The Salon Strikes Again?

Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women, 1899

A few weeks ago, I reviewed The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, a graphic novel about a group of artists and cognoscenti--including Picasso, Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Gertrude Stein, and Erik Satie--who drink a special absinthe that allows them to enter paintings. The absinthe was discovered by the deceased Paul Gauguin, whose 14-year-old Tahitian mistress is using the absinthe to come out of his paintings and kill artists and collectors. The plot may sound silly and far-fetched, but was something I found to be powerfully metaphorical. As I argued in my review, Gauguin's mistress is wreaking vengeance against the Parisian art world and their sexual and colonial objectification of her, which led to her becoming a junkie whore and dying. The fear of their subjects coming back to haunt them as Anna did leads Picasso and Braque to create cubism, which effectively relegates objects to a two-dimensional surface.

Strange Concurrence

So imagine my reaction when I read this report (via the Washington Post) about a woman who attacked Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women at the National Gallery last week, screaming, "This is evil!"

Lack of Evidence

The Washington Post article implies the woman attacked the painting because of the figures' semi-nudity, but I have my doubts. After all, this is hardly the only work of art in the museum that depicts nude people. Why not attack something closer to the entrance? Secondly, why haven't we been told the woman's name? Very suspicious. Even court records have not been made available. Might it be because she's a member of The Salon????!?!?

An Associated Press article reports the woman, "told police the post-Impressionist artist was evil and the painting should be burned," the exact method Salon members used to destroy Gauguin's paintings in Bertozzi's novel ! ! ! !

Expert Opinion

Memory, who blogs at Stella Matutina and reviewed The Salon said of the book, "Me, I think it’s real, but alternate interpretations are certainly possible." When questioned about the Two Tahitian Women assault, she declared the attackeress was, "clearly a Salon member. Or at least someone who's read and been unduly influenced by the book."

I have to say, after reading the book, I can see how it might convince someone to link Gauguin's paintings with evil. Do we need to ban Bertozzi's dangerous vision of modern art in order to protect Gauguin's work? Or do we need to ban Gauguin's art to protect ourselves???? Unfortunately, I think the cat's out of the bag as far as Gauguin's paintings are concerned, so the mysterious woman's attack was essentially pointless.

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THE SALON by Nick Bertozzi

Georges Braque is a typical starving artist in Paris, hoping to invent a new style of painting. After courting the favor of important avant-garde art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, he becomes embroiled in the salon--a group of the Stein's friends (including Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, and Alice B. Toklas) who drink a special blue absinthe that allows them to enter paintings. Unfortunately, Gauguin's former mistress, Anna, has figured out a way to live in the paintings permanently, which has given her super-human strength; and now she's taking bloody revenge on the artists for being objectified, by ripping their heads off. Leo and Gertrude are certain they'll be next.



A part of me really loved this graphic novel--and yes, it was the art historian part. As soon as I saw Memory's review of it on Stella Matutina, I knew I had to read it. A good portion of my master's thesis involved the avant-garde in early twentieth-century Paris, including Apollinaire and Picasso, so it was soooo totally up my alley. That being said, the part of me that reads for pure entertainment value was disappointed. The only character with any personality in this novel was Picasso, and his motivations were pretty basic: food and sex. Everyone else seemed fairly interchangeable. The book feels edited down to the point of near-incomprehensibility, but at the same time it takes a looong time to read. The ending was kind of lame, and I didn't feel like I learned much of anything about this time period or the avant-garde.

But like I said, as a person who knows way too much about this shit, I did enjoy it. My favorite part of the novel was, surprisingly, Picasso. As some of you may know, I'm not a fan of Picasso. I think he's an overrated hack, in all honesty, so any book that presents Picasso as a lewd and unoriginal "little man" who fucks chickens (all true--okay, maybe the chicken part isn't) gets my vote. I actually warmed up to Picasso a bit while reading The Salon, just because he was so stupid. I also loved clever Apollinaire, even though he didn't get a lot of scenes, as a dashing bi-sexual playa playa.

Leo and Gertrude's storyline, on the other hand, seemed to go nowhere; nor was Georges Braque very interesting. This is unfortunate, since Braque's the hero of the story and the Steins are the main connection to Anna, the murderous blue woman.


Paul Gauguin. Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892.

Anna, meanwhile, was very interesting. In the graphic novel, Anna is the girl seen in paintings such Spirit of the Dead Watching--in real life, Gauguin's fourteen-year-old Tahitian wife, Tehura. In The Salon, he takes her to Paris, where they both become addicted to the blue absinthe that allows them to enter paintings. Anna starts to whore herself out for money to buy more of it. She becomes ill with a European disease (let's face it, probably syphilis) and dies, but Gauguin paints new bodies for them and they both become blue people living inside a paradise he painted. Only, Anna now hunts the streets of Paris, tearing the heads off of Gauguin's artist friends and collectors of his work.

This is why I say Anna is taking revenge for her objectification--Gauguin has taken away her humanity, literally regulated her to the status of a painted, sexual object forever. But not powerless--she takes control of Gauguin's blue image, trapping him inside his own painting, and kills those who would presume to possess her (interesting side note: the "spirit of the dead" that Gauguin referred to in the painting of Tehura was occasionally described as a blue spirit with sharp fangs). In that context, I found the conclusion of this sub-plot and how the salon winds up putting an end to Anna particularly interesting.

How does this all tie into Braque and Picasso and the invention of Cubism? It's not made explicit in the novel, but I think the move to non-representational art in the story is connected to Anna, in that little pieces of inanimate objects cannot come out of their paintings to attack you, as apparently Tahitian women can. Cubism is hailed in the novel as a new way of seeing whole objects in two-dimensional space, but it's also a safer representational method for the characters in the book--and crueler for their subjects. Picasso takes Gauguin's objectification of Anna to a new level and fucks her into oblivion until she's nothing more than disorganized facial features, an object unable to bite back, finally and truly relegated to two-dimensional space.

As for the art of the graphic novel itself, the panels mostly have two colors, and the change in them are used to signal different storylines. The colors are kind of garish, but it fits into the style of painting that was going on at the time (as you can see in Spirit of the Dead Watching, above). There are also some very elegant and well-done visual quotations from other famous paintings that made me smile, but didn't really play any significant role in the plot. If I were to be honest, I found myself missing the manga style of illustration, but c'est la vie.

The Salon has a lot of great ideas and is definitely worth checking out if you're interested in this time period. I do wish, however, that the characters were more fully realized and that the narrative flowed more smoothly. It has the feeling of an artistic vision that was restrained; I don't know if that's true or not, but I do have affection for this graphic novel and definitely appreciate what Nick Bertozzi was trying to create.

Musical Notes: Kathleen Edwards, "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory"

Musical Notes: Darkfever & Flat-Out Sexy

Image by suchitra prints

After reading Memory's post about music and reading the other day, I realized that while I do love to set books to soundtracks, I rarely remember what music I pick out to accompany them. That gave me the idea to add a "musical notes" section to my blog.

Here's the music that has been accompanying my reading this week:

Darkfever

One would think I'd go for Irish music with this one, since it's set in Dublin, but I actually found the mix of sexuality, cynicism, romanticism, and good vs. evil that populates Leonard Cohen's music to be more appropriate. Here are two of my faves:

Wow, Leonard Cohen is really old!

Flat-Out Sexy

I'm also reading Flat-Out Sexy by Erin McCarthy (review forthcoming). With a NASCAR-set book and a Southern hero, how could I resist listening to some country music?

Do you like to listen to music while you read? What songs have you been setting to books this week?

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Raphael's Holy Infants

Children in the Victorian Era

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Double Star

As part of the 24-Hour Readathon, Memory from Stella Matutina is challenging us to post a picture that has something to do with the book we're currently reading.

I just started The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (actually I'm listening to it on audiobook--yay Librivox!), and one of the things that really struck me is the attitude of the narrator toward her charge, Flora.  For example:

In spite of [Flora's] timidity--which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us--I feel quite sure she would presently like me.

Whew!  James needs to learn how to use semicolons.  Much is made of how Flora looks physically attractive, and the narrator wonders why her guardian--a young-ish gentlman--isn't spending time around her constantly.  Keep in mind that Flora is young--too young to understand the conversation of adults around her, so maybe less than five years old.  The narrator, a woman, also wonders if Flora's older brother (I'm thinking ten-ish) is as attractive as Flora; and the housekeeper/maid suggests that the narrator will be "carried away by him," and that he is just probably misbehaved enough to be enjoyable.

LIKE OKAY.  James'--or should I say, the narrator's--descriptions of the children seems right on the edge of exploitative, at least from a twenty-first century perspective.  That's why The Turn of the Screw immediately made me think of the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, specifically ones like The Double Star and Infant Undine. 

In case you're too lazy to click on that wikipedia link (and really, who could blame you if you were), Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographer when photography was in its infancy.  She's mostly known for her portraits of famous friends, like Tennyson and Ellen Terry; but Cameron's real passion was taking artistic photographs like those above. 

Even though the Victorians are often thought of as being prudish, about some things they were much less prudish than we are--and one of the big things was the exploitation of children.  To modern eyes, Cameron's photographs of children look like borderline child pornography.  To Cameron, however, she was making something akin to allegorical paintings--these weren't "real" children, they were personifications of innocence and beauty, much as little Flora seems to be to her governess in Turn of the Screw.

Will the little kids from Turn of the Screw become even creepier than they already seem?  I'm only on page 17, but I'm guessing yes.

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