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this." (James McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903)

Pictured: Whistler's 1900 Gray and Gold -- The Golden Bay (Hunter Museum of American Art)

Sunday, April 17, 2011

painting of the month


Wild He-Goats Dance (Arthur Bowen Davies, ca. 1915 -- Maier Museum of Art)

Monday, April 11, 2011

national poetry month!

Some spiders spin webs as beautiful
As Japanese drawings, intricate as clocks, strong as rocks:
Others construct traps which consist only
Of two sticky and tricky threads. Yet this ambush is enough
To bind and chain a crawling ant for long
enough:
The famished spider feels the vibration
Which transforms patience into sensation and satiation.


from Spiders -- Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
(Pictured: The Smiling Spider -- Odilon Redon)

Saturday, April 9, 2011

a visit to the hot l baltimore

Steppenwolf Theatre's revival of the late Lanford Wilson's 1970s hit The Hot L Baltimore is currently happening through the end of May, with direction by Tina Landau and a cast of many fine actors. The set is also impressively rundown and offers a two-story action view, featuring stairs leading to rooms without doors to allow for a kind of voyeuristic, back of a dollhouse effect. If you can sit close to the stage and you're fascinated by authentic props, you'll enjoy noting how magazines leafed through are truly from the 1970s, and that the TV set shows Pringles commercials of the era -- and that some super-groovy ribbed blue bellbottoms are worn by Bill, the desk clerk. And if you lived through the seventies or have a more youthful retro interest in them, the timeline boards of the decade's major events and hit songs set up in the theater lobby will likely round out your nostalgic experience.

Back in the real day, The Hot L Baltimore debuted in March of 1973 and ran through 1976 at New York's Circle in the Square. It showcased the then-new talents of forever tough cookie Conchata Ferrell (who so refreshingly dominates Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men), and Judd Hirsch as Paul, a young man in search of his elusive grandfather. At that time, the play surely had a very different vibe, because it was an immediate representation of 1970s upheaval and change, and America wasn't so familiar with the lives of sassy hookers and/or needed to come to terms with the fact that many of its former glories were crumbling and in the line of the wrecking ball.

So essentially, The Hot L's revival now is pretty much evocative and not a social slice of life, with a note of melancholy added due to the recent death of playwright Lanford Wilson. The play is further deepened by many primary roles being filled by African American actors in this production, including standout performances by de'Adre Aziza, Alana Arenas, Namir Smallwood, Jon Michael Hill, James Vincent Meredith, TaRon Patton and Jacqueline Williams.

Still, if the play is truly supposed to take place in the early 1970s, changing the racial makeup of the cast would have--at the time--caused all sorts of alternate issues and dynamics. Yes, Baltimore has a larger black population than other cities, but perhaps the elderly Mr. Morse might harbor some old school inherent prejudices, or perhaps the fact that Bill the desk clerk is attracted to The Girl might create a greater interracial frisson of conflict -- and the idea of a brash young black woman and her timid brother planning to farm acres in predominately white 1970s Utah seems even more worrisome. Mrs. Oxenham is into making a traditional African fashion statement -- what consciousness-raising led her to that? And why does Mr. Katz dislike Jackie so much? Is it hard knocks disapproval or just, as she complains, because of the way she dresses?

I have to wonder whether being in the front row made me connect more with some of the characters and have more questions about them. Probably too many questions, because in the long run it seems best to just take The Hot L Baltimore as a retro piece -- to enjoy the team effort, the set, the props and the onstage radio crackling out soul tunes, and don't really think that much about the rest.

Pictured: Bill (Jon Michael Hill) and The Girl (Alison Torem) in The Hot L Baltimore

Saturday, April 2, 2011

national poetry month!


The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time...

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.


Walt Whitman (1819-1892)