 Gaudi's Park Guell in Barcelona. Jorge Franganillo, CC BY 2.0  Casa Batllo, Barcelona, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic 2019.  Sagrada Familia. SBA73, CC BY-SA 2.0 Sagrada Familia: Antoni Gaudi’s Magnum Opus We were sick of Gaudi by the time we got to the church. Our first morning in Barcelona was pleasant enough, wandering the winding gardens behind our Airbnb to his park Guell. The mosaic tile fences guided us along the way. The gardens were booked full until four weeks and three days from our arrival. But we were early birds in a city that barely starts its day until after dark, and we promised we wouldn’t stay too long. Still, the park was a riot of the world, throngs of us pushing up through boulevards of fountains and colourful tiles to the lookout of the city. It was pure magic, as if we could see all of Spain, the whole world. Resting for a while on the café patio, a cockatoo flew to our table and perched itself on the rim of my cappuccino. There were souvenirs galore on the descent from the hill down into Barcelona, to the Sagrada Familia. Mirror-shard salamanders, shitting Caganers crouched over astroturf. We took respite from the heat with cold wine and thick, fatty slivers of salty serrano stacked on chunks of chewy bread. Everywhere we looked, there was Gaudi. By the end of our trek, we had had enough of this guy’s candy swirls and palm frond balustrades. Still, we found ourselves there, so in spite of my trepidation at the streaming crowd of people on their way in, we went for it. The church, all those stone spires, fairy tale, otherworldly, as pointy as Astropops, was altogether different inside, a grove. The daylight was a dream outside, glowing from the long stained glass trees. This was Narnia, or Terabithia, or heaven. All that concrete, all that cement, soft. I stood there and wept. ** June 7, 1926. By now you know the story: a mild summer evening in Barcelona, with gentle breezes blowing in from the Balearic Sea. A man crossing the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes on his way to the church of Sant Felip Neri for evening prayers stepped back to avoid an oncoming trolley, inadvertently putting himself in the path of another. Struck, he fell to the ground, hitting his head on the pavement. No taxis stopped to offer the injured man a ride to the hospital. He was worn and dishevelled, with a suit that had been clumsily mended over and over, assumed to be too poor to pay the fare. A policeman finally took pity on him and saw to it that he be taken for help. At the Old Hospital de la Santa Crue, a public hospital for the destitute, he still went unrecognized, and was not offered pricier treatments that could potentially have saved him. After a couple of days, some friends finally found him, and wanted to transfer him to a venue for better medical care. The man flatly refused: “I belong here, among the poor,” he said. He died. The man was Antoni Gaudi, son of Barcelona, the most famous architect in Spain, and today, perhaps, of the world. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets for his funeral procession a few days later to pay their respects to “God’s architect.” ** Antoni Gaudi likely needs no introduction. He is practically synonymous with what you conjure when someone says, “Barcelona.” His grand-scale eccentricity of architecture, churches, houses, parks, palaces, transformed the city into a wonderland of sculptures. Architecture is building, of course, but there is nothing of the pragmatic or utilitarian in his work. We pass by thousands of forgettable structures a day, offices, garages, places of worship. Everything Gaudi created was art on a grand scale. His architecture was fantastical, swirling, spindly, arched, curving, cluttered, bubbling, winding, and intricate, rejecting totally rigid lines and hard angles, which he believed did not exist in nature. Everything was embellished to the hilt with bright colours, stained glass, wrought iron, and mosaics of random shards of ceramics. There is no aesthetic or artistic parallel. Gaudi’s work stands entirely on its own, unmatched. A rare example of sui generis. I had dreamed about Gaudi for half of my life. He was on my list of genius creatives. But I wouldn’t even begin to understand him until I saw his work for real, in Barcelona. The romance, for me, was all the eclectic, broken pottery, and teeter-tottery spirals. The collage of it all. Like so many other rubes, I was guilty of assuming the word “gaudy” came from his name. This common association was an accident of fate: Gaudi’s ancestry in Catalonia has no etymological connections to the old English word “gaudy,” meaning “excessively ornate.” Gaudi’s work is the most renowned example of art in Catalan Modernisme, the late 19th century movement that embraced the decorative, the eclectic, and colour, with rounded, winding shapes. This word, too, can cause confusion: Catalan Modernisme was similar to the Liberty movement in Italy, and to the French Art Nouveau, not the same as “modernism” in general. Modernism rejected tradition, nature, embellishment, and divine inspiration. Modernism was about dismantling and deconstruction. Modernisme was about beauty and enchantment, about adding more, more, more. But there was so much more to Gaudi than ostentation. He was a genius, using ruled geometries such as hyperboloids, paraboloids, and helicoids to construct complex, organic three-dimensional structures without relying on traditional flat walls or heavy internal buttresses. His maverick artistic vision was groundbreaking and idiosyncratic. But Gaudi was an ornament of humility, a mere channel for the divine order. The greatest genius and renegade of art and modernisme was but a servant. ** Gaudi was born in 1852 in or near Reus in northern Spain. His father was a coppersmith. He was the youngest of five kids; two of his siblings died before he was born, and two died in early adulthood. He was not physically robust, struggling with rheumatism and sickly health from an early age, something many attribute as the cause of his taciturn nature and his later tendency towards fringe “natural hygienist” practices of asceticism, also fuelled by his deep spiritual convictions about living like a monk. (He adopted vegetarianism at an early age in hopes of combatting arthritis, but even when he began to earn decent money for his projects, he fasted or lived on lettuce dipped in milk. Though as a young man he briefly tried on “dandy” for size, donning sharp suits and showing up at his commissions in a horse and buggy, he went on to adopt extreme minimalism, mending his garments by hand or repairing them with safety pins, and giving his possessions to the poor.) He was an average student, sometimes barely passing his programs, but he signed up for a broad range of interests, French, philosophy, economics, history, and aesthetics. He was interested in drawing, but enrolled in architecture school, working as a draughtsman for those established in the field to pay for his schooling. Military enrollment was compulsory, but because of his health he was on sick leave for most of his service and spent the time studying. He was involved with other young people exploring utopian socialism and wanted to work with them on a restoration of an old monastery into a commune. When he graduated from the Barcelona Architecture School, the director handed him his diploma, saying, “We have given this academic title either to a fool or a genius.” Gaudi’s first professional projects were designing lampposts for the Royal Square in Barcelona, newsstands, and then, the Worker’s Cooperative of Mataro building. He gained considerable recognition executing his first major project, the Casa Vicens, his own take on neo-Mudejar aesthetics, incorporating eastern and Moorish influences. The intricate patterns, arches, and lavish ceramic decorations caused a sensation, but Gaudi was just getting his feet wet and beginning to find his voice. At the Paris World Fair of 1878, Gaudi constructed a showcase for the luxury glove manufacturer Comella, earning a silver medal for Comella for his display. Wealthy Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell saw the exhibition and made arrangements to meet Gaudi back in Barcelona, a pivotal encounter that led to a lifelong friendship between the men. It was also the start of a series of commissions that transformed the face of Barcelona into Gaudi’s world. Guell commissions some pavilions, horse stables, and a bus stop, and then a palace, a winery, and the Park Guell, which included several houses, a market, and the park, which is a magical labyrinth of gardens, mosaic benches, and enchanted pathways. Gaudi’s Guell Park looks like a playground, but here and everywhere the architect took inspiration from the Grand Architect, God’s handiwork. He created from God’s creation, always reimagining the Master artist’s handiwork. His motifs came from the natural world: mountains, waves, volcanoes. Spirals were borrowed from the humble snail shell. Cacophonies of colour bloomed from flowers. As Gaudi’s public profile increased exponentially, he became more and more immersed in his faith and devotion. For nearly 20 years, he lived in a house in the Guell park, starting each morning on his knees in prayer, then walking the park to visit the 150 spheres placed throughout the pathways, a massive secret rosary. Traditional, old rosaries had 150 beads to parallel the 150 Psalms. ** In March, 1882, construction began the church of the Sagrada Família, under the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar. The plan was for a Gothic revival church in standard form. Del Villar resigned just a year later, and Gaudi took over as chief architect of the project. He transformed the designs and direction of the Holy Family church immediately, incorporating his radical vision, blending Gothic and curvilinear Art Nouveau or Modernista forms. From the start, the idea was to create an expiatory temple, that is, a church funded entirely by donors, in protest of the growing rejectionism of Catholicism and its values. An independent edifice to the glory of God, built brick by brick by independent contributors, would belong wholly to the world, with each visitor sharing part of its construction. Gaudi immersed himself in the work, even as continued his massive projects with Guell, moving later still into a house at the park. He worked on the Sagrada Familia for more than four decades. For the last decade of his life, he dedicated himself solely to the church and nothing else. He moved from the park into his workshop in the church. Gaudi’s elaborate models planned for generations of construction, a church that would one day become the tallest in the world. Gaudi designed the church to reach 566 feet high, a metre shorter than Montjuïc, Barcelona’s most prominent hill, a symbolic gesture that no man-made feat should reach higher than nature. When criticized for the century-plus timeline of his plans, he famously quipped, “My client is not in a hurry.” ** What affects me the most is the paradoxical humility and devotion of the man who is one of the great artistic geniuses in all of history. What other artist brilliantly devised a masterwork on which labour would continue for a century after his death? Not only that, but the artwork is itself the artist’s tomb. His remains are his signature. Gaudi’s bones, in his crypt inside the church, are a silent witness as his grand vision continues toward realization. The basilica rises through a forest of 18 towers, dedicated to the Apostles, the Evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and the tallest central one dedicated to Jesus Christ. The façades are intricately sculpted with figures, plants, animals, symbols, Biblical scenes, and ornaments. The Nativity Façade shows joyful imagery and the Passion Façade is deliberately stark and angular. Inside the sanctuary, there are branching tree-like columns that divide into elaborate vaults. The intention was to create the experience of wonder of standing in a forest. Brilliant stained-glass windows flood the interior with dappled shafts of blue, red, green, and gold. Throughout the church, there are countless symbols of Christianity: the cross, angels, saints, Bible stories, the Eucharist, the Holy Trinity, woven with natural forms like leaves, flowers, fruits, insects, birds. It is a celebration of nature, and an architectural expression of the idea that the natural world itself reflects the divine. As Carl Boberg wrote in the hymn, “How Great Thou Art” in 1886: Oh, Lord my God When I in awesome wonder Consider all the works Thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout The universe displayed! ** Gaudi left detailed constructions and written instructions for his magnum opus, but the Sagrada Familia church is the work of thousands upon thousands of hands. It is impossible to count the number of people who have contributed their labour. In 2022 reports, there were 89 employees listed and 1300 workers assisting in the continued construction. In the past 143 years, there have been exponentially more: architects, structural engineers, draughtsmen, sculptors, stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, metalworkers, glaziers, ceramic and mosaic artisans, painters, plasterers, electricians, surveyors, conservation specialists, and construction workers. ** Gaudi worked for God. Second to his sublime mission to show the world God’s artistry and heart of love was his passion for Catalonia. In homage to his Catalan history and identity, the Parenostre, The Lord’s Prayer, is written inside the church in the Catalan language. But the church is not just for Catalan. It is, as Christ himself proclaimed, for all people. The words, Give us this day our daily bread, have been transcribed on the door of the Glory Façade, celebrating the eucharist, by sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs in fifty languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Romanian, Wolof, Tagalog, Quechua, Galician, and more. ** There are secrets upon secrets throughout the Sagrada Familia, Easter eggs to decipher. One is a numerical grid on the Passion Façade, near a sculpture of the Judas kiss. Created by artist Josep Maria Subirachs, it is an unassuming chart of numbers. However, it is a magic square, inspired by an ancient engraving by Albrecht Durer that also featured a magic square. In this version, the numbers always add up to 33. There are over 300 combinations and every one lands on 33, the number of Christ’s age when he was crucified. ** On June 7, 2026, on the 100-year anniversary of Gaudi’s passing, Pope Leo XIV celebrated a mass inside the Sagrada Familia basilica, commemorating the centenary with 4000 visitors inside and many more outside. Then he went outside and blessed the Tower of Christ, the tallest and most symbolically important tower of the basilica. The tower was then illuminated for the first time. ** From its inception, there have been considerable obstacles along the way. Twice, progress on the basilica was temporarily halted: during the COVID-19 pandemic there were several months when construction stopped entirely. Throughout the whole Covid era, progress slowed dramatically, because the work is fuelled entirely by visitor’s fees and donations, and tourism slowed to a trickle. The other time was between 1936 and 1939 during the Spanish Civil War. This was an era of frequent anti-religious revolutionary violence in Barcelona. Rioters smashed and burned Gaudi’s workshop in the church and his crypt, destroying many of the architect’s models, plans, drawings and photographs. Subsequent architects had to reconstruct aspects of Gaudí's intentions from surviving fragments, photographs, published material and damaged models. But the driving passion of creation carries on. ** It was almost impossible to get to the church. I was resistant to booking an advance spot. Appointments don’t jive with my travel style, and when my partner and I booked our trip to Spain, I didn’t want to commit to a particular time. I’ve been to thousands of churches at home and In Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Tunisia, Israel, Rome, always wandering in. While I love to light candles and drop my donations into the coin box, and am happy to donate when moved to do so, I bristled at the fees of entrance. Despite the fact that the whole trip was really about Gaudi for me, and maybe just a little bit for Spanish wine and tapas, I thought perhaps we could skip the sanctuary and just see the marvel from outside. My partner was not invested in the church, but he knows me well, and insisted we book our place so that I wouldn’t leave without this once in a lifetime opportunity. I reluctantly agreed. It was four months before our trip, but the visitor website said there were very spaces left, and only for tours in either Farsi or Tagalog. Forget it, I thought. Moshy put us down for the Tagalog tour and paid the fees. I’m not the best company for travelling. I love to see the world and like to go alone, at my own pace, two art museums a day and exploring the rest on foot without an agenda. My health and energy levels are poor, and I am easily tired and grumpy. My body hates the sun in any dose and if I have company, they get to hear me complain from morning to night. Never mind my insatiable curiosity and thrill at the intensity of experiencing the art and culture of my destination. Moshy patiently endures, putting up with my grumbling and accompanying me through every museum even when he has more broad interests. I was already exhausted from the heat and Park Guell by the time we made it to the basilica, and seeing the crowds and hours-long wait outside the Sagrada Familia just about did me in. I insisted we turn back, find a shady patio and some icy espresso. Moshy insisted we carry on. Stepping finally across the threshold from the world into the sanctuary was a transcendent experience. The concrete forest was a fortress, dappled with jewelled light. The thrum of voices and elbows faded into oblivion. I was filled with prayer. For me, there is nothing above art. Art is wonder: magic, mystery, mayhem, mirror. Perhaps I am guilty of elevating art even above God, of inadvertently worshiping the creators He created. Does art point me to the truth, or distract me from it? I believe art is divine. That creativity is the best part of humans. If people can be fickle, unfaithful, manipulative, ignorant, and mean, those same people can create incredible music, poems, sculptures. Saints and sinners can be equally gifted: Chairman Mao, one of history’s most murderous tyrants, wrote gentle, nature-focused poetry. A lusty womanizer like Diego Rivera was a child prodigy in painting. On the other hand, art is not only for the blessed, or for the mean and mighty: the everyman, the poor, the institutionalized, the forgotten, can be supremely gifted with creative talents. I believe human creativity is the way we are “made in His image.” No other animal writes short stories or imagines sound into song. If birds dance, humans enslave their bodies to discipline to create ballet, finding liberation in the beauty and pain produced by their form of storytelling. Painters conjure colours to represent the flowers they see or share the secrets of their souls. I was not here for God, but for Gaudi. If Gaudi sidled uncomfortably away from personal glory, I could freely admit, along with the rest of the world, his genius. It was important to me to find the artist himself. We absconded from the Tagalog tour to wander freely. I asked a few guards to point the way to the crypt. And there he was, the great Gaudi, turned to ashes like the rest of humanity, tucked into a box. Nothing radiated from the crypt, only dust. His vision, in contrast, was alive all around him, a work still in progress, a work I was now a small part of. Even so, the artist points us to the deepest truth, seducing admirers into the basilica, transforming seekers and pilgrims who enter there. He is in the middle of a long process to becoming a saint. Gaudi was bigger and more flamboyant and radical in so many ways than his fellow Spanish legends Dali, Picasso, Goya, Fortuny, and Tapies all put together. And still, so much smaller. He must have known his place, both ways: his place under God as just a bricklayer, or maybe a scribe, and his place among men, as inspired, exalted. That conundrum is buried there at the Sagrada: of that elaborate, curly, twisty, concrete megalith like none other, no ziggurat or temple, the imagination that breathed it into being dust at its foundation. I closed my eyes in thanks for making it here. Another dream realized in a world of broken dreams. I prayed to the same God Gaudi prayed to in this very sanctuary. After, we went back out into the streets in search of a Mercado, for pithy donut peaches, pebbly green olives, for more wine, more cheese. Lorette C. Luzajic  Aerial View. Manel Subirats Ferrer, CC BY-SA 4.0  photo by Lorette C. Luzajic 2019  photo by Lorette C. Luzajic 2019  Gaudi's Crypt at the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. Jordiferrer, CC BY-SA 4.0
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 The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, by Cy Twombly (USA) 1961. Photo by whistlepunch, via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Vestiges: Cy Twombly Even after studying his work for many years, and recently reading Chalk, a hefty biography of Cy Twombly, I still feel like I barely know him at all. Twombly is an eternal paradox: his art is possibly the most free, loose, intuitive, raw, and expansive of anyone, anywhere, ever. Yet he is and always was incredibly guarded, private, contained, nailed shut. Artists by their very nature express themselves, but we know precious little about Twombly, his life, what he felt, or how he viewed the world. What were his favourite bands? What kind of food did he like? What novels did he read for fun? What made him cry? Who did he vote for? Who did he love, and why? Joshua Rivkin’s book, Chalk, is a stunning work of poetry, an intimate inquiry from a besotted fan of Twombly’s work. It is relentlessly thorough, sifting through every possible avenue to find Twombly and present something of him to his admiring audience, or to defend his work to his many detractors. And yet, we, along with the author, emerge from the pages empty handed. Rivkin asks, “What artist hasn’t wished to undo all the bounds that hold them steady to the earth?” If some artists can be mysterious, enigmatic, contradictory, and elusive, Twombly takes it to the next level. He was massively successful, popular, and eventually, filthy rich, yet he lurked behind the scenes and in the shadows, avoiding the spotlight entirely. He rarely attended his own openings. He seldom gave interviews, rationing out a measly handful- only four known- over a sixty-year career. He created ultra-contemporary works but eschewed the trends entirely to live among relics and ruins in the past in Rome. His paintings are instinctive, abstract, messy, and modern, huge works sprawling floor to ceiling, where the paint, graphite and crayon are tactile and raw. But his work is not about the now, and in some ways, not about the paint itself at all. Cy’s art is about the past, about poetry, fragmented scrapbooks of ancient civilizations, Etruscan artifacts, classical myth, the vestiges of the old Mediterranean world. Cy was a southern man, American through and through, but lived most of his adult life in the old world of Italy. He was from Virginia- his father a professional baseball player- but lived in aristocratic splendour in several palaces in Rome, in a cultured network of wealthy Italians who were patrons of the arts. His work was widely panned, mocked, and derided, but within just a decade of his debut, Cy’s art was selling to savvy, established collectors, and fetching tens of millions in his lifetime. It was an open secret that he loved men, too, involved with a younger man for 47 years, but he was married to an Italian Baroness for even longer. They never divorced and lived together with their son for most of their lives, remaining close until death in old age, yet there are almost no known pictures of them together. There are few photos of Cy with his longtime partner Nicola Del Roscio, either, but Cy left his estate to his foundation with Nicola in charge, to maintain the walls of privacy and the strategic curation of information and images after his passing. We do not even know the details of his death, at the age of 83. “From cancer,” is the only news that came from his estate. The kind of cancer, and his experience of illness, have not been disclosed. Cy was well liked and people sought out his company, finding him smart and funny. But he spent most of his time in solitude or with his wife or partner Nicola, avoiding parties and exhibition shindigs whenever possible. He sometimes ghosted people who thought they were his friends, slipping out of their lives without explanation, polite and evasive if their paths crossed again. His closest lifelong friend was the artist Robert Rauschenberg. They were briefly lovers in their younger days, then travelled to North Africa together, and occasionally worked together or showed together over the years. The photographer Sally Mann was also a longtime friend from his early days in Virginia. When he returned home in his later years to work there, Sally spent a lot of time with him, documenting his studio and his work with her camera over a decade. In the vast majority of the photos, Cy himself is absent. Twombly’s work is wild, impulsive, monumental, ecstatic, liberated. His massive canvases are messy with free-wheeling swirls and daubs and drips. They are incredibly elemental, like storms, like bodily fluids, like viscera. They thrum with primitive, primal energy, reminiscent of cave paintings and geoglyphs and effigy mounds. Yet there is something urbane and sophisticated about them too, an erudite elegance you can’t quite put your finger on. They wield a powerful spell in person, with visitors describing intense emotional experiences, even religious ecstasy. The mysterious infusion of classical myth and poetry is woven in graffiti and crayon handwriting, fragments of the past coming through the layers like an archeological dig. In their presence, we feel the old world in the new. We can’t help but feeling we are in the presence of the sublime. Twombly has been an enormous influence of my own work, where I declare the same intuitive freedom to follow my internal instincts for gestures, layers, and floating ephemera. The street-vibe of neoexpressionists like Basquiat, and pop-cluttered references to Warhol, Rauschenberg, are more obvious inspiration in my art, along with the bounty of collage materials in Raymond Saunders’ work, or Kurt Schwitters’. And I look, too, always, to Antoni Tapies for the tactile, raw, mark-making frenzied rituals of creation. But Twombly has been there from the beginning, especially in the presence of pencil and crayon, the layers of scribbled words, the breadth of inspiration.. As a writer, words have always been an essential aspect of my artwork, peeking through paint, submerged under imagery, fragmented from magazine ads, reduced to shapes for aesthetic oomph or popping out at random. Twombly resisted any connection to graffiti, feeling his words were more lyrical, emotional, literary. He felt graffiti was transgressive, an act of vandalism or protest. I don’t make this distinction for myself: I claim graffiti’s trajectory before and beyond the contemporary application. The word comes from the Italian “graffiare,” and means “to scribble or scratch.” I trace the urge to write one’s presence backwards through time from the modern streets back through the mists of time, to inscriptions uncovered in old Pompeii and Egypt, to the scribbles and images in caves and etchings in rock from people all over the planet. I share, too, Twombly’s primacy of poetry, and its longstanding connection to art history. My art is filled with poetry, references both overt and submerged. Twombly’s taste spanned classical and French symbolism and modernist- Virgil, Catullus, Mallarme, Rilke. Mine is a medley of obscure contemporary writers, and of Yeats and e.e. cummings and poet-songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon. Nonetheless, like Twombly, my work cannot be separated from poetry, it is foundational even if not obvious or even visible to the viewer. It is embedded in the very act of making what I make. “I never really separated painting and literature,” Cy famously said, quoted by Mary Jacobus in her masterful treatise Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint. If historically, poetry in art was most often illustrated, not scrawled in word fragments that permeated abstraction, it was nonetheless an integral, recurring theme. Narrative paintings on Biblical and mythological stories have been the western canon’s constant bedrock, and such stories, are, of course, more often than not, poetry. The pre-Raphaelites and their followers frequently illustrated poems like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” or John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” Japanese and Chinese art history frequently combined calligraphic poetry with images. Modern, abstract and collage artists in Twombly’s circle and beyond, and Robert Motherwell comes to mind, were keenly interested in the intersection of art and poetry and collaborated as writers and artists on experimental creations combining both. The list goes on. For Twombly, homage could be as simple as scratching “Virgil” across the canvas, or Homer (and Alexander Pope) could inspire a massive, ten-part work, Fifty Days at Ileum. Another series, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, pays homage to the first-century BC Roman poet. He also drew from George Seferis, from Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sappho, and from Stephane Mallarme, to name a few. Books of poetry in Cy’s possession were often found marked up with paint splotches, crossed out lines, and pencilled in notes. Many artists employ asemic writing, that is, the form and gesture itself of writing as an aesthetic act, created without a connection to actual words. Asemic writing is foundational to my own work. Twombly uses asemic practices in most of his works, using the form and gesture of writing in his “blackboard paintings” and everything else he made. Asemic writing mimics the truth that words formed in other languages have a visual appearance and no interpretation for those who don’t know the keys. I use snippets from multi-language books and newspapers, signifying the palimpsest of meaning bubbling up from diverse voices, present even when there is no interpreter. Twombly worked as a cryptographer in the military when he was a young man, which contributed to his fascination with codes and written symbols. I connect words, poetry, and the physical act of writing to belief, ritual, and the mystical, spiritual power of creation. In magic practices the world over, words and images both have the power of conjure. Words are prayer, a direct connection to God. Words preserve personal and cultural narratives. God used words to bring the very world into being, in the beginning, when he said “Let there be…” and there was. Whether the words are legible or mysterious marks, readable or hidden, they are, for me, as essential and powerful as images and go hand in hand in the kind of art I’m driven to create. I also share Twombly’s fascination with archeology and ancient history. The past infuses Twombly’s ultra-modern art, something that for him was not a duality but a conviction of truth. “What I am trying to establish is that Modernist Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself the past is the source, for all art is vitally contemporary,” Cy stated. If modernism was largely an act of rejection of tradition, Cy saw a bigger picture. Abstraction, lyric, emotionalism, reduction of forms was not a rejection of the ancient but rather a revival. Modern art and even modern science and medicine has not proved itself, after all, as the shiny new path of rationalism, but in the long-game has revealed a return to old ways. We have not purged religion, ritual, herbology, hunting, war, magic, storytelling, or “primitivism” from the page, but rather, have returned to it. Everything new recycles the old. Like Cy, I collect cultural artifacts. If my studio is full of “contemporary archeology” from pop culture, dolls and Smurfs and plastic gewgaws, it is also full of icons and amulets, wooden German angels, Roman rings and coins and dice, a Tunisian ceramic doll, Ethiopian crosses, Berber talismans, Mexican stanhope rosaries, fox teeth, a Congolese nkisi nkondo or nail fetish doll, and even medical specimens, human rib bones. Pop art is part of the human story. But the human story and pop art itself are predicated on the lineage of older artifacts. My longstanding subscription to Archeology Today, and love for ancient artifacts, is connected to my unending passion for art history as a whole, all eras, all cultures. Historically, every mask, every tool, every vessel, every piece of jewelry, was handmade, and more often than not, ritualistic or holy. Art. If my art owes a major debt to Twombly, if it has a long-running intimacy with his, still, I cannot know him. The immediacy of his work, the immersion into emotion that one experiences in its presence, does not bind the viewer or other makers to him. Cy remains elusive even when he surrounds us, even when we enter the space he created, the paint he touched. Some people are open books, see-through, transparent. Others guard their privacy tightly, during their lives and after it. Theories abound on the why of it all. Most blame Cy’s hidden side on early and ongoing criticism. His work was widely panned, with a famous ArtNews review by Donald Judd in the early ‘60s calling it a “fiasco.” Judd wrote about Cy’s Nine Discourses on Commodus, “In each of these paintings there are a couple of swirls of red paint mixed in with a little yellow and white and placed high on a medium-gray surface. There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line. There isn't anything to the paintings.” Frequent criticism derided his art as scribbling. He sold nothing at major shows in those days. The story goes that Cy retreated into himself and away from the art world, wounded by hostile reception. The vitriol continued even after his death. Charlie Finch did not mince his distaste at all on Artnet: “Twombly was a no-talent elitist closet case who shamelessly borrowed high cultural references from Homer to Cavafy to justify ugly undisciplined blobs of house paint gagging the senses for mural-sized stretches of canvas which mindless idiots, hiding behind the loose skirts of Twombly's pretensions, overpaid for, making the artist superrich and amplifying his phony, grandiose indulgences.” But every artist faces the bad review and the zero sale exhibition. It’s the usual story, not the exception. Cy’s work began selling anyways, eventually fetching exorbitant prices in his lifetime. Certainly, too, an intelligent man, he knew the game. Other theories blame society and homophobia. Life has historically been difficult for gay and bisexual people, forced to hide their love and desire to avoid facing persecution. True as this is, Cy broke out in the ‘60s when the times were a’changing, and countless gay artists of the era approached the world as flamboyant dandies. Perhaps Cy told us all we need to know about the mystery of his seeming inaccessibility. In a 1994 interview with Dodie Kazanjian for Vogue Magazine- one of only four known interviews given over his six-decade career- Twombly said simply, “I was brought up to think you don't talk about yourself.” In the age of Springer and Oprah, and the barrage of reality TV that followed, in times of over-sharing and confession, of influencer fame and never-ending selfies, those who live apart from the public gaze are anomalies. Like the cryptic writing and dazzling array of historic, mythological, and literary allusions in Cy’s work, Cy himself is a puzzle that remains. Here and there, we glimpse bits and pieces of biography. But we remain outside of him. And perhaps this is how it should be. Humans are naturally curious, nosy, even, about others. We want to know their story. As a reader and a writer and an artist, too, I hunger for the whys, the juicy morsels of drama that make up a life. But Cy owes me nothing. He doesn’t know I exist. How then can I expect that I should know him? To those who adored his art, and those who didn’t, Cy preferred not to explain his work. His art was something to simply be experienced, something to feel, something that would provoke different emotions in every viewer. A very dissimilar artist, surrealist Rene Magritte, spoke nonetheless the same desire for his work. He tantalizingly providing us with an array of symbolic images, then asking us to simply experience the images rather than resolving them. “The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. The feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.” Having Twombly's art to experience is everything, even if we want more. If Cy had his way, he would remove even this bridge between us entirely. “I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them. And then after I’m dead, they could talk about them all they want. I’m just not interested in myself that way…Why should I have to talk about the paintings. I do them, isn’t that enough?” It is. It has to be. Lorette C. Luzajic  part of Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, by Cy Twombly (USA) 1994. Photo by Keith Ewing, via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0  Two from Quattro Stagioni, by Cy Twombly (USA) 1995. Photo by Anna Toss. Via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0  Angelique, by Leopald Burthe (France, b. USA) 1852 The Unknown Legacy of Leopold Burthe It’s a stunning painting. Angelica’s body is breathtaking, with pale, flawless flesh. Her white skin and robes contrast with the shadows and dark waves and the granite boulder to which she is chained, a statement about the soul’s longing for freedom. Leopold Burthe’s painting, Angelique, is perhaps the most striking depiction of Ludovico Ariosto’s Renaissance literary epic, Orlando Furioso. The dramatic story is about a knight’s undying love for the beautiful Angelica. She is abducted by pirates while travelling by sea, and her captors take her to Ebuda Isle. The locals have long been terrorized by a sea monster, and they believe that sacrificing the young beauty will appease him. The artwork shows Angelica alone, chained to the rocks, awaiting the monster to devour her. In the distance we can barely make out her approaching rescuer, another knight, Ruggerio, riding a hippogriff, half horse, half eagle. Burthe was a friend and follower of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whose 1819 treatment of the subject is the most famous. Ingres’ painting is also sublime, exquisitely composed in a triangle to reveal the battle between Angelica, the sea monster, and the heroic knight who slays the dragon at the moment of truth. Burthe puts the spotlight on Angelica and the moment before her fate is realized. He strips away the chaos of the abduction and the islanders’ vicious and desperate attempts to thwart the powerful, destructive forces of nature, and omits the sea monster entirely. We are left alone with the temporality and fragility of beauty. Burthe’s paintings are usually described as Academicism mixed with Romanticism, but he was a neoclassical painter like his mentor at heart, and his teacher, Eugène Amaury-Duval, who was Ingres’ student, staying true to the meticulous, smooth brushstrokes, defined lines, and mathematically structured composition inherent in the movement, his human figures like classical sculptures. Classical mythology and literature were, unsurprisingly, the most important subjects for neoclassicist painters, with messages about morality and heroism over raw emotion. The quiet serenity in this painting speaks to this influence, where idealized figures showed calm stoicism even in the midst of chaos. Even in Ingres’ work depicting the epic battle, everyone looks remarkably unruffled. If you’ve never seen this painting or heard of Leopold Burthe, you aren’t alone. There are only eight or nine known existing paintings by this artist, and known references to a series of drawings. Some of these we have never seen images of but know only from references in records. A French art dealer found this intriguing oil painting in a small shop in southern France. It was well preserved and the signature was clearly legible after a gentle cleaning. Art historians had notations of Angelique and the artist from the Paris salon catalogue from 1852. Researchers confirmed the find. Leopold Burthe was born in New Orleans in 1823, so the New Orleans Museum of Art acquired it in 2018, making it available to the public to see for the first time since 1852. The discovery of such a masterpiece is a monumental occasion. Burthe’s talent was exceptional and rare, and the paucity of numbers of surviving works by this artist makes it all the more reason to celebrate. But the artist remains shrouded in mystery as we know almost nothing about him. This about sums it up: he was born in New Orleans in 1823, into a wealthy family of plantation owners. His father was an officer under Napolean before moving to the south. At three, Leopold was taken to Paris by an older sister, possibly to save him from the yellow fever epidemic. His sister, Marie-Marguerite Burthe, married a cousin, Baron Louis-Frédéric Foucher de Circé. No doubt under these circumstances, Burthe had an aristocratic and cultured education in France. At 17, he began to study with Amaury-Duval. Amaury-Duval was commissioned to paint Marie-Marguerite’s portrait, and sketched a chalk and pencil portrait of her younger brother as a gift. Burthe’s colleague Theodore Chasseriau sketched him in graphite. These are the only images of the artist known to exist. Burthe began exhibiting in Paris as a young man. He died at the age of 37, the cause of which we have no details. His first work in the salons was Bathsheba, 1844, according to the records, but the painting has been lost or otherwise disappeared from public view. Let us revisit this after reviewing the rest of Burthe’s known catalogue. Hercules and Omphale, 1845, is also listed by Google and the museum record as no public image known. However, some sites, like Mythologie, show a painting attributed to Burthe that may be credible copies. (https://www.mythologie.fr/Omphale%20et%20Heracles.htm) Feeding this image back into Google, it confirms that it is Burthe’s. Is this information correct? Arethusa and Alpheus from 1847 depicts a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the nymph Arethusa flees the river god Alpheus. Girl at the Fountain, 1849, is another painting attributed to Burthe that does not make the formal list of known artworks. It shows as belonging to the Musee St. Croix in France but I am not able to find it on their website. Sappho Playing the Lyre follows in 1849, showing Sappho with his trademark meticulous form and brushwork. This painting was purchased by the French state. Next is Ophelie, interpreting Shakespeare’s heroine, in 1851. St. Sebastian, 1852?, foregoes the usual dramatic gore that usually fuels this saint’s representations. In Burthe’s version, Sebastian is serene and calm. Diana and Silvandre, 1852, depicts a scene from the novel L’Astree, by Honoré d'Urfé. The painting is dedicated to Sylvain Marie, a friend of Amaury-Duval. In contrast to Burthe’s other paintings, this work feels rough and lacks the detail and smooth finish we expect from the artist. It is signed and dedicated, so the painter must have been ready to present it. Artists often gave works they considered sketches to friends as gifts. Neoclassical works relied on delicate layers of glaze to achieve their smoothness and depth. Still, it is possible, even likely, the work was unfinished. Most of the painting lacks detail. The column in the background is just an impression, and the figures are soft outlines. Silvandre’s face and hands are nearly blank. Compare the drapery of the characters’ gowns and their bodies to Sappho or Angelique, the latter painted the same year, with crisp perfectionism. We will never know. Because that’s all we have. Narcissus is the last painting that experts have references for from old records. No known images have been made public. Whether this work exists in a private collection or is lost we do not know. Burthe referred to a series of drawings on Daphnis and Chloe, but he refused to publish them, because he was a perfectionist and considered them subpar. They were published posthumously but the records are not readily available to the public. Going back to Bathsheba, the subject of Burthe’s first salon exhibit, I reiterate that experts consider this painting and all images representing it to be lost. In light of this, it is interesting that several hours of research on the artist yielded a curious, low resolution black and white image on Art Price, an auction aggregator. It attributes the image to Burthe. The style certainly fits the artist’s work. I ran the piece through Google Image Search, and it pulled up a single colour image to match. It attributed the work as Echo, by Alexandre Cabanel, a well-known French Academic painter, listing the painting as belonging to the collection of The Met. But The Met’s listing for Cabanel’s Echo is a completely different painting. The image traces only to one site, Mutual Art, but it is no longer listed on the page when following the link. Is it possible that these images are Burthe’s Bathsheba? Auction sites may have left “ghosts” of the images behind that have ultimately disappeared and no longer connect to concrete information. I am certainly not an expert on French Neoclassicism or Academicism, nor do I possess expert verification skills and training for such mysteries. However, this rendering of Bathsheba does not look like an AI colouring: it does not have that “perfect,” artificial sheen to it. What if this image is from an old auction house and it has come undone from its original tracking? Do we have an image of Burthe’s Bathsheba after all? With so few images remaining, and next to nothing known in terms of the painter’s biography, the recovery of Angeliquefrom oblivion is an extraordinary contribution to culture. Even with so little to go on, it seems obvious that Burthe’s talent should be considered an essential one in the canon of western art history. Perhaps there is hope from this discovery that other lost or unknown Leopold Burthe treasures will turn up unexpectedly, too. Lorette C. Luzajic  Roger Freeing Angelica, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (France) 1819
 Hercules and Omphale, by Léopold Burthe (France, b. USA) 1845  Arethusa and Alpheus, by Léopold Burthe (France, b. USA) 1847  Girl at a Fountain, attributed to Léopold Burthe (France, b. USA) 1849  Sappho Playing the Lyre, by Léopold Burthe (France, b. USA) 1849  Ophelie, by Léopold Burthe (France, b. USA) 1851  St Sebastian, by Léopold Burthe (France, b. USA) 1852  Diana and Silvandre, by Léopold Burthe (France. b. USA) 1852  Leopold Burthe, by Theodore Chasseriau (France) 1846  Marquise Louis-Frédéric Foucher de Circé, née Marie-Marguerite Burthe, by Eugène Amaury-Duval (France) 1842  Léopold Burthe, by Eugène Amaury-Duval (France) 1842  Madonna del Parto, by Piero della Francesca (Italy) c. 1460 Madonna del Parto: the Pregnant Madonna, by Piero della Francesca and Beyond Good friends recently visited Monterchi, Mount of Hercules, a tiny village in Tuscany, Italy, populated with less than 2000 people. It’s an ancient, medieval town, once walled against marauders, perched on a hill overlooking the sunny countryside, and a place of crumbling ruins, stone walls shaken loose by various earthquakes over the centuries. “We came for a single painting,” Gonzalo de Cardenas wrote on his Instagram. “Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, perhaps the most human Madonna in art history. Not a distant Virgin, but a pregnant woman standing quietly beneath a tent, suspended somewhere between the sacred and the ordinary. The painting is kept in a museum dedicated entirely to itself. We sat in front of it for so long that it began to feel less like an artwork and more like a presence.” Piero della Francesca painted his solemn beauty in the long blue dress sometime between 1450 and 1475, with most experts dating it to 1459 or 1460. The fresco was famously painted in seven days, a work for the main altar in the Church of Santa Maria di Momentana on the Monterchi slopes. The church was decimated in the 1785 earthquake: only the wall with the Virgin remained intact. She was moved to another chapel, where she survived another earthquake in 1917. The Musei Civici Madonna del Parto was specially set up for the permanent conservation of della Francesca’s painting in 1992. Piero della Francesca was an Early Renaissance artist, mathematician, and geometrician whose paintings were characterized by their humanism, use of perspective, geometric shapes, and rich symbolism. For this fresco, he used lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to create the Madonna’s blue gown, verdigris for the angels’ garments, and slaked lime for the highlights. Miracles and pigment details aside, of course the most interesting thing about the Madonna del Parto is that she is pregnant. Among millions of depictions of Madonna and Child, we seldom see her portrayed gravid. In this magnificent fresco, Mary’s hand rests on her swollen belly: the splitting vertical slash of white down the centre of her dress summons to mind the brutal splitting of the woman’s body during childbirth, and a premonition of the ripping asunder of the temple veil that removed the barrier to God’s presence at the moment of Christ’s death. Mary herself, here, is the temple, with the mystery of God’s incarnation inside her in the most literal way. The angels flanking the Madonna in della Francesca’s painting hold back curtains covered in pomegranates. These fruits in medieval and Renaissance art symbolized the droplets of Jesus’ blood, representing his suffering and death. The tough outer rind of the pomegranate harboured the red seeds of life, a metaphor for Christ’s promise of eternal life. The pomegranate showed life, death, and the Resurrection. Of course, Christian artists weren’t the first to imbue the pomegranate with profound symbolism. The fruit symbolized these ideas already in more ancient myths about Persephone and the underworld. Persephone ate the fruit, just like Eve did, and became trapped in the cycle of death and rebirth, retreating to underworld each year, causing winter, and returning to earth when spring bloomed. The fruit was heavily associated with fertility and the preservation and renewal of life. These themes of women’s sacred life giving abilities echo the ancient past in Christian symbolism. Theologians through time emphasized Mary’s spiritual experience as a willing vessel for salvation over her corporeal manifestations of God’s promises to mankind. Artists generally followed the mores and expectations of their patrons, steering clear of physically realistic depictions of pregnancy in favour of symbolic ones. Mary is often shown holding a book, which referred to her carrying the Book of Life and summon Christ as the eternal Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1). Protestant iconoclasm in the 1500s discouraged Marian portraits in general, and the subsequent Catholic revival took a turn away from “indecorous” depictions of women that emphasized too much about her body and its natural processes. Some paintings showed the metaphorical idea of conception per aurem, an artistic concept depicting Mary’s impregnation as a beam of light or word from God in her ear. .  Madonna de la Leche, Cuzco school (Peru) 16th century Religious and cultural trends that tiptoed around the female body came and went, and come and go, through history. However, the idea that the Church and its believers were uniformly prudish is inaccurate. For example, a recurring trend in Marian devotional paintings is the Madonna con Leche, the Madonna Lactans, or the Milking Madonna, where the holy infant nurses peacefully at Mary’s breast. Some representations show Mary’s naked and engorged breasts loud and proud. These earthy images were meant to affirm the sacred beauty of nature and the full humanity of Christ, and deny unequivocally any shame over the female body. The depictions were often read as symbolic parallels with the eucharist, the ritual of consuming wine to commune with Christ’s death and resurrection, showing Mary’s milk as divine nourishment for the Christ child and all of humankind. Unfortunately, the winds changed after the Protestant reformation and the milking Madonnas became viewed as lascivious, even sacrilegious, and many precious artworks were painted over to conceal Mary’s breasts. However, suppressing religion and nature cannot hold, and with Spain’s conquest in Latin America, and the spread of Catholicism, the Madonna Lactans became especially popular in the “New World” with artists in the Cusco School of Art in Peru. And the oldest Catholic shrine in the USA is Our Lady of La Leche in Florida, founded in 1609.  Madonna del Parto, by unknown master (Italy) c. 1490s Nor is della Francesca’s pregnant Madonna the only one. In the 14th and first half of the 15th century, such depictions actually flourished around Tuscany, with della Francesca’s version capping a run of paintings of the theme. Bernardo Daddi’s Madonna del Parto from c.1330 portrayed her pregnant belly alongside the ubiquitous symbol of the book, an icon surrounded by gold leaf meant to glow in candlelight and show the light of the world. Nardo di Cione’s icon was aesthetically similar, with Mary and the book of the Incarnate Word draped in a royal robe, a heap of stars showing her status as the Queen of Heaven. Scholars assume that the Tuscany pregnant virgins functioned as a kind of good luck charm for women who shared Mary’s state of being, offering hope and solace for a healthy pregnancy and birthing process. The practice of pilgrimage to view Marian shrines and leave flowers or other ex-votos in devotion, and art itself, was viewed as pagan idolatry by believers swayed by the Reformation, which interpreted scripture against imagery literally rather than figuratively. While this certainly impacted the proliferation of paintings and devotional practices, Catholicism and its longstanding attachment to art as a divine gift and means of devotional practice continued to spread throughout the world, via both conquest and consent. Prayer with visual aids is as old as Christianity and older, a widespread human practice in both ancient pagan rituals and other great religious faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism. Other famous pregnant virgins include the The Pregnant Virgin from Németújvár, from 1410, in Hungary. Imagery from the Master of Erfurt in the upper Rhine region in 1400 shows the theme of the Golden Womb, with Mary’s pregnancy surrounding a gold-haloed infant, echoing familiar Orthodox predecessors. Eastern Orthodox icons of Our Lady of the Sign, or the Platytera, frequently portrayed Mary with a medallion symbolizing her womb, with Jesus as a baby, child, or man, dressed in royal robes, inside it. These icons demonstrated the promise that Mary embodied. Sometimes the circle was an almond-shape, visually suggesting the literal portal of the womb, the sacred Sanskrit yoni symbol of the cosmic portal and divine feminine creative power. The Panagia Egkymonoussa or Panagia in Pregnancy was a similar icon. Such icons were and are frequently viewed as protective intercession for pregnant mothers. Paintings of The Visitation were widespread across Europe, and depicted Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. In these artworks, Mary was pictured pregnant with Jesus and Elizabeth with John the Baptist. We return to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi. Her painted delicacy and triumphant survival of multiple catastrophes have made her the most famous of the pregnant Madonnas. Though there are countless artworks featuring the Virgin Mary as pregnant, in comparison to the proliferation of general Madonna imagery, they are rare. But this part of the story remains wildly popular with the masses. Della Francesca’s most beloved artwork has been visited by more than a million pilgrims, many of them pregnant and praying for the physical and spiritual health of their children. Lorette C. Luzajic
 Mary at the Spinning Wheel, by Master of Erfurt (Germany) 1400  traditional Christian Orthodox Panagia Egkymonoussa icon.  The Visitation, by Rogier van der Weyden (Netherlands) c.1445  The Last Time I Showed Up at Midnight, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2015 Finders, Keepers: Disposable Art A couple of years ago, I received a cryptic DM asking about a painting I’d made in 2015 called The Last Time I Showed Up at Midnight. The inquirer wanted me to verify that I was the artist, and wondered what I could tell him about the painting, including how much it cost. Artists receive numerous messages from scammers with elaborate flattery of their passion, originality, and skill, with requests to show available inventory so they can select the perfect, expensive present as a surprise for their wife to celebrate an upcoming wedding anniversary. This run-up is usually followed by some complicated reasons why they can’t use the regular online shopping cart and checkout with their credit cards. This didn’t seem like that, but I wasn’t sure what the man was getting at as he tiptoed delicately around the subject. This particular painting was one of my urban expressionist abstract works in the spirit of the city streets, suggesting peeling billboards and layers of orange and lavender with graffiti and texture. It had been exhibited several year’s before at the Steam Whistle Brewing Gallery in Toronto’s entertainment district, and from there it had sold to a new home. I told the gentleman that the work was not available but he persisted in asking about its value. I told him that it sold at the time for $800 Canadian dollars but that similar works today would cost $1400. I wondered where he had seen the painting. It had been reproduced in a glossy magazine but it was local to Toronto and he was writing from New York State. So I asked him where he had seen the painting. It took some cajoling on my part to get to the bottom of the mystery. The man sent me a snapshot of the painting leaning against his wall. At first he claimed vaguely to have “come across this work.” Finally, he confessed what it was he had not wanted to tell me. He sheepishly told me he had found the artwork sticking out of a garbage dumpster. He was walking his dog when he saw a painting peeking at him from the refuse. He was intrigued by the unusual colour palette and the energy of the piece. He thought it was “really special” and was afraid to tell me because, naturally, it would be upsetting and offensive to find out someone had thrown my art into the trash. Of course I was a stranger to the man and he could not know the delight I take in life’s absurdities. “If someone could afford $800 to buy original art and throw it away when they redecorated, I hope they buy a lot more,” I wrote back. “Keep it coming.” No doubt the man had hoped for something a little more lucrative than a Luzajic, perhaps an abstract expressionist painting from a big name with a big price tag. But he seemed pleased that I did not want the artwork back. “Finders, keepers,” I wrote, telling him to enjoy the find that started his original art collection, and the story that went with it. It was another milestone in my trajectory as an artist. I had now joined the ranks, if at the bottom rung, of painters whose work had been a discarded treasure, discovered later and rescued from a thrift store, yard sale, or in the bins awaiting the city dump.  Tres Personajes, by Rufino Tamayo (Mexico) 1970 A parallel story took place in 2003, when New Yorker Elizabeth Gibson was taking her morning walk on the Upper West Side. Sitting beside a dumpster was an intriguing canvas with abstract figures in hazy reds and purples. “I wouldn't say it was beautiful. It was just so powerful. It had like an other-worldly power,” she told Voice of America. “It was just like a mystery, what was it doing in the trash?” Gibson took the painting home and hung it on her wall. She didn’t see any identifying markers and so her efforts to find out who created the work and how it ended up on the streets of New York were quickly thwarted. But in the years ahead, she felt the work was full of important stories that she needed to dig for. She said the work was “radiating energy” and told her, “Find out about me.” Gibson began approaching friends who knew more about art history, watching TV shows about art, and investigating lost and stolen artworks. Finally, four years later, she made a breakthrough on the Antiques Roadshow website, where a segment on their show in the archives featured the work hanging in her living room. It described the lost Rufino Tamayo painting as a “missing masterpiece.” Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage from Oaxaca. He was a tween when his mother died of TB, and moved to Mexico City to work at his aunt’s fruit stand. She enrolled him in the National School of Plastic Arts, where he absorbed Cubist and Fauvist influences while infusing these styles with individualized indigenismo. He went on to work at the Department of Ethnographic Drawings, and then began painting murals alongside “the big three” muralists of Mexico, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Sisqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. Tamayo shared Diego Rivera’s interest in the importance of pre-Columbian history, artifacts, and art, and in celebrating and promoting the heritage and contributions of Indigenous people as a vital backbone of Mexicanidad, or Mexican identity. However, he did not fit in with the popular political ideas of his revolutionary circle. He did not believe that art should be in service to the state, and he did not believe the communist revolution was good for Mexico. Tamayo felt that artists should be free to express themselves as individuals. Knowing that these beliefs carried considerable risk, he laid low and tried to avoid ruffling feathers, painting murals focused on interesting limited colour palettes, shapes, and themes from Indigenous folklore, rather than the communist propaganda that his peers were creating on behalf of the Revolution. Ultimately, he felt it was best to leave for New York. He lived and worked in and out of New York, Mexico, and Paris for the rest of his career. He experimented with naïve, semi-abstract, tonalist, softly cubist works that defy easy categorization, evocative paintings that seem to draw from ancient dreams of Mexico, from storybooks and legends, while still appearing contemporary today. Tamayo’s years in New York increased his visibility and international appreciation of his painting. He mentored other artists, including abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, whose soak technique canvases use similar tones and palettes. Ultimately, Tamayo returned to Mexico to build the Rufino Tamayo Museo in his hometown of Oaxaca. He is today considered one of the most important artists in Mexican history. The painting that Gibson found propped casually beside the dumpster was a 1970 creation by Tamayo, Tres Personajes. It belonged to a collector in Texas. When he and his wife were in the process of moving, the painting disappeared from their storage locker. No one had ever been apprehended for the theft and the trail had long gone cold. Gibson had the artwork authenticated, and then returned the Tamayo to the collector’s widow. The artwork was valued at just over a million dollars. The woman decided to sell the piece on Sotheby’s and granted Gibson a finder’s fee and a cut of the commission.  Still from Global News segment on Norval Morrisseau artwork found in a recycling bin. In 2019, artist Frederick Roesner was running errands in British Columbia when he saw the unmistakable Woodland painting style of Norval Morrisseau on a partially unwrapped panel in a recycling bin. He hauled the package home and unwrapped an artwork by Canada’s most beloved First Nations painter. Anishnaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was born in northern Ontario. Merging traditional Indigenous themes of shamanic life, folklore, animals, and visionary revelations with the new brightly coloured synthetic acrylic paints on the market, Morrisseau invented the School of Woodland art, an important artistic movement among Native Canadians. Morrisseau was the son of a Medicine Man and Knowledge Keeper, and a Catholic mother, and he painted a syncretic blend of stories from both traditions. A survivor of the Canadian residential school system, he quit school at the age of ten and worked instead with his elders, fishing, trapping, and picking wild berries. He became very sick when he was 19. In Anishnaabe traditions, giving a new name to a person who is dying can renew their energy and save their lives. Norval was renamed Copper Thunderbird, after his vision of turning into a bird. His spectacular six-part work in bright orange, Man Changing into a Thunderbird, tells the story, and is on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Norval’s groundbreaking work has met with various controversies. His decision to share the stories and imagery from the shamanic beliefs and practices of his lineage with people outside of the First Nations was completely taboo among his people. But Norval believed firmly that unity and reconciliation depended on this opening. Indigenous art in general and Norval’s art in particular is incredibly popular with Canadian audiences from all of our diverse backgrounds, so in demand that forgers created a veritable industry copying and selling his paintings as originals. The forgery racket became so entrenched and widespread that even national museums have purchased and displayed the fake works. Ringleader David Voss began the fraud in 1995, hiring young Indigenous artists to copy Morrisseau’s works, producing over 5000 fake Norvals and paying off authenticators to help flood the markets. He was recently convicted and sentenced, receiving only five years in prison for a financial crime that was a much more profound assault on Indigenous culture and Morrisseau’s legacy. At a time when this large-scale hoax was hitting the airwaves, whoever recycled Return to the Homeland, a three-panelled Morrisseau painting, may have assumed they had a fake. But it wasn’t one of the duds. The masterpiece is valued at over a million dollars. Roesner has so far turned down major purchase offers. His goal is to have the work preserved and displayed at the National Gallery of Canada.  Christ Mocked, by Giovanni Cinabue (Florence) 1280 In 2019, during a routine house clearance of an elderly resident in France, a small religious painting that had long been hanging over the kitchen hotplate was moved to the trash. The tenant assumed it was a cheap print that had been there forever. It was time for a change. Thankfully, the cleaners thought twice about the disposal and rescued the work from demise and anonymity. Turned out, the painting was a priceless devotional panel from a diptych by Florentine master Giovanni Cimabue, dating back to 1280 AD. The egg tempera and gold leaf on poplar painting sold at auction for 24 million pounds. The painting was moved to the Louvre.  Detail from undated, untitled Yves Tanguy artwork. In 2020, a traveller inadvertently left his precious cargo at a Dusseldorf airport. It was a surrealist painting by Yves Tanguy. Frantic, the man contacted the police as soon as he arrived in Tel Aviv. The police contacted the sanitation company who combed the recycling dumpsters and eventually rescued the work.  Portrait of Dr. Felix Rey, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1889 A portrait of Doctor Felix Rey was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in thanks for treating his injured ear after the artist sliced part of it off in the legendary episode of passion and tragic psychosis. Dr. Rey and his mother received the 1889 portrait with thanks, but they deemed the artwork “hideous” and “ridiculous,” not able to understand Van Gogh’s unusual and still unappreciated genius of style. The good doctor’s mother used the painting to patch up a hole in the backyard chicken coop. Over ten years later, an admirer of the artist came to the house in search of the portrait and found it still protecting the chickens from the elements. He rescued the work and turned it over to some local art dealers.
While driving down a highway in 2021, a man took a break at a roadside rest stop near Ohrenbach in Germany. He saw two paintings in the dumpster and took them with him. As they appeared to be quite old, he stopped in Cologne to turn them in to the police. Authorities ascertained that one was a 17th century painting of a Dutch boy by master Samuel van Hoogstraten, and the other, dated to 1665, was a self-portrait by Pietro Bellotti. So far, the question of how they ended up in the rest stop trash has not been answered.  Hockey painting by Edward Menges, posted in Dumpster Archeology on Facebook. In 2017, a dumpster diver was hunting for treasures near St. Louis, Missouri, when he found fourteen paintings by a local artist, Edward Menges. The works included hockey and football paintings and some landscapes. By chance, while the urban explorer was gathering the art for rescue, a woman came with a basket of recycling, and when he asked her if she knew anything about the works, it turned out she was the artist’s widow. An art teacher who loved painting, Menges had struggled with dementia and passed away at the age of 96. He was a prolific painter and his widow didn’t know what to do with all of his remaining work. The discovery led to a moderate revival of interest in the painter’s work, which was known locally in St. Louis.  Knight, Death and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, modern day Germany) 1513 When Englishman Mat Winter was eleven, he was already interested in antiques and liked to ride his bike to the local Cranbook dump to look for interesting junk. A woman was tossing out a carload of old stuff and he picked up an interesting picture. He added the drawing to his collection at home and it stayed there for more than a decade. When Winter was older, he took a closer look at his belongings and decided the print looked old and real and took it to experts to investigate. Turned out the work was an original print of a 1513 engraving, Knight, Death and the Devil, by Albrecht Durer, a German Renaissance master.  Banks of the River Seine, by Pierre Auguste Renoir (France) 1879 A bargain shopper bought an old painting at a flea market for seven bucks because she wanted to reuse the ornate frame. At home, aiming to trash the landscape, the work looked older than she had first thought and she took it to an auction house to see if she could earn a few bucks. The work turned out to be Banks of the River Seine, by none other than Renoir, a painting that had been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. It was returned to its owner.  Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio (Italy) 1607 A forgotten Caravaggio was discovered in a French attic when the tenant decided to do a major spring cleaning. One of two known versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted in 1607, the work had been missing for centuries. Experts spent several years authenticating the work. They valued the find at 171 million dollars.  Found drawing by Egon Schiele (Austria) before 1918 A shopper looking for housewares at Habitat for Humanity found a crayon sketch of a nude in a stack of old prints. The drawing was by Egon Schiele, the controversial Austrian master who died at the tender age of 28 from the Spanish flu, along with his wife and unborn child.  Original painting by David Bowie (USA) 1997 In North Bay, Ontario, a lucky thrifter picked up a small expressionist-style painting from a donation centre for five bucks. It was a loose and jejune work in a palette of white, turquoise, and rust, but the buyer felt curious about its subject and more curious that the painter shared a name with David Bowie, the legendary singer and performer. To his surprise, he had purchased an original artwork made by David Bowie in 1997. It was authenticated and sold for more than 100 thousand dollars. The journey of a painting is often a fascinating layer in the art story. Writers who love art most often look to the subject presented in the work, or to the beliefs and biography of the artist who made the work. But often, the trajectory of the art object itself holds all kinds of secrets and scandals. Art has been forged, stolen, looted, lost, burned, flooded, and attacked. It has ended up with eccentric collectors, passed on to other interesting personalities, fought over, and misplaced. Art has been hung on palace walls, played its part in museum scandals and high stake auctions, assumed to be haunted, traded on the black markets, and yes, retrieved from garbage dumpsters. While it’s not likely you’ll be the next one destined to uncover a Jackson Pollock or other million dollar painting at Value Village, it’s possible. You never know what you’ll find. Lorette C. Luzajic  Mona Lisa, by Leonardo Da Vinci (Italy) 1503-1506, possibly retouched in 1517 What’s the Deal with the Mona Lisa? It’s the world’s most famous painting, instantly recognizable to just about everyone. Lisa perches in paint from her five-century old platform, unassuming, almost dull, in drab brown garments, unadorned. But she watches you approach her with that direct, penetrating gaze, that knowing half-smile, turning the tables of who’s looking at who. Her expression is almost sly. Everyone who describes her refers to that look as enigmatic. My Lady Lisa is Lisa Gherardini, or La Giocanda, referencing her husband’s surname, which translates to “the happy one.” Her home was once a family farm near Florence, but today she is entombed in oil pigments on poplar wood at the illustrious Louvre Museum of Paris. She was insured in the 60s for 100 million dollars, at least a billion dollars today, making her the world’s most valuable artwork. The Mona Lisa has commanded a tremendous amount of passion and ire. In a recent incident, climate activists drenched her in tomato soup, protesting an unsustainable food system. In 2022, a man disguised himself as a woman in a wheelchair and smeared her with cake, throwing roses at onlookers as he was dragged out by security. There was an acid attack in 1956 that caused serious damage to the canvas, and someone else threw rocks at her that same year. There are other Mona Lisas, too. Various versions showed up from students studying the master, Leonardo Da Vinci, over the years. I encountered the Prado Mona Lisa unexpectedly while wandering the esteemed hallways of Madrid’s museum. Long considered an unimportant copy, experts uncovered a matching landscape backdrop under dark faded paint during restoration and declared that the painting happened in Da Vinci’s workshop, live, under his instruction. A few bravely contend that this version is superior to the teacher’s. But experts say this is a practical matter from our contemporary perspective: the Mona we have come to love has been eroded by time. The Prado one, by contrast, was painted on walnut rather than poplar, a more stable surface that helped preserve the condition of the art. Perhaps you are like me, unimpressed, unmoved by Mona, perplexed by Lisa’s fame. Is the Mona Lisa overrated? The man who captured her was a master artist, to be sure, a polymath, an architect, engineer, scientist, and sculptor. He gave us essential ideas on art, anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, and palaeontology. He was the epitome of the “Renaissance man” and indeed, is credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. But Da Vinci's other artworks, including The Last Supper, is far more complex and critical to the story of western art. Even other portraits, like the Lady with Ermine, seem much more interesting. Salvator Mundi, lost for two centuries, recently sold for half a billion dollars, the most expensive work ever sold at public auction. Too, there are countless portraits by other artists that I find more compelling. Augustus John’s spitfire Marchesa leaps out of the canvas to demand our attention. Lavinia Fontana’s Bianca degli Utili Maselli and her six children and dog is impossibly intricate and ornate, requiring breathtaking technical skill. What gives? What’s the deal with the Mona Lisa? The Mona Lisa is not the world’s best painting- she’s the most famous. That distinction is crucial to note. It’s a painting that went viral before the age of the Internet Instagram influencer. Perhaps she, and her maker, did nothing much to earn her renown. Certainly Da Vinci changed the world, but it was not his intention that this humble work among his genius output is the one he is remembered by. And Lisa, virtuous, plain/pretty enough wife of a wealthy merchant, might long be obscured in the shadows of time if things had gone differently, along with countless other portraits of wives of merchants in a vast array of paintings through the centuries. Mona Lisa is famous for being famous. John Lichfield described the painting in The Independent as “the best known, most visited, the most written about, most sung about and the most parodied work of art in the world.” Defenders of Mona cite Da Vinci’s role more generally as a genius who brought art and science together, a deep thinker whose curiosity about how things work influenced everything we know. This is indisputable. "Da Vinci invented the airplane!" they point out, in the 15th century. Indeed, his 500 sketches on aerodynamics and flying machines, accompanied by 35 thousand words on the subject, provided fascinating and prophetic concepts for man’s eventual foray into flight. Detractors note that Lisa is among the least of the great man’s contributions. Defenders point to Da Vinci’s pioneering use of sfumato (from the Italian word fumo, meaning to smoke or evaporate.) Sfumato is a painting technique that does away with harsh outlines, softening transitions between colours and tones. The edges of Lisa’s eyes and body fade out, or “vanish in smoke.” This technique, popular in Renaissance painting, especially with the Leonardeschi, artists who followed in their master’s footsteps, was based on Da Vinci’s studies on optics and human vision. To achieve the effect, he used dozens of translucent layers of glaze to blur harsh lines, then smudged them with his fingertips, creating a luminous, soft quality that mimics the way we see depth and dimensions. Fair enough, but again, the technique was not limited to this particular artwork, and was arguably not as dramatic as other technical inventions in art history. The use of a landscape background was also somewhat novel and became quite trendy in Renaissance portraits. And the waist up portraiture was a new path, too, but not unique to this painting or to this artist. A question that arises from this specific argument might be, so what? Another convincing argument against this painting is that it did not depict a major event, personality, narrative, moral consideration, or concept that reflects on the important questions of the human soul. While the artist himself spent the whole of his life puzzling out how things work and what that means for the big picture, this specific piece was merely a paid commission from a Florentine silk merchant, work that put pennies in Da Vinci’s coffer that helped him carry out more essential projects and discoveries. But the painting does say a great deal about the human story after all. The facts that created the Mona Lisa’s curious fame are incidental, and speak to the story of our tastes, perceptions of beauty and importance, and appetite for scandal. Everything that made the Mona Lisa famous happened long after her painter was dead and buried. And what a rollicking adventure it has been. The painting lived at the Palace of Fountainbleu in France, moving to the Palace of Versailles. During the French Revolution, it went on display at the Louvre, and has been there ever since, save for a brief tryst in the bedroom of Napolean at the Tuileries Palace and another stint off site for protection during the Franco-Prussian war of 1871. A brief premonition of Mona madness bubbled up around 1860 when some writers were smitten with romantic views on the subject. Poet Théophile Gautier called Lisa a "sphinx of beauty" and opined that her expression was “vague, infinite, inexpressible.” He attributed to her, “repressed desires, hopes that drive one to despair.” English essayist Walter Pater suggested she was "older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.” While valued by the French intelligentsia as a vital example of Renaissance painting, a crucial era of art and human development in history, the work held little interest beyond the intellectual circles. This all changed in 1911 thanks to a man named Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian nationalist and labourer who was an employee at the Louvre. Peruggia had helped construct the glass case protecting the painting. He believed that Da Vinci’s work belonged to its Italian homeland, not to France, a situation he meant to correct. During visiting hours, he discreetly unmoored the painting, concealing himself with the precious cargo under his overcoat in a broom closet until after-hours, when he and Mona Lisa walked out of the museum after closing. He took her home and she resided for two years in his humble apartment and no one was the wiser during that time. Meanwhile, back at the Louvre, staff were initially unruffled. It was assumed that Mona Lisa was ready for her closeup and that the artwork had been removed for photographing. But as it became clear that there were no such plans in place, the Louvre closed down for a week to investigate her mysterious disappearance. With little to go on, authorities turned their attention to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who held radical, hostile beliefs in opposition to the Louvre. He was a vocal critic of the museum’s security. Apollinaire had previously threatened to burn down the Louvre, so he was as good as any leads they had for a suspect. The poet and his modernist circle viewed museums like the Louvre as graveyards rather than guardians for art, stuffy institutions that championed tradition over bold innovation and took resources and attention away from living and future painters in favour of dead art. Imprisoned for a week and accused of stealing La Gioconda, investigators discovered that Apollinaire had indeed stolen artifacts from the Louvre, a few years before, Iberian statues that he had sold to his friend Pablo Picasso to pass on. Seeing a way out of his predicament, Apollinaire passed the buck and blamed Picasso for the theft of the enigmatic lady. Picasso knew nothing about the heist, of course, preoccupied as he was with chasing living skirts and inventing cubism, and eventually, reluctantly, both suspects were dismissed. Ultimately, Peruggia “returned” the painting to Italy’s Uffizi Museum, where it was displayed for just two weeks before being repatriated to its place at the Louvre. Peruggia was imprisoned for six months for his crime, for which he went from nameless to heroic patriot of Italy’s history. The public at large had never shown interest in Da Vinci’s portrait and most had never heard of it until now. But a whiff of scandal and controversy works wonders for publicity, and now everyone and their uncles wanted to know more about Mona Lisa. The identity of the portrait as Lisa Gherardini Giocondo was recorded by Giorgio Vasari way back in 1550, but in the decades following the art’s theft, a frenzy of new theories abounded as to the identity of the sitter. Was she Isabella of Aragon, Cecilia Gallerani, Costanza d’Avalos, the Ducess of Francaville, Isabella d’Este, Pacific Brandino, Isabela Gualanda, Caterina Sforza, to name a few possibilities? Or, was she a drag queen or genderblend figure, a hidden portrait of Da Vinci’s male assistant and perhaps lover, disguised as a woman? Or was she a self-portrait of Da Vinci himself, portrayed in the feminine? “The Mona Lisa is androgynous—half man and half woman,” declared Silvano Vinceti, head of the National Committee for Cultural Heritage. If the identity of the sitter was never really in question, well, then, there were plenty of other secrets at hand to decipher. The same National Committee for Cultural Heritage speculated that there were hidden symbols embedded and obscured under the paint, including the letters L, V, C, E and B, and a faint 72. Could these codes shed light on the model or the maker? Probably not, say other experts, who attribute these finds to pareidolia, better known as finding castles in clouds, the psychological tendency to see meaningful patterns and pictures that were unintentional. The secret codes are, according to most, nothing more than natural patterns in the cracking paint. Other, more interesting discoveries have come to light under the ongoing scrutiny of the portrait. Lisa’s unadorned appearance and lack of eyelashes and eyebrows have added enormously to her cryptic appearance. As it turns out, she had the same fashionably plucked sparse brows of other Italian women of her status, which had been obscured by the Nair of time and damage during ongoing care and restorations. There was also a dainty necklace that Da Vinci had thought better of and painted over. This was true to the fashion of the times, when it was not befitting to matrons to flaunt their wealth. Married Italian women were expected to project severe modesty, and only wore their jewelry for a year or so after they were married. After the theft, public fascination in the Mona Lisa grew continuously, snowballing along the way. While Eugene Bataille had satirized her already in 1883, showing the figure smoking a pipe, caricatures abounded after the 1911 heist made her a household name. Marcel Duchamp got the ball rolling in 1919 by adding a goatee. Salvador Dali made his contribution to the perception of Mona’s androgyny by turning the iconic work into a self-portrait in 1954, with manly hands and his instantly recognizable twirly, wispy moustache. Writer Dan Brown turned her into divinity in his wildly popular thriller series, The Da Vinci Code, suggesting the Italian words for “m’lady” were actually an anagram for occult secrets and the name of the Egyptian gods Amon and Isis. Today, this humble portrait draws 80% of the Louvre’s massive foot traffic, attracting some ten million visitors a year and up to 30 thousand every day. Museum guests wait on average two hours for thirty seconds of quality time with her in a crowded room. It’s not on my bucket list. La Giaconda does not know what has become of her. She does not know that her face is familiar to the masses far and wide, the face that launched a million mousepads and coffee cups made in China, or the Mona Lisa Smile, the most tepid of all chick flicks in film history. She does not know that she got Picasso arrested, and that she was subsequently insured for a cool billion. She is blissfully unaware that her unremarkable face has been immortalized in muddy tenebrism. From her unintended reign on the Louvre wall, she has watched the world unfolding. And until the termites that take us all out in the end ultimately obscure her, there she will remain, watching us watching her. Lorette C. Luzajic  Just half a minute to catch a glimpse of her in 2015. Bramfab, CC BY-SA 4.0  The Other Mona Lisa, also 1503-1505, painted by Da Vinci's assistant or workshop students alongside him.  Brother Ted’s Hippie House: a Grassroots Art Environment Niagara Falls, NY, a perfect bright sunny day. We pulled over beside the infamous Hippie House at Hyde Park Boulevard and Maple Avenue, into the vestiges of the bygone. The eye could not immediately make sense of what it was seeing: a shambles of eclectic junk growing in clusters from a dilapidated house and surrounding it. Wicker furniture festooned with faded plastic flowers and tangled cords, rain-weary plush toys, a filthy Mickey Mouse in pink sunglasses. There was a bouncy horse with rusty springs, broken Christmas balls, old clocks, a weathered Wurly heaped in kitchen clutter and bicycle tire tubes, makeshift crosses propped with sports netting and batik bandanas, buckets overflowing with warped vinyl and forlorn evergreen boughs, striped orange pylons rumpled psychedelic granny square Afghans strewn amongst vines and unruly grasses. A faded Spiderman mask stared up at me from a wheelbarrow grave. The rickety house looked like it might blow over from the mildest rustle of breeze. It was covered on every side in murals and graffiti. I started snapping photos of sticks shrouded in mangy t-shirts, of leaned mirrors reflecting the blue sky, of a pillar or bricks painted crudely with what might be Frank Zappa, when a small voice from the rubble caught me off guard. I turned toward the faint hello and was startled to see a small and shirtless old man on a refuse throne. Slight, sinewy, he clambered down from his camouflage and extended a sun-bronzed hand toward me. Ted, he said politely, so I introduced myself. He kissed my hand. Ted assured me that it was okay to photograph the yard, with the caveat that I didn’t capture him in any of the pictures. It turned out that I had already captured him in one photo, before he spoke up, but I didn’t know until later. Out of respect at his request, I have kept this image to myself. My friend’s mother drove me to this destination, knowing I would be curious about the weird world on Maple Avenue. I was wading blind through the junk heaps with no context whatsoever for what I was seeing. I told Ted that I was visiting from Toronto, and he asked immediately about some concerts there before my time, told me how he crossed the border on numerous occasions to visit the record shops that were once a Yonge Street mecca. I said I had worked at Sam the Record Man when I was twenty or not even, and his eyes lit up. I learned more later. The junk lot was legendary in these parts, home of Zoundz Music, the house barely standing, where Ted still lived. Music aficionados flocked here for concert tickets and bootleg recordings, a destination in the days you flipped through vinyl albums in milk crates for obscure treasures of sound. I felt a terrible weight of loneliness emanating from this strange and sweet character, but it might have been all illusion. All the locals knew Ted. He could get you a scratchy bootleg of any performance you wanted or hook you up with new records, Jethro Tull, the Grateful Dead. While many folks recoiled at the mess of it all, most remembered Ted and Zoundz with loyal reverence. I found countless comments on Facebook noting his legendary kindness. “Brother Ted,” they called him. “Nice guy.” “Ted is awesome, a really good guy.” “He got me tickets for BB King.” “Got tickets to my first concert from Ted.” Long past his heyday, nostalgia abounded. “He loved his Dr. Pepper!” “I used to shop there all the time. Fantastic vinyl. I bought a bunch of Pink Floyd bootlegs there.” People shared his obsession for music and respect for his knowledge. One commenter mentioned that Ted was so diehard, he even got married at Woodstock. Other comments lamented that Ted should have “laid off the LSD.” Before Zoundz, the same yard overflowing with timeworn detritus of culture was a hangout for The Animals, a local group of motorcycle bikers. There was apparently a huge pet pig. Before that, it was a gas station. If most of us want manicured lawns and a button down way of life, others live outside of that paradigm in another realm that doesn’t answer to societal expectations. Ted’s world is Ted’s alone, but yards and gardens arranged in ways that colour outside the lines abound across the North American map. They are sometimes called outsider or visionary art environments. Seymour Rosen, founder of the SPACES Archive, which documents the genre of art environments, described the phenomenon. “Folk art environments are unique, personal places, which comprise of large-scale sculptural and/or architectural structures hand-built by self-taught artists, often during their leisure time…The folk art environment is quite simply a lovingly hand built, unique dream home.” It’s a helpful explanation, but folk art is actually “art of the people” and follows a cultural tradition. By definition, there are many more than “one” of a kind of folk art. For example, Russian nesting dolls and Scandinavian Dala horses are folk art, and there are many versions and creations, often interchangeable. This is not true with the outsider art environment, which is unique to its creator. And since not all of them are made by outsiders, and not all of them are motivated by visionary or religious impulses, I like the term grassroots art environments best. Such environments are not simply the overflow of hoarding, although the mind behind them may have similarities to the minds of those who hoard. These art environments are art in that they have been arranged purposefully. It is tricky to formulate hypotheses about the environments, because no two are alike, which also brings them the category of original art. Just as there are many paintings, but original paintings are singular and reflect their maker. Outsider art environments are personal, large-scale installations or assemblages created by their particular makers. They are profoundly individualist, reflecting unique personal passion, obsession, preference, and meaning. While the public is often welcome in these immersive home installations, they are not made for the public or with the purpose of the market in mind. Each of these art environments is distinct and driven by a very personal vision. In North Carolina, there is the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, full of huge kinetic wind-driven sculptures. In California, there is Salvation Mountain, where Leonard Knight created brightly coloured hills covered in religious messages with adobe clay and latex paint. Elmer Long’s Nevada bottle tree ranch salvages glass bottles of every colour and nothing else. When I was young and travelling through the Mississippi, I visited Margaret’s Grocery, where the Reverend Dennis stacked bricks up to the sky and painted them red and white, then painted scripture verses onto every available surface. There is a house in Toronto where I live that is completely covered in stuffed animals, which are also glued to the car parked out front. And just down the road from Ted’s is another art environment, created by Prophet Isaiah Robertson. Robertson painted his whole house and numerous erected crosses with intricate patterns in meticulous geometrics, each shape holding personal religious messages for him that he wanted to share with passersby. Photographer Greg Cook spent more than ten years driving around the USA documenting these curious displays. He is a frequent contributor to Raw Art Magazine, and holds exhibitions of his photography on the subject He calls them Wonderlands. It is extremely difficult to categorize and theorize about these Wonderlands. But those who attempt to understand them believe they are often driven by deep spiritual convictions, personal obsessions, or traumatic events. Some creators are impacted with severe mental illness, managing their minds through construction of their own realm. Others are simply eccentric and live by their own vision rather than by the norms and mores of society and culture. The creators transform ordinary spaces into their own deeply personal and idiosyncratic universes, often using recycled or discarded materials and repurposing them with their unique interpretations. The religious impulse is at the core of many such installations, such as Reverend Dennis’s world or Salvation Mountain, and that is why they are often called visionary environments. But many others are driven by other or unknown motivations. There may be a relentless desire or need to create, or more specifically, to build a world of their own, an environment that reflects their unique self that they themselves build, control, and transform. These impulses and obsessions reflect the fact that such environments are often born of trauma, offering the creator a sanctuary of their own space, an untouchable kingdom. Creating a paracosm or private universe provides people a psychological haven from a wider environment that may be confusing or abusive, while the creation itself offers space for processing and managing severe psychological distress or isolation. The repetition of motif or movements in the construction of the art environment often reveal a positive outlet for compulsive behaviours, helping creators manage traits like obsessive-compulsive disorders. Paradoxically, the paracosm can also reflect an identity that is unusually stable. Eccentrics live by their own passions without need for validation from group norms. Grassroots art environments are built by makers with diverse skill levels rather than by trained artists. Some have profound artistic talents or specific trade skills that contribute to the overall aesthetic and durability of their creation. Others do not. For this reason, each world is completely different and viewed with various levels of appreciation (or not) by those who chance a visit. Prophet Isaiah Robertson’s environment is kaleidoscopic, but very tidy, skillful and precise. Others, like Ted’s, are improvisational. The environments are vulnerable because they are subject to time and weather, with materials that are difficult to maintain and restore. Public perception of these art environments varies wildly. We are largely fascinated by them and drive long distances to gawk in admiration and horror. Most of us are naturally curious about anything unusual and about the motivations and behaviour of people we see as living outside the norms. While we may cheerfully spend money on an excursion out of town to take photos of these art environments, we often respond differently when the subject at hand is in our own backyard. Some communities rally for state funds to maintain or restore art environments when the owner moves away or passes on, but immediate neighbours often complain to the city or simply view the environment as an eyesore or hygienic risk. Comments on Facebook mention that someone tried to burn Ted’s house and yard down last year, though I can’t find an official account to verify whether this is true or not. Ted himself said to me that people often drove by and threw things at his yard, screaming out the window. I declined Ted’s invitation to venture inside the house, admittedly worried about fleas and rats. It was enough for my curiosity to be permitted to take photos outside. As I prepared to leave, Ted asked me to send him postcards from Toronto. He said he enjoyed getting mail. Again, I sensed a profound loneliness. I’ve never shaken that feeling, even when reading so many fond declarations about him. Sometimes a person with many friends can still be lonely. Even as I am uncomfortable imposing my own feelings on another, whose identity is theirs to define, I could not quite let go of the sense that being different and difficult to understand can be isolating even if everyone likes you. There are invisible barriers between people, even when they are nice to each other, and intimacy and deep connection is about more than cheerful wishes. Yet even if my feelings were true, there was little I could do beyond offering simple kindness. Later, when I showed my photos to a friend, he was outraged by the heaps of garbage on Ted’s lawn. “This is shameful,” he said. “The city should clean it up.” I was silent at first, but thought better of it after a few minutes and went back in conversation in defense of Ted’s world, told him how sweet Ted was to me when I intruded on his yard. Another friend introduced me to metta last year, gifting me a class at Toronto’s Zen Buddhism centre. Metta is a concept that translates to “benevolence” or “lovingkindness.” It may be interesting to note that religious rituals like metta or Christian prayers include repetitive practices that believers find invaluable in managing and processing the world. Metta involves repeated invocations for the wellbeing of others, working to shift one’s own heart into compassion for all people. The prayer is traditionally practiced in stages that aim to break down the barriers between yourself and others. It can be just a few minutes, or it can be repeated for twenty minutes or even hours. I practiced metta for Ted. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be free from suffering. May you live with ease. One is meant to empty their mind of everything during the prayer but the words and the feeling of metta, as a novice, or a visitor really to the ritual, my repetitions brought the idea of a record player skipping to my mind, in sync with the world of Ted’s Zoundz. When we said our thankyous and goodbyes, Ted kissed my hand again, and retreated back up onto the chair where he disappeared against a heap of bricks and blankets. I stepped over some soccer balls, hubcaps, and a pink pony. Darth Vader caught my eye beside a spindly broom, sweep side up, and scraps of an American flag, waving farewell. A stone Buddha statue tilted its head, a sage sentinel, as we drove away. Lorette C. Luzajic         Woman and Puppet, by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1909 It’s a disturbing painting. A beautiful woman with pale skin and dark features stands nude save for a floral shawl and fingers full of rings, showing off shapely legs and teacup breasts. A grotesque doll-man with a macabre clown face, frill collar, and billowing pink gown slumps helplessly, subordinate. She holds his strings in both hands. The woman’s expression is both bored and defiant, daring the viewer to intervene and knowing we won’t. Mexican artist Angel Zaragga’s Woman and Puppet is meticulously painted, glossy, with rich colour contrasts and strong graphic lines. Zarraga’s style was constantly shifting, with quite a few Impressionistic landscapes, florals, and bathers, an assortment of forgettable canvases of soccer players, and then a preference for Cubist style works after encountering Picasso in Paris. His name is seldom mentioned today, but in his time he exhibited widely and was in demand for painting portraits. But his best paintings all carry the same striking dramatic aesthetic as Woman and Puppet. They are moody, strange, and polished, with mysterious, mythic figures in staged poses, with motifs suggestive of rich symbolism.  Ex Voto (Saint Sebastian), by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1912 Zarraga had only a handful of these masterpieces. I was lucky enough to see his most famous painting, Ex Voto (Saint Sebastian), at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It’s a sublime work that seems to grapple with similar tensions of devotion and submission, serving up equal portions of beauty and pain. Sebastian is beautiful and erotic, his body as artfully posed as a dancer’s, a single arrow piercing his nipple. It was the artistic sensation of the Paris Salon in 1912. The Three Wise Men seems far removed from its Biblical story, turning into a sumptuous, sensual, Art Deco monument to all that glitters, with lavish attention paid to the beauty of the body and the ornament of jewels. These spectacular paintings seem to come out of nowhere, and disappear back into the ether they came from, as the artist moved forward into fuzzier palettes and then onto choppier, colourful deconstructions. But no doubt they were influenced by Julio Romero de Torres, whom the artist met in Spain in the years he lived there, studying with Joaquin Sorolla. De Torres’ paintings forged his own enigmatic style, seldom paralleled, drawing from Art Nouveau, symbolist art, and modernismo for his aesthetic, focused all the while on uniquely Spanish storytelling, with imagery from regional fashion, folklore, religion, and literature.  The Sin, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1915 Perhaps De Torres shows up outside Zarraga only in the work of Cuban painter Federico Beltran-Masses, who ran in the same circles and uses a similar lush palette and drama. His paintings are more thickly outlined than De Torres’ but the kinship of style and subject matter are unmistakeable. Beltran-Masses’ work was considered so erotic that it scandalized the conservative powers of art, and De Torres stood up in support of the merit of his paintings. With just a half-dozen or so known standout paintings that suggest De Torres’ influence, Zarraga has carved out a small but significant place in the pantheon of Mexican masters. Anyone who has seen these works has not walked away unscathed. Woman and Puppet is so strange to contemporary eyes that it might be mistaken for surrealism. (Zarraga did actually work with Giorgio de Chirico, whose pre-surrealist work inspired many of the surrealist painters.) It is the stuff of nightmares. We can’t help but thinking that the puppet man is alive in some terrible way, even as the mesmerizing beauty manipulating his strings seems empty, a vortex, despite her beauty. The femme fatale is an ancient archetype, surfacing in art, literature, and mythology throughout diverse cultures. She was especially appealing to the Romantic poets and to symbolist artists of the late 1800s. The femme fatale is attractive, sexy, and deadly. She lures men with her charm, then manipulates them for attention, money, or amusement, destroying them in the process. Men are her playthings, and she takes enormous pleasure from their decimation. The subtext of the story is often one of dominance and submission, with the lady in the driver’s seat. Zarraga’s painting comes from a French novel of similar name, The Woman and the Puppet, by Pierre Louys. In the story, a man becomes obsessed with a young Andalusian beauty he meets at a carnival in Seville, Spain. Despite being warned off by another man who admits to being her previous boy toy, he pursues Conchita, gets reeled in, then pushed away, until he is psychologically decimated. His power shifts completely to her hands, and he realizes he is her puppet. All the more alarming is the pleasure he feels alongside humiliation, as if he is only alive in the deprivation.  Gala and Paul Eluard. A real-life reference to Pierre Louys’ novel comes from Michele Gerber Klein’s biography of Gala Dali, a formidable figure who by all accounts was magnetic, powerful, demanding, and insatiable. Most of the circle of artists and writers in Gala’s wake were afraid of her and saw her as a kind of dominatrix. Ten years older and married when she met Salvador Dali, he spent the next fifty plus years in complete devotion and cuckoldry. Dali sometimes signed her name on his paintings and said all that he was, was because of her, and he was probably right. She was a shrewd and greedy manager, driving him to increasingly eccentric performances because the weirder he became, the bigger the cheques grew. She insisted on polyamory: she was in an open marriage with poet Paul Eluard when she met Dali, including a three-year menage-a-trois with surrealist painter Max Ernst. Eluard agreed to the terms, but he said he was tortured by her affairs. Even so, he continued to send passionate letters long after their divorce. Dali dutifully participated in performative orgy parties, but claims he only ever consummated his passions with Gala. When they were old, she insisted on living in a castle Dali paid for but was forbidden to visit, entertaining her young lovers and jet-setting around the world with them. Dali begged her to spend their final years together, but his request was refused. Gala continued to push him to work and earn when he was sick and weak, spending extravagantly on herself. Nonetheless, Gala’s story is no doubt complicated and surely Dali was no angel. Her peers were most certainly judgemental or misogynist. The surrealist artists were notoriously sexist, despite their claimed enlightenment. In Klein’s fascinating biography, Gala, she writes of Eluard and Gala dressing up for a ball. They both wore Pierrot costumes. Klein explains that Pierrot was an important figure in Symbolist poetry. Pierrot embodied the themes of idealism, emotion, alienation, and unrequited love. Eluard “styled himself as gala’s puppet: a reference to The Woman and the Puppet, Symbolist Pierry Louys’ novel about carnal obsession.” Eluard later said of the photo that he was dressed up as Gala.  The Puppet, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1791 Zarraga’s arresting artwork of his version of the dangerous woman is inspired by Louys’ book, but the book was at least partly inspired by another painting, The Puppet, by Francisco Goya, c. 1791. The painting depicts four women tossing a straw effigy of a man up and down with a blanket. We know this is the case because the victim, Don Mateo, explicitly compares himself to the figure in Goya’s painting. The stereotype of the femme fatale often shows up in times of cultural change and speaks to men’s anxieties about power exchanging hands. Modern feminist philosophy interprets the trope as misogynist, though some view her as a heroine rather than a villain, and the idea of her is seen as an empowering restoration of control to its rightful hands. Men have indeed long feared women’s power and independence, and have viewed their sexuality as dangerous, blaming women they find attractive for their unruly desires. However, the idea that no such woman exists, or that if she does, her strategies are justified, is equally problematic. Humans of all genders have their dark sides, and they use the powers available to them to execute their wiles. Perhaps what is most interesting about The Woman and the Puppet is the phenomenon it examines, and the complexity of human behaviour and desire. Today, the femme fatale is more often known as the narcissist, a term that often substitutes for sociopath when the perpetrator in question is a female. Female sociopathy presents differently from the male’s, as her violence is usually predominantly psychological (though not always.) I know the sadistic narcissist intimately. I was raised by one. This painting presents a profoundly chilling dramatization of something I witnessed and experienced a version of firsthand. From Potiphar’s wife to Karla Homolka, the ruthless woman is sometimes real, and the complexity of such personalities and situations are worth examination by writers and artists. The femme fatale is not a recurring theme in Zarraga’s oeuvre; nor does erotic desire make frequent appearances, which make its presence in these few works all the more mysterious. There are a few reasonably chaste looking nudes. Some of his sports paintings have been referred to as erotic, even homoerotic. I don’t see it myself. The latter is hardly likely, as Angel painted soccer because his first wife was a championship-level futbulista. On the other hand, the femme fatale shows her face again and again in the work of Julio Romero de Torres and Federico Beltran-Masses.  Salome, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1922 De Torres has least two versions of Salome, and Beltran-Masses has more. Salome was a Biblical beauty who danced for her stepfather, King Herod, who offered her, in exchange, anything she wished. She consulted with her mother, who bore a grudge against John the Baptist because he publicly denounced her marriage to the King. She advised Salome to request John’s head on a silver platter. The symbolic impact of a woman’s role in beheading a male, in cahoots with her mother, was irresistibly grisly. This story shows up frequently in literature and throughout art history, with depictions by Titian, Caravaggio, and Picasso, to name a few. One of Beltran-Masses Salome paintings showed Salome completely naked, with jewelled bands on her parted thighs and wrists, head thrown back, recoiling from the horror she wrought. The painting was six feet wide, and it was so scandalous and offensive that the artist removed it from public exhibition personally to appease his critics. The public then demanded its restoration, and the Royal Academy officially requested its return to the spotlight, where thousands flocked to view. Salome catapulted Beltran-Masses into superstardom, her powers undiminished by two millennia. Both de Torres and Beltran-Masses courted considerable controversy throughout their careers for shocking the arbiters of art, and both were extraordinarily popular with the public and their peers. Versions of the femme fatale showed up frequently in their bodies of work, but this archetype was only one subject of their kaleidoscopic explorations on the theme of women.  Salome, by Federico Beltrán-Masses (Cuba) 1918  La Belle Otero, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1914 De Torres examined feminine roles in Cordoba and Andalusian culture from a variety of perspectives, presenting traditional and modern women with sexuality and agency. He painted maternidad, or motherhood, and he also painted prostitution, without judgement. His exquisite portrait of La Belle Otero, a famous, rather, notorious, courtesan, is one she likely posed for in person. Otero was considered a femme fatale, a woman of insatiable greed who handpicked her client lovers from kings and counts. At least one of multiple duels over her patronage is documented, and legend holds that no less than six men committed suicide in the wake of scandal and spending themselves into the grave. Yet Otero was a skilled dancer, performer and model, a lively companion, and a great beauty, and her companionship was widely sought and valued. It is known that she was the victim of rape at the age of ten, and that she ran away to Lisbon at fourteen to become a dancer. Torres paints her as a figure of extraordinary dignity and intelligence. Flamenco was born in De Torres' backyard, and the lore of strong women in the mythology and performance of flamenco figures prominently in his work as well. As a painter, duality was an important theme, and De Torres frequently painted two women of contrast beside each other, suggesting a multiplicity of psychological motivations in women’s roles and how those roles were perceived. And he frequently alluded to the contrasts of traditional mores with the emerging independence of modern women, something signified by the recurring symbol in his work of women’s high heeled footwear.  Granada, by Federico Beltrán-Masses (Cuba) 1929 Beltran-Masses more often portrayed the wealthy and decadent revelers of the Jazz Age, using rich celebrities as his subject, a kind of Cuban-Spanish Great Gatsby treatment. His paintings were so lush and rich in palette, almost always building from a spectrum of blue that his colouring was called Beltran blue. Every celebrity and moneyed person vied for a place in his canvases. Americans praised his work for its psychological depth. Martha Graham created a dance inspired by his paintings. William Randolph Hearts bought at least four paintings. He portrayed countless people of great fame but his painting of Salome, shown devastated and remorseful for her part in the murder of the disciple John, was his favourite, according to the artist’s wife. He refused to sell it during his lifetime.  The Wise Men, by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1910 While De Torres and Beltran-Masses were prolific in works of their similar aesthetic and richly symbolic psychologies, Angel Zarraga only dabbled with the vibe. However, those are the very works that withstand the century. Zarraga’s skills were never in doubt: he was capable of anything as a painter, but most of his body of work simply does not stand out. His treatment of Saint Sebastian, The Wise Men, and the femme fatale are a different story. Ex Voto is strangely beautiful, and asks interesting questions about the boundaries between religious devotion and eroticism. The Wise Men reframes a familiar story in opulence and wonder. But in my humble opinion, Woman and Puppet is Zarraga's magnum opus. It is gorgeous and garish, and his brushstrokes unflinchingly demean Conchita’s prey into a helpless, tortured, husk of a man. Even so, it is the smug satisfaction on the face of the female figure that haunt long after the viewer has moved on. Lorette C. Luzajic  Like many others, one of my earliest memories of poetry was Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” I was too young to understand anything about the world, but this line struck me deeply and stayed with me for life: “And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbour/ And she shows you where to look/ Among the garbage and the flowers./ There are heroes in the seaweed.” I was moved by the idea that treasures of the human spirit lurked in the detritus and the darkness, running parallel to the suggestion that jewels glittered in garbage. It’s a theme that runs through my own art and writing to this day. What poetry could better encapsulate the peculiar passion people have for thrifting, mudlarking, flea markets, and collecting objects? Humans collect things. There are fine lines between collectors, pack rats, and hoarders. But even the most minimalist among us delights in particular possessions. We invest a great deal of meaning in the objects of our affection. The things we are most drawn to tell others so much about who we are. Chance finds in a ditch at the side of the road or unearthing a mysterious, ancient thing while tilling soil at our property’s edge are more intense experiences than choosing a hammer at the hardware store. But judging from the crowds breaking down doors at the mall on Black Friday, and the staggering success of easy access click and pay sites like Amazon, consuming is compulsive and satisfying however it happens.  Mosvintage Event Hall. Tess Mattew, CC BY-SA 4.0 Collecting is related to shopping, but it is an even more elevated experience. A collector has a profound attachment to the kinds of objects she pursues. For some, the peak experience depends on the chance. Mudlarkers and metal detectorists rescue refuse, digging up the recent or distant past. For others, bargain hunting is the name of the game. Finding a special piece for next to nothing inflates the excitement. Big ticket items thrill, too, bringing a certain satisfaction after a long dream of acquisition, or signalling wealth and status for those who can make big purchases without sacrifice. Some people seek very specific treasures: coins from a particular place or era, jewels from beloved designers, or variations on a theme like Raggedy Ann dolls or blue and white pottery. Bibliophiles may hoard heaping volumes of books with very little else to their name. Others still value rarity most of all, and vigilantly hunt impossible items, original art or fragile glassware, or letters from long-dead poets, where only one or few are known to exist. Money may be no object to such collectors, who spare no expense to possess that unique thing. Whatever one’s motivation or hunting style, the pursuit, acquisition, contemplation, and “having” of the object bring extraordinary pleasure and purpose to our lives. Objects mean so much to us. They might be beautiful or strange, ubiquitous or rare, useful or useless. But they tell us stories about our existence and connect us to others who have shared them. They take us into the mist of the past and the mysteries of the mind. They are talismans, mementoes, markers, artifacts.  The Odalisque with Puppets, by Georges Brasseur (Belgium) 1930 Perhaps some are not familiar with the phenomenon of “objectophilia,” a unique fetish or paraphilia sometimes called “object sexuality.” Some people experience romantic and erotic attraction focused on a specific object or kind of object. Google’s AI defines this as “a form of romantic or sexual attraction focused on specific inanimate objects, such as structures, vehicles, or items. Individuals often feel deep emotional bonds, love, and a sense of reciprocation from these objects, sometimes identifying this as a core aspect of their identity rather than a mere fetish.” You may have read the story about the woman who married the Eiffel Tower, after a previous relationship with her archery bow. A more promiscuous fellow claimed to have had relationships with more than a thousand cars. There were people in the news who fell in love with chandeliers and vacuum cleaners. “Objectophiles often perceive that the objects have souls, personalities, or consciousness, and that they can return affection.” Probably few of us (maybe?) feel an erotic attraction to antique milk glass dice or old puppets, but the rest of this profile likely resonates in some way. Our attachment to objects can be intense, and we often experience a kind of relationship or emotional bond. I feel next to nothing about the fork and spoon in my daily dinner setting, but I have deep feelings for a tiny pair of antique sterling silver sugar tongs with chicken claw feet. The gravel in the parking lot does nothing for me, but the crystal geode heart that my late husband brought for me from the east coast sits on my work desk twenty years later, easy to seize on my way out of the apartment if there is a fire.  Lorette and Gonzalo Cardenas in 2014. Nearly as long ago, in 2007, I worked with a brilliant friend, Gonzalo Cardenas, on an essay for the anthology Shift: Positions (edited by Gordon S. Grice, OCAD Student Press.) “I Heart: is True Love Possible Between People and Products?” asked whether acknowledging and nurturing this bond, rather than advertisers and corporations exploiting the emotional high of acquisition, could be a solution to the ecological problem of stuff pollution. We examined the intimate relationship that people have with products, considering whether understanding this long-term commitment we have with certain objects could reduce the impulse to have many easily disposed of objects.. “Deep bonds between humans bring great emotional satisfaction and meaning to life. I believe that trying to create such bonds between humans and their possessions can replace some of the empty, desperate materialism our culture is dying from with meaningful experiences.” It is obvious that decades of shaming each other as shallow for object lust has had no effect on mitigating consumer culture. Could the key to ecological stewardship be in cultivating our natural need to collect and cultivate these objects? Could fostering rather than attempting to eradicate this deep bond between man and thing be its own solution?  Marie Kondo’s 2014 book of clutter clearly struck a chord, selling over nine million copies, an irony for a treatise on minimalism. The premise behind The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was that less is more, with an important twist: every object in our life should be one that “sparks joy.” Kondo encourages overwhelmed consumers to slow down, touch every thing, garment, fork, and book in our lives, and keep only those things that fill us with happiness or strong emotional connection. Moving forward, we should prioritize purchases that matter deeply and forego quantity. Her method points out that we need a lot less than we have been programmed to think, and most of our things actually cause us stress and anxiety. She encourages us to think about the things that bring us joy, and avoid the stuff of superficial relationships. What if every day was a special occasion? Shouldn’t we want to always wear our most valued accessories and beloved fabrics, and eat on a few beautiful dishes? Isn’t one prized belt or our favourite mug far more valuable and enriching than countless options that mean nothing to us at all? While Kondo’s personal rule to keep only thirty books in her library was impossible for me to match, the gist of her philosophy was indeed "life changing magic.". Just by reading her book, I found myself putting things back and turning away from the checkout line. Did I really love the thing in my shopping cart? Would I rather not save my hard-earned money for the vintage Mexican silver and amethyst Mathilde Poulat ring I’d always coveted instead of another pair of cheap earrings that I might wear once? Wouldn’t I treasure one of the many old art books on my list more when I found it than the handful of paperbacks that caught my eye but wouldn’t add anything to my soul? Perhaps the success of Kondo’s method is the implied acknowledgement that objects have an essence. Artifact collectors and antique aficionados understand that the treasures they seek are not just metal and wood, but possess a mysterious inner force that speaks of human creativity, history, and the relationships they have with people. Intricate cultural handicrafts and precious gemstones are obvious. But even plastic has magical properties and tells stories about a culture. The Kondo method and other decluttering initiatives promise personal freedom and a new kind of relationship with our material goods. Reducing future acquisitions of thneeds (coined by Dr. Seuss in The Lorax, meaning useless, overhyped objects created for mass sales) and a more connected, intimate relationship with objects we keep is a positive direction for us all. But missing in such missions is the age-old conundrum. What should we do with all this stuff? Everything we have ever produced ends up somewhere. Hoarders try to save it. Minimalists ignore it. Junk collectors repurpose it. But all of it is out there, heaped up in our landfills, swimming in our oceans, tucked behind glass in our museums, gathering dust in our attics. Artist and photographer Barry Rosenthal understands the lure of objects as well as their disposability. He is a hunter and collector, a beachcomber like Suzanne in the above-quoted song. He picks up forgotten detritus from the shores of the New York harbour. It’s not the same harbour as Suzanne’s in Montreal, but a poetic parallel nonetheless. Rosenthal embodies the old adage that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. He gathers only what is discarded and keeps it, assembling it in various ways to create still-life arrangements that he photographs in striking compositions that tell stories about our stuff. Rosenthal is a lifelong collector, starting in childhood with baseball cards and coins. Today he collects a lot of things, including pot metal horses and cast-iron frying pans. Mudlarking and beachcombing found objects for his artwork is related to but different from personal collecting. His series, Found in Nature, uses only objects that are free and lost or thrown away, that have ended up on the shores of the harbour. He was working on a series of botanical photographs at the time. “I was scouting out a bird sanctuary, looking for plants to collect and shoot,” Rosenthal told Meta Nexus Magazine online. “Instead I saw vast amounts of colourful plastic trash. I picked up the trash and decided to work with this new material instead of my usual subject.” Rosenthal picks up materials indiscriminately, regardless of his personal attraction to them or any utility they may have once had. He cleans them up at home and stores them. Then he sets up presentations of his found objects, on a black or white background, organizing them by type, by colour, or other aesthetic variables. One particularly striking assemblage is of all blue rubbish, mostly plastic. The arrangement includes hair combs, an array of Paper Mate pens, several children’s sand shovels, a broken propeller, a broom head, a flip flop, and numerous balls and lids. There is a toy crab, and an octopus, a toy soldier, and a kid’s rowboat. Another piece features plastic jugs in various colours and sizes, the kinds of jugs that engine oil comes in, yellow, orange, blue, green, black and red. Some of the jugs are dented or crushed, some are pristine. One piece features only caps and water bottle nipples, forming an abstract piece of colourful circles. Another shows only balls, including footballs, golf balls, tennis balls, and so on. Rosenthal even rescues plastic eating utensils, criss-crossing spoons, forks, knives and sporks into an artful composition. Most are white but two are blue and one is red. The prettiest of these works is of old glass bottles, mostly brown and clear glass, showing apothecary designs of the past. Barry’s Found in Nature series has been widely published and exhibited, landing in National Geographic Brazil and the Museum of Modern Art. The artist considers himself today a witness, who hopes his work inspires future sustainability by raising awareness of marine pollution. But it is the act of collecting that garbage that led him to this place, which was not the original motivation of the work. In this way, Rosenthal’s art is both a love letter to stuff and a lamentation. He told Meta Nexus, “I didn’t conceive of this project from a political or environmental point of view. As an artist, I was visually attracted to this stuff. I had no ax to grind. I knew that I could make something out of the detritus. It was just my curiosity at work... I am shocked and disgusted by what I find. No coastal area in the world is protected from this human created mess.” Today, he speaks about the perils of plastic pollution in the oceans. As we read above, there are “heroes in the seaweed.”  Busy Intersection, Knolling, photo by Norm Wright via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 This kind of photography, of documenting categorized objects, meticulously and neatly arranged, usually from above is called “knolling.” The word was invented in 1987 by Andrew Kromelow and Tom Sachs, working in architect Frank Gehry’s workshop, and referencing the angular design of Knoll furniture. Technically, knolling means objects are arranged in a grid with 90-degree angles. But popular perception has expanded the idea to tidy arrangements in general. It was a way to visually keep track of tools and inventory objects but became a popular aesthetic for storytelling in photography and for advertisers. Knolling has shown up in photos of everything from cell phones, makeup, Lego, magic markers and pasta. The knolling approach appeals to both our fascination with and love of objects and our desire to manage them, order them, categorize them, and display them. How we organize our objects and display them, then engage with them or contemplate them, is part of the way we experience our stuff. Artist Kija Lucas creates photographic art with a similar aesthetic and style. Her series Objects to Remember You By showcases personal object collections to tell stories about individuals rather than humanity as a whole, zooming in on the objects someone keeps and presenting them carefully on a black background. Different from Rosenthal, Lucas does not collect the objects herself. Rather, she collects the people and their stories, documenting their private collections. Rather than coming from the collective anonymity of disposal, found along coasts, her images capture what people have chosen to keep and invested with personal meaning. In Shelf 1 of the series, we see three tidy rows of belongings, including a Virgin Mary statuette, several brass bangles, a Chanel lipstick tube, a pterodactyl, a postcard from Daytona Beach, and a copy of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. In Shelf 4, we see a vintage Singer sewing machine, a cowrie shell, The Silver Palate cookbook, a menorah, a trophy, and a white elephant planter with leaves. “I feel like each person has a history that should be told,” Lucas said in HAF: New Photography magazine online. “I am a collector in a way because I photograph these things, and I care for them and the related stories… But, the objects go home with their owner.” She names related works in several series The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy. “I have a lot of feelings about museums and the colonial impulse to collect and own, and what ownership of certain histories and certain objects is. Museums hold onto the actual thing, assigning monetary and provenance value to it. I'm only interested in the sentimental value of a thing. And I'm only interested in photographing it.”  Cabinet of Curiosities, by Domenico Remps (Italy, b. Germany) 1690s I share Lucas’ interest in the sentimental relationship people have with certain material products, and her concern about the role of museums. Museums have come under scrutiny in recent years for problematic practices of coercive acquisition and looting, commodification of sacred cultural artifacts, and displaying other cultures through primitive or exotic lenses. Collecting and categorization are seen from this perspective as theft and dominance. Many museums today have modernized to align their best practices with repatriation in mind, returning stolen and sacred artifacts to their original owners, and updating their knowledge resources with more accurate descriptions of other people and cultures. But perhaps these true criticisms tell only part of the story. Curiosity and education about the world are at least partial drivers behind the idea and practice of the museum. The word “museum” comes from “muse,” a concept of inspiration. The museum is the house of the muse. However problematic past practices of archeology and research have been, museums now exist in cultures all over the world, sharing important information about people and the past. Museum goers and antique and artifact aficionados and collectors are often driven by genuine curiosity and admiration for the history and artistry of cultures beyond their own. Collecting is a universal impulse and practice, not just a colonial one. Even nomadic cultures like the Bedouin collect objects, often incorporating coins, amulets, and beads into portable adornment. Collecting was known already as far back as 3000 BC in Mesopotamia. Nor is object amassing a uniquely human phenomenon. Many animals collect things, too. Bowerbirds gather shiny objects to adorn their nests. They love blue objects best. Decorator crabs use shells to create disguises. Crows are known to collect coins and bright, shiny objects. Rats steal and hoard stuff, too, keys, coins, buttons, rings. Lacewing larvae, also known as “junk bugs,” have been gathering trash and debris for over a hundred million years, carrying dried vegetation and carcasses of other insects on their back since time immemorial.  Bowerbird. JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 4.0 The origin of museums themselves came from a kind of object lust. Some expressions of this fascination were indeed problematic and racist. Others came from genuine interest. As wealth grew in the 1500s, private collectors began amassing objects for home display, growing eclectic collections of historical and global cultural artifacts, taxidermy specimens, geology, other items of natural history, coins, bottles, relics, and works of art. They were sometimes called “curiosity cabinets,” reflecting curiosity about the world, and sometimes called “wonder rooms” or “Wunderkammer.” These object displays certainly showed off the wealth of the individual collector, who often opened the door to friends and colleagues to view them. Eventually, these collections grew into private or public museums.  Corner of a Cabinet, by Frans Francken the Younger (Flanders) 1619? Wunderkammer and muse houses were and are viewed as holy and magical. Their enchantment comes from the widespread human belief that objects themselves are enchanted, and the stories they hold about humans are profoundly important and meaningful, even mystical. This value is beyond monetary worth, but intrinsic and even otherworldly. The idea that certain objects have immense meaning is widespread among cultures and eras. Objects have deep sentimental value, connecting us to our own ancestors, to people we worship such as saints or celebrities, or to people and cultures that have vanished. Objects that are handmade have much deeper emotional value than objects that are mass produced. We believe that many objects have a kind of spirit or life of their own, and many objects are believed to hold symbolic or actual ritual powers. Amulets, talismans, and religious objects are often considered more valuable than those made of jewels or precious metals. It doesn’t matter if these objects are simple stone or wood, or garbage. People comb thrift shops and yard sales or riverbanks for debris that could hold such a treasure. A rusty old tin object with no monetary value is deemed priceless if an emotional, cultural, or ritual value is attached to it. Our attachment to objects is so universal that many religious practices seek to eschew this desire in the same way they encourage us to overcome or control our natural sexual urges. The idea of “living like a monk” is not just about chastity, but about detachment from possessions. Interestingly, in such practices, limiting the number of objects available to the observant means an intense attachment to specific objects. They enter into a deep relationship with particular revered objects that are invested with sacred, priceless, symbolic meaning. If all of us have some kind of attachment to objects, some are more attached than others. Collectors of course have specific, deep interests in objects of a particular nature. But worthless objects are an obsession for people who hoard. The type of object amassed distinguishes maximalism-prone collectors and hoarders, who compulsively gather stuff indiscriminately, often viewing refuse and precious artifacts as having equal, intense value. They might be equally attached to a Canadian Tire flyer or cheap mass manufactured holiday ornament as they are to a precious heritage artifact or diamond ring. Hoarders are also distinguished by the lack of organization and by the scale: they can fill all available space in their dwelling, to the point of peril for those living in the mess, and even if they occasionally attempt organization, mountains of assorted objects grow unruly around them, rather than being tidied and categorized aesthetically for display.  Hoarding. Photo by Vicki Moore via Flickr. CC BY 2.0 I grew up in such a situation. My mother was a hoarder. There was no refuge from the refuse, it piled up on every surface in every room. Mom squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars on junk, often in doubles or triples or more of the same objects, most never used, and died penniless. We had five refrigerators and they were stuffed full of spoiled food. When she passed away last year, there were bags of food still in her fridge from 1987. No attempt at clearing or change was ever made: our sizeable house was filled from top to bottom with crap never recycled or donated or tossed away. This included thousands of empty margarine containers, rancid toiletries decades old, plastic flowers, a sea of unopened boxes of Christmas decorations, cardboard, toilet paper rolls, envelopes from promotional mail, baby food jars, and dozens of trays of used cat litter. Mother consumed obsessively, too. I recall visiting a bead shop in the early ‘90s and she delighted the owner of the small store with a $700 purchase. She made two necklaces and the rest of the beads were rescued thirty years later from cartons of dusty Styrofoam, yellowing Woman’s Day magazines, and mouldy coffee grinds. Very little is understood about the psychology of hoarding. In Japan, it is called gomi yashiki, which means “garbage mansion.” It is often equated with poverty trauma in the developmental years, yet people who hoard are not universally poor. Furthermore, they spend to the point of desolation on space for storage and unused objects, seldom acting with frugality in mind. We were neither wealthy nor poor: my father was a factory worker with one job through forty years, and Mom inherited a large house and small farm from my grandparents. Every red cent and acre was spent on hoarding crap: the farm is long gone. Father worked himself into the ground trying to pay off the shopping bills, and he had nothing but his truck when he passed away in 2018.
If I have inherited these tendencies, it manifests very differently for me. I’m an impulsive shopper, marginally better with a bit of wisdom of the years. I am also prone to cleaning binges, eager to donate boxes of discards. I have no problem with parting with them. However, certain objects hold tremendous fascination and value for me. I avidly collect treasures and house them in my art studio on shelves lining every available space on the wall. I refer to this area as my “little museum.” Most people would unkindly refer to the objects that attract me as knickknacks or tchotchkes. It is an eclectic collection to be sure, but only certain objects make the cut. They must be small, the smaller the better, with miniature and tiny objects considered the most enchanting. I would never choose a regular sized doll, but tiny dolls and figurines abound. Original works of art or craft are also prioritized. Antiques and ancient artifacts are important, the older the better. Treasures from the world are as essential to me as personal sentimental pieces. And objects that are magical, talismanic, or spiritual, from an array of traditions, are the most important of all. None of the objects in my museum are valuable, but the collection is valuable to me personally.. I want these objects around me at all times, which is why they are in my studio and office, where I work every day. A few objects in the collection: Himalayan chime earrings meant to spook away evil spirits with their rustling; a seahorse skeleton dipped in sterling silver that I have owned since I was ten; cuff links from a friend who took his life a few years ago; my Opa’s broken harmonica; a lapis lazuli game piece from Jiroft, a civilization unearthed and discovered a few decades ago in Iran; a plastic miniature Teletubby doll; several original smurfs; a camel tooth; a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce from my long-ago days on the streets of New Orleans; a Roman era hat or cloak pin; a wooden angel from Germany with my mother’s name on it, from her childhood; a Stanhope rosary from Mexico with a tiny bead where you can squint into and see the Virgin of Guadalupe; a terracotta woman figurine from the women of Sejnane in Tunisia; a meteorite; exvoto art from a Mexican flea market; tiny figurines of Santa Muerte, purchased on site of the shrine of the goddess of death in the notorious Tepito district of Mexico City; pale pink pointe ballet slippers; filigree, coral and turquoise wedding ring from Uzbekistan; a childhood lock of a late bestie’s hair; tiny sterling dice; penca de balangandan, a 19th century pin full of silver and alloy charms, worn by enslaved women for protection and luck; a Moo cow creamer; a human rib bone from a medical specimen provider; a certificate from my then-young brother awarding “best sister in the world”; a small brass box from a girlfriend who was murdered in high school; a little Cuzco style painting I bought in Lima, Peru; a creative writing medal from eighth grade; a nkisi nkondi doll from Congo; a small wooden Madonna figurine from Bogota. Objects of this variety are a core part of my identity and bring a great deal of magic and meaning to my life. They connect me to other people, to my own memories and ancestry, to the creativity and imagination of other people and cultures, and they fuel my art, poetry, and stories. Images are also matters of profound fascination for me, whether of interesting people, objects, religious imagery, or art. Images have always been the backbone of my visual art practice, which integrates collage and mixed media on canvas or in three-dimensional “treasure boxes” that also incorporate tiny found or gathered objects.  Soap Bubble Set, Lunar Variant, by Joseph Cornell (USA) 1950 A like-minded soul who was equally charmed by intriguing objects and imagery was an American artist by the name of Joseph Cornell. Cornell was a prolific collector. He scoured thrift stores and antique shops on his daily walks, treasure hunting for addictions to his collection. Cornell chose a wide variety of materials: photographs of actresses and poets and ballerinas; toys, goblets, seashells, balls; flotsam and jetsam like springs and pipes and old watches; pictures of birds; maps; book pages. He sorted his treasures in a heap of boxes with labels in handwritten marker on the side: Durer; corks; tinfoil; dried pigment. He kept collages and found images in more than 160 folders or “dossiers” or visual material. Cornell was a shy and reticent man, intimidated by large groups of people. He largely kept to himself, and spent most of his time at home with his mother and with his brother, who had cerebral palsy and depended on Joseph for care. He had crushes on Emily Dickinson and ballet dancers but seldom talked to women. One exception was his friendship with Yayoi Kusama, then a little-known artist from Japan who was 26 years his junior. Kusama was struggling for recognition in a misogynist art market. Her work was radical and performative and overshadowed by men around her who stole her ideas. Both found each other easy to talk to and developed a deep bond. Kusama found Joseph gentle. She described their relationship as a “platonic romance.” In the long evenings strained by an uneasy relationship with Mother and preoccupied with his brother’s needs, Joseph sorted and arranged his stuff. He began juxtaposing his favourite images, gluing them into small boxes, adding twigs and trinkets and ephemera until he found them sufficiently aesthetic and poetic. Behold, assemblage, and shadowbox art, were born. Cornell’s object and image shrines were utterly enchanting and charmed audiences. The poet Charles Simic wrote in Dime Store Alchemy, a collection of poems inspired by the life and work of Joseph Cornell, “Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they'll make a work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and his religion.”  Cornell's Studio. Simic’s collection of spare poems and impressions after Cornell has become a classic of ekphrasis. But he was just one writer inspired by the object art. Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote a poem called “Objects and Apparitions”: “Monuments to every moment, refuse of every moment, used: cages for infinity./ Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, and glass beads: tales of time.” Anne Tyler wrote a novel in 1974 inspired by the artist, Celestial Navigation. Jonathan Safran Foer gathered short stories and poems after Cornell for an anthology called A Convergence of Birds. Our collective attraction to objects has always been difficult to explain. Theories abound about status, ownership, control, security, trauma, poverty, memory, superstition, and more. It’s likely they are all relevant to the discussion. But do they go far enough? It’s totally understandable, for example, that as children grappling with alienation, we create friends in our plush toys. Equally, that expensive shiny acquisitions can provide security for us if we grew up in poverty. But what explains the unique thrall that specific objects hold for each of us, over others? We derive incredible pleasure and purpose from our objects. And those that don’t have this effect are easily disposed of. Objects tell the story of our life and our ancestry, or they connect us to other lives and stories. They seem to have their own spirit, and our relationship with them reflects deeply on our very identity.  Handmade objects are widely perceived as having greater value than factory-made objects, whose thrill is often fleeting. Artistic objects, along with religious objects, sentimental objects, rare objects, and objects that are ancient are especially important to most of us. Psychologists, religions, writers, and artists continue to explore the role of objects, positive and negative, in our lives, and what might be at the heart of this mystery bond we have. One thing is true: overconsumption and greed are only part of the story. The large population of our current world, and our easy access to products, has helped steer us toward excess and environmental degradation. But objects are not a current vogue. People who own very few objects may have an even more profound attachment to their things than those with an embarrassing abundance. Anthropologist and archeologist Ian Hodder wrote a book in 2018, Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things (Yale Press), with a different take. He talks about the intricate layers of dependency that humans have with their objects. Whether practically, socially, or spiritually useful, we are bonded to our objects because we depend on them to live, to define our identity, culture, and lifestyles. Such a relationship and dependency is nothing new. Hodder says it goes back more than two million years, and that there aren’t any people or eras where we did not depend on things for crucial aspects of our existence, whether hunting, farming, faith, or as a way to connect to our past or to other cultures. Extracting from nature and leaving a mess behind has also always been part of the object drama. In the Stanford Report, February 5, 2019, Hodder said, “Entanglement is the idea that describes a dependency in our relationship with the things we make. We, as humans, depend on things in all sorts of ways, as tools to keep warm and gather food or as a way to show our social status. In my view, being dependent on things is what makes us human. We cannot be without things.” Lorette C. Luzajic  Death of the Master, by José Villegas Cordero (Spain) 1884 No Bull: the Bullfight in Art and History Spain in 2019 was a whirlwind of art, with one religious experience after another. Gaudi’s Sagrada, and the Antoni Tapies museum, for starters; Picasso’s Guernica, coined by a fellow artist friend as “one of the real seven wonders of the world.” But it is in Seville that I see the painting that will stay with me and get under my skin, a work I encountered for the first time in its natural habitat at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Seville. Jose Villegas Cordero’s Death of the Master, 1884, is a massive painting, 129 x199 inches. I count 24 life size figures gathered around the master matador in repose. It’s an astonishing piece of complexity, resplendent with detail, the glittering jewels of matador costumes on most of the gathered, their lean and muscular dancer’s bodies artfully arranged. The composition is flawless, opening to the viewer on the body of the master matador, as if we are standing there in the throng to mourn or pay our respects. The palette is sublime: murky green and greige for the concrete walls, with the bright white sheet over the supine master to draw us dead centre. Splashed overtop of the stark white sheet is a satin or silk chemise, pale peach, feminine. Our eyes move around to catch the red coat of the figure on the floor in the bottom left-hand corner, curious as he tenderly sorts the matador’s personal effects, including the delicate little slippers. The priest is shrouded in black. The mourners dazzle in shimmery golds, braided trousers, blues, purples, expertly muted. The story goes that this work took 15 years to complete. Villegas Cordero was a painter of genres, historical narratives, Orientalism, and costumbrista works. His work stands out from peers stylistically however, for an irresistible blend of raw, almost abstract gesture and texture, mixed with meticulously detailed and skillful draughtsmanship. His palette was idiosyncratic, too, managing a tremendous range of colours somehow corralled into a subdued overall effect. It’s a stunning painting, inspired by Manuel Fuentes Bocanegra, a Spanish matador who didn’t actually die until 1889, five years following completion. Bocanegra was gored in the stomach and died of infection after, at the age of 52. The romantic dramatization captures the reverence of Spanish culture towards the symbol of the matador, the beauty, the artistry, and the solemnity, too, the reality of death. **  The Dead Toreador, by Edouard Manet (France) 1864 It was my idea. The bullfight. I'd been reading too much Hemingway, and I'd fallen hard for Mexico. I'd been drawn in by Picasso and his peers: the bullfights were as integral to the creative intelligentsia and to bohemia as the cafes and disreputable absinthe parlours. And Manet's painting, The Dead Toreador, had cut me from the inside out. It's a brilliant painting, using a bold perspective that positions you standing over the corpse. The chiaroscuro heightens the drama. In the fall of 1865, Édouard Manet traveled to Spain. He wrote a letter to poet Charles Baudelaire, describing a bullfight he attended in Madrid as “one of the finest, most curious, and most terrifying sights to be seen.” I kept finding my way back to the painting. It was hard to look away. I'm not overly disturbed by my occasional bloodlust, if one wants to call it that. Reality is bloody as much as is beauty. One way of reconciling the paradox is accepting it. Another trait is that I take every opportunity for experience, regardless of my personal tastes or proprieties. I am curious about everything. Nosy. As an artist and writer I want to experience different things, to bear witness to everything I can. It is fascinating to watch people in their many habitats, observing what they do and trying to understand why they do it. I had missed bullfight season when I was in Mexico City. La temporada takes place for a specific time frame from November to March, the opposite of Spain, which runs March to October. There are few countries left where the age-old gladiator sport is still legal. Peru is one of them, so when I was planning a visit to Lima in 2016, I asked my friends to get me a ticket. I knew even then, before going, that it would be a one-shot deal for me. It would be the first time, and the last. I knew I would witness something terrible and epic. That I would be part of an ancient spectacle soaked in blood and roses. **  Taurobolic Altar to Cybele (France, former Roman Empire) 160 AD The modern corrida tradition dates to the early 1700s, spreading with Spanish colonialism to Latin America, where it was enthusiastically received. But variations of bullfighting trace back through Spain’s history, with appearances in written chronicles in the early 1100s. It was enjoyed by kings, peasants, visitors, and invaders. There are parallels to a variety of hunting games and spectacles in different cultures from Africa to Asia. Parallels have also been made to games and rituals where humans tortured and sacrificed other humans, which were shockingly commonplace everywhere, from Rome to Mexico to the west coast of Canada, with some suggesting that the animal came to stand in place for older atrocities. Perhaps. The oldest known mention of bullfighting is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose stories date back as far as 2100 BC, with a scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu fought and killed the Bull of Heaven: "The Bull seemed indestructible, for hours they fought, till Gilgamesh dancing in front of the Bull, lured it with his tunic and bright weapons, and Enkidu thrust his sword, deep into the Bull's neck, and killed it." Various mystery cults involved stories about killing bulls, or real-life practices. Tauroctony was an essential mythology in the worship of Mithras in classical antiquity, with depictions of bull killing in every Mithraeum, or temple. In turn, these ideas were borrowed from the even older Persian cult of Mithra, the lord of light, who was ordered by the sun god to sacrifice a bull. He did so reluctantly, but at the moment of death, creation of the moon, stars, skies, and earth was realized. The dead bull’s blood and seed fertilized every creature on earth, making us alive and sacred. An old Mithraic hymn declares, “Thou hast redeemed us too by shedding the eternal blood.” Such gruesome rites were not man’s domain alone. The taurobolium was the cultic practice in the Roman Empire of massacring bulls to the Magna Mater (the Great Mother). Her priests would baptize themselves in the blood of the beast, then leave the bull’s testicles as an offering. This strange gift of virility stood in for previous rites to the goddess when she was known by the name Cybele, and her priests castrated themselves in her honour. Mother was worshipped as the goddess who stood on the thresholds between the known and the unknown, the civilized and the wild, and the living and the dead. Today we continue to purge manifestations of our pagan past. The bullfight has been banned around the world, surviving today in only eight countries. In Portugal, the sport has been modified to outlaw the killing of the bull. Last year, Mexico also changed the rules towards a bloodless bullfight. Colombia is moving towards a ban as well. In France, the practice prevails legally in only a few historical regions. Protests between animal welfare groups and aficionado activists in favour of cultural preservation are ongoing in the few remaining places that practice the corrida, Spain, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru. **  Plaza de Toro, Lima, Peru, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2016 The matador. He is nineteen years old. He is taut and haughty and heartbreakingly beautiful in his elegant lime green satin capris. He strikes a pose, and then another, and then another. The song "Vogue," by Madonna, runs through my mind. He is smooth and sequined and his carefully choreographed elegance, his entrega, is pure artistry. But there is something raw and primal there, too, a jolt of bitter and addictive testosterone. He is very skilled, but even a rookie like me understands what this is all about: his very youth is at risk of being conquered. Andres Roca Rey might die in front of our eyes. He can disappear in the blink of the crimson magician’s cape. He is a sand mandala, a beauty that could be snuffed out in a whoosh of our collective sense of temporality. Yes. For him, for us, the fact he is staring death in the balls is exactly why we are here. ** It is horrible. We are horrified. The crowd screaming. A sea of men, and row after row of women in their finest maquillage, waving handkerchiefs. We watch as the carcasses are dragged out of the arena after each victory. The crowds cheer wildly. The whole thing is an affront to my Canadian cultural delicacies. It is inconceivable to me that humans would subject an animal to such cruelty and scream for it. There are vestiges of this primal behaviour in other contexts, of course, in hockey and football, in our taste for grisly murder dramas on Netflix. These sociological phenomena bring our brutal past to light: sport was once about throwing men to the lions or gladiators fighting to the death. In Mexico, an ancient kind of Mesoamerican soccer, ōllamalīztli, known for 3500 years, ended with the losing team (and sometimes the winning team) losing their heads to appease the gods and restore the order of the universe. Some reports show subsequent matches using the heads of the sacrificed ones. Such games were so popular that more than 2000 ballcourts have been excavated. The enduring popularity of the corrida be damned, from where we sit, it is senseless brutality. Thousands of us have gathered to participate in the killing of the bull. Ruddy-faced, tubby men; young labourers; old aunties with walkers and even wheelchairs; emo youth with guyliner and lashes as black as the night water of Barranco. Every square inch of real estate in the stadium is occupied. My friend next to me says, "I almost wish it is not the bull who loses." This is the dominant emotional response from the modern, progressive perspective. American female matador Bette Ford said, “In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.” I nod in agreement with my friend, but realize in an instant I'm a fraud because I don't share this view. Roca Rey is barely just a man out there, vulnerable, dangling a gauzy swatch of fuchsia before a steaming thousand pound monster. If one outcome is heinous, the other is even worse. The bull had no choice in this. This is true, and it is barbarism. But the matador, I grudgingly respect. He is putting his money where his balls are. He is standing there before the beast we are all here to kill. He is risking his own life. and we risked nothing but a few centimos and a headache from too much sun. We are safe in our seats, tidy, protected, basking in the luxury of the higher moral ground. In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway said, “It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could.” The matador puts his life at stake. But we are here for the same thing he is. We have paid to witness it. The death of this magnificent creature. ** Roca Rey of Peru is from a “taurine family.” His older brother Fernando is also a matador. His uncle was an ejoneador, a bullfighter on horseback. His grandfather worked in the Peruvian bullfighting administration. Roca Rey started in the arenas at the tender age of seven. As I sit ringside, he has just this year gained the status of full matador. He has already been gored countless times. A sensationalist headline in The Sun proclaimed him the “World’s Worst Matador.” My friend’s brother, who got the tickets for me, says this is nonsense. Roca Rey is already well-known and admired for taking extreme risks. His artful aesthetics are apparently unparalleled. Markos says that injuries reflect the daringness of the matador, the chances he is willing to take. They show that Roca Rey is fearless. Newspapers that deride such injuries as failure do not understand the obvious danger of taking on an angry 900 pound beast. But the matador we behold understands it very well. Markos tells me that at his last appearance, Roca Rey was stabbed in the buttocks. He was also gored in the mouth on another recent occasion, with several teeth knocked out. Both times, he swallowed his agony, and returned from the wings to take his enemy down. Indeed, by 2021, Roca Rey appears in an interview with Christopher North in The Critic Magazine. North says he is “arguably the best torero in the world, and unarguably the most popular.” Not every kid wants to be gored by a bull when he grows up. I am repulsed and awestruck. It is a war crime to place a child in the face of death this way, and everyone who attends these affairs, including me, are guilty of atrocity. But I also tremble to consider the depth of the passion of this thing, this longing. To be a matador is a vocation, a calling, a sort of possession. It is extreme sports or religious extremism, or both. "Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death," Hemingway famously stated. The sentiment echoes something my late husband said about his favourite sport, boxing. He loved it because it was a real fight, not a reenactment. The appeal of smashed zygomatics and mandibles and brain damage eluded me, but for a certain kind of person, the edge of the cliff is the most honest way to approach the truth about life. To grapple with reality and destiny. It is not a game. To truly understand that we are alive, we must face death head on. This perspective can help us understand what drives a matador, and why the spectacle appeals to sold out audiences across time. It’s not that the criticisms of animal cruelty and human rights fall on deaf ears. It’s that those are the obvious. You can’t stop the wars between man and nature, between gods and mortals, by wishing them away. The bullfight is not about killing bulls, not really. It is about life and death. No matter how often he prevails, the success of the matador is a temporary triumph. **  In his memoir, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death, now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.” Hemingway visited Spain and attended his first bullfight in the ‘20s. He was so taken by the experience that be became a lifelong aficionado of the sport. He even participated in bullfighting himself, in amateur events. Hemingway’s wife had suggested around this time that he transition from journalist to novelist. The Sun Also Rises is a book that explores the bullfight and its attendant moral questions, contrasting traditional masculine moral values with the emerging new mindset of the 20s. Hemingway examines life, death, tradition, and the relationship between men and women. Hemingway’s hardboiled, adjective-averse literature was widely admired but has less acclaim today, often viewed as prominent examples of the old boys’ school known as “toxic masculinity.” I confess to finding Hemingway’s flat, Spartan prose tedious at best. But his philosophical consideration of the bullfight as a mythic reflection of those subjects most central to the human conundrums of living and dying bely the notion that such a brutal sport is a meaningless one. Hemingway’s understanding of the corrida as a spectacle rooted in complex confrontations with the most essential questions of our existence was one shared by his friend with whom he attended the fights, the bullish artist Pablo Picasso. Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso regularly accompanied his father to Sunday fights from a young age. He viewed the corrida as a core part of his Spanish heritage. Picasso’s first known painting is The Little Yellow Picador, depicting a bullfighter on horseback. It’s an exceptionally sophisticated painting considering it was rendered at eight years old. It was a theme that Picasso returned to over and over. The corrida is the subject of at least 100 of his paintings. In 1970, just a few years before his death, he painted a series of matador works, including several of himself in the role, illustrations of a man wrestling with his own imminent demise. Aside from his most repeated subjects, the women he loved or loved to hate, perhaps the corrida was the theme with which Picasso was most consumed. Picasso saw the bull as symbolic of the unconscious mind, the inner animal and mystery with which me must all contend. In the violence of the drama of the bullring, he saw the mythic come alive, beauty, tragedy, and ritual. For him, the bull represented passion and sexuality, a raw force of eroticism. Picasso viewed the bullfight as a spectacle harkening back to the days of the minotaur, a mythology of man as half-bull. He saw himself as the mythic minotaur, an emblem of sexual power, instinct, violence, and irrationality. Viewed from this perspective, the bullfight then becomes something other than man defeating death. It becomes man’s battle against his own sexuality and nature. It becomes a symbol of man against himself. **  The Little Yellow Picador, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1889  The Bullfight, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1934  Self Portrait as Matador, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1970 An intellectual alliance and camaraderie between Picasso and Hemingway is unsurprising, given their parallel brutal personalities and reputations. The friendship between the thundering, virility-obsessed Picasso and the urbane, effete aesthete Jean Cocteau is perhaps an unexpected one. The polymath Cocteau was lanky, aquiline and utterly romantic. Referred to as The Frivolous Prince by his peers, after the title of his early poetry collection, his creative output spanned novels, drawings, plays, films, ceramics, paintings, wit, erotica, modelling and choreographing surrealist photography, and an avant-garde, performative approach to the world, infusing drama into everything he was and did. He saw everything in art and daily life as connected to mythology and the epic highs and lows of tragedy and comedy. He insisted only on calling himself a poet and all of his vast creative output as poetry, whatever its form. Cocteau was a fervent admirer of Picasso’s gate-crashing approach to art, viewing the driven, passionate Picasso as a formidable genius. He persuaded Picasso to design sets for the Russian Ballet in the ‘20s, bringing the avant-garde into the classical. Picasso, with his usual megalomaniac self-absorption, was unable to see anyone, least of all a flamboyant homosexual, as his equal, and accused Cocteau of sycophancy, mocking him in an interview. This led to a two decade rift in their friendship. In time, the pair reconvened. They were often seen seated together at the bullfights. Cocteau shared Picasso’s views of the corrida as ritual participation in ancient mythological drama. High tragedy had followed Cocteau since he was nine, when his father shot himself in the head.. Cocteau became obsessed with the subject of death, constantly incorporating classic myth tropes about death and the underworld into his creative work. His life and work embodied the idea that beauty and death were inextricably linked, opposites dependent on each other for meaning. Tauromachie, for Cocteau, was poetry itself, a space for the contemplation of the most profound mysteries. It was a form of ancient ritual and a fatalistic art form. The spectacle of the corrida was living myth. An aesthete to his core, the choreography and costume of the toreros were of deep significance to him. The artistry of the matador’s dance was essential, a ballet that was willing to lose itself in the ultimate sacrifice. Art to the death, complete surrender to destiny. For Cocteau, of course, the eroticism of the corrida was not just about machismo or even symbolism. As a connoisseur of male beauty, the matador was less a stand-in for the idealized male self, but an object of erotic desire. To the Spanish, the role of matador was entrenched in the perception of hypermasculinity. This seems strange to outsiders who see the obvious archetypes of femininity intertwined with the macho: the matador is beautiful, elegant, balletic, and graceful, with sequins and ornament that reflect women’s fashions. The dressing of the matador in his traje de luces (suit of light) is itself a ritualistic ceremony. (Does the suit of light harken back to Mithra, bull slayer and god of light?) The enigmatic costume is skintight, heavily embroidered and tasseled, with zapatillas (little slippers) and pink or white silk stockings. The sense of the feminine alongside the masculine was so strong for me that I wondered if the secret of the corrida had been hiding in plain sight all along: that like Cybele, it is the female who ultimately tames the bulls, and who vanquishes death while personifying life. In any event, it is no stretch at all to see the artful, idealized, perfected, prettified male as a source of erotic attraction for women and gay men. Cocteau depicted countless matadors and bullring dramas in his artworks. His trademark line drawings highlight the grace and dazzling beauty of the matador, and the intimacy of the dance and struggle with the animal. **  Picasso in white, Cocteau in tie beside him, at bullfight.  Matador, by Jean Cocteau (France) 1961 If the torero represented masculinity and virility, it makes sense that women share Cocteau’s ardent admiration for the erotic male bodies and the archetype of the matador. The matador has long enjoyed a kind of rock star status, easily attracting the attention of women. Pop icon Madonna expresses female desire in this context in her 1994 video, Take a Bow. In this ballad, she plays the lover of Spanish bullfighter Ernesto Munoz, so obsessed with the corrida that he neglects his wife. She celebrates the aesthetic of the torero and his dance, intersplicing sensual, contrasting scenes of his rippling adorned buttocks and thighs with her own soft lingerie, cleavage, and curves. She writhes in needy ecstasy, he moves in an eternal erotic dance, as the drama plays out between them and her rival, the bull. Madonna’s work grapples constantly with the personal and political portrayals of female desire, exploring the subject from every angle, accepting the submissive elements of female eroticism without neglecting the fuller bouquet that includes women’s sexual power. In a later performance, Living for Love, she assumes the role of the matador instead, slaying a stable of minotaurs, bringing the mythic and ancient motifs to the modern. **  Video still, Take a Bow, Madonna, 1994 Depending on one’s perspective of the corrida spectacle, the idea of the matadora is either obvious, or turns tradition on its head. There are more than ten thousand licensed bullfighters in Spain, and of those, around 800 are full status matadors. Only eight are matadoras- women who fight bulls. Women were banned from the role altogether until 1974. Some skirted the rules historically, eschewing the ban on foot by fighting on mounted horses. Francisco Goya, the grand master of Spanish art history, frequently portrayed La Tauromaquia. He immortalized the female bullfighter Pajuelera in his 1816 drawing, Manly Courage of the Celebrated Pajuelera at Zaragoza. Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada depicted a matadora in an engraving, dated between 1890 and 1910. Picasso portrayed his young mistress in a 1934 etching, Marie-Thérèse as Female Bullfighter. Predictably, in Picasso’s work, the woman appears in a submissive position, upturned, and docile, vanquished. The rare women toreros hold a different view. American matadora Bette Ford said, “I’ve been gored, my back’s been broken, my hand was almost ripped off.” She told Guernica Magazine, “… When you’re out there in the ring, the bull certainly does seem to stand a chance. The unfairness seems the other way around. I’m in the ring, I weigh 90 pounds, the bull weighs 900. I have a cape and a sword. The bull has two sharp horns. The bull is a 900-pound athlete, an intelligent athlete. It’s capable of guile. A bull will try to outwit you. “ Yet she was never vanquished. She described the fight as a “very spiritual engagement with power, with power and death." In her ten year career, she killed 200 bulls. **  Marie-Thérèse as Female Bullfighter, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1934  Manly Courage of the Celebrated Pajuelera in the Ring, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1816  Matador and Bull, by Elaine de Kooning (USA) 1972 While countless male painters have been inspired by the corrida, few female artists have explored the bullfight theme. Mary Cassatt painted a matador. Another notable exception is the abstract expressionist and figurative expressionist artist Elaine de Kooning. “I went to Juárez to see the bullfights, which immediately struck me as a heightened image of Southwestern landscape – the panorama of the arena, the heraldic colours…” (quoted in E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 1979, p. 255). Her series of abstract paintings shows the energy of the struggle, with bold gestures that captures the essence of chaos, aggression, dynamic physical action, and spectacle. **  At the Pub Torre del Oro, Madrid, photo by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2019 In Madrid, exhausted and exhilarated from the Prado, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the streets, we enter a tiny, buzzing pub and drop our weary selves onto a couple of barstools. What a place! An array of dusty, steely-eyed taxidermy bulls glare down at us. The walls are plastered in gore, in grisly photographs and newspaper clippings about bullfights. There are shrines to fallen matadors. TV screens compete with the din, blasting out replays of fights. We order cervezas to beat the heat, and, scanning the menu, decide to brave the rabo de toro y vino tinto: a Spanish delicacy of oxtail in red wine sauce. The Torre del Oro was mostly established for tourists, but it is based on a longstanding tradition of bull bars in Madrid, where corrida aficionados would gather after a fight to discuss the nuances of the event. Such drinking holes are familiar around the world as sports bars, with one distinguishing difference: these ones serve up the meat of the fallen bulls. Locals tell us the stew we adventurously ordered is more likely made with cow’s tail. There are specialty restaurants, however, where bull meat is served following the fights. We are told that historically, the dead bulls were butchered and distributed to the poor as a form of social welfare. Extra meat was consumed in village festivals by the whole community. This answers an important question for me. I could never say that I’m “for” bullfighting. Still, it is not so much a position on the subject that I seek, but understanding. But I had wondered what happens to the carcasses of defeated animals. I am relieved to learn that they are used for food and not thrown away. In my youth, I was a vegetarian for many years, but eventually resumed consumption. This return to nature had positive effects on my health. Refusing meat is an honourable religious act to minimize the suffering of God’s creatures. If cats and sharks do not concern themselves with the brutality of their diet, humans wrestle with questions of cruelty and sometimes seek out alternative options. For the rest of us, coming to terms with eating death can be difficult. Many of us live in denial, preferring not to think about it at all. I try to remember animals’ gift to us as something sacred. The gravitas of this sacrifice requires ongoing gratitude on my part. In this view, the bullfight takes on even more meaning. Sexuality, power, and the mythic battle between man and nature, between humans and the gods, are certainly aspects of the spectacle. Another is that most of us participate in this as more than spectators or philosophers. Perhaps the bullfight is also a ritual confrontation of the reality of sustenance. Most of us leave the actual killing of our dinner up to someone else, letting them do the dirty work for us. There’s an old adage that if you can’t kill it, you shouldn’t eat it, an idea that emphasizes understanding and accountability and moderation. Is the bullfight is an age-old reminder of the rites we participate in every day while we look away, oblivious, from the truth of death? In this view, the corrida is an artful and honest ritual, far more so than our obtuse, sanitized consumption of meat packaged in Saran wrap and Styrofoam. Lorette C. Luzajic |
Lorette C. LuzajicLooking at art and learning about it has been my lifelong passion, and it fuels everything I do: art creation, publishing, writing, and teaching. Visit this blog for occasional essays and musings on visual art. 
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