Botero at the Musée Maillol

Philippe Dagen, in Fernando Botero, un système qui tourne rond [Fernando Botero, a system that turns round] (Le Monde, January 8), reviews an exhibit of recent paintings by that artist (Fernando Botero: Œuvres Récentes), at the Musée Maillol in Paris until March 15. (The museum's Web site is a cool and pretty Flash representation, so I can't give you a direct link.)

Biographies recount that in 1956, at 24 years old, while he was painting Still Life with Mandolin, Fernando Botero had the idea to break with the normal scale of volume and to make bodies and objects considerably fatter. Botero then became one of the most famous artists on the planet. He shows in almost all major cities and enjoys a retrospective almost every year.

His name is linked with an immediately identifiable figure: a very fat woman, with a monumental head, arms, fingers, thighs, stomach, and ass. Her breasts and feet seem very small in comparison. With very few changes, this procedure is also applied to men, animals, fruits, dishes.

Indeed, the last Botero exhibit was at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, from June 21 to September 28, 2003. What I think Dagen really captures about Botero's work is how the artist's commercial appeal makes him uneasy as a critic. Botero, he says, over a 40-year period, by perpetuating his signature style, has created a simple and automatic reaction in the public.

Visitors to a Botero exhibition know what they are going to see before they enter, they find it there, and they leave it again thus satisfied. This is the way it is at the Musée Maillol in Paris, as it was several months ago in The Hague. Everything is done, in each work, so that it can be that way: it exists only by disproportion. One perceives no other stylistic individuality. After having drawn the forms, Botero colors them, staying carefully within the lines. A slight effect of light or shadow underscores the shapes, and it's done.

One can hardly give the Colombian artist grief for having understood capitalism. He diffuses his trademark through all media, as sports and movie stars do, as the photographer David Hamilton used to do with his willowy nymphettes. It is harder to understand the writings that attempt to legitimate this activity either intellectually or historically.

Ouch. (It gets worse.) He then attacks the authors of the catalogues for the Hague and Paris exhibits, who both try to depict Botero as Gauguin in reverse, using European imagery to paint South American subjects.

Botero is happy to parody figures taken from Piero della Francesca, Velázquez, Manet, or Degas. There is nothing in this that is specifically "South American"—if we suppose that that term has any meaning today—or that "disturbs or even reverses the well-ordered trends and genres of art history in the 20th century."

This is more a process of recycling classic sources, especially Picasso, which makes the 1956 story suspect. Fernando Botero studied and imitated Picasso beginning in the late 1940s. At the time, he loved the "Blue" and "Rose" periods. He had only to advance in the chronology to discover the paintings made between 1919 and 1921, in which Picasso plays with disproportion in his treatment of the feminine body. The bathers become colossal, and their hands thick.

If you want an idea of what he's talking about here, take a look at Picasso's Trois Danseuses [Three Dancers], a pencil drawing dated 1919-1920, and Deux femmes nues [Two naked women], a pastel from 1920. (Those links are from the excellent On-Line Picasso Project.)

The hatred of popular appeal and the charges of being derivative remind me somewhat of similar reactions to the J. Seward Johnson show at the Corcoran here in Washington (see posts on September 13 and September 4). Not that I really want to revisit that.

Death of Classicism

Souren Melikian certainly put me in the Christmas spirit with his article (Classicism to Cataclysm: A Cycle's End, December 20) in the International Herald Tribune. He reviews two shows at the Louvre, Tanagra: Mythe et archéologie [Tanagra: Myth and Archaeology] and L'Esprit Créateur de Pigalle à Canova [The Creative Spirit From Pigalle to Canova], both of which ended on January 5. The description of the two exhibits and how the rage for Classical art influenced the last two centuries of art history is interesting. However, he also uses that platform to answer an interesting and depressing question: "How did the Western fascination with the legacy of Ancient Greek and Roman art come to an end?" Melikian connects the end of artistic interest in Classical art with the general decline of educational focus on antiquity:

It was the crumbling of its literary foundation that signaled the ultimate demise of Classicism. Until the eve of World War II, Greek and Latin humanities underpinned traditional West European cultural values. By the time they left high school, young Europeans were familiar with Greek myths, had read parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and knew by heart poems by Virgil and Horace. Greek was the first to go. Nowadays, Latin is on its last legs. The destruction process hit the visual arts a very long time ago, as witness Canova's first thoughts, so different from his finished art.

You may remember that, last month, I was complaining about this deficit in my own education (see my post Childhood in Greek Art, December 8), but I had never really thought about connecting our general ignorance because of declining educational values with an artistic trend.

Political "Fog" Cleared in Morris's Documentary — by Todd Babcock

Invariably, during the holiday, when all my fellow "escapees" return from their various checkpoints across the map to converge on my little hometown of Jackson, Michigan (the self-reported Birthplace of the Republican Party [picture of the convention Under the Oaks]), there is one night where we all gather to report in on our various accomplishments and lack thereof. This usually takes the form of a lot of cheese, martinis, and spattering the air with verbal jockeying for attention. It’s a lively bunch so you’d better have your rap down.

Once the various islands of catch-up have run their course of war stories on relationships, work struggles, and artistic achievements, the conversations generally find their way to a common circle that has erupted about politics. Here the Leftists passionately plead to be understood, the Right insists they are misunderstood, and the Centrists mumble occasionally that he/she "has a good point." In the end we all go away thinking the other is crazy and gushing over and over, "I can’t believe he said that!"

In a year in which we saw another war in the Middle East, Saddam’s capture, Howard Dean’s anger, Arnold Schwarzenegger made governor, and Rush Limbaugh accused of having an addiction to illegal painkillers, one would think the time was ripe for this year-end discussion. Yet I found myself oddly checked out of these discussions. Perhaps it was overload from a year of political rhetoric that has permeated every nook and cranny of the media. With seemingly 50 news programs, event graphics, Internet polling, orange alerts, and an airport voice-over reminding you of terrorist threats, there was no place to hide. Even the comedians have turned their eyes on matters of the state as HBO’s biggest comedy shows seem to be talking heads spouting left and right in the forms of Bill Maher and Dennis Miller (in an epic struggle, to be sure) and the Clooney/Soderberg-produced K Street. Bestsellers from the likes of Hillary Clinton, Al Franken, Ann Coulter, Ariana Huffington, and other politicians vying for time slots on Leno, Letterman, and O’Brien (in between bouts of an insult comedy dog and stupid pet tricks) have left no stone unturned.

In the end, I fear, my burnout had less to do with the proliferation of political agendas on the airwaves and more to do with my lack of faith in anyone being open to another’s idea. The word agenda seems extremely apt when one gets the feeling that every discussion is coming from a "party line" and any straying from it is a form of losing ground. This polarized defensism is nothing new to politics but has certainly mutated to a new form in entertainment. One feels while watching Ann Coulter spar with Eric Dyson on Bill Maher that if either gives an inch they are going to lose a sizeable margin of book sales that year. When FOX News and CNN and such have a following based on the perception they lean one way or another how can one feel they will risk losing their hard-earned demographic in order to embrace the "truth"?

Yes, indeed, it has been reported that viewers were beginning to tune into Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central in order to get their news. Apparently, Mr. Stewart has found a fine balance of egalitarian satire by skewering the media itself and thus blanketing the entire dialogue in a cloak of ridiculousness. The point being that the only "line" that Jon is towing is the one with "punch" as its prefix. Indeed, Jon is a whore to the bottom-line joke, and who can’t have a little faith in that? The real joke being that, of course, folks are tuning into a mock news program on a network titled "Comedy Central" for their updates on world events. A point that seemed to disturb Mr. Stewart, though I’m sure he was oddly pleased. He won’t miss a beat.

In the end, our own "three-party system" took the form of the Leftist New York designer condemning the Rightist importer from Chicago, while the defeated LA actor tried to find a way to make it funny. (Which is why we have to stop electing actors into office but that’s another posting.)

Feeling reasonably guilty for my lack of input in our annual dissection, I decided I needed some intellectual nutrition to atone for my sins. So I went to the movies. Not any movie, mind you, but a documentary. Not any documentary either, but one about an 86-year-old retired Secretary of Defense talking for 100 minutes on his years during the Kennedy administration. If going to the cinema took the form of penance, this surely had to be it.

How wrong I was.

Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death), the documentarian, has a history of taking unconventional subjects and making them seem effortlessly captivating. This is the man who took a topiary gardener, lion tamer, and man preoccupied by mole rats and wove them together in Fast Cheap and Out of Control and made the link seem like common sense. In The Fog of War, Morris is in top form with this spoken-word documentary that seems to blend biography with history to achieve a certain type of political allegory.

The subject here is William McNamara, the aforementioned Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy administration and later under Lyndon B. Johnson. McNamara is 86 and looking every bit the man twenty years his junior. The man is so lucid and energetically poignant, I found myself doing math equations in my head trying to figure out how a man so young could have served under Kennedy. Born in 1918, the telling of this man’s life in politics can’t help but take the form of a recounting of the twentieth century. Yet, this is no dry history lesson. McNamara speaks with a conviction that drives the film forward as Morris's close-up camera lens practically absorbs his energy and seeps it into the theatre.

The material is rich here. Even if you are a political junkie or a curious onlooker seeking Spalding Gray-type enthusiasm, you won’t be disappointed. McNamara lends himself to intriguing structure as he moves forward with forceful sentences and hand gestures while occasionally cutting back in time twenty years in a shot without ever losing the focus. (Morris intercuts vintage footage of McNamara in press reports, news footage, and actual audiotaped conversations between him and the two presidents.) While Morris's hand is certainly not invisible here with shots of dominoes falling over a world map and his occasional shouted questions coming from what seems like a room a hundred yards away, the effect is fluid and continuous edification.

Though many are aware of McNamara and his time with the Oval Office they may not be aware of the richness of his life outside of politics. Simply hearing a man recount his memory at the age of two (yes, two) of the ending of WWI gives you a certain faith in the wealth of information he can access. Hearing him recount Kennedy’s attempt to lure him from the Presidency of Ford Motor Company to be Secretary of Defense is at once endearing and chilling. ("You know, William," Kennedy allegedly said, after McNamara refused both Defense and Treasury positions due to lack of confidence, "There’s no school for being President, either.")

Throughout the film I found myself trying to find some form of refuge from many of the horror stories from behind-the-scenes politics our narrator continually spouted. When you hear of the nuclear close calls and disheartening conversations with Johnson and Castro, you keep waiting for some sense of reassurance. There is none. In a culture so cinematically and politically reared to be assuaged with safety and the assumptions of "I hope they know what they are doing," this film reminds you that even those with their fingers on the button are just men. Men who make mistakes, make them again, and probably again. McNamara's point he makes repeatedly is that any person in authority in war, no matter what you're told, has made a mistake that has cost human lives, in his case, tens of thousands, but the hope is that you minimize and learn from them.

In the midst of a political mire of information from all sides, this film seems to peel away agenda and simply humanize that which seems so dehumanized by our media. While it's chilling to hear in Johnson's own voice, "I want you to kill some people," there's also a comfort in someone letting you know these men are still simply trying to solve problems. McNamara is a numbers man and made his decisions based purely on what was statistically sound (indeed, he was first recruited by the Air Force as a statistician out of Berkeley). It may seem cold yet, oddly, often the statistics had a form of morality of their own.

While my true desire in seeing "Fog of War" was in the hope that an 86-year-old politician might actually throw caution to the wind and tell the truth. In this case, it plays out like a "be careful what you wish for." McNamara has no interest in shaming the people he worked with or himself. In fact, his honesty, even when harshly revealing, has the effect of humanizing its subjects. He never condemns one side or the other for their methods but simply points out their various levels of effectiveness. When asked about Vietnam and whether there's guilt or regret, he implies that a response will serve no one. "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. I'd prefer to be damned if I don't."

In a time when you feel you can't trust a single source for its authenticity in reporting, "Fog of War" feels like a revolutionary act. Yet one is reminded in this film of a quote from another bastion of political insight and reportage. The movies.

"I want the truth."

"You can't handle the truth!" I hope most people can. See this film.

Lichtenstein in Louisiana (Denmark)

Europeans often have unique (or, at least, different) views on American art, and that's why I am always interested to read reviews of shows on American artists in Europe and to see how they fared. So I was interested in a review (Comic stripped, January 6) by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian of Roy Lichtenstein—All about Art, a major retrospective at the Museum for Moderne Kunst in Louisiana, Denmark, until January 18. (The show will then relocate to the Hayward Gallery, in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, but it will not come to the United States.) According to the museum's Web site, the show features "more than 50 paintings from the period 1961 to 1997, as well as more than 25 drawings and other documentary material." This is the first show devoted solely to the artist in Scandinavia.

Unfortunately, Mr. Jones uses Lichtenstein (since his death in 1997, his works are controlled by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation) as a sort of stand-in punching bag for his anti-Americanism. You can read the article for yourself, but here are a few excerpts that are particularly ugly and ill founded. According to him, Lichtenstein

has dated as badly as John F Kennedy. There are worse things than being a minor artist. Perhaps this exhibition is clumsily chosen, but it makes him seem an infinitely slighter figure than his fame implies. Some artists are better in small doses, and Lichtenstein's later work can be tantalising when you see one big atmospheric painting such as the sumptuous bedroom interior owned by Tate Modern. Yet there are some works here that make you seriously wonder if Lichtenstein deserves to be remembered even as a second-rank American painter. [. . .]

This kind of art—a painting of the back of a painting, a cast of a beer can—has always fascinated Americans. At once naive and sophisticated, it speaks to a culture both materialist and self-conscious. [. . .]

The comic release of Lichtenstein's early 1960s comic-book paintings lies in their honest acknowledgement that he, a grown man, finds meaning in the junk he is supposed to have outgrown. It's absolutely not the case that these paintings mock, ironise or otherwise patronise their raw material. They squeeze out the crass energy of adolescent fantasy as if it were an overripe pimple, and have a lot in common with the new American novel of the 1960s.

Yes, you read that correctly: Lichtenstein's work does not treat its source of inspiration, comic books, with mockery or irony. (As shown above, Ohhh...Alright..., from 1964, is dripping with sincerity.) And, if the media attention to the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination showed anything, it showed that JFK's image is anything but dated: in spite of all the tawdry information that is now known about his private life, he still represents something eternal in the minds of many people. That Mr. Jones proceeds to compare Lichtenstein's work with Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, both disparagingly, is equally mysterious. These works that are anti-establishment (and anti-American in some sense) par excellence are now treated as examples of American self-conscious materialism? Ohhh...alright...

A French Viewpoint on the Barnes Situation

I know that Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes (soon to hit the big time by becoming an ArtsJournal blog) has the Barnes story covered (I treaded on his territory once, in a post called More Renoirs Than You Can Shake a Stick At, August 8), but it can't hurt to hear about how foreigners react to American news. It appears that Geneviève Breerette has been to Philadelphia recently: she has just published a long article in Le Monde about the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Museum, the plans for a Calder Museum, and the proposal to move the Barnes to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to create a Museum Mile. It is published as three articles online: L'héritage en péril du Dr Barnes et de son anti-musée [The heritage of Dr. Barnes and his antimuseum in danger], La collection exilée sur le "Museum Mile" de Philadelphie? [The collection exiled on Philadelphia's Museum Mile?], and La justice appelée à défaire un testament verrouillé [The courts called upon to undo a locked-up will], all published on January 3 and signed from "Low [sic] Merion (Pennsylvanie)." Mme. Breerette does not say anything you probably haven't heard before, but here are some excerpts:

The Barnes Foundation is an unusual case. Visiting it is a delight because of the works it contains, obviously, but also because of the approach to art put forward by a one-of-a-kind collector, whose personal view on art is much more current today than ten, twenty, and thirty years ago. Those tired of modern, antiseptic museums with a very strong flow of tourists will discover a rare pleasure in visiting the Foundation's private universe.
[. . .]
By choice the works are side by side everywhere, or one above the other, obeying demands of symmetry that lines of forged iron underscore: the locks and fittings that Albert Barnes began to collect in the 1930s. This strange formal punctuation, loaded with a symbolic weight that reminds one of Masonic signs, contributes to the singularity of a hanging contrary to current curatorial principles. One wants to say so much the better, even if the meaning of the imposed order escapes us a bit: neither by artist or style, without chronological direction, but by association, contrast, and secret relationships . . . An undertaking that is not unpleasant today and that the greatest museums use from time to time, but only temporarily.
[. . .]
There is a good chance that one day or another the Barnes Foundation collection will leave Merion for downtown Philadelphia. The municipal government seriously sees it happening and supposedly has even reserved a choice location for it on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a wide avenue lined with trees and cultural institutions, leading directly to the Art Museum, its classical colonnade, its pompous stairways, a museum that was built, after all, shortly after the opening of the Barnes Foundation.

So the Foundation would be on the path of the institution that Albert Barnes hated the most, along with the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He was deathly irritated with Fiske Kimball, the museum's director from 1925 to 1955, who gave the museum its current size and with whom the collector was a rival and willingly accepted battle over acquisitions. For example, that of the central panel of Matisse's triptych of the Trois Sœurs, which Barnes, who already owned the side panels, ended up taking down from the wall. Or that over Cézanne's Grandes Baigneuses: the version acquired by the museum in 1937 was vaunted by labeling that in the Barnes a "second version," when in fact it had been created several years earlier, and so on. As a result, when the museum organized a Matisse retrospective, Barnes (who categorically refused to receive visiteurs like Kimball and his friends, whom he found too high-society) refused to lend any works for a snobbish or superficial public, to let himself be "used like an American movie-star with her song and dance act."

So we may think that, if the move to Philadelphia's Champs-Elysées occurs, Albert Barnes, angered as he was with the city's high society, would surely turn over in his grave. [. . .] In the meantime, the Foundation's former students are worried. How would the Barnes collection be installed in a new building? Even supposing that the Merion rooms could be reconstructed, they risk losing the genius of the place which is what makes the Foundation as it is today so charming.

Two notes about the paintings mentioned in this quotation. First, the left panel, center panel, and right panel of the Trois Sœurs triptych are all now on display at the Barnes. Second, a third version of Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses is in the British National Gallery in London. Cézanne probably was working on all three of these paintings simultaneously over a long period of time.

If you want the latest American news on the Barnes move, Don Steinberg's recent article (Adding up a move for the Barnes, January 4) for the Philadelphia Inquirer gives the lowdown on what it might cost to move the Barnes into what could very likely be a wild, modernist building.

Elstir and the Hawthorn

Proust was a sort of culture vulture in his day, and in À la recherche du temps perdu, among Marcel the narrator's many discoveries, interpretators and creators of all forms of art become known to him. If he had lived in our era, he would probably be a blogger, but instead his multivolume book transfigures his encounters with the arts and artists. Marcel admires the painting of Elstir, is introduced to him while on vacation at Balbec, finally meets Albertine while at a party in the artist's country home, and uses his introduction to the Duchesse de Guermantes to see the paintings by Elstir in her house in Paris (and also vice versa). In the third volume, The Guermantes Way (in French, Le Côté de Guermantes), Marcel describes Elstir's work:

If, on my visits to Elstir, what I had asked of his painting had been that it should lead me to the comprehension and love of things better than itself, a real thaw, an authentic square in a country town, live women on a beach (all the more would I have commissioned from it the portraits of the realities which I had not been able to fathom, such as a lane of hawthorn-blossoms, not so much that it might perpetuate their beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty to me), now, on the other hand, it was the originality, the seductive attraction of those paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted above anything else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.

It seemed to me, also, that the least of his pictures were something quite different from the masterpieces even of greater painters than himself. His work was like a realm apart, whose frontiers were not to be passed, matchless in substance. Eagerly collecting the infrequent periodicals in which articles on him and his work had appeared, I had learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscapes and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects (I had seen photographs of two of these in his studio), and had then been for long under the influence of Japanese art.

Most critics and scholars believe that Elstir most closely represents American expatriate painter James Whistler (the two names are almost anagrams of one another), but he may be mixed with elements of Moreau, Renoir, or Vuillard. (I mentioned Whistler in a post on July 28, A Whole New Perspective on Realism, and a Whistler Festival just concluded in Glasgow, where there is a Centre for Whistler Studies at the University of Glasgow.) Although Whistler may not have the famous reputation now as some of his fellow artists of the same period, at the time of his death, he was much beloved in France, as you can see in this monument by Auguste Rodin, La Muse Whistler, made in 1903, the year of Whistler's death, and now in the Musée d'Orsay. As for his resemblance to Elstir, Whistler's career has a lot in common with what Marcel says about Elstir (when Marcel mentions the landscapes he so admires, Proust may have had Whistler's "Nocturne" paintings in mind), and his admiration for Japanese art can be seen in the famous Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art here in Washington. In another connection to Proust, Whistler spent over ten years on a portrait of Robert de Montesquiou (Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac), probable model for Proust's character the Baron de Charlus (see post on December 23, Evocation of a Royalist Past), which is the image I see in my mind when I read about Charlus in the book.

In the quotation above, Marcel refers to his desire to have Elstir paint those things he finds mysterious in life, such as a lane of hawthorn-blossoms. This is a reference to a memory that is introduced in the first volume (in French, Du côté de chez Swann; in English, Swann's Way), the sight and smell of hawthorn flowers in the church of Combray and in the yard of the Swanns' home. Up to this point in the novel, the hawthorn (aubépine) image is much more pervasive in Marcel's memory than that of the more famous petite madeleine, which is primarily a memory of taste. Here is the first description of the white hawthorn, seen in the church of Combray during the "Month of Mary service" (still celebrated in some places in honor of the Virgin Mary, Queen of May). If you are botanically challenged, the image to the left should help you:

When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour, in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle. Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles.

Later, while walking with his family, Marcel strays into the Swanns' garden:

I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves' in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church, framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like strawberry-beds in spring. [. . . After looking away,] I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, will be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes.

The image of a hawthorn tree at right shows what Proust is trying to capture, the cascading presentation of flowers.

New Books on Atget

I have written about the photographs of Eugène Atget before (Eugène Atget Photographs for Sale, August 21; and Photographs at the Musée d'Orsay, October 16), so it should be no surprise that I am writing about them again. An article (Atget au naturel, December 26) by Brigitte Ollier in Libération made me aware of three new resources on Atget. First, Laure Beaumont-Maillet's Atget Paris is now available in a reprint edition from Hazan. This book features 840 photographs of Paris, made by Atget from 1900 to 1920, arranged according to arrondissement. Although the editor is director of the department of prints and photography at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the photographs in this book also come from other collections. As Mme. Ollier puts it:

Atget supposedly wanted to be an actor but became a photographer, capable of giving life to everything he saw. "Whom he sees will live" could have been the motto of this wanderer who never stopped haunting Paris and the Ile-de-France, recording everything that seemed to him worthy of interest: houses, streets, façades, corridors, stairways, corners, and places in a capital drowning in melancholy. His Paris is less empty than it seems at first sight. Sometimes, he puts himself involuntarily into the frame: in certain images, you can see his reflection in the windows.

One such image that is a sort of self-portrait was taken by Atget in front of an antiquities shop at 21, rue Saint-Honoré: that is Atget with his camera reflected in the central pane of glass. Second, there is a new book by Sylvie Aubenas and Guillaume Le Gall, Arbres inédits d'Atget, from Editions Marval. According to Mme. Ollier, this is

a coffee-table book published in a limited edition of 1,000 numbered copies, which contains a group of photographs, unknown until now, since only a few of these images have ever been shown. These 39 trees belong to a series of 111 images taken in Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine) between 1909 and 1911. Each was purchased from him at a special BNF price, between 1 and 3 francs, pre-war value. Today, even Bill Gates, Emperor of Technology, would not be able to buy them. They are priceless: pure gold.

"We found these photos in 1995, by chance, in an envelope which had never been opened. The prints were all perfect, with good contrast and in this brown-red tone that is magnificent," recounts Sylvie Aubenas. A silence follows, and this specialist in the 19th century manages to add, as if Atget himself were going to rise up from the bowels of the BNF with his tripod and black darkcloth: "They were written on in pencil in Atget's writing, imagine our emotion . . ." So, trees, but brought to life, probably shot in autumn with their bare branches, or gigantic roots or trunks. For this is what captivates Atget, the tree as document, the wild tree, the naked tree.

Third, if that's not enough Atget for you, then you need Eugène Atget, Paris 1900, a CD-ROM available from the Bibliothèque nationale de France containing more than 4,000 images of his photographs from the library's collection. (You can see a really cool Flash preview of the CD-ROM here.) According to Mme. Ollier, this represents essentially the entire collection of Atget photographs at the BNF:

4,500 originals religiously arranged at the perfect temperature in the department of prints and photography, which contains around 5 million pieces.

If you are like me and want to order this CD-ROM, you have to do so directly from the library. You can also see some images from the BNF department of prints and photography from Gallica.

Advertisements on Ionarts

Those little ads at the top of the Ionarts page are often a mystery to me. For a long time, I would see ads for Fragonard posters, although there has never been any reference to that painter, I think, in this blog. However, for the most part, the ads seemed to be mostly related to the arts (except for the ad for Fragonard perfumes), so they never bothered me. For the past couple days, though, there has been this ad for an essay mill, which is offensive. Worse, this disreputable and immoral company advertises for "Egar Allan Poe Essays" (if it is not at the top of your screen, you may be able to see it here). Such attention to detail probably would not inspire confidence in potential clients, if they were already not so stupid as to be using an essay mill.

Best wishes to all for the New Year from Ionarts!