The Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum

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For a long time I only knew the Visigoth crowns from a poem by Elinor Wylie, which a friend recently quoted to me:

I cannot give you the Metropolitan Tower;
I cannot give you heaven;
Nor the nine Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum;
Nor happiness, even.

When Partner and I were in Paris last October, I noticed that the Cluny Museum was very close to our hotel. We went there on our last full day in Paris. It’s an old building with a Roman foundation; there are lots of old relics from the days when Paris was called Lutetia. As you ascend through the building, you find all manner of other works of art: later Roman, Dark Ages, Holy Roman Empire, medieval France.

And among those works of art are the Visigoth crowns.

They are not big chunky Burger-King style crowns in the Halloween-costume sense. They are delicate circlets encrusted with sapphires and pearls and other polished stones, festooned with slender strands of gold. (I counted only eight of them, and was a little disappointed. Then I learned that the ninth, the crown of King Suinthila, was stolen in 1921 and has never been found again.)

They were never meant to be worn; they were to be hung above a church's altar, as a symbol of royalty. With a little modification, however, they would look like something an Elf might have worn in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

I want lots of things from museums the world over. I want Suzanne Valadon’s portrait of Erik Satie, which hangs in the Modern Art Museum in Paris (though I’ve never seen it in person). I want the Salomon Ruysdael waterscape that hangs in the RISD Museum only a few blocks from our apartment here. I want Ilya Repin’s gorily tragic “Ivan the Terrible and His Son” from the Tretyakov in Moscow, which would look nice over the sofa. I want a Rembrandt here and a Koons there, and a couple of the Monets from the Metropolitan in New York. Also I might throw in a couple of the Unicorn tapestries from the Cloisters, and I wouldn’t mind the Bayeux Tapestry (if only I had a room big enough to display it in).

But I think I would trade all of the above for one – just one! – of the Visigoth crowns from the Cluny Museum.

Is that so much to ask?

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Shameless plug: artist Drew Green

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I have been on Tumblr for a couple of years now. At first it seemed odd and pointless, and not really intended for someone like fifty-plus-year-old me.

Then I discovered Tumblr members and communities that were friendly to people like me.

And there I discovered Drew Green.

He is an Atlanta-based artist and illustrator. He has a number of personal projects, and he makes money in the meantime by doing commissions.

Here’s how it works: you give him some likenesses – like a photo – and tell him what you’d like. (There’s a fee involved, but it’s surprisingly small, considering the work he’s doing for you.)

His style is cartoonish, but in the best and most professional sense – like the classic Warner Brothers or Disney illustrators. Here’s one of my favorite examples of his work – a gay couple and their son at Disneyworld:

Isn’t that charming?

I kept seeing him post on Tumblr, and finally last spring I sent him a picture of Partner and me at the top level of the Eiffel Tower in Paris last October:

He returned to me, almost immediately, a sketch based on the photo. It was shockingly good. I asked for one small change, which he gladly made. A few weeks later, I received this image:

Both Partner and I are delighted with this. I love showing it to other people. My friend Troy said: “He really caught your sullen expression!” Another said: “I’ll be able to say I knew you before you became a cartoon character!”

Here’s some information on his work and his commissions. His rates are very reasonable, and he’s a very nice guy, and I love his work.

(I told you in the title this was a shameless plug.)

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George Lois asks: Can you do better?

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George Lois was a real Madison Avenue adman from the 1950s and 1960s, and after. He wrote a book some years ago called DAMN GOOD ADVICE, which is a memoir / self-accolade / idea book.

It’s a good read, and a funny one. I recommend it.

(Incidentally: if you watch “Mad Men,” you will be interested to know that George Lois is rumored to be the model for Don Draper, the main character in the series. George, in his book, hotly denies it. “And besides,” he says, “I was more attractive!”, and shows this picture:

(So what do you think of someone who says: “That’s not me! And besides, I was more attractive than that!”? Hmm. I know what I think.)

Anyway: the book is full of good stories.

This one nags at me frequently:

A bigwig goes into a bar and says to the bartender, “Give me the best Manhattan you can make.”

Bartender does so, and gives it to Bigwig. Bigwig tastes it. “It’s good,” he says. “Can you do better?”

Bartender tries again. This goes on for several repetitions. Finally, after sampling Manhattan #5 or so, Bigwig says: “This is excellent!”, and then he glares at Bartender. “Why the fuck didn’t you make it like this the first time I asked?”

I have no answer to that.

What does “best” mean?

And why don’t we do it all the time?

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Men's clothing, and magic, and psychometry

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Partner and I went recently to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, to see a show about men’s clothing.

Shows likes this – fabric, clothing – usually bore the hell out of me. But this one was amusing, and really memorable. They had one of Mark Twain’s shirts. They had one of Andy Warhol’s terrible shaggy white wigs. They had a dapper trim little tux that had belonged to Fred Astaire, and a very small dress suit belonging to Truman Capote circa 1970. They had a Harris Tweed suit that might or might not have belonged to one of the British royals in the early 20^th century.

I was amused and really gratified to see these things. These were garments worn by famous people, and –

Well, and what? Why does that make them special?

Not long ago, a scientist on television showed how people impute mystical properties to things owned by famous people. He showed a group of people a fountain pen that he said had belonged to Albert Einstein, and asked if they wanted to see and hold it, and they all handled it reverently. Then he showed them a sweatshirt and told them it had belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer the serial killer, and asked them if they’d like to handle it or try it on. No one wanted to touch it.

He lied in both cases. The pen didn’t belong to Einstein, and the shirt didn’t belong to Dahmer.

But I understand implicitly what those people felt. We feel instinctively that objects take on the properties and personalities of their possessors. There are even psychics who claim that they have the skill of psychometry: the ability to read the histories of objects and their owners.

I own a Jean Cocteau lithograph – a portrait of Erik Satie – which was once owned by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I like to think that I can feel the personalities of all three when I look at it: Cocteau’s imagination and drive, Satie’s whimsy and purity, Shostakovich’s dark humor and power.

I probably can’t feel any such thing.

But I like to think I can.

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Good coloring

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Probably we all had at least one teacher whom we detested, and who detested us. Mine was Mrs. Velma Himmler, back in the second grade. (I’ve changed her name, fairly obviously.) She was short, and dyspeptic, and mostly angry all the time. I was very timid. We were like matter and antimatter.

Second grade was pretty awful for me. But this most of all stands out in my mind: Velma Himmler let me know in no uncertain terms that I didn’t color pictures correctly. I left white space between the horizon and the blue sky. Velma Himmler told me that this was incorrect and unnatural, and that my coloring was substandard.

I knew, even at the age of seven, that she was full of shit. For one thing, we were in the Pacific Northwest, where there was often a soft layer of white cloud between the horizon and the blue sky (when we were lucky enough to have a blue sky).

And also, more importantly: who the hell was Velma Himmler to tell me how to color my pictures?

Coloring, for children, is a perfectly uninhibited activity. You color what you want, the way you want. Zigzags? Perfect. Solid colors? Also perfect.

Then you get to school, and you discover that there’s a correct way to color your pictures.

I never thought of myself as an artist, so I didn’t take Mrs. Himmler’s criticism very seriously (though I’ve obviously remembered it after all these years).

But later I took up crossstitch. When I was in Morocco, I copied and improvised patterns that I saw in the local rugs – called “kilims” – and did them as crossstitch. I gave all my work away, so I can’t show you any samples, but I can tell you that they were lovely. They used every color. They were geometrical representations of fish, and people, and abstract shapes, just like the original kilims I was copying, and I was able to use all of the psychedelic colors of thread I’d bought over the years.

Good coloring? There’s no such thing. There are all the colors of the rainbow, and more. And shapes.

Kids: when you make art, use all the colors and shapes you know.

Use all of them.

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Edward Gorey

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A while back, Google changed its logo to commemorate Edward Gorey’s 88^th birthday.

 

 

Gorey was an illustrator. I still have some paperback books from the 1960s and 1970s with covers drawn by Gorey. (His style is unmistakeable: scratchy, mock-Victorian, mock-Gothic.)

 

 

But all the while, quietly, he was publishing his own little books: children’s alphabets, morality stories, horror stories, and limericks.

 

 

If you ever watched “Mystery!” on PBS, you’ve seen Gorey’s work; that wonderful animation at the beginning, with sighing women and huge urns crashing on people’s head. Here it is:

 

 

 

 

Gorey passed away in 2000. He lived on the north shore of Cape Cod, in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts. Partner and I have visited his house; it’s a big rambling structure, with a huge bay laurel tree in the yard.

 

 

Gorey collected things. There are buckets full of doorknobs on display! (Older American readers will remember Aunt Clara, on the TV show “Bewitched,” who always had doorknobs in her purse. It’s a sweet affectation to collect doorknobs. To be sure, they can be very pretty.)

 

 

I snatched a laurel leaf from the yard before we left, and pressed it in my ancient copy of “Amphigorey.”

 

 

Happy 88^th, Edward. We miss you.

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Lynda Barry

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I just picked up a book by Lynda Barry, one of my favorite graphic novelists / illustrators / authors. She has published lots of books in which she narrates and illustrates her childhood. They are brilliantly funny, sometimes sad, and always memorable.

 

 

 

Nowadays Ms. Barry tours the country doing a creativity seminar called “Writing the Unthinkable.” She gets people writing and drawing by coaxing them, and urging them, to remember what it was like to be a kid with a pencil or a crayon. Just color. Just write. Just scribble. Don’t worry too much about the result.

 

 

The book I picked up, “Picture This,” is a collaboration between Ms. Barry and her husband Kevin Kawula. It’s about creativity, and writing, and drawing. It features strange characters like “the nearsighted monkey” and “the dear chicken,” as well as some of her older creations like Cousin Marlys. It’s full of collage and watercolor. It’s a feast. I was reading it on the University shuttle the other night, turning page after page, and I realized that the student sitting next to me was reading it along with me. That should tell you something.

 

 

Anyway: one of the points she makes in this book is that you just need to keep the pen (or brush, or the cursor, or whatever) moving, in contact with the paper. You need to feel that contact. Make spirals. Draw ballerinas. Write nonsense.

 

 

Keep moving forward.

 

 

Some of it might be terrible.

 

 

Some of it might be wonderful.

 

 

Keep filling those notebook pages, kids.

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Maira Kalman

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Maira Kalman is a writer and artist and thinker. She has created something I can only call the “graphic essay,” and which can only be understood by looking at / reading one.

 

 

Her graphic world is full of bright colors and unusual angles. Her unique calligraphy swoops and flies among her images. She loves capturing Daily Life: hats, kitchen sinks, burger platters.

 

 

 

One of Maira's great themes is ephemerality: the preciousness of every moment that passes, under the threat of mortality. Every moment, for her, becomes a visual poem.

 

 

Here are the first few images from one of her “And the Pursuit of Happiness” pieces:

 

 

 

Never in a million years could I have come up with “soigné diatoms.” Nor could I have rhymed “Beringia” with “herringia,” nor seen the obvious link between motorcycles and dinosaurs.

 

 

The sketches and paintings and drawings are all her own work, and the photos, and that candy / cookie / Play-Doh single-celled creature at the beginning.

 

 

But the real magic lies in the combination of all these with her words, and her thoughts.

 

 

She described herself in a recent Thinkr video as a “loopy optimist,” and I think that’s appropriate, but I think she’s too modest. Here’s the video:

 

 

 

 

She has written on history, and democracy, and travel, and music. She has shared chocolate with both Kitty Carlisle Hart and Louise Bourgeois, and shown us both encounters:

 

 

"Nature is the guarantee of sanity. Or maybe love. Or both. Or not. Anyway . . ."

 

 

I feel extraordinarily encouraged when I read her essays. They make me feel that it might actually be worthwhile to continue for a few days or months more on Planet Earth.

 

 

And for that: thank you, Maira Kalman.

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The painting over the sofa

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I was reading a little vignette about a writer I’d never heard of, Nathan Englander, in the Financial Times a few days ago.  He is evidently an up-and-coming genius of 42.

 

 

I have decided that I don’t like him.

 

 

The FT often does something like the Proust questionnaire with certain celebrities.  They ask them questions from a list: What’s your favorite virtue?  What do you most dislike about yourself? If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?  (New York Magazine does it, James Lipton does it on “Inside the Actors Studio,” everyone does it.  If the interviewee is intelligent or witty or (insh’allah) both, the results can be a lot of fun.  If not, it can be excruciating.)

 

 

Mister Englander tends toward the excruciating.  His answers are leaden and pompous: he mentions that he finds writing “all-consuming” in the same breath that he claims to take exactly 49 minutes to brush his teeth.  He is trying too hard.

 

 

This answer especially brought me up short:

 

 

If you could own any painting, what would it be?

“Guernica.”  I remember being taken to say goodbye to it in New York by my mum.

 

 

Dear Jesus.  Can you imagine “Guernica” hanging over your sofa?  How charming to come home after a hard day of work and sit down in the living room in front of a Cubist painting of lightbulbs and corpses and mutilated cattle.

 

 

I’d find it a little unnerving.

 

 

I asked myself the same question, and the answer came to me easily.  And the painting lives right now the road from me, too.

 

 

About ten blocks away from our apartment, in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, hangs a painting by a Dutch landscapist named Salomon van Ruysdael called “The Ferry Boat.”  It was painted in 1645, and it looks as fresh today as it ever did.  I always spend a few minutes with it when we visit the RISD Museum.

 

 

The above image doesn’t capture all of the detail, but it will give you the general impression.  First: the soft colors, especially the pale blue sky and drifting dark clouds, and the dark green foliage, and the gray water.  Then the composition: the trees leaning right, the clouds leaning left, the church in the center (or just off-center) pointing straight up, the sailboats just a little askew.

 

 

It is perfect peace.  It is a country morning, and the day will be mostly sunny; the clouds are a little dark, so it might rain a bit later, but it will certainly clear up again.

 

 

Now this part you’ll have to take on faith.  You can’t really see the faces of the people on shore or on the ferryboat, but if you could, they would surprise you: they are grotesque little figures, some of them grimacing and leering.  The first time I took a really close look in the museum, I nearly jumped back.

 

 

I love the painting even more for that.  It’s perfectly serene, an ideal landscape for over the sofa.  And it has hidden secrets that it only reveals if you look at it closely.

 

 

And, if I really worked at it, I could probably steal it and bring it home.

 

 

Perfect.

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But I'm an intellectual!

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In late November, Steve Martin went to the 92^nd Street YMCA in New York City to discuss his new novel, “An Object of Beauty,” with an art critic from the New York Times, in front of a paying audience.

The YMCA has since offered a refund to spectators, saying that the session “did not meet the standard of excellence” they were accustomed to offer.

It was a discussion about art and the collection of art.

 

The audience came to see Steve Martin.

 

 

Okay. I see the problem.

 

 

Steve Martin is a very intelligent man. He even studied philosophy (for a while) when he was in college.  Did he graduate with a degree in philosophy? No, he did not. He went on to do stand-up comedy, with a banjo and an arrow through his head.

 

 

You would think that he'd have a sense of humor about this, since “humor” is how he's been earning his bread and butter for the past thirty years.

 

 

But no!

 

Someone from the YMCA audience the other night sent up a note: “Talk about Steve's career.” And, according to Steve in the Sunday Times, this derailed the whole fascinating conversation about art and life and collecting. Who knows what might have come next? Some fascinating revelation about what it's like to own a Kandinsky, no doubt.

 

But instead, someone had the nerve! to ask about Steve's movies.

 

(After he'd had the nerve to make them, of course.)

 

According to Steve, the YMCA crowd didn't give him a chance. If they'd waited, they would have been treated to gems of conversation! . . . which, evidently, were lacking earlier.  

 

Comedians like to be taken seriously.  Groucho Marx was embittered by the need to be a clown his whole life and longed to be taken as an intellectual.  Woody Allen keeps making serious movies - I've seen "Interiors" at least twenty times, for whatever it's worth - but people still like the old Woody Allen.  An alien in "Stardust Memories" tells Woody: "People on our planet like your movies.  Especially the earlier funnier ones."

 

Steve didn't achieve seriousness the other night by putting on a pair of Marian-the-Librarian glasses and making obvious comments about Edward Hopper.

 

He achieved pomposity.

 

Steve, honey: get over thyself.

 

It is extremely difficult to be taken seriously after being seen pulling handkerchiefs out of your fly.

 

Just give the people their refunds and shut up.

 

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Sunday blog: Erik Satie, by Jean Cocteau

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The above (the original of which hangs in our living room) is an engraving of Erik Satie by the French author / artist / provocateur Jean Cocteau. Cocteau dashed it off from life around 1915, liked it, and reproduced it many times during his lifetime; it made him a lot of money.

Here is the provenance of my copy:

• It was one of a number of engravings in a portfolio given by Cocteau to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in the 1950s.
• Upon Shostakovich's death, it went to his daughter Galina.
• Upon Galina's death, it went to her widower,
• who sold it to a dealer,
• who sold it to me.
  
  

Satie (who died in 1925) was a well-known crackpot. If he knew I had this engraving hanging on my wall, he'd probably be furious that Cocteau made so much money off his image. On the other hand, he might get a kick out of it.

Cocteau (who died in 1963) would be delighted that his work was still being admired, though he'd probably find my living room too bourgeois. Given that he was a capitalist to the teeth, he'd also want to know how much I paid for his work.

Shostakovich (who died in 1975) would probably just shrug. I imagine him saying: “Oh, was that mine? Yes, I think I remember. Oh, well. I'm glad it didn't get thrown away, anyway.”

I'm glad too.

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