Light and dark

Francisco Goya was born on this date in 1746 and worked his way up to being a court painter.  So much of his other work was dark and political, that critics have always assumed that his picture of Charles IV and his family is satirical. (Goya put himself in the shadows far left.) Théophile Gautier described the royals as looking like “the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery.”

Charles IV and his family

Sometime in his mid-50s, Goya became deaf for reasons still unknown.  He suffered as well from tinnitus, dizziness and vision problems, all of which led to depression.  He has been variously diagnosed postmortem as having had a series of small strokes, Meniere’s disease or perhaps a small brain tumor.

In any event, the increasing darkness of his work is often blamed on ill-health.  He did a series of small paintings on tin called Fantasy and Invention, among them the Courtyard with Lunatics – but it is neither fantasy or invention, since in one of his letters he mentions that ‘I saw it myself [at an asylum] in Zaragoza.’

The Caprichos came next, then a series of aquatints called the Disasters of War and finally – darkest of all – the 14 Black Paintings, which he painted on the walls of his house outside Madrid, Quinta del Sordo. (It means ‘Deaf Man’s House,’ but the reference was actually to the previous owner.)

He left the house four years before his death, dying in Bordeaux at the age of 82, which is one possible explanation why the Black Paintings remained unnoticed for almost 50 years.  When the crumbling plaster was finally transferred to canvas, very little remained – but then Goya himself had never planned to exhibit them, never even talked about them.

But the authenticity of the Black Paintings has been questioned recently – Professor Juan José Junquera believes they are fakes – one suggestion is that they were painted by Goya’s son in an effort to get a higher price for the house, a theory that sounds strangely plausible. More here.

La Pyramide

When the new ‘Pyramid’ entrance to the Louvre opened on this date in 1989, architect I. M. Pei must have been relieved that a guillotine for his personal use hadn’t been constructed as well – for almost a year, ever since the first plans for the pyramid had been made public, Pei had been reviled by the French for what the newspapers had called ‘a gigantic, ruinous gadget.’

Pyramid at night.

The director of the museum, outraged by the entire renovation plan, had quit in protest and Pei said ruefully that he even got dirty looks from people on the street.

Once the new entrance was open, the fickle public fell in love with it.  The newspapers were full of praise and the Le Quotidien de Paris gushed that the “much-feared pyramid has become adorable.”

All that hoopla has made the Pyramid Pei’s best known work, but his personal favorite is this JFK Library in Boston.  More about Pei, who will be 95 next month, here.

Kennedy Library in Boston by I.M.Pei

Brotherhood of Mann

Thomas Mann’s big brother Heinrich, born on this date in 1871, never achieved anything like his brother’s literary fame but in his own way made a highly significant contribution to the culture of the 20th century, if not the art.

Mann the Elder was an unflinching critic of German mores – his best known work is Der Untertan (The Subject) in which the protagonist, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Kaiser Wilhelm, is exposed as a hypocrite, philanderer, cheat, liar, coward and all-round loser.

Heinrich was declared persona non grata – officially – by the Nazis; he fled to France, then in 1940 to Spain, Portugal and finally the US. His brother, who had gone to Switzerland, accepted a post at Princeton and arrived in 1939. Both the Manns wound up on the West Coast during WWII – Thomas lived in Pacific Palisades, while Heinrich was down the road in Santa Monica, still his home when he died in 1950.

Heinrich Mann’s most famous work – at least outside Germany – is a little tale called Professor Unrat. It was made into a film by Josef von Sternberg, who ignored Mann’s plea that his girl friend at the time be allowed to star in it.  Von Sternberg chose an unknown fraulein named Marlene Dietrich and called the movie The Blue Angel.

Both Manns are represented in a fabulous 40-foot sculpture in Berlin that celebrates the invention of the printing press.

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This is also the anniversary of the Mariner 7 probe of Mars that was launched in 1969.  Mariners 6 and 7 went walkabout eventually and are now orbiting the sun. The continuing compulsion to snoop around Mars is baffling, but it’s a good excuse to post another fabulous NASA photo, this one from the International Space Station of the US sideways.  Big light clusters from right to left are NYC, Philly and Pittsburgh.

The beat goes on

Many happy returns to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turns 93 today. A poet in his own right – think Coney Island of the Mind – Ferlinghetti will forever be associated with the poets he published after joining with Peter Martin to found the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1953. City Lights put out the Pocket Poets series which included  Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg.

Details are here.  You can hear him read poetry – his own and others – here.

Putting our best foot forward

Remember the Shanghai Expo?  The biggest one ever?
Well, I don’t either.

The 'Seed Cathedral,' Britain's Shanghai Pavilion

It ended on October 31, 2010, which was only 17 months ago, but maybe because the Olympics in Beijing had sucked all the air out of the room a year and a half before, the Expo didn’t get the attention it deserved. The mainstream media mentioned it in passing, but they were probably all tuckered out from the Olympics.

Or maybe they didn’t want to call our attention to what we had paid for.  Or to the fact that we don’t know what we paid for because it’s all a big secret.

Anyway, I’m watching a lot of TED talks (now on Netflix, thank you so much) about architecture and these guys – mostly guys, btw, but that’s a topic for another time – are talking about the Shanghai Expo.  The Danish guy is describing the use of pure water inside the Danish pavilion and how it’s from the newly clean harbor in Copenhagen and everyone will be invited to take a dip right there in the pavilion and so on. (They also brought The Little Mermaid to Shanghai – which took a lot of doing – and left a video of her on the rock back home.)

And then this Brit is talking about the British pavilion for which there was almost no budget so he kept it simple – 66,000 acrylic tubes attach to a central block, each 22 feet long with fiber optics to conduct light and – trapped at the end – seeds donated by the Kew Gardens seed bank.  (See it and much more of Thomas Heatherwick’s work here. )

Very impressive stuff.  Just out of curiosity, I tracked down a photo of how my own country was represented:

Really? Seriously? A fugitive from a New Jersey tank farm?  This is what we paid for?
Apparently no one liked it, although the Chinese were very polite and said nice things and didn’t seem at all bothered by the interior decor which consisted mostly of corporate logos.

Yeosu consists of a peninsula plus more than 300 tiny islands - the expo theme this year is the oceans.

An enterprising blogger from Shanghai named Adam Minter did a great series on the pavilion – here’s the link – and from him I get the impression that that sad excuse for a building cost about $61 million.  (He points out that the expo people have refused to make any info available to the public.) A former Disney executive who specializes in expo pavilions seems to have been responsible for the design and program, which was mainly a 15-minute movie. Tsk, tsk – not much imagineering there . .

All of this is the fault of our State Department, which subcontracts expo stuff and which obviously has no interest  in innovation or even good p.r.  This year, they have given the task of putting our best foot forward to a former Universal exec who now does expo stuff and who is – wait for it – making a little movie to show visitors.

What a policy shift, eh?  We continue to think of these things as amusement parks, while other countries use them as exemplars of innovation and cutting edge design.

But get your tickets now for the Yeosu World Expo in Korea which opens in May – the rest of the world may have some really interesting stuff to show us.

(US pavilion photo  by Micah Sittig.)

Up to code

It was right about now, in 1804, that Napoleon changed life not only for the French, but for most of the rest of Europe as well.

1812 portrait by Jacques-Louis David - click for the large version with the word 'Code' visible on the papers on the desk.

That was when the new Civil Code he had ordered was officially adopted and thousands of people who had never known the rule of law woke up to find that feudalism had vanished overnight.

Until the Code Civil des Francais, the closest things to law were really just customs, plus all the charters, exemptions and special privileges granted by kings and local lords.  It was all pretty hit or miss and could vary from region to region.

What Napoleon demanded and got was a legal structure based on Roman law as embodied in the Justinian Code of the 6th century. But it differed dramatically in many respects, most notably when it came to religion – Justinian, the Eastern Roman Emperor, ordered that everyone had to be a Christian.  Heresy was out and while being a pagan wasn’t against the law, certain pagan practices were.

Napoleon’s Code, on the other hand, in the spirit of the revolution, called for freedom of religion, an end to privileges granted simply by birth and a civil service that was based on merit.

On the criminal side, it set up a Court of Assizes to try felonies and for the first time ever, it mandated legal representation for the accused – more than 30 years before the English got around to allowing accused felons to have a lawyer.

The Napoleonic Code, photo by DerHexer.

And because we’re talking Napoleon here, the code went into effect in much of the territory he occupied – thus, it became the basis of law in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands.  It was translated into Arabic and became part of the law in Egypt after the Khedive, and in 1864 it was adopted by Romania, which uses it still.

There have been numerous changes and additions over the years of course, but it remains the core of current French law. With amendments, it runs to about 3,000 pages and is available on CD from Dalloz or you can read it online here.

It’s clear from the portrait shown that the painter David thought that Bonaparte’s chief claim to fame was not military but civil.

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OMG – nearly forgot Bach’s birthday – he was born in 1685. Listen to this while you do the math:

Getting real

And…we’re back! Just in time to  wish Henrik Ibsen a happy birthday. Ibsen, which btw means son of Ib, was born in 1828.  He appeared in the history of drama about the same time as Flaubert and George Eliot emerged as novelists, a time in the Victorian era when romanticism and gothic flights of fancy were giving way to realism.

Ibsen feeling grumpy...

Ibsen started writing in his teens, but had no particular success until Peer Gynt in 1867, by which time he’d already left Norway.  He would live in Italy and Germany until he was in his sixties and while there, produced his best work: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler.  

He is often compared to Shakespeare, sometimes  for his style and deft dramatic structure or because of his pivotal role in the history of the theater – he influenced Strindberg, Chekov and other realists – but you can argue that he was more polemicist than poet. What was shocking and controversial in the 19th century however doesn’t pack quite the same punch anymore. His characters seem a bit two-dimensional these days, but that’s just my opinion and there is no denying that actors love to play them – he is revived endlessly.

All of his plays are available at Project Gutenberg, including An Enemy of the People, which must be the first – maybe the only? – play about a whistleblower. Okay, I take it back about Ibsen not being relevant. . .

What no one can fault is his decision to ask Edvard Grieg to write some incidental music for Peer Gynt – here’s the Berlin Phil with some Grieg which will knock your socks off: