 Frenzy, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1893 Frenzy What is passion, if not a runaway train to which one clings for dear life, or a powerful stallion rearing up on hind legs, foaming at the mouth, dark and dangerous and wild? Władysław Podkowiński’s 1893 painting scandalized eastern Europe in its month on display at the Zacheta, and ushered in the era of Symbolist painting in Poland. Twelve thousand people flocked to the national gallery to see the massive, volatile depiction of a naked woman, arms and legs wrapped tightly around a frantic bucking steed, face upturned and head thrown back. From those thousands, not one brave enough to buy the work from the struggling painter who lived on fumes and slept on the floor. The ten-foot tall canvas was executed entirely in black, brown, and fiery orange, with the redhead’s tresses roiling into the storm of the stallion’s mane and motion. You could say she was the anti-Godiva, nowhere close to vulnerable and saintly. The legend of Godiva was about a pure and wholesome beauty devoted to justice, who rode naked on horseback through town in protest of taxes eating the poor. Here, instead, was a woman astride, given completely over to desire, in the throes of ecstasy. The title, Frenzy of Exultations, or, usually, just Frenzy, said it all. In another kind of frenzy, on the 37th day of the show, Władysław Podkowiński entered the gallery and stabbed the canvas with a knife, ending its exhibition. The artist had been very upset about not finding a buyer for the artwork. He had given all he had to that painting, body and soul. Podkowiński was severely ill with tuberculosis and worked to complete the art in utter exhaustion for months, often working from his bed. Some said the price was simply too high at 10 000 rubles, a ridiculous ask. Other accounts say there actually had been an interested patron, but he offered a third of that and his offer was turned down. From Podkowiński’s point of view, he understood the value of this work, that it was his magnum opus, a painting unique in all of art history. Plus, the chance for rest and real medical treatment was on the line. His life literally depended on that sale. Then there was the other side of the story: his fury towards his muse, Ewa Kotarbińska, whose husband had hosted the artist at his estate. People were talking: some said that the beautiful brunette’s face bore only a passing resemblance to the woman on the horse, but that clearly the artist had seen her body for himself and portrayed it accurately. Other stories held that when he had made his desires known to her, she had rejected him, refusing to leave her wealth and marriage for a starving artist. She banished him from the house to the rainy gardens overnight. Already sick, this was the nail in the coffin. Nine months following the exhibition of Frenzy and the vandalism of the painting, Władysław Podkowiński was dead. He was 28 years old. The artist’s stormy horse and rider was, one way or another, the end of him. There is no parallel artwork in the artist’s portfolio. Frenzy is considered the first Symbolist painting in Poland, the movement sweeping Europe, born from the belief that realism did not actually portray the real world. The mystical undercurrents of life, the hidden, esoteric, mythological, and unconscious were the keys to understanding humans and history. Symbolists in poetry, other literature, and visual art sought to show the deeper truth through metaphors, to both tell their stories and decipher the world around them through symbols. Podkowiński was known as a highly skilled magazine illustrator. After a trip to Paris where he discovered Monet, he was credited with bringing Impressionism to life inside of Poland. His gauzy, drowsy, sun-dappled ponds and gardens were populated with innocent children at play and happy ducks. With white picket fences! They were sweet trifles, lovely, and forgettable. It was his illness that drove Podkowiński into the subterranean recesses of his mind. He was face to face with the grim reaper, declining in the prime of his life. Death was consuming him from the inside out. He began to draw various rigorously detailed skeletons, and turned his attention from light to dark. Tuberculosis is a bacterial respiratory infection known in those days as consumption, because of the way the illness consumed you. In the late 1800s, upwards of 70% of people who lived in cities were infected. The disease has been traced back at least 9000 years and found in mummies, and is thought to be much older, even millions of years. It has been around much longer than humans. We often associate TB with tragic poets and artists like John Keats, Amedeo Modigliani and Edvard Munch. But it affected everyone, especially city dwellers who lived in close proximity and squalor. One in seven people in Europe in that era died from TB. Tuberculosis is still the world’s most deadly infectious disease, with over a million deaths per year. The vaccines are only moderately effective and antibiotic treatment is complicated, often involving four different drugs for a period of up to two years! In the context of what Władysław Podkowiński was facing, as a gifted young man with hopes and dreams rapidly going down the drain, nothing about the painting or its attempted destruction seem like madness after all. The profound disappointment in his rejection from the object of his affection would have stood in for all of his chances at love and life. And her sensible sentencing of a lusty youth to the outdoors after inappropriate advances, if that is what happened, could literally have accelerated his inevitable demise. Seeing her power, both sexual and financial, from his destitution and looming destruction, his obsessive desire and need is understandable. In his mind, Ewa held power over his life. Interpretations of the artist’s Frenzy draw from symbolist ideas as a whole. Certainly, there is the heady pleasure of an unapologetic woman and a visual representation of orgasm. But the painting also looks terrifying, showing the power and danger of desire and obsession, and the struggle between life and death. Though the woman is in rapture, the horse looks quite deranged, suggesting that in experiencing the pleasures of life, we are often oblivious to the headlong collision course with death. In ancient mythology about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the black horse represents famine and hunger. Thinking of hunger symbolically, we see ourselves completely consumed, driven mad by desire. But sex and passion are, of course, symbolic of the life force itself, for obvious reasons. After the artist succumbed to his illness, the painting was repaired. It toured to Moscow, Lodz, and St. Petersburg. In 1904, it was given to the National Museum in Krakow where it remains a prize part of the collection. In the absence of the artist’s voice, we can only speculate on the exact meaning and intention of the work. But one thing is certain: this painting about life was about death. Lorette C. Luzajic ** Poems and stories inspired by this artwork: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-writing-responses-wladyslaw-podkowinski  Children in the Garden, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1892
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 Portrait of Madame de Florian, by Giovanni Boldini (Italy) probably 1888 Giovanni Boldini’s Portrait of Madame de Florien The woman is pretty in pink, an ice cream cone or swirl of cotton candy under Giovanni Boldini’s brush. She is a whirlwind of cerise satin and soft lace, limbs and torso and upturned throat impossibly long. The viewer’s eyes follow her swan profile, the strong line of her nose, past the single gleaming rope of pearls adorning her tender decolletage. Her slim fingers splay suggestively, invitingly, framing the mystery of her small, elegant breasts. Boldini, from Italy and working in Paris during the Belle Epoque, was a society portrait painter extraordinaire, known for his whirlwind, razzle-dazzle aesthetic, as if the beauty of his subjects was a kind of electricity. In 1933, Time Magazine crowned him the “master of swish” for this frenzied quality. Countless beautiful women of status hired the painter, and also became his lovers. He immortalized them in a whirling thrum of vivacity, attuned to the most enchanting aspects of their personalities and their sartorial splendour. And like his frenetic, slippery style, he himself was tough to pin down, a man with many models and muses, but no wife. Until he had finished painting, that is. At the age of 86, Boldini married Emilia Cardona, sixty years younger. One particularly beautiful lover was Madame de Florian, the subject of the most famous painting of Boldini’s career. Its date of creation is widely contested, with sources pointing at a range of dates from 1888, when Marthe was 24 years old, to 1910, when she was in her forties. Whatever her age, Boldini’s passion and devotion was evident in every stroke. The portrait was a secret for at least a century. It was not seen until 2010, eighty years after the death of the artist. Along with the painting, it was Marthe, too, who was forgotten. After her death in 1939, she drifted into obscurity in the mists of time. Initially a humble seamstress from a modest family, Marthe had been a great beauty from the Paris half-world, the society that lived in the twilight margins, at the fringe of respectable society. In the gilded world of the Belle Epoque, or “beautiful era,” before WW1, there was a parallel society in full swing, one that rejected the Victorian mores of the era, one that prized beauty, art, music, and pleasure above all. It was a society of spectacle and indulgence, and the arts bloomed from the attention that wealthy patrons lavished on them. Fashion, too, blossomed. Haute Couture and French lingerie were ushered into the world on the bodies of the beautiful women mingling on display at operas and parties. The fluid, sensual curves of Art Nouveau embodied the era’s aesthetic in jewelry and wallpaper. Marthe had two infants named Henri, “paternity unknown,” the first deceased at three months old. Legend says she was hired to repair garments for the legendary courtesan Cora Pearl, and grew fascinated with the demi-monde. She herself became a demimondaine whose beauty was widely pursued. If she was not quite at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of courtesans, the crème de la crème as it were, Marthe certainly held her own with several prime ministers as her patrons. In the Belle Epoque, the courtesans were the queens. They ruled everything. These celebrities were known as “les grandes horizontales,” and grand they were, glittering in gorgeous gowns and jewels and silk stockings. But they were hardly “horizontal,” rather, women on top. They were prestigious, and did not associate themselves with the much more common streetwalkers or brothel attendants. Sadly, those impoverished women were quite literally a dime a dozen, in those times. While most of the grand courtesans came from humble origins, they competed for the wealthiest, most exclusive lovers, like men who owned businesses abroad or who lived in palaces. The courtesans expected to be established in mansions, furs, diamonds, carriages, and horses, with an eternal spigot for impulses and the finest Champagnes. And it wasn’t just about the money: these women were free to live on their own terms, love who they wished, travel, learn languages, attend the theatre, drink, and gamble. They wielded significant power as patrons of the arts, influencing tastes and becoming investors and collectors. The courtesans achieved their ranks for a variety of reasons: skills in the art of seduction and the boudoir, of course, but perhaps their performances outside of the bedroom were much more important. Spectacle was key: the more flamboyant and luxurious her personality, the bigger her clients. Most essential was being good company. A good conversationalist was smart, witty, and well informed. These women learned independently about those things that interested them, especially art, music, history, and business. Marthe’s portrait by a fashionable painter as lover was stunning but hardly unusual. If the courtesans were “kept” by wealthy gentlemen, artists in the era were “kept” by the courtesans who collected them and became their patrons. The women had some dependency on the painters, too, to ensure their likeness could be both looked at and preserved. What was unusual about the story of Marthe modelling was not her identity or her love affair with Boldini, but simply the way that the painting is a time capsule to another era, Marthe frozen like Sleeping Beauty for a hundred years, awakening in the age of Instagram to invite us backwards, to Paris and the golden age. Perhaps few visitors to her home after her retirement would have seen the greatest Boldini of them all. And certainly, Marthe had no idea when she died in 1939 that she would be resurrected, and that her story would be told in no less than four novels, capturing the public’s imagination. (The Paris Apartment, by Michelle Gable; Paris Time Capsule, by Ella Carey; The Paris Secret, by Karen Swan; The Velvet Hours, by Alyson Richman.) Certainly she would not have anticipated that her granddaughter, to whom she bequeathed her Paris apartment, would have to flee south to get away from the Nazis, or that the girl would never return but would pay the monthly rent for 70 years. It was only then, at the time of Marthe’s granddaughter’s death, that the rent went unpaid and the apartment entered into. And inside, under decades of dust, was another world, another time. Marthe’s realm was untouched for seven decades. It was a world of endless mirrors, of fleurs de lis wallpaper in ivory and pale green, of magnificent candelabra and elaborate gold carved picture frames, of floral porcelain basins, of velvet cream coloured drapery, of chinoiserie pottery. A taxidermy ostrich, now quite dusty and dead, was once an exotic treasure of decadent opulence. And in the middle of all of it, the centrepiece, and the masterpiece. Boldini’s painting, valued now at three and a half million, leaving Marthe, too, untouched, infinite, resurrected, the goddess of the story. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Ire: on Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire I was still a teenager when a big brouhaha broke out in Canadian media and around the dining room tables of people who loved art and outrage. In 1989 and announced a year later in 1990, the National Gallery of Canada had blown $1.8 million dollars on three vertical stripes of red and blue paint by American abstract expressionist colour field painter Barnett Newman. The work had been exhibited at a fair in Montreal and purchased with our tax dollars during an economic recession. As the Canadian weekly newsmag MacLean’s wrote later, “Public umbrage boiled over.” Barnett Newman’s works are common belt-notch purchases for curators and so most museums have one or another version of his zip paintings. He is hailed as an artist concerned with spiritual meaning, depicting Bible stories and Jewish concepts in elegant minimalism. His works are hailed as a million-dollar protest of American wars and imperialism. Voice of Fire was no less than God speaking to us through the burning bush in the Old Testament. “My goal is to give the viewer a feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time, of his connection to others, who are also separate.” Say what? I was between worlds in that era, extricating myself from high school and family, having just landed fresh and naïve in the big city, Toronto. My entire adolescence had been steeped in the passionate embrace of paintings and sculptures. For me, art and art history was at once substance and escapism. And I was of two minds about this particular controversy. I was a young writer on board with rebellion and anything anti-establishment. But I was also keenly aware that the National Gallery was, after all, the establishment; and that such money could go a lot further supporting artists of less fame and more talent. More, I didn’t like the painting. Almost no one liked the painting. MP Felix Holtmann said it for all the struggling commoners: “It looks like two cans of paint and two rollers and about 10 minutes would do the trick.” The intelligentsia mocked him as a clueless and blundering pig farmer. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones would gush later about the painter’s blue and white stripes, Onement VI, selling for more than forty million: “a powerful example of his ineffable style at its height of confidence and magic. A single white line divides a flat expanse of blue: it seems to rip open the universe, a crack in space and time.” he wrote. “Great art is essentially priceless.” But the greatest and ever-acerbic art critic Robert Hughes emphatically declared Newman “by far the least formally gifted” of the new minimalist abstract artists in my prize signed copy of The Shock of the New. “He had no discernible talent as a draftsman.” Hughes attributed any success the painter had to his temperament. “…He was tenacious and argumentative, and his reductive cast of mind served him well in the studio.” Newman’s admirers were just “avid for one more hero in an age of entropy.” He went on to say that “Their simple, assertive fields of colour hit the eye with a curiously anesthetic shock. They do not seem sensuous: sensuality is all relationships.” Hughes took the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly the nothingness I felt when standing before the giant stripes, on a visit to Ottawa three and a half decades later, finally seeing the infamous work in person for the first time. In that time, I have myself become an artist with “no discernible talent as a draftsman.” A few decades have convinced me even more profoundly of the importance of other skills and values in art: meaning, aesthetics, symbolism, creativity, texture, contrast, innovation, imitation, provocation, protest, ritual, to name a few. Though I do not share the staunch modernist’s rejection of traditional art, being a huge admirer of the wonders of our artistic past, I do not share the old western art academy’s rejection of modern or multicultural digressions from their viewpoint. Art is an incredible journey of different cultures, different eras, different skills, and different perspectives. And so I desperately wanted to feel something less ambivalent when I got there. I was at least expecting to be in on the joke. Lorette C. Luzajic  Voice of Fire, by Barnett Newman (USA) 1967  Voice of Fire at National Gallery, Ottawa. photo by author.  I'm Lorette, an award-winning mixed media artist; a widely published poet and writer of flash fiction; founding editor of two literary journals, The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw; founder of The Ekphrastic Academy where I teach art appreciation and creative writing; and much more. Looking at art and learning more about it has been my lifelong obsession and fuels all of my creative and professional practices. Here, you will find occasional essays and musings on art and artists. Enjoy! |