Art Libraries in Canada

Ionarts reader Chris Hand (who lives in Montreal and blogs at Zeke's Gallery) wrote to me recently about my post on the Artothek phenomenon in Germany (see The Perfect Use for the Lottery, February 2). As you may recall, I was shocked to learn that people in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and so on could borrow artwork from an artothek in the same way you could borrow a book from a library. Chris writes:

Here in Montreal, pretty much all the museums rent out work, and the Canadian Government actually has an art lending bank. All of them are cheap (although not as cheap as the Artothek). I did not realize that this was not standard practice in other cities. Pity.

He also sent the following two links: the Artbank (site in French, La banque d'œuvres d'art), run by the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Rental Gallery of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Since we already loved the city of Montreal, one of the beautiful and interesting places of this world, Ionarts does not need to hear too many more reasons before relocating to Canada or Europe becomes not only desirable but imperative.

If the National Gallery of Art ever catches up with its enlightened Canadian counterparts, Mark Rothko's Man Smoking (1933) is going to be the perfect addition to my music room. For a few months. Then, maybe I would go for Kandinsky's Small Worlds I (1922). Turner's drawing A Yorkshire River (c. 1827) or Vuillard's Vase of Flowers on a Mantelpiece would also be nice.

I'm quite serious when I say that one of the presidential candidates (how many of them are left now?) should jump on this issue. I could actually regain some interest in the primary race. (This goes against our inclination: see the Ionarts motto in the upper righthand corner.)

Ionartium (Ir)

Thanks to David Sucher at City Comforts for drawing my attention to Humbug's Periodic Table of Blogs. In the latest version (updated February 5), David's blog and yours truly appear in the Arts and Entertainment section. Thanks for the link!

How Much Do You Love Balzac?

In an article (Honoré de Balzac en version numérique [Digital edition of Honoré de Balzac], February 10) in Le Figaro, Marie-Douce Albert describes what one fan of Balzac's novels has done (my translation):

This is one thing Balzac could not have imagined. That there could exist a devoted Japanese reader of La Comédie Humaine [in English, The Human Comedy]. A Japanese fan, so full of fervor that one day he would have the idea of listing all the words of his favorite author. This unusual person really and truly exists. Now retired from the Saitama University, in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Kazuo Kiriu was a professor of French literature for 32 years, and more than 20 years ago he began digitalizing the works of Balzac in order to study the vocabulary used by the writer in La Comédie Humaine, as well as in his first novels and in his letters to Mme. Hanska.

From this word hunt, he completed an alphabetical list which, from "abîmer" to "Zuzino," brings together all the nouns, proper and otherwise, found in the writer's work. This probably gave the professor a precise understanding of the word "work," which Balzac used no fewer than 5,542 times in La Comédie Humaine. And the results of his labor are furthermore free for all to use, on the Web site of the Maison de Balzac. It's a crazy undertaking, as this 69-year-old gentleman admits. To understand its origin, we have to go back to Japan after World War II and to an adolescent looking for "a third way" between the destruction of traditional Japanese ideals and the refusal of the American model. The young man threw himself into European literature: Dickens, Heine, Gide. Up to the day when his high school librarian, "with whom I was perhaps a little in love," he admits, suggested he read Le lys dans la vallée [in English, The Lily of the Valley]. From the emotion provoked by a "white shoulder," he made the work his whole life. He learned French and became a professor. Then he undertook this research that no one else, in seems, has dared. All this, "because I do not read Balzac very well," claims the former professor, who in perfect French asks his interlocutor to correct his mistakes.

"That is extreme modesty," say Nicole Mozet and Isabelle Tournier, of the Groupe international de recherches balzaciennes (Girb) [International Group of Balzac Studies]. "We also had need of this index. It offers extremely fast and precious information, on big things as well as the smallest." Thanks to the Maison de Balzac Web site, designed by Claire Scamaroni, you can worry about the comings and goings of Lucien de Rubempré in the different volumes, wonder about the absence of the word "syphilis" (which was after all one of the great ills of the period), or undertake a gigantic study of urbanism in Balzac by tracing the squares, the avenues, the bridges.

You can read Mme. Mozet's official announcement of Mr. Kiriu's work here. You should also check out Balzac Text Data Mining: How to pick apart Balzac's Comedie Humaine with a computer, which shows you how to use Python to analyze Balzac. In all this furor about Balzac, I am reminded of François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), in which young Antoine Doinel, the director's alter ego, nearly burns down his parents' apartment because he lights a candle in a homemade shrine to his favorite writer, Honoré de Balzac (image shown above).

New Building from Imre Makovecz

I may be one of the few people left who was not familiar with the work of Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz. As I learned in an article (Ideal dome exhibition, February 9) by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian:

His most sensational new building is unquestionably the Stephenaeum (shown here), an auditorium and the cultural heart of the Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem [Péter Pázmány Catholic University] of the Sacred Heart's faculty of humanities at Piliscsaba, some 20 km north of Budapest. The Makovecz design—and, yes, it is real—takes the form of two circular buildings, one adopted from the form of a traditional Magyar jurta (yurt), the other a Renaissance tempietto, crashing into one other. Here, it appears, are two opposite worlds, urban and rural, rational and romantic, national and international, trying to match and marry.

There are designs for this and other buildings in an exhibit called Hungarian Architecture Today: Modernist and Organic, at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London until February 26. This exhibit is part of a series of cultural events, Magyar Magic: Hungary in Focus 2004, sponsored by the Hungarian Cultural Centre to honor the entry of Hungary into the European Union this coming May. Mr. Glancey also describes another Makovecz project, at Farkasreti-temeto (Wolf's Meadow Cemetery):

Here, among hilly acres of horse chesnut and ash trees, are the much-visited graves of former dissidents and refugees, among them the composer Bela Bartok and the conductor Sir Georg Solti. Matyas Rakosi, Hungary's Stalinist dicatator, is buried here, too. Before he was removed from power in 1956, Rakosi had executed some 2,000 of his fellow citizens and incarcerated at least 100,000 more. Yet, the reason an increasing number of visitors ride the yellow and white trams from Moszkva ter in the centre of town to this wooded grave yard is to witness its extraordinary and unprecedented mortuary chapel. The winged doors of this architectural cave open to reveal a timber simulacrum of the human torso. The dead rest in caskets where the heart would be, if this building, designed by Imre Makovecz, was alive. On quiet days, and with candles flickering, it is easy to imagine the building breathing.

Now, if that description does not make you want to see an image of this chapel (the architect claimed his inspiration for the interior was the human rib-cage), nothing will. It took a little searching, but here are some pictures of Makovecz's mortuary chapel at Farkasréti temeto, completed in 1975, which is absolutely beautiful and yet creepy. So this got me interested, and I started looking for other buildings by Makovecz. The most attractive, I found, are the Visegrád Forest Education Center (1982–1988), a Catholic church at Paks (more pictures here) (1987–1990), a Lutheran church at Siófok (1986–1990; see image above), and the Villa Tibor Jacob (1988–1991). (The latter looks now like the guest house at Rivendell.) Outside of Hungary, there is a set of commercial buildings called Naturata in Überlingen, Germany (1992), and the famous Hungarian pavilion for the 1992 World's Fair in Seville, Spain. There are also images of several other Makovecz buildings available from a site in Denmark called Research into Organic Design. Several other pages are available, mostly in Hungarian or other inscrutable (for me) languages, but sometimes with good images (you can see pictures of Makovecz here and here, for example). The architect's official Web site is "Üdvözöljük," which I'm guessing means "under construction."

UPDATE:
Brian Micklethwaite blogged about this article yesterday (When buildings collide – to make a building, February 9) in his Culture Blog.

Anonymous 4

This winter I am participating in a team-taught seminar at Catholic University, called "Sacred and Secular Music in Medieval Culture," which is being cosponsored by the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music and the Department of Medieval and Byzantine Studies, thanks to the leadership of Professors Joan Grimbert and Grayson Wagstaff. I will be giving a lecture this Wednesday on Gregorian chant in the medieval Divine Office and its impact on the life and creative culture of the Middle Ages. Much more exciting, however, the renowned performing ensemble Anonymous 4 will be giving master classes on performing medieval music to the class as part of a residency this semester at Catholic University. They will inaugurate their involvement with a concert this Saturday in the Crypt Church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. If you will be in Washington this weekend, you should attend, since the group has announced that this year's tour of performances will be their last. Their program for this concert, "La bele Marie," features a new selection of 13th-century French music in honor of the Virgin Mary: according to their Web site, "conductus—marvelously varied one-, two- and three-voice songs in Latin—and popular medieval chansons in honor of 'la bele marie'." (The group will give another concert in Washington on March 14.) If you won't be in Washington, try to see them in another city on the tour.

Correction

In my complaining about ticket prices at the Kennedy Center (see post on February 4), I overlooked a service called Ticketplace. This is not the perfect solution to the problem, but it is the "only half-price, day-of-show ticket outlet" in Washington: on the day of a concert at the Kennedy Center, you can buy unpurchased tickets for half the asking price. It's something.

Those Rich Americans

I am bothered in so many ways by this article (L'art fait fortune à Palm Beach, February 7) by Harry Bellet in Le Monde. It is supposedly about the Palm Beach Classic, a "new antiquities market" in West Palm Beach (Florida): according to their Web site, this year is the eighth annual installment of the sale, which ended today. However, most of the piece is devoted to softcore gawking of wealthy potential clientele for this venture, across Lake Worth in the exclusive neighborhood of Palm Beach. Not only does the nexus of wealth and fine art disgust me in many ways, but the salivating over the outrageously ostentatious lifestyle of this tiny sliver of Americans reinforces the absurd stereotype of Americans as obsessed with money and status. Here is my translation of an excerpt:

In Palm Beach, you see convertible Ferraris parked with the keys left in the ignition: they are watched over by cameras installed at each intersection, on the traffic lights. The sky here is always blue. That is the reason why wealthy Americans come here to warm their rheumatism when snow is covering the rest of the United States.

When he moves into his winter house, William Koch (Bill to his friends), carries in his luggage the Botero sculptures that he cannot do without: several tons of bronze that follow him in his travels and come to winter on the lawns of this garden that, stretching out on each side of his very large house, covers the whole width of the island. Botero is one of his friends: the Colombian artist even dedicated to him a portrait, representing Bill dressed as a chubby little sailor, holding a miniature sailboat model under his arm.

In his cellar, Bill has dozens more: all the boats that have won the America's Cup since its inception are lined up as models in glass cases. The one from 1992 is his, a boat using revolutionary technology (Le Monde, May 19, 1992). He had his Boteros transported to the lawn of the house he rented then, by the San Diego Yacht Club. Bill is a passionate sailor and collector. He also likes good wine: his cave holds around 35,000 bottles of the best vineyards and requires twenty employees. At the entrance, a touchscreen computer allows you to choose a vintage and to find the bottle thanks to a detailed map. At the back, in an alcove, there are a half-dozen rarities behind a gate: Château Lafite 1737, brought back by Thomas Jefferson from his ambassadorship in France.

What does any of this have to do with an antiquities market or just with art in general? Well, the rest of the article does examine what Bill Koch and some other collectors buy for their homes. I am always disturbed when Europeans believe that this sort of story represents a large part, or even the majority, of the American population. When talking with people in Europe, I often have to make clear that the average American (someone like me) has a lifestyle remarkably similar to that of the average European. Often, especially when an American is traveling in Europe, the assumption is that you must be wealthy.

Lest we think that this sort of voyeurism is a European phenomenon, the sale and Mr. Koch were also covered in an article (Everything Is Hardly Enough, February 5) by Christopher Mason in the New York Times. At least there, it's in the Home and Garden section, instead of the Culture section. (There are even pictures of Mr. Koch's house in the much more detailed write-up by Julie Carlson (Bordeaux, Boats and Botero: The Passions of Collector William Koch, February 4) in Antiques and Fine Art.) I am all for rich people spending money on art, especially when the money goes to artists, but if you want to be thoroughly depressed about how too much money ruins art by making it elitist and inaccessible, read Souren Melikian's report (Time to sell in a hot market, February 7) on recent art auctions in the International Herald Tribune.

The Return of the Art Movie

So I went last night with a couple friends to see the restored version of The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965; here is the screenplay in English) at the new E Street Cinema, in downtown Washington. (In case you missed it, here is how film critic Michael O'Sullivan wrote up this new theater, E Street Cinema A New D.C. Landmark, January 4, in the Washington Post.) When it opened on January 9, the E Street Cinema identified itself as "an eight-screen luxury movie theatre specializing in first-run independent and foreign language films." I naturally assumed that a cinema that shows anything but indigestible blockbusters (yes, I am talking about the last two Matrix coproliths) would follow a few standard conventions.

When I first moved to Washington (I see no need to be specific, so let's just say it was long ago in the last century), I used to go with some regularity to worship at the altar of foreign cinema. The only shrines to this neglected religion were the Biograph Theatre, which was converted in a quite unsophisticated way from an old car dealership on M Street in Georgetown, and the Key Theater, not far from it. The former was replaced by a drugstore in 1996, and the latter by a designer hardware store in 1997. Part of the fun in seeing a different kind of movie was surviving the surroundings: sitting in a room where porno films had been shown at another time that day, leaving scraps of food for the poor rat inhabitants, and being one of a handful of people in a cramped space with seats that had not been cleaned or disinfected since 1974.

Since the lamentable closing of the Georgetown independents, for foreign films or anything off the beaten path, you were pretty much limited to the screenings of the American Film Institute National Theater at the Kennedy Center, which is terribly inconvenient. A short time back, an eclectic little place called Visions Cinema Bistro Lounge opened on Florida Avenue, but I have not been thrilled with it. The E Street Cinema has a storefront on E Street NW between 10th and 11th, but all the screens are in the basement of that block, some of them at a considerable distance through a warren of tunnels. It's disturbingly posh and well lit: if having 25% less track lighting and less expensive carpet and tile would have kept down the ticket price ($9.25!), I think it would have been a good trade-off. Still, you can buy European chocolate or a cappucino instead of the more traditional cinema fare, which is nice. The screen for The Battle of Algiers was small, but the seats were comfortable. Plus, when you leave the theater and walk down 11th Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, you will see one of the most beautiful buildings in the District of Columbia, especially in the dense fog of a rainy night.

Also now playing at the E Street Cinema: Tokyo Godfathers (Satoshi Kon), Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald), The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet; see his official Web site in French), Girl with a Pearl Earring (Peter Webber), Monster (Patty Jenkins), My Architect: A Son's Journey (Nathaniel Kahn), and Big Fish (Tim Burton; see Todd's review on January 17). If I still thought that the Oscars were at all relevant, I would now have a better chance of seeing some of the more obscure entries. Even so, Washington has a long way to go before we can enjoy the range of film viewing experiences available in Paris, for example, because of the burgeoning number of small theaters that show eclectic assortments of current and past movies. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, look at the list of movies playing there right now.