A news item today about the recovery of three stolen Picasso paintings set their worth at $66 million. I think there are six in the New Orleans "Spared from the Storm" exhibition at Joslyn, plus a charming small bronze Mask of a Faun, so the total worth of all the show's works must be astronomical. I laughed at the funny bronze Turtle by the surrealist Max Ernst, squashed to oval stylized flatness but recognizable. Without naming everything, I enjoyed a fine large Renoir drawing, the "Study of a Tree," an apple tree blossoming in spring on twisted branches, not the usual rosy plump pink nudes. (The Joslyn has a Renoir of two girls at a piano, one playing, one turning pages.) There's a Mary Cassatt mother-and-child (the Joslyn has a woman reading), the American Cassatt being the only woman accepted as an equal by the French Impressionists. George O'Keeffe has a very large "My Back Yard," a typical New Mexico landscape in bright light colors so that it looks like a huge watercolor but isn't. Used to his much duller, muted neutrals in cubist paintings that are abstract puzzles elaborately fitted together, I delighted in the Fauvist early Braque, "Landscape at L'Estaque," with those saturated colors Matisse loved, emeralds, blues, oranges, blazing yellows and pinks and reds, like having a brass band march brazenly around in dazzling uniforms for your eyes. Joslyn's Jackson Pollock is much bigger and better, however, which is why it's usually gone on loan.
Signaling my admiration in the prior entry for Gerome's technical skill in creating tactile effects with the gold blouse set off with red and orange shimmers, absolutely "touchable" as silk, I used the Faustian bargain of selling one's soul (but past tense) to emphasize how very much I admire humanly made beauty. As an amateur artist since I was a child, I know a bit about creating special effects, color optics. I did not mean art had to be realistic (me? the one always looking for the new, the experimental?), for I've put up with enough BS over my decades from grumbling Norman Rockwell fans and the bad, tired joke of "Well, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like (and this ain't it)!" about abstraction. I taught Humanities and art courses during my college faculty years, after all. And when Kutak Rock had an open house to show off their then newly refurbished Omaha Building, our Standford White historic classic stocked with all kinds of art, most contemporary and hence not realistic, I still remember a very annoying judge complaining to me over the abstractions of color and design. His slammed-door-shut mind obviously had never looked at microscopic or telescopic views of nature, never paid attention to rock formations, oil streaks on pavement, refracted reflections in all our glass. Such a tightly girdled sort has never even considered how abstract the comic strip art is I often admire for turning a few deft lines into a circus of characters not at all realistic. Actually, all the time I was at the exhibition, studying how artists had worked their magic, I was thinking of the problem of reality and illusion and connecting it with the TV news and the nature of film, which I'll deal with another time.
And I mentioned the Faustian bargain probably because I've just joined Netflix on a trial basis, having discovered it as a treasure trove of foreign and independent movies, and two of my first selections were the Czech Jan Svankmajer's dream-nightmare versions of Alice in Wonderland, Alice & Darkness Light Darkness (1988), and Faust (1994), surreal experiments with stop-motion animation, Claymation, special effects, puppets, human characters, blending the real world with the imaginative: when the human Faust tries to escape his fatal contract with the demonic puppets, Mephisto, Mephistopheles, and Lucifer, fleeing out of the basement labyrinth where the theater is back into the streets of Prague, he is run down by a red car, which a policeman discovers has no one in it, The End. The Alice was a bit too gritty and stiff for me, though having the stuffed toy White Rabbit scissor off the cut-out playing-card jacks' heads at the Queen of Heart's "Off with their heads!" was clever, but the Faust is provocative fun and good for several viewings.
Returning briefly to Joslyn, in the south basement corridor is a companion show to the paintings and sculptures, "Stan Strembicki: The Lost Library." He's a photographer who discovered that the New Orleans Alfred Lawless High School library burst from the Hurricane Katrina floodwaters and spewed books out onto the grass, gravel, asphalt, mud. The pulpy paper, not quite papier mache, lost print in blotches, so that a book page looks like a typographical experiment seen through a white sheet shot full of ragged holes. His overriding principle was not to touch anything, just take wondrous close-ups, then blow them up, of the books lying amid clover, on brick pavement, with twigs and leaves across the pages, or smears of mud or miniature sandbars. The books are often famous, Voltaire's Candide, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Thoreau's Walden. It's like reading them in mysterious code, with many words just ghostly shadows, one of the most engrossing photography exhibitions I've ever seen. Such destruction of books makes any book lover weep, but Strembicki has made a peculiar, triumphant beauty out of disaster, and, believe me, these photographs are beautiful.
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