Naked heart forever – unprotected, exposed, defenceless

Edvard Munch, Madonna, Hamburg, Oil on canvas
Edvard Munch, Madonna, Hamburg, Oil on canvas

The Poet asks his Love to write

                    Visceral love, living death,

                    in vain, I wait your written word,

                    and consider, with the flower that withers,

                    I wish to lose you, if I have to live without self.

                    The air is undying: the inert rock

                    neither knows shadow, nor evades it.

                    And the heart, inside, has no use

                    for the honeyed frost the moon pours.

                    But I endured you: ripped open my veins,

                    a tiger, a dove, over your waist,

                    in a duel of teeth and lilies.

                    So fill my madness with speech,

                    or let me live in my calm

                    night of the soul, darkened for ever.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Edvard Munch, Madonna Oslo, Lithograph
Edvard Munch, Madonna Oslo, Lithograph

‘Du bist mein und bist so zierlich,’

You’re mine and so dainty,

You’re mine and so mannerly,

Yet still though you lack something:

You kiss now with such pointed lips,

Like a dove, when drinking it sips:

You’re really too dainty a thing.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Edvard Munch, Madonna, Wurth Foundation, Lithograph
Edvard Munch, Madonna, Wurth Foundation, Lithograph

O so dear

 

O so dear from far and near and white all

So deliciously you, Méry, that I dream

Of what impossibly flows, of some rare balm

Over some flower-vase of darkened crystal.

 

Do you know it, yes! For me, for years, here,

Forever, your dazzling smile prolongs

The one rose with its perfect summer gone

Into times past, yet then on into the future.

 

My heart that sometimes at night tries to confer,

Or name you most tender with whatever last word

Rejoices in that which whispers none but sister –

 

Were it not, such short tresses so great a treasure,

That you teach me a sweetness, quite other,

Soft through the kiss murmured only in your hair.

Stephane Mallarme 

Edward Munch - Death and the Maiden
Edward Munch – Death and the Maiden

Another Day

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhereLove are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation…

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

Friedrich Hoelderlin 

 

In my beginning is my end (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker, I)

5th century BC

Acropolis, Athens, Greece

6th century AD

Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy

16th century

Matthias Gruenewald, Die Stuppacher Mdonna
Tiziano: Salome con la testa di S. Giovanni Battista

16th – 17th century

Caravaggio, San Giovanni Battista

18th century

San Francisco Church, Salvador, Bahia, Brasil
Inside the Church of San Francisco in Salvador

19th century

Cezanne, Large Pine and Red Earth
Degas, The Millinery Shop

20th century and beyond

Nolde, Hermit on Tree
Freud's Couch, The Freud Museum, London, England
Helmut Newton
Maria Adair, Instalacao Ambiental
Elaine Roberts, Lotus Flower
Venice - my photo
Anselm Kiefer, Salt of the Earth
Boy - my photo
Thomas Schutte, Efficiency Men
Naoussa, Paros, Greece - my photo
Lefkes, Paros, Greece - my photo
Marpissa, Paros, Greece - my photo
The Earth of Marathon, Attica, Greece - my photo
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets, East Coker, III

 

Happy New Year!!!

P.S. This came as a result of rediscovering X’s letter with the extensive quotation from Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets”. The hand written page is hers.

Images of Theotokos, the Mother of God – From North to South

Today we are celebrating the Dormition of the Mother of God, Theotokos, and I want to share with you some of my favorite images of Her.  I will start from the North of Europe, and the turn from Gothic to Early Renaissance. The direction is from North to South.

The North begins with Jan van Eyck, the Master who opened the way for the rejuvenation of art in the north, for the decisive transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance. His influence is visible in the works of all the Masters who succeeded him.

Jan van Eyck: Lucca Madonna c. 1430

Rogier van der Weyden was an Old Master who following the lead of van Eyck, pioneers Early Renaissance in Northern Europe (second half of 15th century).

Rogier van der Weyden: Head of the Virgin, c. 1440

This extraordinary study of the head of the Virgin is one of very few surviving drawings that can be attributed with any certainty to the early Flemish masters, and one of an even smaller number of drawings with a generally accepted attribution to Rogier van der Weyden. Its extreme sobriety and intensity of expression are utterly characteristic of van der Weyden’s work.

Source: Louvre Museum, Prints and Drawings, Head of the Virgin

Rogier van der Weyden: Madonna and Child c. 1460

Martin Schongauer was a follower of van der Weyden and a superb engraver. He was born and worked in the town of Colmar in Alsace.  The Madonna in a Rose Garden is his masterpiece. It can be seen in the Dominican Church, in Colmar.

Martin Schongauer: Mary in a Rose Garden

Matthias Gruenewald was one of Schongauer’s students. His masterpiece is the Isenheim Altarpiece, to which I have dedicated a separate post. In this post I want to present another of his major works, the Stuppach Madonna.

Around 6 km/4 miles from Bad Mergentheim’s old town in the suburb Stuppach is a small, unremarkable chapel that houses a remarkable painting, the Stuppacher Madonna. This painting of Mary with Child was removed from the Maria Schnee Kapelle in Aschaffenburg during the 1525 Peasants’ War. It remained in the hands of the Teutonic Order until it came to this chapel in 1812.The Stuppacher Madonna was long thought to be the work of Rubens. Only in 1908 was it recognized as one of the pieces from the Marienaltar (Mary Altar) and the 1519 work of the great German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. (A second piece of the altar is in Freiburg, while Aschaffenburg only has copies.)

Source: European Traveller, Top Sights in Bad Merghentheim

Matthias Gruenewald: Stuppacher Madonna

And in order to remember the Isenheim Altarpiece, here is a detail from the Nativity panel.

Matthias Gruenewald: Madonna and Child, detail from the Nativity panel

We are now going south, to meet the Italian Masters, and a Greek who became Spanish.

I begin with Lorenzo Monaco, whose brilliant colors make him one of the pioneers of Renaissance in Italy. See in the picture below how wonderfully the pink becomes the dominant color of the picture, eliminating the black. The picture is practically flat, maintaining in this respect the Byzantine tradition.

Lorenzo Monaco: Virgin and Child on the Throne with Six Angels c.1415-1420

Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian Master, with his solemn Madonna is next. I love the use of green in the painting, it becomes the center of the harmonies and works superbly with the pale blue of the sky and the ultramarine of Madonna’s dress.

Giovanni Bellini: Madonna degli Alberetti c. 1487

Young Rafaello, with his Madonna del Granduca, gives us a masterpiece in the study of black. In this he anticipates Caravaggio and chiaroscuro.

Rafaello: Madonna del Granduca c.1505

Titian, turns the tables and presents a dark haired pale woman as his Madonna, named the  Gypsy Madonna. She is like a an ordinary girl carrying a huge burden. You notice the green curtain in the background, tribute to Giovanni Bellini.

Titian: The Gypsy Madonna c. 1515

Rafaello a few years later gave us the Madonna of the Chair, a much more vivid and “alive” painting, where the faces almost jump out of the canvas to reach us.

Rafaello: Madonna of the Chair c. 1518

El Greco, the Greek, Dominikos Theotokopoulos, started his life in Crete, and via Venice ended in Toledo, Spain.

El Greco: Virgin and Child with St Martina and St Agnes, 1597-9

El Greco lifts us up in the skies and the clouds and the greyness of the storm that is about to come.  El Greco does not use the domestic environment used by the other artists. He belongs in the sky, and this is what he paints.

El Greco: Immaculate Conception with St John the Evangelist

Back to where it all started. the most fitting end of all.

We traveled from the North to the South, from the Earth to the Skies, from the simple, ordinary faces of everyday women, to the incredibly beautiful faces of sheer perfection. Next trip will be from the West to the East.

Edvard Munch: Madonna

 

Self portrait with bottle
Self portrait with bottle

Introduction

Edward Munch is one of my favourite painters. 

Today I start a sequence of posts dedicated to him. I have chosen the “Madonna” paintings as the theme and created a collage of quoatations, statements, press releases, to highlight the various aspects of the theme, the artist and most of all, the paintings and lithographs presented.

 
Beyeler Foundation Media Release: Edvard Munch – Signs of Modern Art

Munch’s concern with loneliness, love and death is of incomparable urgency. His art reflects the crisis,
transience and eclipse of the individual in the Age of Industrialization. His oeuvre was interrupted by
existential caesuras, yet at the same time developed with inexorable logic.

Munch’s handling of picture support and painting materials was highly unconventional. He transcended the
traditional borderlines between media such as printmaking, drawing, photography, collage and painting.
This helped him to represent growth and decay, creation and destruction through a range of devices extending
from the dissolution of figures and their merger with the background to strange intersections with the picture
edge and scratched paint surfaces, all the way down to exposure of many works to the ravages of rain and
snow. By means of what he called this “acid test,” Munch not only integrated the factor of chance in his art
but made natural decomposition a component of the creative process. In his late work, he raised process
and temporality, as an actual, physical disappearance of matter, to a universal expression of transitoriness
in his material-based modernity. In this way, as early as the turn of the century, Munch opened the door
to the development of art in the advancing twentieth century.

Madonna, Oslo, Oil on canvas
Madonna, Oslo, Oil on canvas

 

The Press

When “The Madonna” was shown in Norway in 1895, Munch received this typical review from the daily Aftenposten:

“He seems either to be someone who’s hallucinating about art or he is some kind of joker who thinks the public a fool and makes a lie of both art and life. Even though these caricatures are laughable, the worst is that such disgusting lies are being perpetrated — which makes one quite ill and tempted to call the police.”

 

 

Madonnam Oslo, Lithograph
Madonna, Oslo, Lithograph

 

Robert Nelson, The Age

The keynote for Munch’s output is given in a colour lithograph called Madonna of 1895. It shows a naked young woman in an erotic swoon. She is represented in a disembodied graphic manner, with hollow eyes, abundant hair and writhing body. Around her form, a border surges with spermatozoa; and in the bottom left-hand corner, a hapless foetus cringes in sorrowful isolation in the plane of the woman’s thrusting hips.

Writers have observed that this fierce confounding of lust and death belongs to Munch’s epoch, to the prevailing fear of female sexuality and especially to Munch’s personal insecurities, his anxiety in yielding to blighted seduction, his failure in libidinous bliss and his brooding in psychological defeat.

But the deeper significance of this terrific image is not so much in the keen pangs that it expresses on a personal level: it’s the philosophical trumping of spiritual conviction expressed through the title, Madonna.

The word Madonna unmistakably alludes to the Virgin Mary, who was conceived with divine intervention and who, in turn, gave birth to Christ without Joseph’s sperm. For Munch as for Nietzsche and Freud and many intellectuals in Oslo, this story of immaculate conception was considered wishful thinking on a hysterically social scale.

The philosophical name given to the wholesale discredit of religious spirituality during the industrial period is “materialism”. At the risk of blasphemy, Munch proposes that there is no transcendence, no hallowed spirit, no universal being or redemptive belief. There is only an agonising zeal for joy, which is ultimately consumed through inescapable death.

Materialism is a tough philosophy – the fatalistic fruit of science – which few people relish; and art, in particular, has always found greater profit in promoting the earnest and authoritative delusions that have proliferated from animism to Jung. But for Munch as an artist, the brave new recognition of material causes throughout nature and behaviour brought new problems, because all artists are spiritualists at heart and Munch, in particular, talked of nothing so much as the soul and the heart.


 

Madonna, Hamburg, Oil on canvas
Madonna, Hamburg, Oil on canvas

 

 

MOMA

Alluring and inviting, disturbing and threatening, Munch’s Madonna is above all mysterious. This erotic nude appears to float in a dreamlike space, with swirling strokes of deep black almost enveloping her. An odd-looking, small fetuslike figure or just-born infant hovers at the lower left with crossed skeletal arms and huge frightened eyes. Forms resembling sperm pervade the surrounding border of this print. Little about the Madonna seems to conform to her holy title, save for a narrow dark gold band atop her head. This haunting apparition reflects Munch’s alliance with Symbolist artists and writers.

Woman, in varying roles from mother-protector to sexual partner to devouring vampire and harbinger of death, serves as the chief protagonist in a series of paintings and corresponding prints about love, anxiety, and death that Munch grouped together under enigmatic headings. Madonna was first executed as a black-and-white lithograph in 1895. During the next seven years, Munch hand-colored several impressions. Finally, the image was revised in 1902, using additional lithographic stones for color and a woodblock for the textured blue sky. Self-trained in printmaking, Munch often used its mediums in experimental ways, such as the unusual composition of woodcut and lithography seen here.

Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 46Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 46

 

Madonna, Wurth Foundation, Lithograph
Madonna, Wurth Foundation, Lithograph

 

 

Epilogue

“My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm … . Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness, I would have been like a ship without a rudder.”  (E.M.)