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Tag Archives: Édouard Manet

Chronicling Covid-19, 2021

07 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by michelinewalker in 19th-Century France, Art, Covid-19, Sharing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Édouard Manet, Covid-19, Donald Trump, sharing

Un bar aux Folies Bergère d’Édouard Manet (Courtaud Institute) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This painting by Edouard Manet is so intriguing. Where is the gentleman looking at the young woman?

However, this picture fits my topic. This post was written yesterday and it is about Covid-19. It’s incredible, but Covid remains a major threat. Yesterday, there were 2,641 new cases in the province of Quebec, revealing that some people celebrated Christmas and the New Year. One couldn’t. However, there was no demonstration against sanitary measures. Somehow, that is not the sort of thing Canadians do.

I pity the people of Washington, DC. There was a huge pro-Trump rally, which means that a thousand or thousands of people were infected. I believe they wanted life to be normal, which has been Mr. Trump’s attitude. Life is not normal and the pandemic will not end if strong measures are not taken. We must accept that there is a pandemic and stay safe. What choice do we have? I’m glad I live in Canada.

Despite the new lockdown, efforts are being made to keep street people safe. As I told you, I didn’t vote for Monsieur Legault, but I admire the way he is dealing with the pandemic. However, after ten months, Quebec still sits at the top of the list of Canadian victims, followed closely by Ontario. Many are working from home, and many are considering instituting a universal basic income. As for retired persons, it seems that pension funds are not decreasing. I keep thinking that poverty is at my door, but that is not the case.

Love to everyone and a very Happy New Year. 💕

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe d’Édouard Manet (Wikipedia)

© Micheline Walker
7 January 2021
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Manet, “Japonisme” and Modernism

08 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Japonism

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Academic art, Édouard Manet, Hokusai, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Japonism, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet, Paris, Salon, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

640px-Hokusai_portraitKatsushika Hokusai, in an 1839 self-portrait (Photo credit: Hokusai, Wikipedia)

As of Édouard Manet’s “modernity,” there occurred a gradual decline of academic art. The nude women of Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) did not quite belong. Symbolism had therefore entered the visual arts. At first glance, this painting seemed a “realist” work, consistent with Gustave Courbet‘s art, but it wasn’t. The academicists, Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who excluded it from the Salon of 1863, the regular exhibition of Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts, must have sensed what Victor Hugo had sensed when he first read Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, (The Flowers of Evil.) Hugo called Baudelaire’s collection of poems a ‘nouveau frisson’ (a new shudder, a new thrill)[i] in literature. (See Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil], Wikipedia.)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler‘s “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl ” was also rejected by academicists. Whistler was introducing impressionism and Japonism, which, Whistler’s case, would be called the Anglo-Japanese style. After leaving the United States, Whistler spent some time in France, but soon settled in England.

Both Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Whistler’s Symphony in White were “different,” so both were shown at the 1863 Salon des Refusés.[ii]  Émile Zola stated that “[b] eauty [was] no longer an absolute, a preposterous universal standard,”[iii] and, in 1886, he published L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece), a novel inspired by the rejection of Manet’s “Masterpiece.” That same year, Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto.

Our Japanese artists are:

  • Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753 – 31 October 1806),
  • Katsushika Hokusai (c. 31 October 1760 – 10 May 1849)  and
  • Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 12 October 1858).

398px-23_-_The_Sea_off_Satta

394px-03_-_Sukiyagahsi

View of Mount Fuji from Satta Point in the Suruga Bay, published posthumously (1859)

Sukiyagahsi in the Eastern Capital, from “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” Utagawa Hiroshige, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
 
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
 

Modernisme

Manet’s inclusion in a painting such as the deceitfully realist Déjeuner sur l’herbe of elements that did not seem to belong and did not belong, and Japonisme contributed to the ultimate acceptance of different styles, a multitude of “isms.” How else could Art Nouveau, Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh),[iv] Cubism (Picasso), Intimism,  (Modernism  [EN]), etc.have emerged? The unexpectedly enigmatic art of Manet and Japonism ushered in the degree of acceptance that characterizes modernism. In fact, Japonism was a tidal wave.

By the same token, there occurred an equally unexpected integration of various arts and crafts: musical, visual, etc. There was collaboration between stage decorators, composers, literary figures and various “artists.” Sergei Diaghilev‘s Ballets Russes employed major artists, including Pablo Picasso. Russian painter Léon Bakst was the Ballets Russes’ stage- and costume designer. Sergei Diaghilev also employed soon-to-be major composers: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky, etc. (For lists of artists and musicians who worked for Diaghilev, see Ballets Russes, Wikipedia.)

In other words, although there had to be exceptions, beginning with Manet and Japonisme, the world of art broadened. Modernism, starting with Impressionism, inaugurated greater diversity. A list may be useful.

  • Æstheticism (British art for art’s sake): James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, etc.;
  • artwork that is precise rather than “impressionistic” and “suggestive,” i.e. the art of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Edward Burne-Jones, William Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse, etc.;
  • decorative arts, i.e. the Arts and Crafts movement: William Morris, John Ruskin, etc.;
  • Art Nouveau, curvy and sensual, whose most acclaimed representative is Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, etc.;
  • illustrators: Anne Anderson, Aubrey Beardsley, Ivan Bilibin, Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, Edmund Dulac, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Rackham, John Tenniel, etc.;
  • posters, many of which reflect Japonisme or Orientalisme, in general, i.e. Toulouse-Lautrec, Théophile Steinlen, etc.;
  • Japonisme (Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt)
  • interior decoration: La Maison Jansen, a Paris-based decorative office, founded in 1880 by Dutch-born Jean-Henri Jansen, Tiffany, design;
  • Post-Impressionism and other “isms.”

In other words, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, rule-governed academic art simply faded out. But there’s more…

“Views,” or the Japanese Hours

As well, some Japanese prints depicted “hours” of the day. In traditional Japan, hours had been associated with an animal. There were twelve hours: the Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Hare, the Dragon, the Serpent, the Horse, the Sheep, the Monkey, the Rooster, the Dog and the Boar. (See Horloge japonaise traditionnelle, Wikipedia.) These prints reminded me of Benedict’s Canonical Hours. “Hours,” or equivalent observances, existed before Western monasticism. They in fact still exist, not only in Western culture, but also in other cultures and religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Janeism. (See Monasticism, Wikipedia.)

As for “Views” or “Famous Places” (meisho), they sometimes resemble genre art, or art portraying persons going about their daily activities. Hokusai‘s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fugi and Hiroshige‘s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, both meisho (“famous places”) pieces, bring to mind the miniatures of Jean de France’s Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, illuminated by the Limbourg brothers and showing the labours of the months. Hiroshige’s series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo is divided into seasons, which takes us back to the calendar, no banal invention.

RELATED POSTS

  • Canonical Hours or the Divine Office
  • Books of Hours, a Rich Legacy
  • Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
  • The Fitzwilliam Book of Hours: comments, palimpsests
 
HOKUSA~1
 

Netsuke-Workshop-large

Sarumaru Dayu, from the ‘Hyakunin Isshu Ubaga Etoki’
A Netsuke Worshop, from the ‘Hyakunin Isshu Ubaga Etoki’
Katsushika Hokusai
(Photo credit: Hokusai Wikipedia and Hokusai, The Complete Works)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)

_________________________

[i] Wikipedia (Manet) contains a fuller commentary.

[ii] “Frissonner” means to shiver.

[iii] There were other Salons des Refusés (1874, 1875, and 1886) but it did not become an annual exhibition. The 1863 Salon des refusés was decreed by Napoléon III. (See Salon des Refusés, Wikipedia)

[iv] According to Wikipedia, the “term [Post-Impressionism] was coined by British artist and art critic Roger Fry, in 1910, to describe the development of French art since Manet.”

Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
(Photo credit: Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Wikipedia)
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
 758PX-~1 
   
© Micheline Walker
8 July 2013
WordPress
 

Related articles
  • Katsushika Hokusai: Beauty (michelinewalker.com)
  • Édouard Manet’s Modernity (michelinewalker.com)
  • Édouard Manet: Enigmas (michelinewalker.com)
  • Utamaro’s Women & Japonisme (michelinewalker.com)
  • Utagawa Hiroshige: a “Human Touch” (michelinewalker.com)
  • William Merritt Chase: Japonisme in America (michelinewalker.com)

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Édouard Manet’s Modernity

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Arthur Rimbaud, Édouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, cocotte, Gustave Courbet, Jean Moréas, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet, Modernity, Symbolist Manifesto

La Pèche (Fishing), by Édouard Manet, 1863

La Pêche (Photo credit: Wikimedia)

Enigmas

Related Post: Édouard Manet: Enigmas.

A few days ago, I wrote a post on Édouard Manet‘s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and pointed out that Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia (painted in 1863 and exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon), a sister painting, were enigmatic works of art.  Beginning with Manet, art historians tend to look upon a realist or seemingly realist work of art as transitional.  The foremost among realist painters was Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877).  Now, these transitional works of art take us from Realism to Impressionism, alighting briefly on the Barbizon “plein air” school, but other influences are possible.  Such may be the case with Manet.

Literature as a Possible Key to the Enigmas

Literature may offer insights into Manet’s enigmatic paintings.  Manet was a friend or acquaintance of writers and poets associated with French Symbolism.[i]  Where writers are concerned, Manet knew Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé (the most esoteric and hermetic among these writers), Paul Valéry and others.

Olympia, by Édouard Manet, 1863

Olympia, by Édouard Manet, 1863

(Photo credit: Wikipaintings)

The Symbolist Manifesto

In the Symbolist Manifesto, written, in French, by Jean Moréas (15 April 1856 – 30 April 1910), born Ioannis A. Papadiamantopoulos, in Greece, and published in 1886, symbolism is described as follows:

“In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.”
In a nutshell, ‘to depict not the thing but the effect it produces.'”
See Symbolism (arts), Wikipedia. 
 
“Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales, …”
Manifeste des symbolistes, Le Figaro, Supplément littéraire, p. 1-2, Saturday, 18 September 1886.
 

A Note on Charles Baudelaire

The Symbolist Manifesto was published later than Manet’s epochal Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (1862-1865).  However, Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (Gutenberg EBook # 6099 [FR]), a major literary turning-point, was published in 1857 and is a symbolist and modernist collection of poems.  In « Correspondances »,  Baudelaire states that man passes through “forests of symbols” (des forêts de symboles) and he makes associations, which he calls correspondances, that sometimes jar.  Yet, although they do not seem to fit or belong, they may be and are very poetical:

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
– Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, …
 
(There are perfumes that are fresh like children’s flesh,
sweet like oboes, green like meadows
– And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, … )[ii]
  

Modernity

In short, in Déjeuner sur l’herbe, what one sees may be allusive, which would link Manet to symbolism.  The naked ladies of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe may be a reference, as may the gentlemen.  They may in fact be remembrances, but whatever they are, they do not truly belong.  Nor does Olympia. The public did not like Olympia, but it may simply be that instead of painting a Titian Danaë, or Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which Olympia resembles, Manet showed a demi-mondaine [FR], a modern high-class prostitute or cocotte.  This was shocking and a rather peculiar form of modernity.

As for A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, just where is the man?  Moreover, is the second woman a reflection of the woman tending the bar?  Manet was a trained artist and knew perspective.  Therefore, when and if he encroached on the rules of perspective, he did so consciously.  At any rate, something jars.

Not all of Manet’s paintings are as evocative as Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Olympia, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère or La Pêche, featured above, but these four paintings feature an uncanny element, such as the couple shown at the bottom right of La Pêche (Fishing).  As their clothes indicate, these persons lived in another age.  They are Baudelaire’s Vie antérieure (past life).

So it would appear that Manet depicted the ills of modernity and did so in his own modernist manner.  He discreetly juxtaposed elements that do not seem related and some of which are symbols.  I am using the word “discreetly” because, at first glance, with the possible exception of Olympia, one is unlikely to notice Manet has imported extraneous elements into these paintings.  This could be a characteristic of Manet’s modernity.     

Conclusion

Let me close, by repeating that the enigmatic Manet may have been influenced by French symbolism.  In Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Olympia, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and La Pêche, shown at the top of this post, something does jar.  These paintings may be related to the symbolist movement in French literature, but they may also constitute an early form of modernity that expresses resistance to modernity, a resistance conveyed by the inclusion of elements that do not quite fit: “esoteric affinities” (Symbolist Manifesto, quoted above).

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica,

Manet also influenced the path of much 19th- and 20th-century art through his choice of subject matter. His focus on modern, urban subjects—which he presented in a straightforward, almost detached manner—distinguished him still more from the standards of the Salon, which generally favoured narrative and avoided the gritty realities of everyday life. Manet’s daring, unflinching approach to his painting and to the art world assured both him and his work a pivotal place in the history of modern art.[iii]

A Boy with a Dog, Édouard Manet, 1861

A Boy with a Dog, by Édouard Manet, 1861

(Photo credit: Wikipaintings)

___________________________________

[i] Symbolism is not confined to literature, French literature in particular.  As a movement, it includes writers and artists living in several different countries. (See Symbolism (arts), Wikipedia.)

[ii] See Symbolism (arts), in Wikipedia.  To read a translation of the complete poem, click on Correspondences.

[iii] “Edouard Manet”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 22 Jun. 2013

Francis Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963)
“Trois Novelettes”
Gabriel Tacchino, (b. 1934) piano
art: La Place Valhubert, 1875, by Armand Guillaumin (February 16, 1841 – June 26, 1927) (Photo credit: Armand Guillaumin, Wikipedia) 
 
   

Peonies in a Vase, by Édouard Manet, 1864

Peonies in a Vase, by Édouard Manet, 1864

© Micheline Walker
22 June 2013
WordPress
 
(Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Édouard Manet: Enigmas

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Édouard Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Courbet, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Salon

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, by Édouard Manet, 1863

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, by Édouard Manet (1862-1863)

Although future critics may think differently, Édouard Manet‘s (23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Luncheon on the Grass, (c. 1863) may well have changed the course of the history of European art, mainly French.  It is a representational, à la Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877), rather than an abstract painting.  However, it ushered in a revolution.

Le Salon & Le Salon des Refusés   

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe could not be shown at the Salon  (founded in 1725), the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.  It was rejected by Academicians Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) and Adolphe-William Bougereau (30 November 1825 – 19 August 1905).  Manet therefore showed it at the Salon des refusés.  Ironically, history was very kind to rejected artists, les refusés. 

Avant-garde artists had to settle for the Salons des refusés, which was somewhat of a blessing.  Persons who own works by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Claude Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassat, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin etc. were shrewd investors.  Americans loved the Impressionists, and other Modernistes.  The shrewder investors bought a Vincent van Gogh or a Pablo Picasso.

You may remember that Gertrude Stein and her brother Leon Stein bought Matisse’s Woman with a Hat, showed at the 1905 Salon d’automne, a new Salon, established in 1903.  Matisse was described as a Fauviste, a wild beast, but he didn’t coin the term.  This was “du nouveau,”  (something new), to quote French poet Charles Baudelaire.  Matisse used unusually bold colours.  The Cone sisters were also in Paris at the time.  These wealthy American socialites could afford artworks.

SalonAutomneManet_1866_The-Fifer_GGW-468

The Fifer, by Manet, 1866

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: an element of Magical Realism

Novelty made Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe a painting Academicists would reject.  It featured a nude woman sitting with two fully dressed men and sharing a luncheon.  Nudes had long entered the Fine Arts, but not in such a manner.  The nude figure does not seem to fit the painting.  But it could fit the imagination of the gentlemen sitting next to her as well as Manet’s imagination.  It could also be a reference or a reminiscence: art within art.  There is in Manet an element of magical realism, a characteristic of Latin American literature.  According to Professor Matthew Strecher, magical realism is “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”[i]

Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère is also enigmatic.  Just where is the man?  Furthermore, I wonder whether or not the mirror reflects the woman.  Manet was accused of not knowing perspective, which does not make much sense.  (See A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, Wikipedia.)  But the newness of the painting may be the depiction of the young woman who seems a foreigner.  Her eyes display a kind of bewilderment.  The painting could be a depiction of Marxist alienation.  The painting was shown at the Paris Salon, in 1882, at a later date than Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863).

Edouard_Manet_004

Un Bar aux Folies Bergère, by Édouard Manet, 1882 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of my former teachers writes that “[i]n each case Manet takes a ‘standard’ Reality, not only as to content, but also as to form.”[ii]  Professor Gowans also states that Manet was teaching other painters and that his work is therefore “didactic.”  As for the public, they were not a factor.

Also enigmatic is Manet’s Olympia, shown at the 1865 Paris Salon.  But it will not be discussed today.

______________________________

[i] Matthew C. Strecher, “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki,” Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 25, Number 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 263-298, at 267.

[ii] Alan Gowans, The Restless Art, A History of Painter and Painting 1760-1960 (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), p. 190.

Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_Project_3© Micheline Walker
17 June 2013
WordPress
 
Olympia, 1863
Photo credit: Wikipedia
(Please click on the picture to enlarge it.)

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James McNeill Whistler: Women

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, United States

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Édouard Manet, Freer Gallery of Art, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, London, Maud Franklin, Musée d'Orsay, National Gallery of Art, Whistler

??????
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
294px-Whistler.white.393pix220px-Whistler_James_Arrangement_in_White_and_Black_1876
 
 
 5150-004-540FAA4Bharmony-in-red-lamplight_jpg!Blog
 
 

 

Head of a Young Woman, ca. 1890
Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.)
Arrangement in White and Black, 1876 (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Harmony in Red Lamplight, 1886
Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist’s Mother, 1871–72 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Photo credit: Wikipaintings.org
The Athenæum
 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 10, 1834 – July 17, 1903)

There is more to say about Reynard and motifs, but all I can send my readers today are pictures of the women in the life of American-born London-based artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 10, 1834 – July 17, 1903).  I have been sick with migraine for the last two days.  The second part of my blog will be posted later.

Three Women: jO, Maud and Beatrice

The two loves of Whistler’s life were Joanna “Jo” Hiffernan (ca. 1843 – after 1903) and Maud Franklin (9 January 1857 – ca. 1941).  Joanna had been Whistler’s model and helped him raise his son Charles James Whistler Hanson (1870–1935) the result of an affair with a parlour maid, Louisa Fanny Hanson.  Whistler’s mother never learned about her grandson.

Whistler painted a portrait of Joanna which he showed at the 1863 Paris Salon des Refusés (the Exhibition of Rejects [non Academic works]) at the same time as  Édouard Manet‘s showed his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863).  Manet’s painting caused a scandal, but Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1, a work in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, did not go unnoticed.  On the contrary.   We also have a painting of Maud, Arrangement in White and Black, 1876.

In 1888, Whistler married Beatrice (“Trixie”) Godwin (née Beatrix Birnie Philip).  She had been his pupil and model.  She was the former wife of architect Edward William Godwin.  They first lived in Paris but returned to England when she was diagnosed with cancer.  “Trixie” posed for Harmony in Red Lamplight, 1886.  They lived in the Savoy Hotel until her death in 1896.  Trixie was 39 at the moment of her death.  Whistler himself died seven years later.

Whistler’s Mother

However the woman who dominates Whistler’s life is his mother, born Anna Mathilda McNeill (September 27, 1804 – January 3, 1881). James’ mother had Southern roots.  Whistler enjoyed looking upon himself as an “impoverished Southern aristocrat.”  James did not want to have been born in Lowell, Massachusetts.  Later in life, when he sued John Ruskin for libel, he insisted he was born in Saint Petersburg.

After Whistler settled in England, in the 1860s, she joined him.  She did not like her son’s bohemian lifestyle, so accommodations had to be found for “Jo.”  Yet, the most famous of Whistler’s painting is the now iconic Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: The Artist’s Mother (1871–72), a portrait of Whistler’s mother.  When she died, he added her name, McNeill, to his.

I will pause here…

Whistler by William Merritt Chase, 1885
292px-Chase_William_Merritt_James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler_1885

Micheline Walker©
April 23, 2013
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News & Views: September 4th, 2012

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Music, Sharing

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Abraham Lincoln, Édouard Manet, Carl Jung, collective subconscious, Gabriel Fauré, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Julian Lloyd Webber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, The News, United States

A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, by Édouard Manet*
Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
Photo credit: Wikipedia
 

Oliver Wendell Holmes on Taxes

Today will not be my best day as a blogger, as today is the day Quebec elects a Premier, which is a pre-occupation.  But I would like to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr (8 March 1841 – 6 March 1935) with respect to a citizen’s obligation to pay taxes.  “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” he wrote in Compañia General de Tabacos de Filipinas vs. Collector of Internal Revenue 275 U.S. 87, 100 (1927).  I know very little about Mr Holmes, but he was mentioned in a document I read, which prompted me to investigate a little, but not to an extent that would allow me to express opinions about him.  What I know is that he was an “American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932.”

Let me repeat my quotation:

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

The Collective Subconscious

As for the post I published yesterday: The River Runs Deep… Thoughts on the United States and Quebec, what I wrote is relevant.  There is not only a personal subconscious, but also a collective subconscious (Wikipedia).  This theory is part of a precious legacy.  It was formulated by Swiss-born Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), the famed “psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology” (Wikipedia).

the existentialists: We can shape our lives

Although there is a collective subconscious, we can to a large extent break away from it.  The existentialists also left a message.  Put in a nutshell and simplified, this message is that we can shape our lives.  In fact, we can do so not only at a personal level but also at a collective level.

Garibaldi and Slavery

Garibaldi, a founder of Italy as a unified state, offered his services to President Abraham Lincoln, but would not act if slavery was not abolished.  So although slavery may not have been perceived as unethical to plantation owners, it was perceived as very wrong by Giuseppe Garibaldi (4 July 1807 – 2 June 1882).  And among plantation owners, many treated their slaves with a degree of respect, as all human beings should be treated.  It could be that they knew, in their heart of hearts, that slavery was morally unacceptable.

The News

 
English
The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/
The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
The Montreal Gazette: http://www.montrealgazette.com/index.html
The National Post: http://www.nationalpost.com/index.html
Le Monde diplomatique: http://mondediplo.com/ EN
 
CBC News: http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/
CTV News: http://www.ctvnews.ca/
 
French
Le Monde diplomatique: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/
Le Monde: http://www.lemonde.fr/
Le Devoir: http://www.ledevoir.com/
La Presse: http://www.lapresse.ca/
 
German
Die Welt: http://www.welt.de/
 
Micheline Walker©
September 4th, 2012
WordPress
 
composer: Gabriel Fauré (12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924)
title: Élégie
cellist: Julian Lloyd Webber (b. 1951)
pianist: Peter Pettinger
 

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