Water Rats
· Bohumil Kubista's The Sailor ·
I photographed these young Russian sailors some years back in San Francisco’s Chinatown while they perused every touristy junk display up and down the street. They looked not a day over 14, if that, and were ready to flirt with anything in a skirt. Their portrait ended up in a montage called Water rats for a series named (S)Elective Affinities which combined portraits and places that were distant in real life but had psychological commonalities. I placed them into a photograph of a poster of the Sutro Baths near the Cliff House in S.F., an old bathing facility that is now in ruins after a fire in 1966.
Below is a painting of a sailor by Bohumil Kubista one of the founders of modern Czech painting. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohumil_Kubišta) The color palette and geometric construction somehow reminded me of the montage above. Kubista was an interesting artist and critic, who was greatly influenced by a number of painters, van Gogh, Munch, Cézanne among them. He held contact to the German expressionist group Die Brücke, but developed an original style. Other than yours truly who just jumped into montage work without any formal schooling, he took studies seriously, worked on color theory, mathematics and geometry and analyzed the old masters. His life was short, born in 1884 he perished in the 1918 flu epidemic after spending his last years of life in the army.
If you google Eugène Carrière and click on images you’ll face an astonishing array of somewhat monochromatic brown/sepia/beige/black paintings. Lots of them, and all a little bit mysterious, glowing, or, as Wikipedia describes it, with a misty color scheme. I had first seen his famous portrait of Paul Verlaine at the Musée d’Orsay and then encountered the one below, of Alphonse Daudet, in some small museum in San Antonio, Tx.
( Music here:
Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), “The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared.” His enduring nightmare, that America, with its notions of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, would be “gain[ing] control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man” was made real in 1945. In August of that year atomic bombs were deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100.000 people immediately, 10s of thousands through radiation exposure later, and devastated most of the attacked cities. Current talk of “Let’s make America great again!” hints at a willingness to repeat this kind of strategic annihilation, and one wonders if and what we’ve learned from history, if anything at all; it also makes Freud seem quite prescient.
