Monthly Archive for December, 2010

Cauchetier’s Christmas Card: Adoration of the Magi

December 27, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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The most anticipated part of Christmas for me when growing up was not the exchange of gifts, nor the sumptuous dinner my mother always prepared for wandering relatives and friends, but the annual airing of a TV show. I know it sounds geeky, but in those very early days of television, NBC’s decision to commission and air an opera, in English, on Christmas, was a major event for the still infant medium. Eagerly watched via live broadcast from NBC’s famed Studio 8H, Jean-Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors attracted over 5 million viewers, at the time a stunning number. That first December 24, 1951 telecast went on to become an annual event; the opera transcended all cultural barriers of clichéd spear-chucking Valkyries and became one of the most beloved traditions in television history. It also gave a human face and personality to the three characters of Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior, the eponymous Night Visitors, also know as the Three Kings or Magi.

Church of Saint Lazare Autun, France.

Images of the Magi first appeared in Christian art in the fourth century as catacomb paintings and on sarcophagi reliefs. They were at first represented in Eastern dress: distant visitors come to give tribute to the new king of the West. The visit of the Three Kings quickly became a central motif in Christian iconography, foretelling the triumph of this new religion. In an email that Raymond Cauchetier sent me accompanying his photos of sculptures of the Three Kings (celebrated by Christians on Jan. 6 as the Epiphany), he said that the dominance of this story in Christian lore is all the more amazing as the only mention of it in the canonical gospels is Matthew, 2:1-11.

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Cauchetier’s Christmas Card—The Nativity

December 20, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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Tympanum and facade of Paris’ Notre Dame.

The tympanum and portal of Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral represents a high-water mark of Gothic architecture; but it has had an uneasy history. This was the site of many religious and political upheavals—from the 1548 rioting of the Huguenots, its re-dedication during the 1789 revolution into a secular “temple of reason,” its near conflagration during the Paris Commune of 1871, on up to the protective removal of its stained-glass windows during WWII. Then, of course, there are its many incarnations in the movies.

Last July, I stood near my hotel on the nearby Ile-St. Louis, looking not at this iconic facade but at its south end apse and intricate flying buttresses.

Notre Dame long lens rear view from the Ile St. Louis.

I had come to Paris to visit a recent friend, the French New Wave photographer Raymond Cauchetier. He and his wife, Kaoru, had just met me at the breakfast room of my small hotel a few blocks away. Cauchetier, at 90, still has sparkling eyes and speaks an eloquent, argot-free French with animation. Not that the limits of my Peace Corps French could follow great chunks of it, but Kaoru was a generous translator. Several months previous I had written a three-part essay about Cauchetier’s life and work, centered mainly on the decade of his New Wave set photography; but the last part of the blog entry included several photos from his book maquette on Romanesque Church Sculpture, a project to which they both have dedicated several decades of research, travel and photography.

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Henryk Górecki’s Sorrowful Songs

December 13, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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Henryk Górecki

I’m not a globetrotter. Where did Beethoven go? Just to Heiligenstadt.

That’s a good model.

Until 1992, Henryk Górecki’s music was little known beyond the border of his birth country Poland. That year the recording company Nonesuch released a recording of his Third Symphony that rose to the top of the pop charts in several European countries and became a crossover CD phenomenon in the United States, selling well over a million copies, an unheard of number for a classical music disc. It also further elevated the recording career of then two-time Grammy winning soprano Dawn Upshaw. The symphony was featured in numerous videos and motion pictures and was used as a fundraising lure by many NPR stations including KCRW in Santa Monica.  Even the most classical music phobic listener could not avoid it.

CD cover, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs."

The composer was part of the post-Stalin Polish Renaissance generation that achieved international acclaim in the late 50s. Other principals were Andrzej Panufnik, Witold Lutoslawski, and Krystof Penderecki. Górecki, singularly in the group, remained a private and shadowy figure in the classical music world until his death this past November in his native town of Katowice. Last week on Dec. 9 this less-traveled composer would have been 77.

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Francesca Woodman: The Naked Prisoner

December 6, 2010 in John’s Bailiwick
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Woodman behind the lens, a rare use of large format.

My life at this point is like very old coffee-cup sediment and I would rather die young, leaving various accomplishments… instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things….

This quote is from a letter to a friend written, not by a 19th century Romantic male poet from the Sturm und Drang era, but by a late 20th century American woman photographer named Francesca Woodman. She was born in Denver, Colorado on April 3, 1958 and committed suicide by jumping from a window of her East 12th Street New York City loft on January 19, 1981. She was twenty-two.

Of such stuff—precocity, a headlong rush of  brilliant and eclectic work, then an early demise—are artistic legends made. Woodman’s life and art are a near seamless blend of all the clichés of an artist dying young. It is little wonder that in the past several decades, her life and photography have been appropriated by fellow artists and critics all too eager to ride the pale horse of this metaphor into the twilight of ambiguity and mystery. Her very identity has become the currency of “body” artists, “picture generation” photographers, feminists, psychiatric papers, surrealists, serial imagists, and students searching forever new theses topics. Francesca Woodman has become commodified even as most of the body of her work remains unknown, held in private trust by her family. Only two hundred of her images were published in her lifetime, dribs and drabs since; even the most authoritative monograph of her work written by Chris Townsend for Phaidon Press only hints at the unknown, undiscovered work yet to be seen.

Amazon.com—Francesca Woodman book link

Phaidon Press monograph.

At thirteen, her artist father, George, gave her a camera, a Yashica 2 ¼ x 2 ¼. It was the principal camera she employed throughout her single decade long career. Her first acknowledged photograph is a premonition, a lodestone, in fact, of what lay ahead in her work.

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