Month: April 2023

De Nittis Paints Vesuvius

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Grove Koger

The name Giuseppe de Nittis isn’t familiar to most of us, given the fact that our surveys of nineteenth-century art tend to neglect Italian artists. However, in his short life (he died at the age of 38) he accomplished a great deal in a wide range of modes.

De Nittis was born in the southeastern Italian city of Barletta in 1846, but he spent time in the late 1860s in Paris, where he befriended such artists as Edgar Degas. Many of his paintings of social life have the immediacy of quick sketches, and mark him as the equal of many of the Impressionists he met in France. If you’re curious, you can see a good selection of his works on YouTube.

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In any case, what intrigue me the most are the 60 or so paintings de Nittis made of the volcano Vesuvius in the years 1871-73. Vesuvius, you’ll remember, was responsible for the destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii in AD 79, and has erupted repeatedly ever since. One such eruption occurred on April 26, 1872, killing some 20 observers and stranding the staff of the Osservatorio Vesuviano for several days. The director of the observatory, Luigi Palmieri, subsequently wrote that his seismographic observations suggested that the April event was actually the “last phase” of an eruption that had begun in late January 1871.

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Whatever the details, this is the period in which de Nittis produced the works I’m talking about. Painted in the open air, they don’t pretend to be finished, carefully composed works. Small and nearly abstract, most are the result of a series of arduous climbs the artist undertook in order to reach the upper slopes of the volcano. As he recounted in his memoirs, he “needed six hours on horseback to get there and back, and to make the final climb to the crater on the shoulders” of his guides. Occasionally he worked the small sketches into larger, more finished pieces, such as the spectacular example at the top of today’s post, Vesuvius’s Ash Rain (1872), but I’m not sure which approach I prefer.

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Palma’s Grand Gran Hotel

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Grove Koger

One of the most attractive sights in Palma de Mallorca’s old town is the Fundacio La Caixa, an art museum and cultural center at Plaça de Weyler, 3. We’re familiar with the building since we’ve passed by it many times on our way to breakfast in a nearby square, having walked up the broad, tree-lined Passeig del Born from our hostal and, without fail, paused to admire the avenue’s stone sphinxes.

The foundation is housed in what was once the Gran Hotel, an elegant modernista gem designed by Barcelona-born architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner and completed in 1903. The Gran was Palma’s first luxury hotel and, I believe, its first modernista building as well. That’s it you see below in a photograph from Catalonia & the Balearic Islands: An Historical & Descriptive Account by Albert P. Calvert (London: John Lane, 1910). Around the same time, Mary Stuart Wood described the hotel in The Fortunate Isles (London: Methuen, 1911) as the establishment in Palma “best suited to tourists, especially if there are ladies in the party”—a statement that might profit from clarification.

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Today there’s a café on the building’s ground floor, while the upper floors have housed the foundation itself and its collections since 1993. On our visit in 2018, Maggie and I took in a traveling exhibition of late works by Giorgio de Chirico—a selection of paintings in which the Italian artist produced oddly lifeless copies of the early “metaphysical” works that had made him famous. Much better were several small chromed sculptures based on those same themes, works that seemed as fresh as the paintings seemed stale.

However, the main reason to visit the foundation is to enjoy its permanent collection of paintings by Barcelona-born Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, who lived for several years on Mallorca. Although they might recall the works of such Fauve masters as André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, Anglada’s canvases are more decorative and more intensely colorful, as the 1910 painting you see below, Valencia, makes clear. At more than 19 by 20 feet in size, it’s his largest painting, and certainly one of the most vibrant we’ve ever seen.

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A Dream of Paradise

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Grove Koger

April 11 is the anniversary of the death of Jacques Prévert, who died in 1977. If you recognize his name, it may be because City Lights published a translation of his poetry collection Paroles in its “Pocket Poets” series in 1966. Or you may recognize him as the screenwriter for the films Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows) and Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise). In both cases, the director was Marcel Carné, and in the latter, the pair created what’s regarded as one of France’s (and the world’s) greatest movies.

As Prévert explained in an interview printed in the Classic Film Scripts edition of Children, the paradise (paradis) of the title is a reference to the “cheapest seats in the theatre, the worst, the furthest away from the stage, for the ‘people.’”

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The film chronicles the intersecting lives of five disparate characters in the Paris of the 1830s—the beautiful courtesan Garance (played by actress Arletty) and the four men pursuing her, including Baptiste Deburau, a mime (played by Jean-Louis Barrault) at the Théâtre des Funambules. Deburau’s infatuation with Garance is the heart of the film, but the courtesan’s other admirers—the mediocre actor Frédérick Lemaître, the arrogant aristocrat Édouard de Montray, and the elegant and equally arrogant criminal Pierre-François Lacenaire—form a kind of knot that Lacenaire, who has been insulted by de Montray, finally cuts in a dramatically Gordian manner.

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Children of Paradise is divided into two sections—“The Street of Many Murders” and “The Man in White”—and in its unedited version runs to more than three hours. The Classic Film Scripts edition also includes scenes that never made it to the screen.

It’s nearly impossible to talk about Children of Paradise without mentioning the incredible story behind its filming. It was shot in 1943 and -44, during the German occupation, and its sets had to be moved between Nice and Paris because its designer (Alexandre Trauner) and composer (Joseph Kosma) were Jewish and were constantly in hiding. The main set was damaged during a storm, and a number of the movie’s German extras, hired out of legal necessity, had no idea that they were working alongside other extras who were Resistance fighters by night. Ironically enough (or perhaps not), Arletty was found guilty of treason after the war due to her romantic involvement with a Luftwaffe officer and was sentenced to a period of house arrest.

Children of Paradise is a film in the grand manner, but I can imagine an even grander one in which a master director creates a second film devoted to the creation of the first, perhaps told from Arletty’s point of view, and manages to fold the two stories, old and new, into an enormous collage—a glorious tribute to the counterpoint of art and life. I’m willing to give the idea away, and all I ask in return is an acknowledgement in the credits—and, at the premiere, a seat in paradis.

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Graham Greene & the Mysteries of Identity

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Grove Koger

In 1988, at the age of 84—an age when most writers have long since closed shop—Graham Greene published a new novel. That in itself was cause for celebration, as Greene was (and is still) regarded as one of the very best English novelists of his time. But The Captain and the Enemy (Viking) was a very good novel, perhaps even better than very good. Time will tell, but in the interim, it’s worth considering what Greene managed to accomplish within the book’s 189 pages.

It seems that the Captain of the book’s title has won the narrator, Victor Baxter, from Victor’s father in a game of backgammon. Showing up at Victor’s school to claim his prize, the Captain admits at one point that his own name is Victor—a name that, it turns out, neither character likes. So young Victor becomes Jim, a name he’s far happier with, and accompanies the Captain to a new home after a “good lunch at The Swan”—which the Captain, who appears to be short of funds, cleverly manages to avoid paying for.

The business of the names and the subterfuge at the Swan set the tone for the rest of the novel, for, as the Captain explains early on, “When you get to know me better, boy, you’ll realize that I don’t always tell the exact truth.”

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Portrait by Yousuf Karsh

Jim’s new home turns out to be a dismal basement apartment, and his new “mother” is Liza. The relationship between the Captain and the much younger Liza is ambiguous, but it becomes clear that they care for each other very much, although neither is willing or, apparently, even able, to acknowledge it. Making the situation even more difficult, the Captain is seldom present, spending long periods of time away on mysterious business. He talks from time to time of Spain and the war and his escape across the Pyrenees, and admits that he dreams of “all that gold which Drake took from the mules in Panama.” He’s also fond of King Kong, which he regards as a “great story.” And then there are references to the distant and mysterious Valparaiso, which is apparently not the port in Chile. (Hint: look up the word’s meaning in Spanish.)

Who is the Captain, really? In time, we learn that he was apparently only a colonel, and that his real name is Carver—or Cardigan, or Smith. At times he’s bearded, at other times shaved, at other times still he sports only a mustache.

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The same ambiguity hangs over the odd family unit at the heart of Greene’s novel. It consists of a mysterious and generally absent father figure, a somehow mother, and a somehow son—all of which may remind astute readers of another family, but Greene wisely doesn’t push the resemblance. I will mention, however, that Victor’s (I mean Jim’s) “real” father shows up at the flat very occasionally, and is known to the Captain and Liza both as “the Devil.”

The latter sections of The Captain and the Enemy transport the story to Panama and a different, far more dangerous world, as Jim endeavors to deliver a piece of bad news to the Captain. But the Captain himself is now engaged in what will turn out to be the deadliest game of his life. At novel’s end, only one question remains, but it won’t be the one you’re expecting.

Green’s title, by the way, is drawn from the 1912 novel The Simpkins Plot by the Rev. James Own Hannay, who wrote under the pseudonym George A. Birmingham: “Will you be sure to know the good side from the bad, the Captain from the enemy?” Hannay’s novel is a comedy of mistaken identity set in Ireland and I gather that its mood is a far cry from that of Greene’s work. Greene was widely read in Edwardian literature, but his knowledge of this otherwise long-forgotten novel is still something of a surprise.

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