February 5

1922


Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel by Renoir
Defining "Art" has long been an issue - and quite probably a wild goose chase (I think it was Borges who said that the gods made everything for a purpose, even wild geese; so let's carry on with the chase).

To those of us who try to make it, art is unquestionably a verb, and lower case. To those of us who enjoy looking at it, and are unable to resist passing untutored value judgments as we do so, art is unquestionably an adjective, and still lower case. To those of us who write essays on the subject, from Giorgio Vasari to Robert Hughes by way of Ernst Gombrich, Art is unquestionably a Noun, and therefore Upper Case. And for those who wish to transform it into merchandise, which is to say Capital, self-evidently a Capital A, Upper Case. No wonder we argue about definitions!

There is another way of approaching this. In the days of church predominance, when the walls and windows of their holy shrines were Piagetian classrooms to teach the illiterate their catechism, art was unquestionably an Ideological Tool. At the same time, in the castles and manor houses of the aristocracy, as in the villas and apartments of the bourgeoisie later on, art was just as unquestionably an Ornamentation. In both cases, the artist was a mere artisan, an out-source worker, a supplier, at best a craftsman. Nor has that changed since the proletarian revolution of the 20th century that has removed the church, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie from power, and placed it instead in the hands of the spivs, barrow-boys and flea-marketeers who now control the Means of Distribution (far more important in the technological age than controlling or owning the Means of Production). In our world, art is Merchandise, Real Estate, Capital, and the "value" of a Work of Art is not its technical skill so much as its investment potential, its "box office", the celebrity brand signature in its bottom corner, its capacity as a "design template" to replicate itself in other marketable formats.
When it was church and aristocracy, artists serviced directly, themselves and sometimes their workshops under contract to a Pope, a King, a Count, a Bishop, though both sides liked to use more high-falutin' terms, like sponsor, or patron. But the bourgeoisie were neither rich nor powerful enough to have personal artists, and anyway it was a virtue of being bourgeois to have tastes that were eclectic, and so your walls needed the works of multiple artists, and someone of technical expertise, whatever that might be, to tell you which artists were fashionable this year. That expertise was mostly controlled by the Academies, who used their Salons to promote the artists they considered worthy, and to ostracise those of whom they disapproved. 

But the disapproved needed to earn a living too, and so the great transition to the flea-market began, when the Impressionist painters looked beyond the church, the court, the academy, the salon, seeking out private dealers like Vincent Van Gogh's brother Theo who would market them, and provide them with purchasers. Peggy Guggenheim and Charles Saatchi come to mind in the 20th century, but the key name, largely unknown beyond the world of the art historian, was also the first and greatest: Paul Durand-Ruel.



He was born into the business, on October 31st 1831, in Paris. His parents, Jean Durand and Marie Ruel, owned a papeterie, a stationery store, with an unusual sideline - they exhibited the works of several artists, including Géricault and Delacroix, but for the purpose of renting out the pictures, not for selling them. And why not, if you are Mme Verdurin and want to show off your vogueness without having to spend your savings on what will soon enough be replaced by a newer voguerie? The idea caught on, which brought dozens of other artists to the store, hoping to get exhibited. Before long the papeterie became the world's first high street art gallery, and moved to a rather more salubriously bourgeois neighbourhood, at 103 rue des Petits Champs, right next to the Place Vendôme.

His 17th year was that of the Revolution which created the second French Republic. Three years later he was admitted to the Military Academy of Saint Cyr; but he wasn't cut out for the macho life, preferring to explore his more feminine side through the paintings that he lacked the skill to make himself. Joining the family business, he spent the next several years travelling through Europe, simply going from studio to studio and exhibition to exhibition, looking for the X-Factor, and finding it, right where he had started, in Paris, on the Champs-Élysée, at the 1855 Universal Exhibition.


By 1862 he was married, to Eva Lafon, with whom he would have five children. And then it was 1863, the catalytic year for European Art, the year in which the power of the Academies was undermined, so far as to be beyond recovery, and not by the artists or the dealers, but by the restored Emperor-President himself, Napoleon III, who may well not have had the slightest inclination of what he was doing when he agreed that there should be a Salon des Refusés, an exhibition at which the artists who had been rejected for the Salon could show their work anyway, in a democratic forum where the public not the "experts" could form their own opinion. Or at the very least call on a different sort of expert to tell them what they should and should not like. An expert like Paul Durand-Ruel.

When his father died in 1865, Paul inherited the business, growing it with innovations that today's art galleries would take for granted as fundamentals and necessities: personalised exhibitions to promote individual artists; careful placement of publicity in the press to establish each artist as a name; close association of the art world with the world of finance; a network of international galleries (London 1870, Brussels 1871); free access to those galleries, but also to his apartment which was effectively another gallery and a lovely place to meet the actual artist and be able to tell your friends about him (and even,occasionally, though rarely, her).

The list of those who owe their fame and posterity to Durand-Ruel is quite remarkable. Delacroix he inherited, but grew. In the 1870s he added, every one of them unknown, or virtually, until he found them: Boudin, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Morisot and Cassatt, putting all of their works on display in a collective exhibition in 1874, in the studio of the photographer Nadar. The name given to that exhibition, prompted by Monet's painting "Impression: Sunrise" (and probably intended ironically by the exhibitor), would enter history as a movement: "The Impressionists". So totally unsuccessful was that exhibition, Durand-Ruel found himself in serious financial difficulties.

But things got worse. So convinced was he that this was the future of Art, he sponsored a second exhibition of "The Impressionists" in 1876, only to find it derogated as an "insane asylum" by the establishment critics (Turner, the original "Impressionist", had had much the same reaction to his experiments with the depiction of the movements of light and time, two decades earlier). And not surprising really - the Salon des Acceptables fighting back against the Salon des 
Refusés. The 1848 political revolution re-staged on the canvas of the canvas: the old Establishment versus the new Democracy. So Durand-Ruel too took up the sword, and named it Barbizon - the group of artists who, back in the 1830s, had established an artist colony at Barbizon near Fontainebleau, and whose work had repeatedly been rejected by the Salon: Corot, Daubigny, Diaz de la Pena, Jules Dupré, Millet, Théodore Rousseau, Daumier, Courbet. When it happened again in 1878, D-R stepped in to help them. More money down the proverbial.

For the next several years, when literally nobody was buying anything painted by an Impressionist or an artist of the Barbizon school, D-R went on supporting them, building a personal collection of their works that makes the Guggenheims and Saatchis of the world look like beginners. Exhibitions too, in Berlin, London, Boston, Rotterdam. Mostly collective, but including one-man shows in Paris for Boudin, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley.

By 1886 he was as good as bankrupt. But just at that moment he received an invitation from the American Art Association, encouraged by American Innocents Abroad who had visited the rue des Petits Champs as part of the grand Tour, to organize an exhibition in New York. The response was electric. Suddenly "Impressionism" was an acknowledged artistic movement, and American artists were rushing to imitate it. Suddenly Renoir and Pissarro - not yet any of the others, but it wasn't far away for several - were being acknowledged as painters of major international significance. Sales at the Paris gallery were newsworthy; and all that extra publicity added Monet's name soon afterwards.

Between 1890 and 1914, when Europe finally got bored with the civilised pursuits of art and literature and music and philosophy and decided to ape the macho epoch of serious barbarism instead, D-R organized exhibitions literally worldwide, including a 1905 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London, with nearly three hundred Impressionist paintings on display - the largest ever, before or since.

The painting at the top of this page was Renoir's personal tribute to his friend and "patron", made in 1910. The other paintings on this page, besides my own little piece of flea-market appreciation which includes two Gauguins, a Monet and a Toulouse-Lautrec, are a detail from Renoir's "Dance at Bougival" and Monet's "Impression: Sunrise", the one that bestowed the movement's name. Jigsaw puzzle versions of all three can be found online (caveat: they come with cookies and unsolicited but personally-targeted advertising), and T-shirts displaying them are available from... you can surf that one for yourself.

D-R died today in 1922. Two years earlier he had been awarded the Légion d'Honneur, and - quite rightly - not for his contribution to Fine Arts, but as a recognition of the scale of foreign earnings that were attributable to him. He had, in the meantime, acquired twelve thousand paintings, more than a thousand Monets, about fifteen hundred Renoirs, four hundred each by Degas, Sisley and Boudin, some eight hundred by Pissarro, a mere two hundred Manets and nearly four hundred by one of the few women on his list, Mary Cassatts. The value of those paintings on the Art Market today is equivalent to about six 
Légions d'Honneur, per week, for every year that he lived. Most of them, but this is surely irrelevant, are also rather good paintings.


Posters of this blog-page are available on demand from scammer.com, or from my hawker stall in the car park behind the Champs-Élysée. Buy one, get one free.

The photograph of the wild geese (adjacent) is by someone who claims to be called Alfred Sisley, though I'm fairly sure it wasn't that Alfred Sisley. It was rejected by the Salon International des Photographes on six occasions, and is now ...



And if only I had time and energy before I go back to my next imitation-Dada ready-made, performance-exhibition, one-legged on-a-plynth, video-montage of the "Cubist Mona Lisa" (the genre is now officially known as pre-post-quasi-pseudo-neo-Impressionism), I would love to write a piece about that other scarely known but equally extraordinary... and female this time... the philosophical letter-writer Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Madame de, or really the Marquise de Sévigné, born today in 1626. In amber for now, but I promise to return to it.





You can find David Prashker at:


Copyright © 2017/2024 David Prashker
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The Argaman Press



January 7

Eliezer Ben Yehuda with his newspaper, Ha Tzvi
1858

Lithuania. Birth of Eliezer Perelman, the father of modern Hebrew - or Ivrit, as it should properly be called. Trained as a doctor in Paris, he was one of the early Zionists who pressed the case that Herzl would eventually formalise, advocating Jewish settlement in the yishuv of Erets Yisrael fifteen years before the first Basle Congress. And made the conviction meaningful by emigrating there himself, in 1881, when he was just 23.

He also made the case for Zionism and for Ivrit by example, publishing a Hebrew-language newspaper, Ha Tzvi, and taking the Hebrew surname Ben Yehuda in place of the Yiddish Perelman, though Ben Yehudit would have been so much more appropriate (he probably didn't know, most Jews to this day don't, that the language of the Bible was never called Hebrew back then, but Yehudit - see Nehemiah 13:24), and any of Peninah (פְּנִינָה - coral), Margalit (מַרגָלִית - gem), Charuz (חָרוּז - bead) or Dar (דַר - mother of pearl) would have served as an accurate translation of his own name, by his own rules, depending on which type of pearl he wished to favour. 

The true pearls anyway were two sisters, Devora and Hemda Jonas, Jerusalemites now but originally from Verkhnyadzvinsk, in Belarus. Eliezer married Devora in 1882, and had five children with her, but in 1891 she died of tuberculosis, and he took Hemda for his second wife. With both it was understood that Ivrit would be the language of their home, and they brought up their children as the first to be fluent in it. For this he was universally ridiculed (universally may be overstating the matter; but there were about 20,000 Jews in Turkish Falastina in 1881, and about 19,990 of them ridiculed him, so "universal" is appropriate in the context). Hebrew had not been a living language since the fall of the First Temple in 586 BCE - through the last five hundred years of Jewish sovereignty the first language was Aramaic - so why would you revive it now? To which Eliezer Ben Yehuda had a pearl, an absolute gem of an answer: there hasn't been a hope in hell of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine for nearly two thousand years, so why would you revive that false hope now? People got the point and started learning Ivrit.

Ben Yehuda's argument was actually twofold. First, that the revival as a spoken language of the ancient language, would provide an essential prop in the revival of the yishuv. Second, that Jews returning from so extensive a Diaspora required an esperanto to avoid the pitfalls of Babel, and this Ivrit could most easily provide because actually everyone already knew it; prayer and scripture study, after all, had always been in Hebrew, because that's the language of the Bible and a significant proportion of the prayers; while Ladino-speakers were no more inclined to learn Yiddish as a lingua franca than Yiddish-speakers were Ladino. Ultimately he was proved prophetic.

Va'ad ha-Lashon, the committee to oversee the renaissance of Biblical and liturgical Hebrew - Yehudit, or now Ivrit - as a modern tongue, was set up in 1890, and Perelman remained its leader until his death in 1922. His lexicon contains every Hebrew word from every period, and rivals Gesenius in its scholarship. Best of all are the modern creations rooted in the ancient. Chashmal (חַשְׁמַל) for electricity for example - take a look at Ezekiel 1:4 - as also Delek (דֶלֶק) for the fuel we put in cars; and marvellously Letadlek (לְתַדְלֵק) when one airplane refuels another in flight (the word was actually invented long after Ben Yehudah, but employing his system, when in-flight refuelling was invented as a necessity of Operation Entebbe). Not all of them caught on alas. Sicha rechoka (שיחה רחוקה) is literal for a telephone, but Telefon (טֵלֵפוֹן) is what is used, a Hebrew Franglais but without an academy of bigoted xenophones to back it up.

What likelihood of Catelonian being revived, now that the Spanish government in Madrid has crushed its attempt at independence? What likelihood the Breton or Basque, the Rohingya or Kurd, surviving the attempts to destroy them in favour of universal, or simply local, homogenisation? According to National Geographic, "One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish." Though at the same time there are other languages that have been recovered, as several of my Welsh friends whose kids are now learning it in school can confirm. A full list of those that have been revived, or at least are being attempted, can be found here. Kol ha kavod (that's "congratulations" in modern Ivrit) to Eliezer ben Yehuda for reviving one of them.





The death-day (1972) of John Allyn McAlpin Berryman, who was really and boringly John Smith until he took the poetic pseudonym, boring as a poet too, by his own admission - who would bother to read more by him if this piece of glumness were the norm and not the "just me being my usual witty, playful self":-

(Photo credit: Tom Berthiaume)



“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.  ← 1st phrase incorrect.                                                                                       2nd spot-on
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, 
we ourselves flash and yearn,                      ← would scan better with                                                                                 ‘ourselves’ at the end
and moreover my mother told me as a boy  
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored   ← 'repeatedly' would be                                                                                 grammatically correct
means you have no    also incorrect use of speech marks;
                                                singles here please
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no  
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.


The poem is "Dream Song 14"; the notes in green are mine; his appearance in this blog on his death-date (the show is over) rather than his birth-date (so much potential, who knows what he will make of it), may also explain why this poem is in my "Book of Days" rather than in my "Private Collection".




Amber pages:


The birthdays of French composer Francis Poulenc (1899), and flautist Jean-Pierre Rompal (1922)



The birthday also of that lesser writer but fine zoo-keeper Gerald Durrell (1925)


1610, Galileo discovered the first 3 satelites of Jupiter (see January 8, and also March 29, September 24 and December 11)


1798, Britain introduced the world's first income tax 


1839, Daguerrotype first shown (see January 2)


1914, First ship through the Panama Canal, just ten years since the treaty was signed (November 18, 1903) that gave consent to dig it; though it wasn't officially opened until August 15 of that year, and control of the canal wasn't transferred to Panama until April 1st 1982 - and this despite Panama having become fully independent from Colombia (whatever that means when you are also geographically adjacent to the USA) on November 3, 1903





You can find David Prashker at:


Copyright © 2017/2024 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press