In Which the Link Between a Luscious Nude and a Factory for War Machines is Pointed Out.

So here is a question for you:  What could possibly be the link between this:

Cabanel's Birth of Venus, sometimes referred to simply as "The painting of the woman with the boobs and the water".

And this?

Newport News Shipbuilding, sometimes referred to as the place where they build the things that launch the things that deliver things that make other things go boom in the name of Freedom.  

The answer is this:

An unlikely link between the two, though if you are smart you can probably guess what is going on here.

So what is all this then?

The first picture is The Birth of Venus, by Alexandre Cabanel, a huge hit at the Paris Salon of 1863.  Napoleon III, upon seeing the painting, purchased it immediately; probably not because of its artistic value but rather because in addition to some highly polished brushwork and a rather realistic depiction of an ocean wave it features - rather prominently - a very naked woman.  Perfect for adorning the study of the man who has everything and is worried that his adventures in Mexico are beginning to flounder. 

All joking aside, though, the painting really was very much adored.  It was just within the bounds of propriety of the time, where painting nudes was okay if it fell into the historic/mythological schools of French painting, featuring seamless brush strokes, accurate depictions, and a purpose of either imparting a moral lesson, exemplifying beauty, or telling a story from France's glorious past.  We might look at this Cabanel and see it as something not much better than soft core pornography, laden with all the chauvenistic baggage that western culture has loaded on to itself.  But for the Parisian of 1863 it checked the boxes.  The most scandalous aspect of the painting, the thing that was up for debate at the time, was the look that Cabanel's Venus is giving as she peeks out from under her arm.  Is she actually in repose, or do her eyes suggest a sort of post-coital contended grogginess?  The critics in Paris battled it out, could not agree on any kind of consensus, and the mild whiff of controversy only added to the overall warm reception to Cabanel's work.

I'm getting a bit off track here, but it should be noted that the adoration of Cabanel's nude was in direct contrast to the derision hefted almost joyfully against Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, exhibited at the 1863 Salon des Refuses (a special sort of extra Salon held featuring paintings rejected by the Paris Salon jury of 1863, after there were objections that the jury was too harsh).  One of the problems with the painting, as the Parisians saw it, was that the men were wearing contemporary clothes and were in a contemporary setting.  In 1863 this just wasn't normally done.  Pictures of everyday life took a back seat to stunning histories or mythological settings, usually featuring men wearing nothing but plummed trojan helmets and women in various stages of undress, modesty sometimes preserved by the fortuitous fold of a toga.

Manet was one of the first to paint the modern people of Paris with all their glory and grit going about their everyday lives, doing things like going to horse races, listening to music, drinking absinthe, and having lunch with naked women in the city parks, because that is apparently what normal French people do.  Anyhow, the idea that painting contemporary people going about their ordinary lives could actually be meaningful required the artistic mores of the day to undergo a pretty significant adjustment.

Secondly, the painting depicts the woman as a likely prostitute; the everyday clothing of the men, the casual discarding of her clothes, and the frog placed towards the right side of the painting all suggest that this woman was being paid to be there, and though prostitution was rife in Paris in the 1860s it was not kosher to depict the workers who plied their trade.

Third and final:  critics found the woman in Manet's painting to be ugly, and painted without technique or depth, the uniform pallor of her skin akin to a photograph.  People didn't like that.  Though somewhat risque, Cabanel's Venus by comparison was seen as a charming painting of a beautiful naked goddess as opposed to a rather brash work depicting a scene of questionable morality that did nothing to further the study of the beautiful. 

Manet's controversial Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.  I have no idea what the bather in the background is there for.  Don't ask.  

So now to Newport News Shipbuilding.  The Shipyard was founded in 1886 as the Chesapeake Dry Dock and Construction Company by Collis P. Huntington. Long before that, he made a ridiculous amount of money building railroads (he was heavily involved in building the transcontinental railroad), and was known for being fairly unethical, which in the world of 19th century business and politics is really saying something.   Still, he is known for saying the words that are inscribed onto every shipbuilder's heart:  "We shall build good ships here;  at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships".  Later, when he found out the rum runner he was building for Johnny K. Chesterton & Sons was going to be behind schedule because the paint had failed due to the high levels of humidty present during the summer in Hampton Roads (something he clearly did not think hard enough about), he uttered the immortal shipyard motto:  "It is what it is."

When his first wife died of cancer in 1883 he married Arabella Yarrington Worsham, a Richmond courtesan who somehow struck up a liason with Collis P. Huntington after the Civil War, perhaps thanks to Huntington's love of cards and gambling and her presence at a popular Richmond faro house doing...stuff?  Not sure, really.  The details are vague.  But she became his mistress at the age of 19 and was moved to New York City with her entire family where she and Collis carried on for 14 years until finally getting married in 1884.

Even before their marriage, Arabella was one of the richest women in America.  And when you are filthy rich, with all the power and status that that entails, you need a painting of yourself, a portrait, that shows to everyone else how fucking filthy rich you are, yes?

And here is where we come full circle back to Cabanel.  In addition to being a very gifted painter of T&A, he was a renowned portrait painter.  Portrait painting was the bread and butter of the many less successful artists of the time and Cabanel was so wealthy and famous he really didn't need the money - but he apparently enjoyed it, and many of his portraits of fully clothed and very wealthy men and women (even one of Napoleon III himself in 1865) would receive acclaim in Paris Salons well beyond that of 1863. He gained international fame and during the Gilded Age was the best known French painter in America, aside from maybe Messionier; many Americans - especially women - desperately wanted to have Cabanel paint them.  It was a fairly meaningless status symbol, the tricked out SUV of the day.   

Cabanel never came to America, so in 1881 or 1882 Araballa Worsham arranged through an agent to sit for Cabanel and she made the trip over to his Paris studio to sit - or rather stand - for her portrait, which is the third picture shown above, entitled "Mrs. Collis P. Huntington", completed in 1882.  I would note it is unusual, in that most Cabanel portraits of the time were 3/4 length, but here we have Bella Huntington in full length glory, perhaps showing the stature she commanded at the time.  It is also noted that the title of the painting seems like a reverse anachronism, as Arabella was not married to Huntington at the time; though perhaps in 1882, with his first wife (Elizabeth Stoddard)* dying and Arabella well established in society, she may as well have been. 

So there you have it.  The future wife of the founder of Newport News Shipbuilding had her portrait painted by the very same man that wowed all the men of Paris with a painting that they could study with great intent in the name of the artistic beauty that it inherently stood for, examining some parts perhaps more closely than others.

It is amazing, sometimes, how such things are connected to each other.

The portrait was donated to a museum in California by her son Archer Huntington, who incidentally founded the Mariner's Museum.  But that, to use one of the cheapest endings of all time, is another story.

If you want to learn more, I recommend the book "The Judgment of Paris" by Ross King and a couple of articles online; one about Arabelle Huntington and the other about Cabanel and his portrait painting.  A lot of the facts I allude to, but perhaps don't quite set correctly, come from these sources.

NOTE:

*Aside from the fact that she was Huntington's childhood sweetheart, little is known of Elizabeth Stoddard.  She apparently lived a rather quiet life in her New York City mansion as her husband criss-crossed the country.  It is possible that Elizabeth knew of and accepted Arabella, as documentation shows that Arabella and her mother helped during Elizaebth's illness.  One wonders what kind of woman she was, and what kind of life she lead.  

Ted Cruz and Bad Renoirs

Two Things:

First, I must officially announce the end of the Ted Cruz Magical Mystery Tour.  Congratulations Senator Cruz: you have broken my will.  On the Alpe Duez that is the 2016 Presidential Campaign I have cracked and am heading back towards the team cars for a snack while I watch you doggedly grind on to try and catch Trump and Carson, who look surprisingly good in their tight fitting bike shorts.  It’s easy to see where Trump gets his confidence from.  He's got really nice calves.

It was a nice idea, I think, to try and capture the hum drum day to day movement of a man on campaign. But in practice it turned out to be a lot of work – trolling through Twitter feeds, logging miles, calculating distances, estimating the amount of chicken eaten at this event or that event;  it all turned out to be a little too much for me.  If I had been able to keep track daily that would have been one thing, but I got two kids at home and I’m holding down a job at the candy factory and Chelsea FC are in crisis and there just isn’t any time.

So we return the bus back to the Merry Pranksters, dispose of the rest of the marijuana at the Colorado state line, and with heavy hearts say farewell to the mystery tour.  We hardly knew thee.

But it also gives me more time and space to follow the campaign in general.  It is interesting, if not also down right fucking scary.  Yes, Trump and Carson are ahead in the polls (though dismayed by the appeal of Trump I understand it, though Carson….wow, I mean, I just don’t know what people see in him), but look at my boy Cruz down there.  Poll numbers stubbornly persistent around 7 – 10%, biding his time, staying out of the lime light, raising tons and tons of money and basically right now just trying not to lose, so that if and when Trump and Carson lose their appeal he is the next man up, the anti- establishmentarian who has in fact been a part of the establishment, who understands the levers of power and therefore is best positioned to destroy it.  Look out my friends.  Look out.
Second, a half-hearted boo to the Renoir Sucks At Painting (RSAP) movement.

Look…Renoir isn’t my favorite either.  There are other painters I enjoy more, but there are also plenty I enjoy less.  I think when Renoir is on he is excellent – it is hard for me to have any problems with his Luncheon of the Boating Party, I love his portrait of Monet, and I think these show that he can be quite good.  I think the problem with Renoir is, perhaps, that he can be sublime and shambolic in the same canvas.

Renoir Eats Lunch on a Boat

Take for example one of my favorite paintings, A Bar at the Folies- Bergere:

Fun Fact:  The Oranges signify that this woman might actually a be a prostitute.

I love this painting.  I love the fact that Renoir captures the movement around the busy Parisian bar, the people mingling over their drinks, the eyes of the barmaid with their sort of sad look, signifying the loneliness that one can feel in the midst of a bustling hedonistic paradise.  And look, there in the corner? That is a bottle of Bass Beer, with its signifying red triangle trademark.  Delightful!
But ah, the mirror in the background.  We see the barmaids back, with her disappointing squirrel tail haircut, and I suppose that we are the man in the top hat, talking to her.  But the problem is that by the laws of physics that perspective in the mirror should not be -

Wait, what?  This is a painting by Manet?

Manet?? Really??

Huh.

Okay, so maybe Renoir sucked at painting after all.   Still, I’m not going to traipse around the country with a sign that says “God Hates Renoirs” like a trooper in some kind of artsy-fartsy wing of the Westboro Baptist Church.  I have more important things to do with my time, one of which is definitely NOT following every movement of Ted Cruz as he continues to ask people for large amounts of money so that he can become leader of the Greatest Country on Earth and then refuse to govern it effectively with the obstinacy of a stubborn child denied desert because she didn’t eat all of her carrots, and yet still refuses to eat the carrots based on principle alone.

Plus, art is subjective.  Who can say what is good, and what is bad?  Lots of people thought Van Gogh was horrible painter when he was alive, it was only near the end of his life that the critics finally started to see what we think we see today.  And it’s not like everything Van Gogh did is a masterwork.  Van Gogh is my favorite painter, but there were some days were clearly there was too much brandy in his coffee and the results were slap dash and crappy, and in general his portraits often leave something to be desired.  Mr. Geller is right that we shouldn’t just assume that something is good because we’ve been told for years that it is so, but then what right does he have to tell people who love Renoir that his art is the worst art of all art?  He has no right.  He’s just a blowhard who has latched onto this one “cause”, garnered a following, and will probably try to spin it into a book or a movie or a You Tube channel or something.  I believe he is genuine, that he hates Renoir with all the gall and vitriol at his command, but 50 years ago he’d just be an eccentric man fuming in the corner of a coffee shop, chain-smoking cigarettes and writing letters to the editor, and we’d give him a wide berth rather than embrace him.

And so, I will do the same.

Books You May Not Like (Especially if you are French or Prussian or Dutch or Pretty Much Anything But British) -- Waterloo, by Bernard Cromwell.

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you had an English grandfather, a man who had spent the better part of his life pouring over English history in general and the Napoleonic Wars in particular,  and you asked him "Grandad, could you tell us about the battle of Waterloo"?

Well, you needn't wonder any longer.  All you have to do is read Bernard Cromwell's book Waterloo, published in 2014. I came upon it because, with the 200th anniversary of Waterloo coming tomorrow (June 18th), I figured it was high time I read a book about "The Battle".  The Economist said this one was good, so I downloaded it.

The Economist, it should be said, is British.  So are these hard ass bastards:

The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras, Elizabeth Thompson

The Book gets pretty well ripped by some on Amazon because it is "biased" and "repetitive" and "doesn't offer any new knowledge about Wellington or Napoleon".  Those people are entitled to their opinions, and I actually think I agree with them.

But unlike them, I don't give a rip.  I thought this was a great book.

If you've never read much military history before, this book will be great.  A lot of military history can become mired down in units and numbers and blocks moving across the battlefield, which can make it confusing and distant to the uninitiated.  Cromwell tries to avoid doing a lot of that, only referencing unit numbers when necessary, and keeping things at the general level (the corps, the wing).  You'll learn a lot about the battle.

If you have read a lot of military history before, this book will also be great.  Sure, the facts of Waterloo are the facts.  You can read them all on Wikipedia and know how the battle went.  But I thought Cromwell's writing really brought the battle to life.  The book almost read like a novel (which, as Cromwell did write the Sharpe series and a number of other novels, you would kind of expect).  He wraps some things in hyperbole (I think he says, as the Imperial Guard begins their charge, that the entire world was watching) but it actually doesn't sound misplaced.  You get a sense of how desperate the battle was, particularly the defense of Hougamont.  You can get a feel for what it was like to see the Guard's bear skin hats peeking over the ridge as they advance, the drums beating a relentless pas-de-charge.  Few things I have found paint Napoleonic-era combat quite so vividly.

Is it biased?  I'm not so sure.  Cromwell never, ever discounts the Prussian contributions to the battle (Wellington would have been beaten if the Prussians had not arrived or had arrived much later , I think most people would say that with certainty), but I do wish he had spent a few more words on the fighting in Plancenoit which was just as harsh as anywhere else on the field.  If Cromwell is hard on Napoleon and the other French generals for their leadership, and rather in praise of Wellington and his presence on the field, it is because such distinctions are probably deserved and the contrasts were real.  Napoleon led from a distance, watching the battle next to La Belle Alliance.  Wellington left little to chance and road all over the field, exposing himself to the dangers, inspiring order in his men.  I think it may be possible that Cromwell has Wellington in two places at once, but perhaps that is a testament to how much the Duke actually did during the battle.

Best of all?  There are maps!  Every chapter has a map showing the situation that will be covered therein.  They are even easy to see on your Kindle Fire.  A number of military histories I have read recently have eschewed maps for some ungodly reason;  this one has them aplenty and I was ever so glad.

In short, I couldn't be happier.  A great read.  If you hurry, you may be able to read it by the 200th anniversary of the battle's end, about 2000 tomorrow.

Oh crap, wait.....that's 2000 tomorrow Brussels time, which is....2:00 in the afternoon Eastern time.

You better get going.

Happy Graduation, Graduates!

This past weekend I attended my Brother-in-law's high school graduation.  It's incredible to think that when I first met him he was a tiny little eight year old guy who still watched Power Rangers.  Now he's 18 and he towers over me like a giant, and he knows more about cars than I ever will.

How much of the ceremony he'll remember 14 years on I can't say.  I know that I can't remember much of mine.  I'm pretty sure that Frank Beamer was our commencement speaker.  I vaugely recall that he gave a decent speech with all the normal platitudes, though what exactly he said I can't remember.  I think that I can remember who our valedictorian was.  She had done a science fair project on genetics that had cancer research implications; my entry concerned which brand of store bought cookie could hold the most milk after being immersed for 4 seconds.  I didn't win the science fair.

I remember also not particularly enjoying myself.  Why that was a I couldn't say.  Perhaps it's because I knew that my friends, some of whom I'd grown quite close to, were about to be scattered to the four winds. Maybe it was the first signs of depression that would manifest itself fully in college and never really go away. Maybe my shoes were too tight.  I just don't know.  

The graduation I saw this past weekend was fairly typical.  A band played an endless rendition of "Pomp and Circumstance" as the graduates walked in.  A note to anyone thinking about cutting funding for the arts in public schools:  think again.  Sitting through 15 verses of "P&C" is bad enough, but if it's played poorly that is a horse of a different color (brown, I think). The commencement speaker was from the business world, and he told the assembly that staying connected, being kind to others, and working hard would lead them on the path towards a life of consequence. The kids got their diplomas.  Hats were tossed in the air.  There was much rejoicing.

The valedictorian's address was interesting, though not in a good way.  The speech was essentially a 12 minute metaphor in which the graduates were compared to champagne bubbles heading towards the top of a flute glass.  Among 31,000 other children graduating in Virginia alone, who are also bubbles in this very large glass of champagne, how could the people in this class of 126 rise to the top?  She answered the question and neatly showed us how clever she was by quoting something by Ayn Rand which in a mere two days I've already forgotten.

I found it to be annoying and condescending.  "Heck" I thought to myself I did, "she probably delights in pointing out, over and over again, that the final battle in 'The Patriot' is actually a mash-up of Cowpens and Guillford's Courthouse, and that Colonel Tavington is actually based on the real-life Colonel Tarleton, who survived the war and returned to England to rise to the rank of General and nearly commanded British troops in the Peninsular War.  Tarleton's dragoons wore green jackets, not red, and..."

And I realized I do the same thing, all the time.  This girl and I are the same.  She was a more annoying, more attractive, and much younger version of myself.

Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1781.  His compatriots would always note that Tarleton was "Not a particularly kind fellow" which loosely translates today into "He was a total dick."  That's one thing, at least, that the movie got right.  Nice hat.

It made me wonder what I would say if I was a valedictorian, especially with the benefit of 14 years additional experience.  I'd probably be tempted to speak to them of the challenges that lie ahead, but I hope the better angels of my nature would prevail and I would trot out the good old platitudes about how the world is theirs if they are willing to work for it.  Graduation, after all, is supposed to be a happy occasion, not a time to bicker and argue about who killed who.  It is my hope that my brother in law, and all others graduating as the school years draw to a close, remembers it always as something happy and joyous.

Congratulations, Graduates!  The world is yours!  Soon you be able to eat cookies for breakfast and no one will be able to stop you.  Because you are adults, you have arrived, you are kings of the castle and masters of your own destiny!  Go on, just take a big honking block of cheese and just bite into like an apple. You know you've always wanted to see what that was like.  Well, now is the time.  You've earned it!  

Birth of the Newport News Candy Factory Daily Hot Dog Lunch

This is no bullshit people:  times are tough at the Newport News Candy Factory.

The trouble is generally thought to have started when we missed the nougat craze of the mid 90's because management, frankly, didn't know how to spell it and they thought it was too "French".  Then there was the great chocolate covered prune debacle of 2004, and sales further suffered during the Great Recession.  Things finally came to a head in 2010 during a meeting of the board when CEO Mr. Smithington, son of founder Hunter Smithington, looking like an old pale frog in a suit at the head of the table, spoke and said that way back when he was a kid the Newport News Candy Factory made things had "zip, zing, and pep. We should do that again, get back to our roots.  I want something with pep!"

And thus Mr. Pippin's Peppy Pepper Poppers were born.

They were little chewable candies that looked liked peppers.  The "pep" came from a bit of caffeine that was laced into candy.  We might have pulled it off except for two small problems:

1.  Mr. Smithington demanded that they be licorice flavored.  Now, it is true that Mr. Pippin's Peppy Pepper Poppers were not necessarily made with children in mind, but rather for the more sophisticated professional on the go who might do with a nip of caffeine but doesn't have the time or the inclination to grab a cup of coffee or a latte mochachinomiamio;  unfortunately, studies show that 7 out of 10 sophisticated professionals agree that licorice tastes like shit.  When confronted with that scientifically verifiable fact Mr. Smithington defiantly declared that he had been making candies since Marlene Dietrich grew tits; that no one had sold more candy than him on the Eastern Seaboard; that candy was what he knew and the bunch of smart-ass college kids from New York who did the study don't know jack. People love licorice and that's that. So we went with it.  

2.  The ad campaign floundered.  Mr. Smithington was a great lover of the arts, and he wanted to include some of his favorite paintings in the campaign.  These two spots ran in prominent magazines all over the nation:

All well and good I suppose; but then there was this ill-advised doosie that ran in Playboy:

The blogosphere went ape-shit with stories about how the company was being run by a bunch of backward looking, misogynistic old fuddy-duddies who laughably still thought that people actually read Playboy magazine, when all bloggers know that print is dead. Even the 30 percent of sophisticated professionals who actually love licorice wouldn't be caught dead with a box of Mr. Pippen's Peppy Pepper Poppers for fear of being "un-cool", "not-hip", "not-with-it", "not-down-with-the-whole-women's-lib-thing".

The board voted to clean house.  Mr. Smithington went to spend the rest of this days in his large house overlooking the James River supplied with all the licorice his vast fortune could buy, and he died on a Tuesday.  Some say it was of a broken heart; others say it was probably licorice poisoning, a deadly disease that claims one life every 5 years in the United States alone.

Of immediate concern was raising worker morale in an age of stagnant wages and diminishing benefits. We basically ended up with two choices:

Choice number one centered on Employee Engagement.  We'd bring in Gallup and get them to deliver their patented Q12 survey and management would fix our leaky roofs and buy us ping-pong ball tables and bring in former astronauts to inspire us about our mission and offer yoga classes and have engineers sitting at their desks on hoppity-hops (or is it hippity-hops??) and we'd all band together every Thursday and sing kum-bay-yah.

OR, for the same cost, we could feed every employee in the company a hot dog per day for the next 13 years, and that included weekends.

The hot dog lunch idea was intriguing.  It would show the employees that management cares by offering them a free lunch.  Without having to worry about what to have for lunch at work people would actually show up on time because they weren't busy trying to pack their lunches at the last minute.  On the flip side, health care costs for the labor pool, their bodies subjected to a daily dose of low quality frankfurters, would undoubtedly rise.  Yet again, on the other hand, with cancer being the main risk of daily hot dog consumption, the policy would have the morbid side benefit of making early retirement buyouts unnecessary.

"No," said Sandra Moynaham, the VP in charge of making the decision.  "If the press even thought we were thinking like that, they'd have a field day.  It's bad enough as it is that we don't make the campus tobacco free."

In the end, the added health care costs were too steep to support the daily hot dog lunch, and upper upper management figured it would just be another entitlement the union would demand to keep.  In the immortal words of the not so immortal licorice lover Mr. Cyrus Smithington, "You give 'em 13 years of anything, you might as well give 'em 100".

So we all took the Q12 quiz.  We found out, based on the level of disagreement with the statement "I have a best friend at work", that we really don't like each other very much.  We all decided to remedy that by having a series of events that would bring us all together, were we could share our stories and our thoughts on what truly matters in life.

What possibly could bring everyone together in such a way??

Food.  Food brings people together in just that way.

And thus, the daily Newport News Candy Factory Hot Dog Lunch was born.

On Christopher Moore's "Sacre Bleu"

Sure, I could talk about how the President visited Newport News Shipbuilding the other day, and how his visit disrupted traffic and shook down hot dog vendors and emptied parking garages, and how he talked about this and that in an effort to deflect blame for Sequestration away from him and on to Congress, and how I didn't get to see him because I had mandatory training, and how as a consolation prize I happened to run into Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus at the IHOP where we had an epic game of Battleship over a few short stacks.  I would have won if my Submarine hadn't defected.  Damn you Jack Ryan!  I don't care if you are the shit, those Irish terrorists should have had the experience and tactical acumen to waste you when they had the chance.

But I won't talk about any of that, because I just finished Christopher Moore's Sacre Bleu, and I would rather write about that.

The plot is complex, and even now only a day after finishing the book it is difficult to remember the many twists and turns.  But I will try to summarize it enough to talk about some salient points (I wonder how many readers I just lost with the phrase "salient points"?  Stick with it.  I promise you, there will be boobs):

Lucien Lessard is an aspiring painter working in his family's bakery in Montmartre, Paris, in 1890.  It is not the happiest of lives for him, especially as the family tests their freshly baked baguettes by cracking them over Lucien's head (if the crust wraps around his skull with a satisfying crackle, perfection is achieved).  After the death of Vincent Van Gogh (whom Lucien studied with briefly at one of the many art schools in Paris) the lovely Juliette, the woman who broke Lucien's heart when she suddenly vanished two years ago, returns.  After some brief re-introduction she pretty much demands Lucien paint her nude.  He, with little hesitation, obliges.

Lucien gets sort of unstuck in time.  He and Juliette work on the painting as artist and muse, they take go to resorts on the Seine that burned down in 1873 (it is 1890, mind you), they go to London to see the Toilet of Venus by Velasquez.  When he returns he is near death, practically in a coma and Maman Lessard cracks Juliette over the head not with a baguette but with a crepe pan (Ah....the food of France).  Despite the heavy blow to the skull Juliette escapes into the night.

The Lessard family, worried about Lucien's health and sanity, calls on his friend Toulouse Lautrec to try and reach him, to try to get him to stop seeing this girl, and to get the garish yet masterful Blue Nude he and Juliette created out of the house.  When Lucien comes to he is convinced that the ultramarine blue that Juliette supplied him for the painting is driving him insane (not a bad theory....there are some who say that Van Gogh's habit of actually eating paint while he worked poisoned his mind and made him mad...though there is probably some kind of chicken and egg thing going on there).

So over the rest of the book they try to solve this mystery.  And it turns out that Juliette actually is a muse, a spirit who inhabits the body of different people in the lives of artists.  She is working with a shamanistic,  little, twisted, awful man named The Colorman -- who is basically a paint maker with magical powers.  For centuries, CENTURIES, he and the muse have roamed the earth creating art.  The muse inspires the artist, gives the color that The Colorman makes to the artist, and eventually takes some of the paintings they produce back to The Colorman.  In a strange ritual the painting is drained of its color and it winds up on the muse's naked body as a powder, and The Colorman scrapes the color off of her skin and stores it in jars.  In this ritual their strength is renewed and...

Yeah, I know.  It sounds dumb.  And for a while, around page 100 or so, as things were just beginning to take shape, I thought that the book was indeed going to turn out to be really stupid.  But it didn't.  It turned out to be profound.

I think, in a hilarious and vulgar sort of way (the book is actually quite funny - Christopher Moore is a gifted humorist if you didn't know.  I will be reading more of him) the book is trying to get at what makes great art. In the ritual we see a couple of things that suggest what Moore thinks about that.

First, there is a price to be paid for great art.  It may not be a universal truth, but to me it seems that the greatest works of art have been created or composed or written by those who have not only great talent but also a certain depth of spirit and a certain willingness to pour themselves into what they are creating.  Even on a lesser mode of creative output the creative act takes something, it costs something.  Even this crappy little blog costs something (this blog post alone has taken me 6 fucking hours....which makes me think maybe I am missing the point of blogging....).  I think that is something worth pointing out in an age where I want the world's entire library of cute cat videos to be accessible by a device I can carry in my pocket and I wanted it yesturday.

You know something?  If Obama actually HAD made a Royal Presidential Decree (or an RPD for you military types) that now all Newport News Shipbuilding Employees could have smartphones with cameras (there are very few without them), than maybe I would have actually had that yesterday   Another opportunity missed, Number 44.  Another opportunity missed.

Where were we?  Ah.  Point number 2.....uh, I can't remember it.  Something about how art feeds on itself, how it inspires itself, it regenerates itself.  Lets move on.

Any book about artists living in Monmartre is going to have a good bit of seedy sex, and as a counterpoint to all the serious insights Moore has the Touluse Lautrec's of the world who seem to draw their inspiration not from depth of spirit but by spending their days at the bars and brothels in a happy kind of debauchery, giving way utterly and completely to a blotted experience.  Juliette herself, as a muse, is suggestive of the criticism from a  few circles that great swaths of Western art is more about "Hey, look at these" than anything else.

See?  I told you there would be boobs.  

Now, I don't know if that's quite true (if nothing else its certainly a grand, Freudian over-generalization), but Moore definitely keeps pointing to the nexus between sexuality and creativity throughout this book.  Though, naturally, he does so in a hilarious way.

Okay, so what have we learned?  If you want to create great art, just take two parts passion, one part pain, some old ideas, a good dollop of sex, and mix it all up.  Bake it in the oven at 350 degrees for two hours and Voila!  A souffle fit for a King (if you have the talent to actually keep it from all falling apart, that is).  Did I just compare Van Gogh's "Starry Night" to a cheese soufle?  Yep.  Reckon that I did.  And Art is now ruined.

As a side note, this book really was right up my alley.  It had everything I could ever ask for:  Paris, the 1890s, sex, absinthe,  art, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and lots and lots of humor.  Its the kind of book I wish I could write one day.

Art Credit:  Bather Arranging Her Hair, Auguste Renoir, 1893.  Downloaded courtesy of the National Gallery of Art; deemed public domain.

Books you may not like: Vincent Van Gogh, The Life

If I sit and really think about it, public schools, of all things, really helped foster an interest in art.  I remember basically three pivotal moments in my schooling that really cemented a love of art.  My entire time spent with art in school couldn't have taken more than 117 hours of schooling out of the staggering 15840 I spent in grade school and college, and yet those 117 hours (a mere 0.74%!) have paid incredible dividends, adding a richness to life that goes well beyond the scant amount of time spent.  Opponents of teaching art in public schools, take note!

Anyway, here they are:

1. I remember being exposed to art for the first time, really, in the third grade, when every other week we were marched off to the art room for an hour.  And one of the paintings I remember seeing was Van Gogh's "The Bedroom in Arles" I don't what it was about it - maybe it was the colors, or the kind of skewed perspective, or the fact that we learned Van Gogh was so crazy that he cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend (which, to the mind of a third grader, was kind of cool, but why go through so much trouble just for some dumb girl with cooties), but I liked it, and I tucked it into the filing cabinet for later.  
2. I've mentioned in this blog many times my European History teacher's delegation of teaching art history to "Sister Wendy's History of Painting".  While I have often joked about this, I have to commend him for giving the task to more capable hands.  
3. At Virginia Tech, all science and engineering majors have to take a class called "Creativity and Aesthetic Experience", where basically the head of the theatre department learns us about theatre, art, and music, and we have to go and see some shows and concerts.  It was kind of silly, but it was welcome break from never ending math and it was here that I learned about texture and contrast in painting for the first time, only deepening my appreciation.  

There you go.  A smattering of arts education goes a mighty long way.  

Anyway, as my appreciation grew, I became more and more drawn to Van Gogh's work, and I have to count his landscapes, and even some of his still lifes, as some of my favorite pieces of art.  If I happen to come across one in a museum I can stand and look at it, transfixed, for fully...well, five minutes.  But in this day and age of tweets and instantaneous everything, five minutes sitting contemplating a painting is like an eternity.  You know, kind of like how one dog year = seven people years.  

I even came a little bit to idolize the man himself. My knowledge had deepened a little more - I knew that the had given his ear to a prostitute, not merely his girlfriend, and that he was totally reliant on his brother for money.  Still, I admired the way he seemed to give himself wholly to his art.  But that was about all.  I wanted to know a little more.

So it was natural then that I would pick up a copy of the latest Van Gogh biography, Van Gogh: The Life .  It reads wonderfully well, justifying the claim by many reviews that it practically reads like a novel.  The authors did an incredible job of breathing life in Van Gogh's life and times.  The book is also well illustrated though most of the illustrations are black and white.  Van Gogh painted so many works I found that sometimes I had to go to the Google or to another book I have on Van Gogh to see a particular work being discussed in the book.  

Well written as the book is, its a tough read because it is basically an 800 page study in human misery.  Van Gogh was an odd kid with a strange personality that his parents (a pastor in the Dutch Lutheran church and his very status oriented wife) did not take too well.  He was sent to a series of boarding schools in which he failed, and then the family used its connections to get him a job at Goupil art dealers, at which he failed several times.  He then tried to be a missionary but failed as that at well, and when studying to take entrance exams so that he could go to seminary and be a pastor like his father?  Guess what:  failed those too.  

Vincent's repeated professional failings, coupled with his odd behavior (drunkenness, cavorting with prostitutes, hanging out with the peasants) brought scandal on the family and finally he was basically ostracized.   

And that seems to be the source of Vincent's misery.  For some reason he just was unable to connect with people, he was unable to find a family, and he would try again and again to graft himself into someone's life.  But, as Sien Hoornik, Paul Gauguin, and host of others found out, he did it with such incredibly intensity that it was simply impossible to live with him for more than a few months.  By the end of his life, even the two penny whores of Arles would politely refuse the strange man's company.

What's doubly sad that is tragedy seemed to touch all of those he came into contact with.  One of Vincent's brothers was killed in the diamond mines of Africa; one of his sister's ended up in an insane asylum; one of the only women that seriously loved him nearly killed himself after both her and Van Gogh's family got in the way of the match; Sien Hoornik drowned herself at the age of 45.  

And then there's Theo Van Gogh, Vincent's younger brother, who was a success at Goupil and struggled all his life to support Vincent by sending him money, paints, canvases, and trying to sell his works through his art world connections.  Theo was the closest friend Vincent ever had, and yet their relationship was under constant strain from Vincent's never ending demands for money.  Theo and Vincent cavorted together in the whorehouses of the Parisian underworld and both of them contracted syphilis.  The disease drove Theo horrifically insane and he ended his life in a straight jacket and a padded room.  Were it not for Theo's marriage to Joanna Bonger, who did much to give Vincent the recognition in death that he had never had in life, Vincent's art work may have died with Theo.

The question I found myself asking as I read the book is:  was it all worth it?  Was the work left behind worth the price?  Is my five minutes of enjoyment worth a lifetime of unhappy toil?  I don't know.  But it's a dangerous question to pose, because it suggests that nothing is worth ceaseless Sisyphean task of living a life that all of us are engaged in, even if it is something that a good number of us engage in with more happiness and success than Vincent Van Gogh.  Then again, perhaps Van Gogh's work points to an answer.  Maybe it is our mission, our vocation, to pull something beautiful out of the jaws of life, steeped in suffering though it may be.