Les Hysteriques - Francis Berezne (2002-2008)

Painting One

The painting is predominantly black and white, impressionistic in style, the background is pitch black and the subject is a young woman, lying on a bed covered in white sheets. She is wearing a white night dress, her face is turned towards us, her eyes are wide open, eyeballs an unnatural white, this in contrast to her otherwise calm, serene demeanor.

Painting Two

The same figure is now sitting up on her bed, her head raised, looking at someone who is standing to her right. One arm is folded across her chest and the other is raised, bent, elbow held high, suggesting defiance. Perhaps she is resisting someone’s effort to restrain her. Her lips are downturned.

Painting Three

The background is again black, the figure is in her bed, lying down, her arms are crossed atop her chest, suggesting a supplicatory attitude.The young woman’s eyes are closed, she is smiling. Her bed frame is metal, the bars along the back and sides are vertical. It looks like a hospital bed.

Painting Six

Now, the figure is sitting up, her legs are crossed unevenly, one knee is higher than the other, her arms are lifted up high suggesting prayer, her eyes are raised, she is smiling, ecstatic, unnatural. This is the giveaway image for me — I now know what I am looking at: these are modern impressionistic paintings based on a series of photographs taken by hospital photographer Albert Londe in the neurology ward of the Salpetriere hospital in Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. The figure depicted in the original photos and immortalised in subsequent paintings, in reconstructions of hospital scenes in films and art galleries and in reproductions in science textbooks is Louise Augustine Glezies, a patient of Jean Martin Charcot, a doctor of neurology and exponent of hypnotism.

Painting Sixteen

Suspicions confirmed. And this painting is the biggest piece of the puzzle, one which unlocks the origin of these odd and unsettling paintings. A huge work, it isolates and enlarges a segment of a famous painting by Andre Brouillet (1887) which features Charcot, a group of colleagues and another favourite patient called Blanche Marie Wittman, a woman who was hypnotised at the weekly hospital meetings and made to enact, for the edification of the doctors and certain interested members of the public, the common pathologies associated with hysteria and epilepsy. In this painting, the patient is bent over backwards, supported by a doctor and two nurses while Charcot stands nearby and explains the drama to his audience. Coincidentally, Sigmund Freud, himself a student of Charcot, hung a copy of this painting in his consulting room in Vienna.

This collection of twenty four paintings is executed between 2002 and 2008 by French artist, author, teacher and mental health patient Francis Berezne. And despite the devastation brought on by mental illness (Berezne spends some twenty years intermittently in hospitals and eventually hangs himself at the age of 64), he produces some poetic writings and haunting paintings that portray beauty in impossibly troubling situations. Two years before his death he writes of this series of works,

It appears that those who look after these people want to classify them, their symptoms, their crises, as one classifies plants in a herbarium. The photographer is looking at them as a botanist discovering a specimen, or as an entomologist pinning a butterfly in a box. But the result is of great beauty, showing women extraordinarily alive, who suffer, who enjoy, who know limit states, who sometimes take pleasure in posing in front of the lens. I have chosen these photographs, brush in hand, for their undeniable beauty, because they speak of the human condition, the fate of women and madness in general.

This moving collection of paintings is called “Les Hysteriques” and occasionally travels to small art galleries.

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The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers, 1951

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers is a masterpiece of American Gothic writing. Published in 1951, the novella is set in a small town in the American south and populated by the bizarre, freaky, rural, ill-educated, violent and often lonely and bored characters that populate many of the novels and films that represent this tradition. In the case of Ballad, essentially a story of failed couplings, an impossible love triangle drives the action: Miss Amelia is the fierce, disagreeable giantess who is opaque of heart and in love with Cousin Lymon. Lymon Willis is a self-indulgent hunchback of indeterminate age, in possession of an inconstant heart and mad not for Amelia, but for Marvin Macy. Marvin is Miss Amelia’s spurned husband, “evil” by all accounts, and determined to take revenge on his wife for her rejection of his love. Love triangles are not uncommon in art, even when the characters are as unlikely as these three: a giantess, a hunchback, and a killer. But the nature of the love that each of these three offers and the reaction of the beloved to that love are quite unique and complex. In the case of Amelia, she marries reformed lothario and thug Marvin for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she resists his advances for ten nights, after which Marvin disappears only to return a decade later, a hardened criminal, bent on destroying Amelia. Amelia in time falls in love with Cousin Lymon, “spoils him to a point beyond reason”, ignores his “mischief making”, his rumour mongering, his masochistic attraction to Amelia’s enemy Marvin, and worst of all, his inconstant heart. Amelia is a woman troubadour, loving her beloved from afar, with a love that is chaste and turned on its head: her beloved is not good or fine or deserving of her care. What is the nature of this love? Cousin Lymon’s ears begin to twitch when he sets eyes on Marvin for the first time (Lymon is like a bat or a living gargoyle, ugly but attuned to his physical reaction to Marvin). He suffers abuse at Marvin's hands and foils Miss Amelia’s attempts to rid the town of Marvin's disruptive presence. Cousin Lymon’s love may well be homosexual, a latent sort, perhaps, chaste, and certainly unrequited but he is dogged in his pursuit of Marvin. Marvin Macey, the third factor in this bizarre sexual triangulation is cruel, abusive and feared by young girls in the community. His desire for the conspicuously hard and masculine Miss Amelia, his unexpected gift (he transfers his property to Miss Amelia, an act of selflessness, perhaps even a sign of self-emasculation), are all strange and inexplicable: he is a heterosexual man who loves a woman who is like a man who cannot consummate her marriage. Carson McCullers is the ideal person to write of the complexities of human sexualty, herself having had a fraught relationship with both men and women. The southern gothic atmosphere, the narrator, herself invested in the history of the town and the peculiar personalities that played out the life and death of the Sad Café has made for an unforgettable novella.

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Federico Garcia Lorca Little Viennese Waltz (Poet in New York 1929-1930)

The best a casual reader of surrealist-inspired poetry can do is enjoy the surprises and the non sequiturs that give form and substance to the art form. But  if one is even passingly familiar with the artist’s background, it can be helpful to call to mind details of that poet's life while reading the poetry. Federico Garcia Lorca's poem Pequeno Vals Vienes, translated as Little Viennese Waltz and Leonard Cohen’s Lorca-inspired song-poem Take this Waltz are lovely examples of the image-rich, emotive poetry that can result when a bizarre, haunting moment is captured by a talented artist.
Does Little Viennese Waltz have anything to do with Lorca’s depression and subsequent year-long pilgrimage to New york following a break-up with his lover, sculptor Emilio Aladren? When Lorca offers us “...this close-mouthed watz”, “this broken-waisted waltz”, “this waltz that dies in my arms”, “this ‘I will always love you’ waltz” and ends the poem with “my love, my love I will have to leave violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons”, is he bidding goodbye to the unfaithful Aladren? Who knows?
Perhaps Leonard Cohen knew. He named his daughter Lorca. He tells us that he discovered the poetry of Lorca at the age of 15 when, rummaging through a used bookstore in Montreal, he came upon a book of Lorca's poetry and experienced an epiphany which lead him to declare that he would become a poet in the style of Lorca.
But perhaps it’s not necessary to mine the lives of artists to discover the sources or the motivations that lead to their masterpieces. Perhaps it’s enough to be moved by the feelings aroused by beautiful art. Leonard Cohen’s Take this Waltz ends with this offering, “O my love, O my love, Take this waltz, take this waltz, it’s yours now. It’s all that there is.” Just a song, just a series of images, just a feeling. And perhaps that is good enough.

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George Nakashima (1905-1990)

A recent visit to a small cafe near the St. Lazare train station in Paris brought me to mind of the American Crafts movement and the woodwork of Japanese-American architect and furniture maker George Nakashima. The round wooden spindles hanging from a flat piece of wood, itself hanging from the ceiling, the large communal table made with two solid pieces of wood joined in the middle, and the wooden slats used to create ledges on which bags of coffee beans offered for sale are displayed all suggest a fusion of tradition and innovation, comfort and surprise.
I think the interior designers responsible for the look of Braun Notes may have had in mind the aesthetic that influenced late 19th century American architects and designers who sought simplicity and strength and insisted on the use of natural materials in their productions. And in design terms, the restroom might be the most interesting space at the cafe as the brass wash basin, the exposed copper pipe bringing water to a basic faucet and especially the long wooden counter running the length of the room, most bring to mind the Nakashima aesthetic. Braun Notes is, of course, a commercial enterprise built to sell a quick meal to a young, trendy clientele and not an art space (and as a restaurant it is not particularly comfortable or well-built), but its “look” certainly channels the philosophy that brought master designers and conservationists like George Nakashima to world attention. Nakashima was a forestry major who eventually received an MA in architecture. He travelled the world, studied traditional carpentry techniques in Japan, worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in India and mastered what he came to call the “free-edge” aesthetic and built “live-edge furniture”. His signature designs are his “conoid” chair and his tables made of slabs of wood with knots and burls, connected with wooden butterfly joints, smoothed out on top but left unfinished on the sides.
In his 1981 book, The Soul of a Tree, George Nakashima encapsulates his eco-art philosophy in these two sentences: “When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man’s use, as they would soon decay and return to earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth.” Nakashima tables are glorious and Braun Notes makes a good espresso.

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Jean Luc Johannet’s Tower of Babel (1980s)

Carved on cliff faces in Lebanon at Wadi Brisa are two reliefs dating to about 500 BCE depicting the Tower of Babel. In late medieval Germany, Meister der Weltenchronik paints a charming little, five-storey tower standing beside a thatched workspace and half a dozen artisans busily constructing the modest tower. Two hundred years later, Dutch artist and map-maker Cornelius Anthonisz produces a dramatic etching of a colosseum-inspired building spiraling into the sky, the top smashed by a violent wind, chunks tumbling to the ground hitting people, and a small army of sword-wielding, trumpeting angels flying towards the catastrophe. In 2011, Iranian artist Goran Hassanpour assembles TV screens into a tee-pee shaped conical tower whose screens display different views of the same dramatic waterfall.

The story of the Tower of Babel has provided and continues to provide material upon which artists, historians, linguists, theologians and archaeologists build explanations for any number of positions and viewpoints.

Jean Luc Johannet’s Tower of Babel does not often travel as it’s fragile but currently it’s showing in Paris at the Halles St Pierre to the end of February 2018. It’s worth a look. It’s a gigantic pencil and china ink drawing made in the 1980s by a gifted polymath who is able to incorporate his training in architecture, sculpture, poetry and painting to produce a version of the Tower that is altogether unique. His work references the “naive art” movement exemplified by Ferdinand Cheval and the Catalan modernism of Antoni Gaudi. He also takes inspiration from Swiss set designer and sculptor H R Giger whose aesthetic sets the mood for the Alien films. Johannet’s Tower is a pyramidal structure built on a river, straining to reach a baroque sky and populated by mechanical birds, winged ships and shifting nightmarish flying creatures. The Tower itself looks alive, its projections resemble horned masks, giant cilia, rows of sardine-like statues and at least one monkey and snake embedded in other figures.

Johannet’s tower is the Lovecraft version of Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who.

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T.S. Eliot - Peter Ackroyd - 1984

Any student of modernism as expressed in world literature and especially in Anglo-American literature would nominate T.S. Eliot to the list of writers who wrote groundbreaking poetry, beginning with Prufrock in 1915, The Wasteland in 1922 and ending with Four Quartets in 1945. Peter Ackroyd’s 1984 biography of T.S. Elliot takes the reader on a well-observed, fair-minded journey through the life and career of a towering cultural figure whose public image was not altogether attractive. Eliot, we all know, was considered aloof, arrogant, self-absorbed, highly intelligent and highly sensitive. He held anti-semitic views and joined his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound in espousing fascism. What we did not know, but may have guessed at, particularly after having read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats or watched the musical Cats was that T.S. Eliot had a sense of humour. Ackroyd reminds his readers that Eliot, while essentially a serious man — a product of his puritanical upbringing — nevertheless enjoyed light entertainment like detective fiction, music hall shows and American comic films (especially the work of the Marx Brothers). In his youth and throughout his life, Eliot read comic strips like the surrealistic, linguistically playful Krazy Kat and the classic, slapstick single strip Mutt and Jeff. At the offices of literary publishers Faber and Faber, where Eliot worked for some forty years, he liked to play practical jokes, including setting off firecrackers in the coal scuttle and a sending letter to the editor of the Times, proposing a "Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses.” Ackroyd tells us that Eliot, a dedicated writer of letters, wrote to friends “rambling in a high spirited or nonsensical manner about nothing in particular”. Such humour even stretched to the envelopes, and those addressed to friends such as Clive Bell often had on them verse instructions to the postman. It is a pity that Ackroyd could not give us more examples of the lighter side of Eliot’s personality but a bit of light investigation has revealed that the Eliot estate refused Ackroyd permission to quote from the poet’s unpublished work or correspondences. However, the hefty, two-volumed “Letters of T.S. Eliot” were published years after Ackroyd’s biography and are available to all — enabling us to fill in the many details and also to look anew and with more intimate evidence at the life and times of the “Old Possum”.

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