Library Culture Picks by Mike Duffy: June 2019

For the summer and, indeed, for months beyond Le Musée en Herbe offers Monsters, Mangas and Murakami, a monstrous exhibition for people 3 to 103 years old. This exhibition is most alive and fun when it is made into a game for children by the outstanding guides who lead small groups through the rooms on a pictorial scavenger hunt. The scrolls, prints, manga boards and figurines present images, both directly and in hiding, for kids to find. Flowers with faces, the cult-figure super hero Astroboy, monsters and funny pictures fill out the four rooms of the museum. I watched a group of 3 to 5 year olds happily engaged in looking at and talking about what they were seeing. Some families opted to take the guide books and do the searches themselves while 8-to-11 year olds appeared satisfied to sit and read sample Manga and graphic books. What is it that captivated these boys and girls?

Of course, monsters capture the imagination of many children, but here it is the presentation through Manga and artwork that creates an especially rich environment. Manga is a form of graphic storytelling with historical antecedents and contemporary progeny. Pictures rather than words tell stories on Egyptian temple walls, Greek vases, Roman mosaic floors, stained glass windows and in both 9th and 19th Century Japanese pictorial tales. Modern comic strips, cartoons and graphic novels continue this rich tradition of using rather flat, often black and white, images to propel a narrative with little use of words. Expressive faces, large eyes which can convey love or fear, broad vaudeville gestures, conventional figures—these are the tools of the artists and storytellers in Manga and related forms. By the start of this century, close to half of all books and magazines sold in Japan were Manga, with its good-versus-evil, battle-filled, sometimes sexual, boy-oriented content, although now Manga are also written with female superheroes. (Interestingly, France is second only to Japan in sales of Manga.)

The very popular (and successful) artist Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) works in graphic storytelling, in complex and colorful designs, in sculpture, video, advertising, and above all, in commercializing his highly developed Pop-Art sensibility. On display here, a pretty, geometric pop-floral design carries a subtle environmental message, while in other work (not on display), he has worked on videos for Kanye West and Pharell Williams as well as on handbag design and merchandising display for Louis Vuitton. Like Andy Warhol whom he idolizes, Murakami recognizes no boundaries between art and commerce, seriousness and fun and in this exhibition a sculpture, Manga story boards and figurines delight with Murakami’s inventive imagination. Also like Warhol, Murakami works with others with a cooperative, Kaikai Kiki, through which a team realizes works that Murakami designs. This also resembles the methods of contemporary artist Jeff Koons as well as that of mid-20th Century Victor Vasarely. Along with Warhol, Koons, and Vasarely, Murakami transcends traditional ideas of what art is and what an artist is to create signature Pop Art, Op Art, Manga images and figures.

Advance planning for a visit to Le Musée en Herbe will pay off. The guided groups for children were sold out through advance reservations when I visited, and the staff suggested calling several days ahead of your reservation if you would like some English language accommodation. For me, somewhere between 3 and 103, this experience was an introduction to several artistic expressions that I usually pass by quickly and a reminder that even the youngest among us can be thrilled and enchanted by the imaginative work of creative geniuses. Monsters, Mangas and Murakami, your kids will love it.

After seeing Hammershøi, The Master of Danish Painting at Musée Jacquemart André you could conclude that Vilhelm Hammershøi’s works are dark, depressing, based on the grays and browns with lone figures or no figures, and you would be half right, but only half, as this quintessentially Danish painter understands the wonder of faint sunlight coming through a window during seemingly endless winter.

In the first room, there are two paintings with several figures; this will be the last time you see people pictured together in the exhibition as Hammershøi paints single people, empty rooms and empty landscapes again and again. You will also see a slight smile on the face of one of the figures in Three Young Women (1895). That, too, will be the last you see as most of the figures in his paintings have their backs to you. Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) thought Five Portraits to be his greatest painting and it is both very modern and very 19th Century with the artist, his friends and brother sitting in a Last Supper-like setting, each seemingly without any relationship to the other. His single, large female nude in another room also betrays signs of modernism in its unflinching presentation of a human figure apparently exactly as she appeared with no brushing away any of the flesh. Yet these, to my mind, are not the important figurative works on display. Those are pictures of his wife, Ida.

In the next to the last room, all of the paintings are of Ida. She appears alone, mostly with her back to the viewer. In only one, Hvile or Repose (1905) does she seem to be a real individual, resting in a chair. It is, indeed, a lovely picture, but it is not typical of Hammershøi’s repeated presentations of her. In picture after picture, Ida appears standing, alone, looking out a window or placing a cup on a table, always in their home, almost always from behind. The rooms are sparsely furnished and almost all without decorative elements, but what is glorious is the light coming through a window. While Hammershøi is often compared to another Northern European master of light shining into a room, Vermeer, it is the differences which are first noticeable. There is a color-filled vitality in the Vermeer works and a gray stillness in those by Hammershøi. Vermeer’s works sparkle with all the glitter of the Dutch Golden Age, furnishings and clothing reflecting the wealth of the times and picture women facing the viewer. Hammershøi, in contrast, paints relatively bare rooms, a woman dressed in black facing away from the viewer. Yet, what they share is a sense of the importance and beauty of sunlight when it enters an otherwise dark home. (Another comparison might be to the work of American Andrew Wyeth who also painted plain interiors in a direct, realistic fashion.)

The final room, following the wonderful pictures of silent, still Ida, contains fantastic, utterly realistic paintings of the interior of the Hammershøi’s home. Only one includes a person, the others allow us to see and understand what light must mean to those who live in far northern climes. Hammershøi often shows sunlight brightening a space just outside the doorway of a room, the sun streaming in through an unseen window, lighting up but not necessarily warming the home. There is a great play of light and shadow and a suggestion of silence. These may be stoic moments, but they are not necessarily sad. The white, brown and blue-gray colors are indeed muted tones and it is in the quiet, nearly contemplative scene that the irresistible attraction of the sun unfolds.

Three rooms, one each with landscapes, buildings or nudes, offer surprises. Hammershøi paints in the tradition of Danish and Dutch landscape artists who worked without dramatic mountains as backdrops and his pictures are flat, people-less, moving toward abstract bands of color. Seeing them, you realize that it was no wonder that Van Gogh whose painting career is fully contained within the lifespan of Hammershøi would go wild on finding the bright light and colorful sunflowers and wheat fields in Arles or San-Rémy-de-Provence. The quiet presentation, again people-less, of Hammershøi’s The Guilford Street Jewish School (London) (1912-1913) bare, almost bleak, contrasts with a nearby 1911 painting of ruins by his brother. The latter is macabre, almost cartoonish while the former can be seen to have a serene beauty, and the single nude painted in his maturity stands interestingly in contrast to his other work. It was done as part of a commission and that may have led him away, momentarily, from his otherwise somber, impersonal approach.

Vilhelm Hammershøi was a true master of his craft, whose highly disciplined presentations often mimic the photography that he loved. Strangely, he cropped his canvasses the way one crops a photo, that is, he painted a large canvas, then cut out only that portion he wished to show others. He was thought to be terribly modern with his cold, distant portrayals of people and places and through his use of quick, short brushstrokes and smudges in many works. In the exhibition there are a few works by his contemporaries (his brother, brother-in-law and a friend). These highlight how much depth there is in Hammershøi’s paintings, how great a painter he was, how he was, indeed, a master of Danish painting.