About time we introduce some new members to that idiosyncratically chosen group, don’t you think?
The first person should have been known to me, but wasn’t. I only learned about them when a dear friend sent me a bundle of postcards from a current blockbuster exhibition in Hamburg, Germany. She knew how much I wished to see Rendevous of Dreams at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, celebrating a century of Surrealism and juxtaposing some of the works with those of German Romanticists who were influenced by some of the same inspirations as the more modern movement.
“The supernatural and irrational, dreams and chance, a feeling of community and encounters with a changing natural world were vital sources of inspiration for German Romanticism and shaped international Surrealism differently a century later.” (Ref.)
Toyen The Dream (1937)
If you live in northern Germany, go see paintings by Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Toyen, André Masson, Paul Klee and Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810,) while I longingly stare at the postcards.
So: here is Toyen, a name that means “it is he” in Czech, but could also be a play on the French citoyen,) chosen by a painter originally named Marie Čermínová (1902 -1980) who refused to use any feminine endings in her own language (which contains linguistic gender differentiation). They were a firebrand, left home as a young teenager and followed progressive political movements while attending UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design) in Prague. They worked closely with fellow Surrealist poet and artist Jindřich Štyrský until Štyrský’s death, collaborated with the future Nobel prize-winning poet Jaroslav Seifert, and poet František Halas. Living for some years in Paris, they and Styrsky founded an artistic alternative to Abstraction and Surrealism, which they dubbed Artificialism.
Toyen Among the Long Shadows (1943)
Their output was prolific, in paintings, drawings and book illustrations even during the years when they went underground during the Nazi Occupation in Prague, sheltering Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler. The two moved to Paris permanently after the war and joined the Paris Surrealists. Even when fascism struck and attacked a person and their work, they did not give an inch, much less capitulated. I am so grateful for models that indicate you can – and must – follow your passion, even under the most dire of circumstances.
The work is ravishing. If you live in Great Britain, you had a chance to see some of it at Richard Saltoun Gallery in London. Dreaming in the Margins was up until October 4th (this blog got delayed, alas, by reports on more pressing current events…) You can still look at the website, though.
Toyen THE LAW OF SILENCE (1953)
Toyen’s sexuality is unknown, since they avoided revealing any details about their personal life, creating a mysterious persona, but their public styling cut across gender boundaries. This fluidity was one of the factors that led to an artistic focus on themes of gender, politics, and eroticism, but they also created highly political art that addressed women’s experiences, misogyny and the destructive effects of war and authoritarian regimes. Here is a longer biographical sketch of the artist which labels Toyen as transgender.
Toyen Eclipse (1968)
***
I really can’t figure out how that artist escaped me, given my preoccupation with Surrealism this year with all those centennial celebrations (and prior to that just my affinity to some of the female artists of that movement before they were introduced to mainstream audiences.)
I am less perturbed by the fact that I had never encountered Frank Menchaca, the second person for today’s addition to the interesting people department, a composer who turns out also to be a visual artist, a poet and writer, with a foot in the sustainable energy business and education. Talk about a renaissance man. His visual art work can be perused on his website (link in name) that offers some 14 galleries. I came across his music first; just like Toyen cross-referenced poetry in her illustrations and other works, Menchaca links some of his compositions to poetry, in direct and indirect ways. As you know, I am a sucker for cross overs. And I feel certainly encouraged by people who do not restrict themselves to one creative or intellectual area only, even if standards of excellence might differ across media. I allow myself too often to beg off of some project just because I am not good (enough) at it, and it is so easy to retreat to the familiar.
What brought me to Menchaka is a piece titled Crows listening to Wallace Stevens. It can be found on an album The Demon rubs his Palm which I have listened to so often now that I can whistle in the demon’s company. By all descriptions, the music relates to multiple contemporary composers like John Luther Adams, for example. I wouldn’t know. I do know Steven’s 13 Ways of looking at a Blackbird, though, given that I spent an entire spring 15 years ago creating drawings and montages for the stanzas of this poem that I found wonderfully challenging to interpret. Early days for me regarding the craft, but I still like the ideas.
Here is my exhibition statement from 2011:
Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, first published in 1913, has been hailed as an imagistic masterpiece. Stevens himself called it “a collection not of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations.” A first reading of the 13 stanzas, each mentioning the blackbird, offers indeed a multitude of sensory modes and perceptions. On closer inspection, though, the poem hints, as so much of Stevens’ work, at the relation between the perceivers and the world they perceive, extending our focus beyond perception to thoughts and feelings as well. Yet the text is challenging, frequently switching perspectives between who does the looking and who beholds whom in knowledge of the world. For good measure, Stevens adds the occasional barb, sufficiently opaque to leave the reader even more unsettled. Who would know that “the bards of euphony” refers to his critics (Stanza X) or that the men of Haddam, a hamlet in Connecticut, embarked on a futile search for gold (Stanza VII).
My challenge was to provide sufficiently representational images to echo the content of the stanzas, but to stay abstract enough to mirror the reticence of the poem’s language. I tried to convey my sense of the poem as a whole, taking as my guide the notion that our perception inevitably goes “beyond the information given,” such that the phenomenal world can never be objectively represented but consists rather of a chain of apperceptions guided by interpretation. To accomplish this goal, I, among other things, replaced the poem’s blackbird with glass marbles that were montaged into my drawings and photographs from my daily environment.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Again, here is the full album, best listened to without interruptions, and on multiple occasions, when the connections become ever more visible, or should I say audible, rooted in a poem performed at the end.
