Artist(s)/ Artisan(s) unknown
       Two views of a pair of Louis XV rococo ormolu chenets, ca. 1740s

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Ormolu was a painstaking process whereby finely-ground high-karat gold was applied, using mercury and kiln-firing, to a bronze object d’art. The effect achieved is said to have been unequalled in terms of lustre & richness of color (and based on the examples I’ve offered here, I can see why). But the process was also pretty heavy on the mercury fumes, so gilders didn’t live very long, and in 1830 mercury was banned from this kind of gilding process. When I look at these two pictures I think of the gilder (or gilders) who helped create them and works like them: probably forgotten, brainpans swimming with quicksilver and dead early, unwitting sacrifices to… what? Rococo? The refined tastes of royalty? A R T ? Look at these andirons, licking up into the void like the flaming logs they were designed to support, beautiful, serpentine, alien — who made them & what kind of lives did they lead? I wish the love and praise lavished on these objects could somehow add to the souls of those whose lives were cut short crafting them. That they could somehow witness what’s come of their efforts in whatever incarnation their souls inhabit, bear witness to how their poisoning wasn’t in vain.
 
 
 
 
 
 

For more related info, check out this great post about 18th and 19th century gold leafing, ormolu, & other related decorative methods over at Decor To Adore.

       Robert Frank (b. 1924)
        From the top: London, 1952-53; Elevator—Miami Beach, 1955

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     ”London” belongs in that special class of photograph that is not only strikingly composed but is also able to generate a powerful & complexly emotional narrative interest. Why is the woman running in the rain? Is it even raining or just damp and dewy out? Did she jump from the back of the car to rush to some appointment? Late for work? Look at the way the car’s backdoor window frames, like a camera, the person across the street. Look at the long beam of flagstone sheen flanked by dark bricks and the black of the car. Look at the haze settling over everything like a blanket. I see this and feel so many things at once… fear, thrill, gloom, curiosity, a sense of delight and discovery, wonder.
     Love the Miami shot as well, the way the camera finds her and her eyeroll while socialites pass out into the rotty flowered hall. Does she envy them? Or does she it all clearly as sham? Is she resentful, jealous, or just bored? Elevator operator or hanger-on lagging behind? And does she know she’s being snapped? We share her viewpoint no matter what, we become her, unite with her as she stands still, out of step with everyone but following them all closely with her eyes.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Great article on Frank, including more of his work, over at Transmopolis.com.

       Willem de Kooning (American, born in the Netherlands, 1904-1997)
        The Cat’s Meow, 1987, oil on canvas

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Joy, joy joy. I respond right away to the rhythms of this, the open spaces, the subtleties of warm hue — much more so than the savage murky-colored gouge-work of earlier de Kooning. I love the allotment of color across the canvas, the magenta working into the red, the smudged & slightly anemic blue of the sky, the mixed feelings the linework gives me of nervy squiggle and dance. A few things for me nudge this piece toward a kind of thrill of unease (which makes me love the piece even more): the wide open caffeinated eyeball on the top left for instance, and the biomorphic disarray.
      I’m reminded of Debussy’s stated desire to write music “whose form was so free it would sound improvised” — to me “The Cat’s Meow” triumphantly delivers the visual equivalent, communicating both raw improvisation and the sense of thoughtful composition at the same time.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For more de Kooning, check out this great article over at Art Market Monitor.

       Odilon Roche (1868-1947)
        Repos, date unknown, watercolor on paper

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The lighter stripe along the blonde’s leg. The way the brunette’s arm rests on the blonde’s hip with their fingers almost touching. The blonde’s hair echoing the golden smears worked into the purple behind them like clawmarks or licks of flame. The green silk (or water) wrapped around the blonde’s wrist. Golden bracelets near the light chestnut tuft. Smoke & violet. Suggestion of something other than repose about to begin or just having ended.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of Roche’s art at artnet.com.

       Yin Yanhua
        Pink Sofa 18, 2006, oil on canvas

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cotton Candy cushion explosion. Reminds me of a huge rotted old mushroom cap I found in a field once, purply-brown and upturned. The meat of the cap was dried and tufted like shredded insulation. You toed it and it puffed out its dead spore powder. Pink sofa’s blurry pouf makes me think of that. —————— What else? The initial innocence of a nice pink sofa and how it’s gradually undone: first by its cushions’ frowny sag, then by the way the pink reveals undertones of unhealthy blood-glow, finally by that creepy nimbus of rosewater fog. Or is that fog? Maybe something else: a naked body, mid thrash, post- or mid-coital. Terrific & troubling work.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of Yanhua’s art at artnet.com.

       Berenice Abbott
        From the top: Penicillin Mold, series, c. 1942-46; Nightview, New York, 1932; Behavior of Waves, c. 1960

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Beginning with Penicillin — mark the little beaded dews in the fuzzcap’s centre. Mark the mandala presence, the fuzzing out/ghosting out into the void at the perimeter. The perfect septa-wedged divisions. The hint of concentric. This disc could be a world or an alien spacecraft or what it in fact is: a chip of a prick of a flake of a nick of a granulet. ————— Next, “Nightview”: well lawd, who doesn’t goo over this classic? Thrilling, terrifying, achingly beautiful. Those catastrophic-fire glows like a hundred sets of explosives caught nanoseconds after detonation. And that’s not just post-9/11 paranoia talking — to me those white hot glows flooding out all over the place just seem kinda alarming. They’re also gorgeous and sexy. (I’m imagining Abbott having used some kind of special magic lens that reveals the visual spectrum of sex, with each flare representing energy emitted at the precise moment of peak-of-orgasm. Yeah, I have too much time on my hands.) This photo also makes me think of an old J.G. Ballard story about a world existing in a state of such ultra-dense habitation and construction in all directions (and having been so for many, many eons) that its inhabitants have completely lost any sense of open space & open air, of what it means for one of their mass transit trains to actually come to the end of the line (no one can conceive of such a thing), of a space that is not infinite development. That story always gave me the shivers, imagining the endlessness of stacked quarters ducts crawlspaces and rooms, like some big office park building extended in every dimension as far as the eye could see, endless elevators up & down, endless halls left and right, just cell after cell after cell after cell. “Nightview” gives me those same delicious & heady creeps: I feel like if the camera panned in any direction there’d be the same buildings in the same configurations relative to each other, forever. ———– Finally there’s the “Behavior of Waves”. Nothing more to say here other than that I could spend a good hour a day on a couch staring up at a giant blow-up of this gorgeous, hypnotic piece. Oh, and ‘mathy smears’.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of Berenice Abbott’s work at the New York Public Library’s site, here.