It Ain't Over Yet!

Still 11 days left in Christmas, 2 days left in Hannukkah, the Solstice is over but the Yule log is still with us.

Happy Holidays from Brooklyn and from Hollis, Queens!

Christmas

On Christmas, every child is the Christ Child.

Iraqi orphan

Santa Maria Gloriosa

A 12th century apse mosaic from Torcello near Venice






The Virgin of Vladimir, a magnificent 12th century icon from Constantinople sent to Kiev. A painting that has been worshiped to death; probably all that is left of the original are the faces of the Mother and Child. The rest is later restorations.






The Donskaya Virgin by Theophanes the Greek, a variation on the Virgin of Vladimir by one of the few medieval Russian icon painters who was not ordained.






The Blue Virgin from one of the oldest surviving windows in Chartres Cathedral, from the end of the 12th century





The North Rose window of Chartres Cathedral given by Queen Blanche of Castille. The window is about Christ's first coming. The Virgin and Child sit in the center surrounded by the ancestors of Christ described in the opening of the Gospel of Matthew,and by prophets who foretold His coming.






Fra Angelico, The Linaioli Tabernacle






Fra Angelico, The Cortona Polyptych







Donatello, The Madonna of the Clouds






Luca della Robbia, The Madonna of the Apple






Jan Van Eyck, The Dresden Triptych






Jan Van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. The artists of the Renaissance identified the Virgin Mary with the natural world, especially in this painting where Jan Van Eyck includes one of his most splendid landscapes in the background, a view of a city and surrounding countryside with distant mountains lit by the morning sunlight.





Jan Van Eyck, detail of the landscape from the Rolin Madonna. The painting is probably based on the Venite recited at the morning office in most books of hours at the time. As the Venite is a hymn to God the Creator, so is this painting as we view a sparkling morning landscape through the Trinitarian symbolism of three arches.






Rogier Van Der Weyden, center panel of the Columba Altarpiece






Rogier Van Der Weyden, detail from the Columba Altarpiece, to my mind, one of the finest Madonnas ever to come out of the Flemish painting tradition.





Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranite






Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat; Botticelli was a conservative reactionary who wanted to return to something like the romance and transcendence of earlier Pre-Renaissance painting. In an age when most artists used oil paints, Botticelli resolutely painted in tempera, by then a very old fashioned painting medium. Like all conservatives who want to return to the past, he ended up innovating. Mimicking the styles of the past would lead into the dead end of pastiche. So Botticelli created a very original and personal style.







Giovanni Bellini, a Renaissance Madonna in a beautiful landscape with echos of the old Byzantine icon tradition well known in Bellini's native Venice.






Giovanni Bellini, The Barbarigo Madonna; one of Bellini's best and least visited Madonnas in a church on the island of Murano near Venice.





Giovanni Bellini, detail from the Barbarigo Madonna, a splendid landscape.






Titian, Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine and John the Baptist; Titian's magnificent continuation of the natural poetry begun by Bellini.





Raphael, The Sistine Madonna; There's good reason why Raphael's Madonnas are such classics and so popular. He creates the impression that the Virgin and Child with 2 saints are descending from the realms of light to greet us. Raphael perfectly calibrates just the right amount of emotion, compositional harmony, and dynamism to create a perfectly gratifying image. This was the last Madonna Raphael painted entirely by his own hand. It was originally commissioned by Pope Julius II for the church of San Sisto in Piacenza. The Pope intended it to be a gift to Piacenza for the city's support for his military campaign to subdue the Papal States in Emilia Romagna. After the Pope's unexpected death, Raphael turned it into a memorial picture including Pope Julius' features on the figure of Saint Sixtus. Some historians argue that the wooden part that the adorable cherubini are leaning on is the Pope's coffin. Perhaps. St. Barbara on the right looks, not out at us, but down at the cherubs and the "coffin." At that time, St. Barbara was invoked at the time of death, along with the Virgin Mary. The parting curtain can be seen in a lot of Italian tomb art since the 13th century. It is as though the bed curtains part and the Virgin Mary and the host of Heaven arrive to greet the deceased. To my mind, it's a Christian version of a Japanese Buddhist raigo painting.






Correggio, Rest on the Flight Into Egypt with St, Francis







Nicholas Poussin, Holy Family on the Steps; Poussin's most magnificent variation on Raphael's work.





Rembrandt, Virgin and Child, etching; a Protestant interpretation of a traditionally Catholic subject





Giovanni Batista Tiepolo; one of Tiepolo's regal Rococo Madonnas








Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, pastel; not a religious picture, but I believe it belongs here. Her work is in that long tradition of Madonnas that begins with the Renaissance, though here secularized and brought into the modern era. While Cassatt discarded the transcendence, she lost none of the tenderness inherent in the subject matter.






Henry Moore, Virgin and Child carved for St. Matthew's Church in Northampton in 1943; a 20th century attempt to return to some kind of suggestion of transcendence in an age where all the traditional language and imagery of religion are in doubt.




My favorite remarks on this subject come not from Dante or Saint Bernard, but from a scientist and author, a secularized Jew, Dr. Jacob Bronowski:

Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, HG Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, for a thousand years. But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead, ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island -- why, they even look like Mussolini! That is not the essence of the human personality, even in terms of biology. Biologically, a human being is changeable, sensitive, mutable, fitted to so many environments, and not static. The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, The Holy Family.
When I was a boy in my teens, I used to walk on Saturday afternoons from the East End of London to the British Museum, in order to look at the single statue from the Easter Islands which somehow they had not got inside the Museum. So I am fond of these ancient ancestral faces. But in the end, all of them are not worth one child's dimpled face.

Happy Holidays to All.

Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel, who is to be buried today, belonged to that rarest of species, the leader who took on an empire, and won without firing a shot. He was a playwright with roots in absurdist and surrealist literature. Like his fellow Czech national, Franz Kafka, he realized that the absurdity and misery reflected in his work came not from his psyche, but from the reality of life under the heel of arbitrary and lawless power. For Kafka, it was the dying absolute monarchy of Austria-Hungary. For Havel, it started with Hitler's occupation and extended into the long years of Soviet domination. The basic requirements of his literary work forced him into politics. The very absurdity that Havel wrote about could be turned back upon the quisling regime and create a space where people could breathe freely, if only for a moment. He needed that little moment of space in order to write. Almost against his will, he found himself involved in dissident politics, and at the forefront of the effort to end the Soviet occupation of his country.

While the North Koreans wail over the death of their god king, and others mourn for Christopher Hitchens, I'm saving my grief for Havel who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk.








Havel was a lifelong Zappa fan.

Note to My Readers

... all 2 of you out there.

This blog has been rather spotty the past few days. I'm buried in work right now with the end of the semester. Believe it or not, I have a lot of projects underway in my studio, but none of them are getting finished and are on hold. Not only the workload, but also some necessary construction prevents me from going there. They are installing new windows and heating in my studio, but they are also having plumbing problems in the building (as in port-o-potties in the back lot).

On top of all that, I'm back on the insomnia/ depression treadmill up at 3AM playing solitaire and feeling like crap in the morning. And yes, I do go to bed earlier these days, usually around 10PM.

Above all, I'm feeling an overwhelming sense of futility these days. Maybe it's just the annual holiday blues and it will pass as soon as Xmas is over.

I hope to be back to regular posting shortly after Christmas, if not before.

And since Brad Evans, our resident sociopath, is back in business, I'm taking the comments offline. If you wish to speak to me, then do so on Facebook or by email.

Two Cheers for Obama

Barack Obama is the ultimate dream date heart-breaker. One minute he makes your fondest dreams come true, and then the next he's flirting with your worst enemy right in front of you.

Barack Obama is the best president on gay issues ever, hands down. Far more than any of his predecessors (and more than his successors I fear), he's been out front and in the lead on gay civil rights. Of course it's political calculation, but that doesn't preclude genuine conviction and some courageous leadership. Ending the ban on gays serving openly in the military was a major accomplishment, and in the teeth of a hostile Republican House. He's now out front of Europe on the issue of international recognition for the basic human rights of gays and lesbians.

One of his unsung accomplishments is in the area of education, especially the student loan program. He brought a certain measure of sanity to a program long out of control by taking the profiteers out of it. Tuition hikes are still out of control, but at least some measure of law and order returns to the once very lawless and profitable business of interest, penalties, and fees. Loan repayments are still a huge burden on the young, affecting their decisions about careers (there's a reason why a lot of MDs these days are foreign; most Americans can't afford the quarter million dollar debt load to go to medical school, while other countries see paying the high tuition and expenses as an investment in their best and brightest).

The health insurance reform plan is a lot less than the Medicare-for-all solution that I'd like to see. But, it is the most significant piece of progressive legislation since the Medicare Act of 1965. It will end many of the worst abuses by the insurance and health provider industries. It will make health insurance available for many more people, though not for everyone.

Barack Obama decisively ended the reckless go-it-alone cowboy foreign policy of the second Bush Administration. While the damage is not undone, there is a new and more cooperative approach to the rest of the world that goes a long way toward restoring at least some of the lost authority and power of the USA. Obama deserves credit for ending the Iraq War and drawing a line under the Afghan War.

And yet, he is the whole reason the Occupy movement exists.

Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, depends on corporate patronage, and most of it came from Wall Street. That patronage kept him from sensible policies like seizing and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks that even the Reagan Administration used on the collapsing savings and loan industry. Wall Street influence on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue kept post-crash regulatory reforms very minimal and full of loopholes. The SEC remains an emasculated agency. The current reforms are far short of a necessary revival of the Glass-Steagall Act that once forbade banks to gamble with depositors' assets.

That same financial industry influence keeps any real relief for underwater homeowners a very remote prospect.

The House Republicans humiliated the President in last summer's budget battles. He allowed himself to be humiliated with his repeated preemptive surrenders on major budget policies. He nearly lost my support entirely when he offered near unilateral surrender on Social Security and Medicare. I'm willing to delay and even halt progress in the name of political expediency, but I'm not willing to go backward.

Obama's absence on the issue of economic justice is the whole reason for the rise of Occupy Wall Street. That's the problem with being a progressive. The leaders of the Democratic Party are usually in bed with the very people making life miserable for everyone else. As a consequence, the rank and file must take matters into their own hands.

His worst offense of all is his continued expansion of the National Security State begun by Cheney and Company. Obama's decision not to veto a bill mandating the arbitrary detention of American citizens by the military puts the long term health of our democracy in doubt.

On some issues, Obama is another FDR. On most others, he's another Grover Cleveland.

Since it looks like the Republicans are offering us a choice between Gordon Gekko and WC Fields with a back up chorus of assorted crazies, then there is no question who this blog will endorse in the coming election year.

Four more years of the black guy in the White House. We could do a whole lot worse.

Is There Something In The Water?

Unfortunately for the future plutonomy, it looks like the unwashed masses will not make a return to serfdom quite so smoothly and quietly after all.

It's hard to return to servitude and humiliation after tasting freedom and dignity.

Expectation, the spark of revolution. Something to contemplate for Advent.

Moscow

London

Cairo

Tel Aviv

Santiago, Chile

New York

Dallas