STUDIO-ONLINE

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In this exhibition Guillermo Esparza opens up the exclusive world of traditional Byzantine Iconography and shares his discoveries and techniques. The influences of classical architecture, of his extensive religious and ecumenical studies, keep alive an ancient canon, painted in pigments freshly ground and mixed by hand in medieval tradition. His path to Iconographer was long and arduous: thousands of brush stokes, years of constant study at the Morgan Library and at the General Theological Seminary, a master emerges.

As a boy Guillermo was stuck with the wonder at church icons and a rooted feel for the work of grandfather Don Benito’s work in Mexico. Two great men — Martin Schaffer, and Bishop Michael Dudick of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Passaic shaped his development. After years of working as an environmental sculptor in the Southwest, in 1988 Guillermo decided to learn the art of the Orthodox and moved to New York City. “Bishop Michael Dudick was an expert in iconography and pointed out many of the directions that I should go.”

Today, Guillermo Esparza is internationally recognized and respected for his work. Currently he’s capomaestro for the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation and artist-in-residence at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, New York. He recently received a Proclamation from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, honoring his recent exhibition “Arcanum Angelorum” (Mystery of the Angels) at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.

Here at studio-online you will view some of his Iconography and other works accompanied by music from Guillermo’s wife, Maria Andriasova Esparza, daughter of the famous Russian composer Iosif Andriasov.

Video interview by Veronica Aberham

Current Exhibition: Arcanum Angelorum (Mystery of the Angels)

Dates: February 26 – July 31, 2009

Location: Holy Name Chapel, 263 Mulberry Street, New York, NY, 10012
(Please note: The exhibit will take place in the undercroft of the Old Cathedral.)

For exhibition hours, please contact the Cathedral’s office at (212) 226-8075.

For further information, please visit:
http://www.guillermoesparza.com
http://www.andriasovaesparza.com

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, with essays by Richard Cleary, Neil Levine, Mina Marefat, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Joseph M. Siry and Margo Stipe (Skira Rizzoli in association with the Solomon R. Guggenheim and Frank Lloyd Wright foundations, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

It is impossible to gauge which image stands tallest in the minds of his admirers (and detractors): Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) the man or his architectural designs. Wright’s towering personality, troubled personal life and rocky road to success make for a dramatic story. In 2007, journalist Nancy Horing made her debut as a novelist with Loving Frank, a fictional rendering of the most troubled period of Wright’s life, when he suffered professional setbacks; questioned the turn his life and career had taken; and left his first wife for Mamah Cheney, the spouse of a client, with tragic results.

While some Wright scholars might have raised an eyebrow at Horing’s portrayal of their heroe, her book registered spots on national bestseller lists and introduced Wright to many who knew only of his acclaimed Prairie-style homes. The bulk of Wright’s commissions consisted of private residences, but he directed much of his considerable energy and enviable imagination toward designs for public spaces. Now, 50 years after his death, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has displayed an outstanding collection of Wright’s projects, public and private, to mark the 50th anniversary of its Wright-designed building. In association with the Guggenheim and the Frank Lloyd Wright foundations, in May Skira Rizzoli released the exhibition catalogue. No doubt, it will earn a place with other long-famed and indispensable Wright references.1

For the general reader, the catalogue provides a porthole to Wright’s brilliance as architectural philosopher. Readers will notice that many of the projects detailed in the show and catalogue were not realized. Soon into the book’s texts, they will understand, along with Wright, that architecture in the most profound sense is not about floors, walls, roofs and windows. Builders build, but Wright explored space from within outward. He aimed to create complete environments in which people could flourish. For Wright, human beings deserved organic architecture reflecting the natural setting and expressing their aspirations. Even more so, Wright promoted a connection to the wider community. Throughout his life, he wrestled with ideas for addressing this need, as well as other challenges of urban life. For example, his designs for Broadacre City, a truly sub-urban development proposed in model form in 1935, contained the flowering of ideas seeded in earlier projects. 2 In Broadacre City, Wright used design as a tool to erase barriers between city and country, organically integrate such modern necessities as cars, reinforce community ties, and protect personal privacy.

The 360-page catalogue contains 250 color and 15 black-and-white illustrations and retails for US$75. Designed by Tsang Seymour and printed by Amilcare Pizzi in Milan, the volume’s production values are impeccable. The catalogue design highlights Wright’s practice of rendering his ideas in numerous studies, perspectives and floor plans. Text placed as narration to the visual story functions almost like audio components of exhibitions; this approach is particularly effective in Wright’s case.

In five essays, Wright scholars view his legacy from different directions converging at the point of his underlying architectural vision. Margo Stipe explains his philosophy of organic interior and exterior space. Joseph M. Siry describes Wright’s designs for Unity Temple in Oak Park, IL (1905-08); the Annie M. Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL (1938-41); Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, PA (1953-59); Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, WI (1956-61); and other houses of worship. Richard Cleary relates Wright’s experiences with contractors and craftsmen, including those connected with his designs for housing blocks (American System-Built and Usonian houses). Neil Levine demonstrates Wright’s quadruple block plan as the origin of the Prairie house. And Mina Marefat gives readers a tour through Wright’s grandest (and final) urban project, the unbuilt “Greater Baghdad Cultural Center.”3

Features of the Baghdad plan include an opera house, university, art gallery, museum, bazaar, fountains, bridges and a statue of Haroun-al-Rashid (the fifth Abbasid caliph, 786-809), one of Wright’s childhood heroes from A Thousand and One Nights. To connect buildings and public spaces, Wright chose the ziggurat. Like the spiral (implemented by Wright in plans for the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium for Sugarloaf Mountain, MD, and in the Guggenheim building), the ziggurat was his way of expressing a universal and cultural geometric symbol of unity while achieving a complex architectural aim. A section of color plates follows the essays, focusing on projects in the Guggenheim exhibit. Organized chronologically, eight of the nine projects are amplified by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer; Marefat provides text for a segment on Baghdad.

Two additional titles join Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward on Skira Rizzoli’s spring 2009 list. Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, with text by Kathryn Smith and photographs by Alan Weintraub, offers readers 350 new images of Wright’s designs built from the beginning of his career through the Guggenheim, opened six months after his death. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years: 1920-1932 by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer identifies Wright’s bold determination (and outrageous confidence) as key to his triumph over financial ruin and personal scandal during these years.

One of Wright’s most famous contributions to philosophical and practical architecture, the Guggenheim was given landmark status in 1990 by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission; in 2005, the museum was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. With nine other Wright-designed buildings, it appears on the UNESCO World Heritage Center tentative list for designation as a national treasure.4

Looking back on his career in the pages of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, readers may detect a nearly pre-determined destiny for Wright from his earliest days designing and building for his equally formidable family, Welsh farmers and preachers settled in Wisconsin. As such, he becomes akin to some of his heroes from childhood and beyond: Don Quixote, Haroun al-Rashid and Lao Tzu, among them. Springing from a supremely self-assured clan with roots in the stone-and-oak landscape of Wales, Wright traveled his own road, accepting it as a difficult choice. Fiercely held notions of human dignity and a democracy more God-given than political are coded into every one of his controversial designs. However one feels about Wright’s philosophy or particular built projects, as presented in this catalogue Wright is a monumental figure. From within and outward, he expressed ideals and found design solutions that cannot be ignored in our economically, environmentally and creatively challenged world.

1. Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward opened at the Guggenheim on May 15, 2009, and closes on August 23, 2009.

2. Wright discussed these ideas in a 1932 article, “The Disappearing City,” published in book format (90 pages with five black-and-white illustrations) by William Farquhar Payson. Drawn from a lecture he gave in 1930 at Princeton University, the article went through many revisions. A second edition appeared in 1945, titled When Democracy Builds. Later, he rewrote and expanded the text for a final version, The Living City, published in 1958.

3. Margot Stipe is curator and registrar of collections at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, AR, and Spring Green, WI; Joseph M. Siry is professor of art history and American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT; Neil Levine is a professor of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University; Mina Marefat is an architect practicing in Washington, DC, and a former senior architectural historian at the Smithsonian Institution; and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer is director of archives at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

4. The 10 buildings being considered include the Guggenheim Museum; Taliesin, Wright’s home in Spring Green, WI; and Taliesin West and studio in Scottsdale, AZ, which serves as the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Title of the round table open to the public: “Contemporary Asian Art and the International Biennales”
Participants: David Elliott, Hou Hanru, and Jack Persekian
Moderator: Alexandra Munroe
Venue: Museum Auditorium
Time: 7 p.m.
Pick up your free ticket at the Museum box office or at www.guggenheim-bilbao.es

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao brings together 18 international curators, artists, and experts in modern and contemporary Asian art

Dovetailing with the exhibitions Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe and © MURAKAMI, both devoted to two internationally acclaimed Asian artists, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is slated to host the second edition of the Asian Art Council from May 30^th to June 2^nd. The Asian Art Council will bring together a distinguished group of 18 international experts, curators, artists, and collectors from Asia, Europe, and the USA. In this gathering they will debate the status of Asian art within the context of international modern and contemporary art and its integration into the exhibition, education, and acquisition programs of the leading museums, such as the Guggenheim net.

The agenda for this three-day meeting consists of a series of lectures and round tables, followed by forums for discussion and debate. They have all been designed in conjunction with the participants and will revolve around subjects like universalism, cosmopolitanism, and “glocalism”; innovation, imagination, and creative destruction; and contemporary reflections on modernity in Asia.

At the meeting of the Asian Art Council, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Director General, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, in his capacity as the Director General of Global Strategy of the Guggenheim Foundation, will present the future Guggenheim Museum Abu Dhabi, one of the most ambitious projects within the New York-based Foundation’s expansion strategy.

All the sessions and activities in the seminar will be held behind closed doors except for the one scheduled for Monday, June 1^st at 7 p.m. in the Museum Auditorium, which is entitled “Contemporary Asian Art and the International Biennales”. In this round table, prominent experts in art and members of the Foundation’s Asian Art Council David Elliott, Hou Hanru, and Jack Persekian will debate the organization of international biennales and share their ideas on how to present non-Western art in a global setting. This event, which is free of charge for the public, will be moderated by Alexandra Munroe.

Participants

-Alexandra Munroe. Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim Museum New York.
-Sandhini Poddar. Assistant Curator of Asian Art.
-Arjun Appadurai. Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University.
-Jane DeBevoise, President, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.
-Layla S. Diba, independent Curator, New York.
-David Elliott, independent Curator and writer, Berlin; Artistic Director of the 17^th Biennale of Sydney (2010).
-Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
-Hou Hanru, independent Curator and writer; Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of the Exhibitions and Museum Studies Program at the San Francisco Art Institute; Curator of the 10^th Biennale of Lyon, France (2009).
-Geeta Kapur, critic and Curator, New Delhi.
-Hongnam Kim. Professor in the Art History Department at Ewha Womans University, Seoul; former Director of the National Museums of Korea.
-Victoria Lu, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai.
-Midori Matsui, art critic and expert, Tokyo.
-Jack Persekian, Artistic Director of the Sharjah Biennial, Jerusalem; Founding Director of the Anadiel Gallery and Director of the Al Ma’Mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem.
-Apinan Poshyananda, Director-General of the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture of the Ministry of Culture, Thailand; President and Acting Director of the Office of Knowledge Management and Development, under the Office of the Prime Minister, Thailand.
-Uli Sigg, Collector, Switzerland.
-Shahzia Sikander, artist, New York.
-Wang Hui, intellectual Historian, Tsinghua University, Beijing.
-Xu Bing, artist and Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Stirred by her experience decades earlier of teaching at Tsuda College in Tokyo, author Angela Davis-Gardner infused her third novel, Plum Wine, with the delicate flavors, colors, sights, sounds and art forms of Japan. Originally published in 2006 by the University of Wisconsin, now this eloquent exploration of the subtle art of emotion is available in paperback from the Dial Press.

Casting in the lead role a young, independent American come to Tokyo to teach at a women’s college during the 1960s, Davis-Gardner deftly explores the nuanced negotiations of respect, honor and emotion that take place in the country. Symbolic of the clash between East and West, Barbara Jefferson’s attempts to understand the feelings and intents of those around her are sometimes humorous, but often painful. During World War II, Jefferson’s mother had worked in Japan as a correspondent; stimulated by her mother’s stories and memories, Barbara became sensitive to the Japanese arts and ways. Yet, while living in Japan, often she finds herself in a quagmire of misunderstanding, unable to clearly express herself and struggling to interpret the sophisticated non-verbal language of native Japanese.

At the start of Davis-Gardner’s story, readers learn that Barbara has formed a deep bond with an instructor at the college, Michi Nakamoto, and that Nakamoto-sensei has died. She leaves Barbara a traditional tansu chest filled with bottles of plum wine. (A type of antique cabinet, tansu chests were, principally, made between 1860 and 1910. A chest’s design and construction is particular to a region and reflects an owner’s status, wealth and profession.) Each bottle is wrapped with a dated sheet of rice paper filled with intricate Japanese calligraphy. Barbara cannot read the characters and decides to find a translator, certain that her mentor has left a treasure with a message to decipher. Even the arrangement of the bottles in the chest seems portentous. Barbara observes that:

“The wines were arranged in reverse chronological order, right to left, like a Japanese text. There were no wines for the years 1943-1948; the gap was filled with crumpled paper. The oldest wine in the bottom drawer was dated 1930. Michi-san had been in her early forties when she died; she would have been quite a young girl in 1930, too young to make wine.”

The latest bottle is dated 1965 and made from plums grown the previous summer. In effect, the chest is a cipher. Setting off on a quest to learn more about her friend’s life and mysterious death, Barbara doesn’t realize the truly epic tale she is about to enter, while penetrating a shameful period in human history and falling in love along the way.

While Barbara considers Michi’s gift unusual, she believes that it reflects her mentor’s character. From the moment Barbara arrived at the college, Michi had served as a surrogate mother. In her reflections, Barbara relates that she feels like an orphan and outsider, her mother having been distant and cold. The college’s president and some instructors feel that the tansu is an inappropriate gift, particularly the wine, for a visiting female instructor. Later in the novel, others will question Barbara’s right to the tansu. Her fierce protection of the wine and dogged determination to uncover Michi’s motivation give Barbara a reputation for what may be, in the Japanese mind, quintessentially American: impulsive, unpredictable and emotional. To students in her American literature and composition classes, these qualities merely add to Barbara’s attraction. While young people in the West at this time are calling for revolution, these young women continue to be bound by tradition and class.

Barbara’s independence also draws Seiji, a talented potter, to her aide as a translator. Almost immediately, their work on the translations evolves into intimacy. Barbara’s most profound lessons about Japan, Michi and herself are sparked by her tumultuous pairing with Seiji. Kept off balance by his erratic responses–gentle caresses and poetic murmurings giving way to anger and silence–Barbara never knows where she stands or if Seiji can be trusted with Michi’s papers. But, in the end, he gives Barbara the keys to the mystery by taking her on trips to the coast and mountains; introducing her to Japanese arts and ways of life; and demonstrating the legacy of the atom bomb in Hiroshima. Struggling with shame and dishonor, Seiji is damaged. Similarly, Michi’s papers expose her and her family as victims of, first, class prejudice and rigid tradition, then the bomb.

Each chapter features Davis-Gardner’s exquisite descriptions of the landscape, as well as discussions of folk beliefs, many centered on dead spirits. For example, the figure of a fox woman, from a cache of stories featuring such figures, becomes an emblem in Plum Wine. When she lived in Japan, Barbara’s mother had been given a scroll painting of a fox woman by a Japanese man who claimed she was a fox. When Michi sees the scroll displayed in Barbara’s room at the college, she says that they share this: Michi’s mother claimed the ability to speak fox language. And after Barbara and Seiji begin their romance, he bestows on his lover a Japanese name which means “beautiful fox woman.”

Although there is enough mystery and romance in Plum Wine to keep readers enchanted and intrigued, in much of the novel Davis-Gardner deals with mother-daughter relationships and devastating loss. This mix makes the novel a page-turner and a heart-breaker, and might leave readers wondering if Davis-Gardner has presented the rupture of death and destruction as final. Is the legacy of pain that runs through Michi’s and Seiji’s families irreparable, and can a modern American woman like Barbara grasp its meaning?

On the anniversary of the bombing, Seiji takes Barbara to the Motoyasu River and explains that in Hiroshima, the O-Bon festival of the dead is celebrated on August 6, the anniversary of the 1945 bombing. Residents of Hiroshima and visitors from across the country and the world come to the site for the annual Peace March. They set bright lanterns printed with the names of loved ones on the river to guide souls back home where they can find peace and rest. Michi’s gift to Barbara suggests that the dead are working on behalf of the living as well. In stitching together’s Michi’s history, Barbara and Seiji discover pieces of their own. Perhaps this, at the deepest level of being, is true healing.

Isidro Blasco
Shanghai Planet, 2008
C-Print, museum board and wood
22/ x 21/ x 4 inches

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Transforming Photography, presents an inclusive selection of works that redefine the material nature of photography. At a time when the boundaries between artistic medias and traditionally held expectations of the nature of photography are in flux; Transforming Photography suggests alternatives to the commonplace manipulations offered through digital processes. The exhibition will feature visceral and process based photographic works by Isidro Blasco, Ben Dean, Mary Heebner, Gerald Incandela, George Legardy, Joni Sternbach, Joan Tanner, Ethan Turpin and Thomas Zika.

The exhibition also features the Los Angeles debut of Spanish Born; New York – based Isidro Blasco who combines architecture, photography and sculptural installations to explore vision and perception. In a similar manner, Joan Tanner mounts collaged celluloid transparencies on hand made light boxes fabricated from found objects re- appropriated by the artist combining both photographic and sculptural processes.

Using the physical gestures of drawing, Gerald Incandela uses the chemistry of photography to refine photographic images beyond the camera. His works are held by the Getty Museum, and this exhibition will represent his debut in Los Angeles as well. In contrast, George Legrady and Ben Dean utilize distinct digital computational strategies to create viable photograph like images which are synthetic, constructed works. Their work map new, advanced approaches to digital photography within the context of the exhibition.

Other artists reinvent historic photographic processes and archive materials. Joni Sternbach, a Brooklyn based artist who is currently the subject of a solo exhibition organized by Phillip Prodger at the Peabody Essex Museum of Art, uses the pre-civil-war period photographic process of tintype (or wet plate process) to document though portraiture contemporary surf communities on both the East and West coasts. Ethan Turpin mines the historic images of vintage stereocards to create new digital composites that challenge cultural and economic presuppositions. His work employees the hand-held antique viewing devices to create the dimensional photographic effects characteristic that made stereocards a salon sensation in the early portion of the 20th century. Lastly, the German photographer, Thomas Zika suggests the creative opportunities presented by “found” photography in his lush and sensual Bathers project.

Opening Reception:
Saturday, May 30th, 4-8pm

Edward Cella Art & Architecture
6018 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
www.edwardcella.com
P 323.525.0053

Up, Up and Away, My Beautiful, My Beautiful Balloon
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye

Reviewed by Rob Rich

It’s human nature to think about what happens when we die. Maybe our consciousness just disappears, leaving behind an empty shell to feed a few roaming Lumbricus Rubellus. Or perhaps we’re judged by our actions in our life, and that leads us to one of two places. Dale E. Basye’s interpretation of this afterlife, specifically the place stationed in a more subterranean locale, makes me hope for the former.

When Marlo and Milton Fauster come to an abrupt and untimely end in a freak marshmallow-bear explosion, everything goes to Hel-…Umm, I mean Heck. Heck is more or less the adolescent equivalent of “The Place Downstairs.” It’s an institutionalized holding pen meant to contain and torment children until their Final Judgment has been passed (or they turn 18) so that they can be shipped off to their rightful places. Actually, it’s a lot like boarding school. This is Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, recently released in a paperback edition (Dell Yearling, 2009).

Unfortunately for Milton, he’s not supposed to be there. He was always the model kid citizen; he always achieved straight As; and he never broke the law. He just stood too close to his sister when the marshmallow bear went up in gooey flames. Marlo, you see, is a different matter entirely. In fact, her mall-wide crime spree is what landed them both in the Afterlife in the first place. Heck hath no fury like a woman scorned for swag. Milton doesn’t belong there, but the Galactic Order Department never makes mistakes. Right?

While Heck may be Dale E. Basye’s first book, it’s by no means his first foray into writing. He’s won several national journalism awards, was a film critic, and has written for many different companies and publications (reviews, essays and stories, mostly). He was even the publisher of an arts and entertainment newspaper called Tonic.

The humor and charm of Heck is obvious from the beginning (and mirrored in the sufficiently goofy and gruesome line drawings that open each chapter, created by the suspiciously named illustrator Bob Dob). From Marlo’s crime spree, to Heck’s Phonics junkies (children who really did get hooked on it), and ethics class with Richard Nixon, the jokes (and some groan-inducing puns) permeate the book. It’s the kind of book that will thoroughly entertain young readers, but it’s inaccurate to think that this is a book purely for kids. Some readers may chuckle at Heck’s (literal) toilet humor, and others may find a sad-but-true familiarity as Marlo is ostracized from all of the girls in Heck thanks to two very nasty young ladies. Much of the humor has a more mature side, or satirizes more adult concepts. Take the Department of Unendurable Redundancy, Bureaucracy and Redundancy, for example. While the name itself may elicit a chuckle, it becomes downright hilarious when Marlo and Milton pass through during one of their escape attempts. People sit in a drab lobby, with nothing to do but wait for their number to be called so they can file their paperwork. Of course, there’s no guarantee you won’t miss your turn in the time it takes you to reach the counter.

The more time the Fauster kids spend in Heck, the stranger (and more entertaining) their situation becomes. During a class with the infamous Typhoid Mary, Marlo inadvertently stumbles into the position of Teacher’s Pet. Finding herself in the exact opposite situation that she’s used to in school (she’s always the class troublemaker), Marlo panics, and in her desperation to escape the scorn and ridicule of her classmates she only makes things worse. Milton doesn’t fare any better in Richard M. Nixon’s Ethics class. He’s used to being the smart kid the other kids refer to as the Teacher’s Pet, but after mentioning the Watergate Hotel he ends up in a position typically reserved for Marlo; that of the Class Troublemaker. Along with this accidental swapping of their classroom identities, the duo takes a trip through the River Styx. Of course, in Heck it’s no mere river. In Heck, it’s a fully operational sewage system that funnels all of the human (and demon) waste in the world down to the real “Place Downstairs.” Needless to say, it’s a bit of a messy excursion.

Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go is a very entertaining book. Some readers may find it a little slow in the beginning, mostly due to an overuse of puns (an opinion I’ll admit is probably biased because of the twenty years of bad puns my father has subjected me to). As the story of the Fauster children progresses, all of the details begin to fall convincingly into place. As Milton and Marlo begin to understand just how important they are to each other, as they both begin to mature, the humor ratchets up delightfully. I’ll be looking forward to visiting Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck when it’s released in the coming months.

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

The choice to read a novel by Howard Norman should not be made lightly. Once one is involved in the lives of Norman’s peculiar characters and the truly unusual plots he concocts, there is no way out. A two-time finalist for the National Book Award–for The Northern Lights (Summit Books, 1987) and The Bird Artist (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994)–Norman is also known for his work as a collector and translator of Algonquin and Cree folklore. His first collection of translations, The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems of the Swampy Cree Indians, won the American Academy of Poets Landon Award for translation in 1978, and some of his translations have been adapted for children’s picture books, for example a beautiful edition illustrated by Caldecott Award-winning illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon, The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese: And Other Tales of the Far North (Harcourt/Gulliver, 1997).

The Museum Guard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) is the second title in Norman’s Canadian Trilogy, which began with The Bird Artist and closed with The Haunting of L. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). Set in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1938, a remote area of a world on the brink of catastrophe from Hitler’s encroaching presence, the story begins as a classic coming-of-age tale, with DeFoe Russet orphaned at the age of nine when his parents are killed in a zeppelin crash. Left to be raised by his hard-drinking, prickly but charismatic uncle Edward in the hotel where Edward lives, DeFoe is an untethered soul, making his way through life seemingly unguided by any inner sense of purpose. Later, reflecting on his random course through life, DeFoe will state:

“I felt locked out in the cold. The particular cold of my narrow life; I had not even philosophically ever thought of it as a life, only days lined up behind and in front of me. The narrow alley of cold, of having been born and raised in Halifax, a place I could never, not for the life of me, figure out how to leave.”

As he, in his words, “endures” life, DeFoe becomes both attracted to and repelled by certain characters that change the course of his destiny. He follows Uncle Edward’s footsteps, first working in the local train station and then joining Edward as a guard in the three-room Glace Museum; practically hangs on every word spoken by university professor and Glace tour guide Helen Delbo; and develops a convoluted (and overwhelming) attachment with a young half-Jewish woman, caretaker at the Jewish cemetery in Halifax, named Imogene Linny. Obsessive relationships with people and paintings abound in Norman’s story and play out according to each character’s particular psychology and temperament. DeFoe’s actions are carefully gauged and measured; Edward’s are alternately rash and closely held, brash or secretive depending on his mood. In different ways, uncle and nephew become connected to Helen Delbo, Imogene Linny and, of course, to paintings that cross the threshold of the Glace Museum. As guards, they divide their time between rooms A, B and C, taking turns and making deals based on their sympathies and antipathies. DeFoe explains:

“There are any number of ways a painting can be ruined for a museum guard. Ways a guard can come to hate a painting; come to beg another guard to switch rooms. Beholden, until he asks you in turn to switch. Yet how could I ever have imagined the sequence of events that had so terribly ruined ‘Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam’ for me? I could scarcely breathe in the same air as this painting.”

Helen Delbo’s explanations and suggestions of painters’ intent fascinate DeFoe and Imogene and, quite possibly, Edward, but none of her intellectual exercises can come close to the emotional power of Dutch artist Joop Heijman’s “Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam.” Noticing DeFoe’s preoccupation with the painting, a police officer says to him, “You sure keep her dance card filled, don’t you?”

Imogene’s obsessions are most extreme and intensify as the novel progresses. When DeFoe meets her, the Glace is showing a group of Dutch paintings. Like DeFoe, Imogene is an orphan. Norman reveals little of her background, but deftly sketches her fragile psychological state through small but powerful details of action and speech. Long before Imogene comes to believe she is the woman in “Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam,” a portrait of Heijman’s wife, readers will recognize her instability and the role she will play as catalyst for some future catastrophe. Imogene begins to dress like the Jewess, speak about Heijman as her husband and make plans to travel to Amsterdam. She breaks off her relationship with DeFoe, seemingly because he will not steal the painting for her. She begins to visit Edward (who says he will steal it) in the hotel, quits her job at the cemetery, moves in with Helen Delbo and devotes herself to studying art. Eventually, she meets Heijman in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Norman has orchestrated quite a drama in quiet Halifax involving a visit from a Canadian broadcaster with hero status, multiple murders and a prison term for DeFoe.

With elements of a psychological thriller, The Museum Guard is not, essentially, plot driven. And even though these unforgettable characters are unlike any that readers have encountered, the novel does not revolve around them so much as around the power of paintings. This becomes clearest when a letter from Heijman describing his works is read over the radio. Each description features his now-deceased wife, a victim of the Nazis during Kristallnacht while she is in Germany trying to save her parents. Heijman’s intimate view of his beloved, his devotion to noticing and reveling in her smallest acts, is truly moving. Is it any wonder that Imogene, an orphan who feels, as she says, estranged from her soul, adopts the woman’s persona? Intuitively, Imogene has found a spiritual home in “Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam.” Certainly, being a Jew in Amsterdam at this time in history is dangerous, but it is a danger that Imogene welcomes because it is real. As Heijman’s wife, she means something to another human being. She has a place of her own and a story that is important enough to be painted. Given the time period and subsequent turn of world events, it seems fitting that irony and tragedy result. Norman leaves readers with few answers but many questions. No doubt, they will continue to ponder Imogene, Heijman, DeFoe and Edward as they search for other titles in Norman’s backlist. He is a author worth exploring.

Clarice Cliff by Lynn Knight (Bloomsbury, 2005)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

The decade following World War I was a crucible of change. Firmly held beliefs about class, gender and race that supported unbreachable barriers began to be questioned, challenged and, for the most courageous, discarded. Art, literature and philosophy–areas in which, historically, old and new rubbed uncomfortably, but continually, against each other–reflected sensibilities at the highest aesthetic level that would soon filter down to all levels of society. Taken together, a push for change in social arrangements and brash experiments in the arts set the stage for the emergence of a major presence in home fashion, English ceramic designer Clarice Cliff (1899-1972). Known for her idiosyncratic blend of eclectic color combinations, energetic patterning and novel ceramic shapes, Cliff managed to tap the imaginations of a mass audience of women at home and abroad.

Born into the lower working class and rising in the Staffordshire potteries from the bottom, Cliff understood pottery manufacture from the ground level. Unlike other women who earned wages in the potteries, Cliff did not play it safe by learning one skill traditionally offered as “women’s work,” and staying with a firm until she married and had children. The most prestigious job for a woman was as “paintress.” Freehand painters stood apart from the girls, who began work at age 13, and women who did other tasks. Adept at hand painting, Cliff also sought and found work (and training) in gilding, lithography and modeling. These skills gave her a broad and deep education and, ultimately, made her an effective manager as well as a successful designer. During the 1930s, she became a chief designer and then director; few other women were designing, and those came from social classes well above Cliff’s.

By all standards, her life was not only atypical but radical. Yet aside from a few markers (driving a car, smoking, dressing in bold colors, rather eccentrically decorating her room in her parents’ home and, later, her flat), Cliff appears to have been surprisingly traditional: She lived in her parents’ home in Tunstall until the age of 37; attended social events when they were professionally required and sanctioned; and provided escorts for her employees when they traveled to give public demonstrations. She lived a quiet life that revolved entirely around her career. Her designs could be seen in magazine advertisements, department and specialty stores throughout England and museum exhibitions, but Cliff held her private life close. She rarely agreed to have photographs taken to accompany the numerous articles about her published in the popular press and art journals like The Studio, which frequently reported on her designs and public reactions to them.

Nevertheless, for a woman of her social class, she drew not only attention from these publications and their audiences, but hushed whispers of residents and workers in the potteries. She purchased and drove an automobile at a time when the appearance of one in Tunstall was considered a major event. Her clandestine affair with Colley Shorter, part owner with his brother of the three potteries (Newport Pottery, A.J. Wilkinson and Shorter & Son) where she worked for most of her career, of course, caused eyebrows to raise and rumors to fly. Cliff and Shorter were discreet; 17 years older than Cliff, with a wife and two daughters, Shorter limited his exchanges with Cliff to the periods of foreign travel they undertook to promote Cliff’s name, meet with major retailers and seek design and manufacturing inspiration. Until marriage to Shorter became possible many years later, Cliff was married to her work. She and Shorter had a gift for mass-marketing and branding well before these terms became the common language of economic success.

In her biography of Cliff, fashion writer Knight takes the woman now considered one of the twentieth-century’s most influential designers as a touchstone from which to view the critical social, economic, political and artistic changes that brought England into the modern age. During Cliff’s teenage years, she was exposed to labor strikes affecting the potteries (with resulting work shutdowns and severe economic hardship) and press coverage of the women’s suffrage movement. Soon after she joined Shorter’s firm, he identified her talent and sent her to London to study at the Royal College of Art. True to her nature, Cliff made the most of being in London. Contact with art, fashion and theater opened a new world to her. The designs she later created for her famous Bizarre line reveal an astounding range of influences, including Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Fauvism, Japanese prints and textiles, Art Nouveau, Wiener Werkstätte, Bauhaus and folk art. Titles of her patterns are keys to these and other influences: Picasso Flower, for instance. Knight ably demonstrates that, while any of these styles on their own might fail to captivate the impressive audience commanded by Cliff, her fusion brought a miniature course in art history into the homes of women from the lower middle classes up to the aristocracy.

Today, Cliff’s work mainly figures into discussions of Art Deco. At auction, many pieces have brought record-breaking prices. Bold design and color à la Cliff and Bizarre either attract or repel, Knight admits. The craftsmanship of the work is impeccable; Cliff came from the “making” side of things, and she and her workshop team spent hours perfecting shapes and glazes. But some of the designs, particularly the novelties, border on kitsch (the Lido Lady ash tray, perhaps).

In her postscript, Knight reflects on some lasting impressions of Cliff’s persona:

“Considering reactions to Clarice Cliff, I am struck by the frequent overlap between the personal and the professional, of how often she offends notions of decorum, whether of good design or good behavior: She is seen as a ‘scarlet woman’ in every sense. She has been criticized for her ‘publicity seeking and self-promotion’ and her relationship with Colley Shorter has, in the Potteries at least, colored past responses to her work.”

In the same paragraph, Knight states that, despite the comparative obscurity in which she died, Cliff’s reputation has been restored. The ceramic market in England took years to recover following World War II, and then Cliff’s talents were submerged as she tried to satisfy current tastes in England, America and Canada for traditional shapes, patterns and colors. After Shorter died, she sold the company and retired to their beautiful Arts and Crafts-style home not far (but worlds away) from the gray, polluted environment where she grew up and worked. A major exhibition in 1972, the year she died; numerous publications covering her work and its collectibility; special-issue reproductions of her most popular designs; and licensing agreements for tea towels, biscuit tins, magnets and other common items decorated with Cliff patterns ensure that, as it was in her heyday, Cliff’s designs are available to a mass market.

Among the many delights to be found in Knight’s biography are period black-and-white photographs including those showing Cliff’s Bizarre Girls painting in the workshop, demonstrating in department stores and on a float at a charity event; Dame Laura Knight on a visit to A.J. Wilkinson while Cliff was overseeing production of designs by Knight and other fine artists for the exhibit Modern Art for the Table (held in 1934 at Harrods); and an article in Modern Home (January 1933) covering the tableware that Cliff created for actress Marion Lorne. A full-color section shows some of Cliff’s most popular designs and radical shapes. The few photographs of Cliff reflect a confident, determined woman with great energy.

Knight has done a remarkable job of registering Cliff’s importance far beyond her own career. Cliff’s method of designing an extensive range of patterns and applying them to a wide range of shapes–traditional, modern and experimental–then producing each pattern/shape combination in small quantities ensured that there was always something new offered by her workshop. As a result, she and Shorter forged a firm connection between her name and the concept of “new” in the public mind. It took a long time for women to shake social conventions that kept them in the home; Cliff gave them power within that sphere. She stated that she wanted to give women colors and designs that brought joy into the home. Hers was a spirited art. As Knight’s biography evinces, Cliff’s story has much to teach artists, designers, craftspeople and retailers about success.

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

As luscious as the ripe fig consumed by the young woman at the center of this intricate web of obsession and intrigue, Jody Shields’s debut novel, The Fig Eater (Little, Brown, 2000; Back Bay paperback, 2001), transports readers to Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, cauldron of new art, literature, music and philosophies. Shields takes as her main character the now-infamous “Dora,” an Austrian patient diagnosed with hysteria and treated by Sigmund Freud early in his career. Using this pseudonym, Freud wrote about her in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905). In it, he revealed Dora’s painful psychological turmoil resulting from her relationship with her parents and their close friends, identified by Freud as Herr and Frau K. Love triangles figure prominently in Dora’s story, and Freud attributed her anxiety to repression of sexual desires for her father, Herr K. and his wife.

As fascinating as Dora’s case may be, Shields adds spice by creating Dora’s fictional murder and using it as a stone thrown in calm waters–the seemingly imperturbable veneer of upper middle-class life in Vienna. This initial explosion sets off a series of events and explorations by the lead investigator in the case, his Hungarian wife, Erszébet, and Erszébet’s friend, a young English governness named Wally. Deeply affected by Dora’s murder, these characters each have very different responses and reactions based on their habits, world views and, of course, subconscious motivations and fears.

Shields displays the inspector’s psyche via his mode of investigation, which is drawn from his personal bible, System der Kriminalistick, a police manual written in 1904 by Hans Gross. Those familiar with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes stories will recognize similar methodology. The inspector believes that by scrupulously adhering to scientific principles, acute observation of psychological states and rigorous organization of facts, one will find the key–the “error in the situation”–that is the fingerprint of the culprit.

Erszébet, whose name means “Elizabeth Bridge,” in fact functions as a bridge between her husband’s rationalist urges and the pull of the spirit world. An amateur artist, she responds viscerally to her surroundings and objects; steeped in Hungarian and Gypsy folklore, she is guided by inner knowledge. She is convinced that her body will yield the information she needs to identify Dora’s murderer. She wonders if Dora is a revenant, or corpse returned from the grave to haunt the living. Shields has researched a curious array of folk beliefs and superstitions involving werewolves; tarot readings; power symbols; talismans; and magical spells, plants and fasts. The fig of Shields’s title is, perhaps, the most telling magical object and does, indeed, lead to the murderer.

It is this quality of deep knowing that disturbs the inspector and Wally. He longs for Erszébet’s intimacy as a lover but resents her metaphysical way of perceiving and the distance she maintains in order to practice her magic. For her part, as the story progresses Wally’s need for Erszébet’s friendship intensifies. The rise and fall of Wally’s spirits mirrors Erszébet’s volatile emotional availability. Intuitively, Erszébet knows something sensed by Freud and pursued by psychologists ever since he formed his pivotal theories. She says she would like to tell her husband that his investigations are not rationale; they are like dreams. Interpretation is an art, akin to the storyteller’s:

“In order to understand the terrible images you’ve witnessed, you make them into a story so you can carry it. Or it will carry you.”

Like the inspector, Wally finds Erszébet maddeningly distant, an unreachable but compelling enigma. Shields tells readers:

“Wally finds her unfathomable, like a lighthouse in daylight, her purpose hidden.”

Like her second novel, The Crimson Portrait (Little Brown, 2006; Back Bay paperback, 2008), a dark but ultimately illuminating love story centered on victims of facial disfiguration caused by combat during World War I, Shields’s first effort defies genre categories. It is likely to satisfy a wide range of readers by offering not only a first-rate psychological thriller, but a spellbinding portrait of an age shaken by social, cultural, political and artistic change. Although many establishments still barred women without male chaperones, others had begun to welcome women of Dora’s class. She could travel alone in a carriage and sit in a cafe, drinking a coffee with brandy and smoking a cigarette. Aside from Dora’s mother, a weak and foolish woman, Shields presents strong-willed female characters who lead independent lives. True to her English heritage, Wally takes the bull by the horns and, dressed in men’s clothing, gains access where other women are denied; Frau K. is no stranger to love affairs; and Erszébet jealously guards her secret inner life from her husband.

In the art world, the Vienna Secession, formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian artists, continued to decry age-old conventions in the visual arts, while writers, poets and thinkers rebelled against their own traditions and predecessors. (The paperback cover of The Fig Eater reproduces an apt image, Secessionist member Max Kurzweil’s Woman in Yellow). Shields deals with class and racial prejudice as well in the characters of a Gypsy gardener accused of Dora’s murder, and Erszébet’s friendship with Wally, who works to support herself.

A former magazine editor and fashion writer, Shields holds a master’s degree in art. Her prints are represented in a variety of private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Throughout The Fig Eater, she displays an intense relationship with light. The changing seasons, shifting shades of passing clouds, alterations of landscape from rain and snowfall, these Shields captures through subtle details painted with beautifully refined and lyrical language. She wields language as deftly as an accomplished Impressionists wields a brush; with color, light and shadow as her palette, she paints a Vienna in which natural elements can cause physiological and psychological disturbances. In the figure of photographer Egon, who assists the investigators, Shields offers readers a glimpse of the way human manipulation of light and shadow can reveal and obscure truth, create a story or cast doubt on its authenticity.

There is one recurring theme that is guaranteed to entice even the most ascetic of readers: Shields’s descriptions of Viennese and Hungarian pastry and other dishes. From Böhmische dalken (thin pastry with steamed plums) and gebackene Mäuse (“baked mice”) to mehlspeise (rice pudding soaked in red wine served with csöröge fánk, sweet fritters) and caramel-glazed Doboschnitten (the famous Hungarian fiver-layer sponge cake), Shields generously sweetens her narrative with mouth-watering descriptions. Like the pull of the unconscious temptations of sex, money and power, fine pastry has a way of rendering one powerless.

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An artist dedicated to the Fine Arts, finds himself as a master in world of abstraction.  After many years of working in figurative drawing and sculpture, Marco Duran was challenged by an artist friend to paint together and from that moment forward he has continued to amaze us all.

Marco Duran graduated from the prestigious Daniel Reyes Art School in San Antonio de Ibarra, Ecuador.  It is there that he mastered drawing, painting and sculpture.

For more information you can visit his site at www.marcoduranart.com