Balthus, R.I.P.

[Dave Monroe]

See as well ...

Nochlin, Linda.  "Seurat's Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory."
    The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society
    San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991.  170-93.

Which takes up Ernst Bloch's comment that Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of the Grand Jatte" is "more Hades than Sunday."  No street, per se,
but indifference, private worlds aplenty.  A veritable hell of bourgeois
alienation.  The geometry, the pointilism (which Nochlin plays up as a sort of
impressionist road not taken, not much taken, at any rate), the way in which no
figure's gaze meets that of another ... not quite the pleasant backdrop to Sunday
in the Park with George most people take it to be, at any rate.  See ...

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/eurptg/28mac_seurat.html

I hear the Musee d'Orsay has been trying to trade James Abbot McNeil Whistler's
Arrangement in Black and Grey, No. 1 (a.k.a. "Whistler's Mother," which I believe
might be the only American painting in its collection) for that Seurat painting
for years, but the Art Institute of Chicago has wisely not bitten ...

Hm ...

Ernst Bloch reagiert auf die „Grande Jatte“ folgendermaßen: „Das Bild ist ein
Mosaik der Langeweile ... eine Landschaft des gemalten Selbstmordes ... lauter
glückloses Nichtstun ...“  Seurat will jedoch kaum die Leere bürgerlicher
Freizeitgestaltung anprangern, sondern vielmehr eine gewisse Distanz zum
Geschehen waren.

It sez here ...

http://www.studenten-welt.de/features/referate/seurat_grande_jatte.htm

'Zat about right?  Somebody let me know ...

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, David Morris wrote:
>
> >
> > http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/balthus.html
> >
> > "In 1933, The Street caught the attention of the Surrealists because of its
> > strange, almost dreamlike atmosphere: all the figures seem indifferent to
> > one another and carve up the space into a series of continuous private
> > worlds."
>
>                 cf. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
>
> regards,
> Mark
>
>

And, of course, there's always Giorgio de Chirico ...

http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/692.html

Which, as has been mentioned, might well have been Pynchon's inclination for the
cover of The Crying of Lot 49 ...