Stissing Lane: August 2009

Quote of the Day

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

One Lovely Day

Art of the Day

Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (Joseph Mallord William Turner)

Literary Pick (****)

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

La Ciliegina Sulla Torta

Bakerella

Book City Jackets

Yatzer

Literary Pick (**)

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

Goodreads

Literary Pick (**)

To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Art of the Day

The Stolen Kiss (Jean-Honore Fragonard)

Lolalina

Cultural News

The mamas take their place with the dadas
The feminist reclamation of the absurdist movement

In 1971 Linda Nochlin asked “Why have there been no great women artists?” Taking this question as the title for what became a seminal text, she suggested that the answer lay in the systematic exclusion of women in a male-orientated society, or, as she put it, in “the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substance upon which the profession of art history is based”. This, she maintained, had prevented the emergence of any “great” women artists. Her essay catalysed many elements of contemporary feminist thinking, and, over the next 35 years, was instrumental in the launch of art-historical discoveries, reclamations, revision and rehabilitations of hitherto submerged women artists. Dada’s Women by Ruth Hemus is the latest addition to this list.

Dada as an art movement is often overshadowed by its ostensibly more glamorous and eccentric child, surrealism. Often described as the phoenix risen from dada’s ashes, surrealism elevated Woman to mythical status, making her Muse, Object and Other. This objectification has ignited fierce feminist debate—Whitney Chadwick, Dawn Ades, Rosalind Krauss and Mary Ann Caws, among others, all turned their attention to the subject. As a result, many women artists have been inscribed in the surrealist canon: Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun, to name but a few.

Dada, which formed the very ideals on which surrealism was based, has, however, failed to undergo the same overhaul, and is still perceived as a boys only club. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse made an effort to redress this in Women in Dada (1999), but, apart from a handful of specialist essays, little else has been attempted. Indeed the book under review is not the fruit of long gestation, but began life not so long ago as a PhD thesis that has been polished up by Yale University Press for a public debut. A specialist, academic, feminist thesis may sound more than a little forbidding, but this book exceeds those daunting adjectives. Ruth Hemus presents a well ordered, clear and concise account of the place of women in dada, focusing on five individual artists connected with the movement: Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber, Hannah Höch, Suzanne Duchamp and Céline Arnauld. The introduction, which accuses many of the best known accounts of dada as being “at best lazy and at worst an indication of patriarchal ideologies at play in art and literary histories” states the author’s aim to “challenge and stretch the perceptions of dada”.

This aim is particularly well realised in her presentation of Emmy Hennings and Céline Arnauld, the least known of the five women. Arnauld particularly deserves reconsideration. Her work has long been out of print, there have been no studies of her life and there was no existing bibliography of her work until Hemus compiled one for this publication. It is surprising to learn that Arnauld was relatively prolific and produced 11 volumes of poetry, a novel and an anthology, all of which had been forgotten until now. Hemus examines in depth three of Arnauld’s poems (in French) and reveals her to be a clever and witty craftsman whose work, in keeping with dada itself, touches both on the horrors of war (“the rain falls suspicious and petty/ Your words are shrapnel/ on the sunflower wheels/ The cemeteries extend to the dead grass…/ Watch out for the open graves”) and the comic absurd (“Well then, that’s all I have to say to you. It’s Poetry, believe me.”)

The most vivid chapters are those on Höch and Taeuber, not least because of the smart colour reproductions of their works. Taeuber in particular (who is, in fact, mentioned in Nochlin’s essay as an example of an artist whose work can’t be classified as “feminine” and yet has been overlooked because of her sex) is presented as an enormously talented and versatile artist. Indeed previous writings on Taeuber, both in her lifetime and after, focus on her personality rather than her standing as an artist (as is the case with Hennings, whose life as a heroin-addicted prostitute has been paid more attention than her life as a poet, performer and founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, the birthplace of dada). Taeuber’s paintings and tapestries, and Höch’s collages, would hold their place next to work by their male counterparts.

As well as highlighting the work of these five artists (in Arnauld’s case, for the first time), Hemus demonstrates the correlation between the different geographical centres of the movement: Zurich, Paris and Berlin. In juxtaposing the work of these five women, the reader is exposed to the sheer diversity of medium which distinguishes dada from other movements at the time. Hemus has succeeded in introducing the reader to the women of dada, and in bringing to life a subject often regarded as a museum curiosity.

Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press)
The Art Newspaper

Sweerisat

Visuals. a creative space

Literary Pick (***)

The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

Quote of the Day

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
-Madeleine L'Engle

Robyn Glaser

Krisatomic

Daily Poetics

Design Evolution

Design Fragment

Art of the Day

Winged Victory of Samothrace

The Winged Victory of Samothrace is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic sculpture. The figure creates a spiraling effect in a composition that opens out in various directions. This is achieved by the oblique angles of the wings and the placement of the left leg, and emphasized by the clothing blowing between the goddess's legs. The nude female body is revealed by the transparency of the wet drapery, much in the manner of classical works from the fifth century BC, while the cord worn just beneath the breasts recalls a clothing style that was popular beginning in the fourth century. In the treatment of the tunic-sometimes brushing against the body, sometimes billowing in the wind-the sculptor has been remarkably skillful in creating visual effects. The decorative richness, sense of volume, and intensity of movement are characteristic of a Rhodian style that prefigures the baroque creations of the Pergamene school (180-160 BC).
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace,is a third century B.C. marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory). Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world.

Tatielle

Automatism

Literary Pick (****)

Anthem (Ayn Rand)

Quote of the Day

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
-Abraham Lincoln

Diary

Jessica Hische

Ruby Gatta

Otis & Frank

Design In White Invite

Literary Pick (****)

Rescuing Da Vinci (Robert M. Edsel)

Designage

The White Board

Mona Lisa Attacked with Teacup

A Russian tourist sparked a security alert when she threw a mug at the Mona Lisa, the world's best-known painting, officials at theLouvre Museum have revealed.
Screams erupted from the 40-odd tourists jostling for position around Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic painted lady when the empty terracotta mug flew over their heads and smashed into the portrait.

The Russian woman is thought to have bought it minutes earlier at the museum gift shop.

However, the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile was unaffected by the commotion, as the mug bounced harmlessly off the bullet-proof glass shielding her and shattered on the floor, according to the team of staff paid to guard her.

"There was no damage done to the painting whatsoever," a museum official told Le Parisien.

"Naturally the Mona Lisa is a carefully watched and protected painting. It is kept in a special sealed box to protect it from vibrations, heat and humidity. It is protected by thick glass resistant to bullets and any other object hurled at it," he said.

The woman was seized by two museum security guards and handed over to central Paris police after the incident on August 2.

The remaining tourists were then left in peace to gaze at the work, viewed by 8.5 million people each year.

The Russian is being held in custody and has reportedly undergone a psychological examination.

Doctors were trying to assess whether she was suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, a rare condition in which often perfectly sane individuals momentarily lose all reason and attack a work of art.

In July last year, a 32-year-old woman wearing lipstick kissed a painting by the American artist Cy Twombly on display in Avignon, leaving left a large red smudge. She was sentenced to community work.

At the Orsay Museum in Paris the previous year, a man ripped a hole in a painting by impressionist Claude Monet.

The last attack on a work of art at the Louvre was in 1998, when a mathematics professor and calm family man suddenly attacked a statue of the Roman philosopher Seneca with a hammer.

The Mona Lisa is the only painting ever to have been stolen from the Louvre, in 1911, and then recovered.

In 1956, it was damaged when a vandal threw acid over it while it was on display at a museum in Montauban, in France.

The same year, a Bolivian man threw a rock at the painting, damaging paintwork below the Mona Lisa's left elbow.

The painting belongs to the French state.

telegraph.co.uk