It’s been a little while and in fact there is a backlog of photos in waiting. This amazing creature cannot wait though, so here he is. Black whippets are rare, and a self-colored black whippet rarer still. I know there are more self-colored sighthounds in the EU than the US, but I haven’t seen any, probably because it is too cold for them to come out. This dark-haired hound was almost glowing in the rare patch of sunlight…I was already on the tram and the dog was waiting for the tram on the other side of the street, and when I got off at the next stop and walked back was already gone. I hope I see him again!
During the session “Reframing Painting: A Call for a New Critical Dialogue,” in the midst of a wonderful paper called The “Irrelevance” of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings by Christina Chang of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, I noticed this handsome assistance-dog-in-training was sitting almost right in front of me. What amazing good fortune, and what a great place for an assistance dog to train (and if he or she is training to help people with certain types of disorders, a lot of likely assist-ees).
Even while being mesmerized by the talk my body began to pay more attention to the dog. He or she was a Labrador-type dog but with lustrous long hair, with cowlicks and widow’s peaks leaping to and fro. My fingers itched to twirl and smooth those curls and I could not help but wondering what is really important.
The dog was a bit anxious and needed to go outside so his person, and nice woman who I exchanged smiles and eye contact with, took him before the session closed. I couldn’t find them again. I would like to know more about them both…
Marcie Carey has chosen “the quiet mind.” I loved from first sight and have come to greatly respect the steadfast “resistance to extroversion” of this retiring Italian Greyhound who mostly devotes herself to patient admiration of her cat and kitten friends. Marcie’s indulgences are that she enjoys eating all kinds of unusual foods, unusual for a dog, I mean, like cranberry relish, and to being stroked and snuggled by people she has known for more than six years, which at present includes only myself.
Marcie (who arrived with this normal non-avant garde non-literary name, the one word she knew, and thus kept) has always been a very beautiful little dog, tiny even by Italian Greyhound standards with expressive black shoe-button eyes and her white scarf, feet, and tail-tip. Since Marcie has gotten older her blaze and mask has extended up her nose and face and now covers her eyes. Her fur is also salted and peppered with many different flecks shading from white to black and all the saturations of grey in between; you can see some of these variations, even in the whiskers, in the high resolution photo above. Marcie has several whorls of fur, called when they occur in horses wheat ears or corn ears, on her chest and neck. These are oval, almost heart-shaped patches or hair that grow in opposite or circular directions as compared to the rest of the fur – crop circles of hair. I tried to get some photos of her (below) where you can see these patterns, but Marcie was skeptical about being photo documented.
I was thinking today about how talkative MC, as most people call her, has become over the years. When she first came to live with Queequeg, Astra, and me in Miami she hid for most of the first days. The person from Italian Greyhound Rescue who placed Marcie with us did so, actually, knowing that we would not try to make any extraordinary socializing efforts with this very timid dog who was seized from a puppy mill and very nearly feral. Quee and Astra were so gregarious. They were very loving with the new little sister at once and showed by example that there was only sharing of attention, sleeping surfaces, and food. Sometime I will tell more about Marcie’s first months, but they were spent in silence. I tried not to think about what had happened at the puppy mill but I began to worry that something had happened to MC’s larynx or throat and that she was unable to bark.
Gradually, though, Marcie did begin to express herself, through more frequent instances of allowing to be touched, stroked, and finally, held, and through some adorable “breath sounds,” small chuffing and sighing noises she still to this day makes. One day I was making some food she was particularly interested in – some kind of noodle soup I think because I remember the hot cauldron – and suddenly Marcie emitted a little “woof!”. MC was surprised and I was surprised. I tried not to react one way or the other so she wouldn’t attach any traumatic significance to using her voice, but I was very thrilled. After that, Marcie began vocalizing more and more and today she has the same screeching trill as many other IGs. Italian Greyhounds are close to Basenjis, the “yodeling” dogs, and like their cousins they are capable of quite a large range of sounds, almost like mynas. While she is far less interested in conveying communication to humans via sound (or understanding human speech) than her sisters were, Marcie has a fairly large repertoire of noises.
Happy 1 November: To those who worship in a cathedral of rain dripping from the trees, woodpeckers etching a gospel into the bark, mockingbirds calling the sun out of the shadows, bats folding their wings tipped with sunset, owls threading the night air and stitching a cape that whirls them away through the starry sky, to the constellations who have watched over every creature ever born.
Yesterday was Astra Carey’s birthday and today is the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. I was thinking about both of these things as I spent Halloween for the first time ever as an “adult” at a nice dinner party — a popular activity this week. At the first I heard the latch snick shut too late, but tonight was surrounded by my fierce Teutonic guardians. Of course when I got home I watched Lars von Trier (earlier this week Melancholia and then tonight AntiChrist to keep in perspective how things actually are “broadcast from the outside in” [I am pretty sure that’s what that Maps lyric really says or at any rate I like it better].)
In the exactly three months since I “resigned in protest” from the church I have not missed it at all. I had already spent all the years I can remember from a child just meditating and thinking about being this or that animal the entire duration of every service anyway, though I believed in the teachings about forgiveness, patience, love, charity and so on and appreciate communal rituals and think they are important. Of course I am completely skeptical of yuppies who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” as this is just a cop-out not to have to be bothered to go to a service. Of course now I am one of those people while I am figuring out how to implement “organized pantheism.”
Toward the end of her life a relative was so upset and disgusted by the priest/child abuse situation – the horror itself of course but also the cover-ups – she was seriously investigating other religions, everything from the Anglican church to the Baha’i faith. She was a rational and methodical person but I understand now that this is a rational behavior – if – not in the historical abstract like the Borgias – actual people alive now who you know who are Catholic are deceitful, sadistic, unforgiving, abusive of the trust of those they hold power over and you are Catholic this generates a ?. So they have to go, or you do. Finally having such a personal revelation I was suddenly quick to voluntarily excuse myself.
But I am a little nostalgic today. I used to love not just Halloween but All Souls Day and All Saints Day. These days of obligation were taken very seriously in Belgium, almost as seriously as May Day: the trains, metros, stores, banks, postal service, schools – everything – would shut down and people spent the day walking from churches to the small graveyards beside the churches to the larger cemeteries. This was a solemn public ritual but I could tell other people felt similarly hopeful that perhaps the interceding saints, on this one day, would let the departed know how much we loved them still in life. I’m pretty sure my animal and human family members and my (sadly, many) friends who have died the past few years knew because, well, they did. But you never get to say everything, and you never know what is going to happen. Maybe the comforting thing about participatory rituals is that they make a reality.
Franz Marc’s metaphysical visions were never far from him, occurring in “Two Paintings” in the confident statement, “What appears spectral today will be natural tomorrow.”[1] This sentence is in several respects characteristic not only of Marc but of that short period in European thought that runs from 1902 to 1914. It was the period in which Henri Bergson’s élan vital, and philosophical ideas about the confusion of immediate subjective experience, uncategorized and uncategorizable, became commonplace. As was the case with Wilhelm Worringer’s concepts, this discussion spread quickly into artistic and literary circles especially in France and in England but also in Germany. The rejection of scientific optimism touched a nerve. At the beginning of the 20th Century this was a mood that had been encouraged by the rapid introduction of new styles in painting, sculpture, and the applied arts that had accompanied each of the recent splits in the German art world, with one “Secession” leading to another, and with the “advanced” artists of one decade often becoming the reactionaries of the next. Throughout the 19th Century — especially in France — artists had been rebelling against the established academies and official salons and had looked for new ways of showing their work in rival salons des refusés.
In Germany by the end of the 1800s the situation had become dramatic. Many writers wondered about what was “German.” In the art world the question arose especially from the fact that, as Robin Lenman pointed out in an article preceding his book, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850-1914 (1997)[2], state and municipal patronage of the arts in Germany was on a particularly large scale, so that the relation of art to the state became of central importance for artists trying to make a living. Those artists who were not included, or who thought themselves inadequately represented in the large official exhibitions held in the major German cities, had economic as well as aesthetic reasons for creating new outlets for their work. As the painter Lovis Corinth remarked on joining the Munich Secession in 1892, “I had the instinctive sense that I could get ahead in this clique.”[3]
Akademie der Bildenden Künste München
The first of these Secessions was that in Munich in 1892, the subject of a study by Maria Makela,[4] following to some extent the model of Peter Paret’s pioneering book of 1980 on the Berlin Secession. Similar movements were started in other German cities, for example Düsseldorf and Dresden. In Austria the Vienna Secession was founded in 1897.[5] Each of these movements had its own emphasis, but artists moved from one city to another. Many Munich artists went to Berlin at a time when the imperial capital seemed a richer and more dynamic place than Munich. In each center it had been the controversy over the showing of “foreign” art that had been one of the principal issues over which the split took place. The Munich Secession began by emphasizing naturalism in opposition to the sentimental scenes of Bavarian peasant life popular among local painters and patrons, but it too was protesting against the elaborate grandiose state portraits and history paintings of Franz von Lenbach and Anton von Werner, the director of the School of Fine Arts in Berlin.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century it was Munich that was the artistic capital of Germany. The collections that King Ludwig I had assembled before 1848 and the neoclassical buildings that housed them, the number of artists living and working in the city (some 9,000 by 1894, rising to 14,000 in 1907), the possibilities of café life — all made the Bavarian capital an attractive place for artists, both from inside Germany and elsewhere, as well as writers, visiting connoisseurs, and tourists. Bavaria retained a strong sense of character and traditions. The inhabitants of Munich were very conscious of the advantages to their city of its reputation as a center of artistic life. One of the issues that had led to the founding of the Secession was the invitation to international artists to send work to the annual exhibitions, though even among Secession members there was soon a movement to limit the number of such works shown: in 1893 more than half the exhibitors were foreign; as a result of complaints by Munich artists the number had fallen to 17 percent by 1908.[6]
The applied arts showed even more clearly than the work of the painters how diffuse and contradictory the modern movement had become.[7] Indeed one of the characteristics of “advanced” art in Germany at the beginning of the century was, as Seth Taylor points out in his study of the influence of Nietzsche on certain aspects of Expressionist literature, Left-Wing Nietzscheans, the tension between the artist’s desire to become socially involved in the problems of an increasingly urbanized, society and the equally strong desire to withdraw from the world into a rural Arcadia was never really resolved: “The longing for social involvement was contradicted by a libertarian desire to withdraw from society completely.”[8]
One of the new artists in Munich made quite clear what he thought of the Secession’s exhibition in 1902:
Hanging on the walls, it seems, are the “same old things” we saw long ago, only somewhat faded — pictures that take as their point of departure the literal repetition of nature and thus forfeit the luster of the artist’s intentions.
The writer was Kandinsky. Many of Marc’s and Kandinsky’s works and other important collections and donations are now housed, ironically, in the mansion that belonged to Franz von Lenbach, the wealthy painter of official portraits and one of the main figures against whom Kandinsky was reacting. A study by the gallery’s then-director, Armin Zweite, with biographies of the artists and commentaries by Annegret Hoberg on the paintings reproduced, The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich (2000) provides an indication of the riches of the collection which also includes works by Münter, Macke, Alexei Jawlensky, and Paul Klee.
Marc provided a link between Munich and Berlin and between the Blaue Reiter and the very different artists of the Brücke and the circle around the Berlin dealer and critic Herwarth Walden’s literary and artistic weekly, Der Sturm. Marc collaborated with Walden to organize the Erster DeutscherHerbstsalon in Berlin in 1913. There, too, Marc met Walden’s former wife, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler. This relationship produced Marc’s Postcards to Prince Jussuf. The originals of these twenty-eight small paintings, all featuring animals, sent by Marc to Lasker-Schüler between 1912 and 1914, are now divided between the Bavarian state collections and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and are reproduced together in a book by Peter-Klaus Schuster, which tells in a preface much about this collaborative project.[9]
The Symbolists at the end of the 19th Century had been concerned with “the Spiritual.” In France this had involved some of them with the Rosicrucian revival of the 1890s, and the Symbolist heritage left a strong imprint on Munich painters and writers, among them the criminally undertranslated poet Stefan George. They were interested in the new spiritualist movements, especially Theosophy, whose apostle Rudolf Steiner was read by Kandinsky. The Russians in Munich brought with them their own tradition of mystical speculation.[10]
[1] Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 104.
[2] “Painters, Patronage and the Art Market in Germany, 1880-1914,” Past and Present, No. 123, May 1989.
[3] Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany, (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980) 269.
[4] Maria Martha Makela, The Munich Secession: Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Munich, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
[5] Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Knopf, 1980), 200-209.
[6] For a valuable detailed account of the economic situation of Munich artists, see Robin Lenman, “A Community in Transition: Painters in Munich 1886–1924,” in Central European History Vol. 10, March 1983. See also his “Politics and Culture: The State and the Avant-Grade in Munich, 1886–1914” in Richard Evans, ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Barnes and Noble, 1978).
[7] The monograph by Annelies Krekel-Aalberse, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Silver (1989), illustrates the tension in trends, and also shows, in such objects as a silver caviar dish or a tea caddy set with amethysts, the class for whom artisans were working.
[8] Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism 1910–1920 (Walter de Gruyter, 1990).
[9] Peter-Klaus Schuster, Franz Marc, and Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Marc, postcards to Prince Jussuf, (Munich: Prestel, 1988).
[10] For a discussion of these see Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford University Press,1980), especially Chapter 2.
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