Liberal Arts Blog — Bridges — The Pont Neuf (Renoir, Paris), the Brooklyn Bridge (Stella). Sydney Harbor (Moore)
Liberal Arts Blog: Friday is the Joy of Art, Architecture, Design, Film, Fashion, and All Things Visual Day
Today’s Topic: Bridges — the Pont Neuf (Renoir, Paris), the Brooklyn Bridge (Stella). Sydney Harbor (Moore)
Do you have a favorite bridge? A favorite painting of a bridge? But before we get to bridges, a recap for those new to the blog.
We ended 2023 with posts on English painter John Everett Millais (1829–1896) and Danish-French-Jewish painter Camille Pissarro (1830–1903). We began 2024 with Georges Seurat (1859 -1901) and Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). Then we jumped around a bit thematically from the film “Barbie” (2023) to a consideration of the images of five elephants (from Ganesh and Hannibal to Babar, the white and the pink) to images of marcescence, syzygy, and kairos. and, then the most important images with which to plaster the walls of schools, brains, and memory palaces eg. (eg. the Buddhist Wheel, Ulysses tied to the Mast, the hourglass, the skull, and the tulip, and, of course, Orion).
Then a three-part series on hats beginning with the now ubiquitous flat cap (aka newsboy cap, golf cap, Irish cap…..). Then, the fedora (think Indiana Jones, Humphrey Bogart), the cowboy hat (think the Marlboro Man and Little Nas) and the Easter Bonnet (think “Easter Parade” by Isaiah Berlin, Haley Mills, Judy Garland). Last week we moved to the Russian ushanka, the Canadian “toque” (beanie), and the Peruvian “Chullo.”
Two weeks ago, the first in a series on dresses, we featured Gustav Klimt’s golden dress, Audrey Hepburn’s little black dress, Grace Kelly’s white wedding dress, and Julia Roberts’s red opera dress.. Last week, in part two, we considered style, length, tightness and the hemline as a stock market indicator.
Back to bridges. I grew up in Washington DC, and my first memory of a bridge is being terrified crossing Key Bridge over the Potomac River between Georgetown and Rosslyn in Arlington County, Virginia. First case of acrophobia. In college and graduate school, my morning run would take me from the John W. Weeks footbridge in Cambridge up to Watertown or down to the Salt and Pepper Bridge between MIT and Beacon Hill. In Paris, I would run along the Seine from the Pont Neuf connecting the Ile de la Cite to both the right and left banks up the Pont d’Iena linking the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero. What are your fondest memories of bridges?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
LE PONT NEUF — PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR (1872) National Gallery, Washington DC
1. “The Pont Neuf is the oldest standing bridge across the river Seine…It was completed in 1607 by Henri IV. In 1867, Claude Monet and Renoir depicted the bridge in their series of river paintings, returning to the subject again in 1872. This time, they were painting in the turbulent aftermath of the Paris Commune uprising.” (Wikipedia)
2. “Both Renoir and Monet painted separate works using the same perspective to depict the Right Bank side from the second floor window of a cafe. Edmond Renoir, Renoir’s brother helped him to set the scene by delaying people walking on the bridge and asking them questions, giving Renoir time to sketch their likenesses. Edmond himself appears twice in the painting with a walking stick and a straw bowler hat.”
3. Renoir’s most beloved paintings include “Au Bal du Moulin de la Galette” (1876), at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris and “Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880/1). at the Philips Collection in Washington DC. See second and third links below.
JOSEPH STELLA, BROOKLYN BRIDGE: VARIATION ON AN OLD THEME (1939)
“To Italian-born Joseph Stella, who immigrated to New York at the age of nineteen, New York City was a nexus of frenetic, form-shattering power. In the engineering marvel of the Brooklyn Bridgte., which he first depicted in 1918 and returned to throughout his career, he found a contemporary technological monument that embodied the modern human spirit. Here, Stella portrays the bridge with a linear dynamism borrowed from Italian Futurism. He captures the dizzying height and awesome scale of the bridge from a series of fractured perspectives, combining dramatic view of radiating cables, stone masonry, city scapes and night sky. The large scale of the work — it is nearly six feet tall — conjures a Renaissance altar, while the Gothic style of the massive pointed arches evokes medieval churches. By combing contemporary architecture and historical allusions, Stella transformed the Brooklyn Bridge into a twentieth century symbol of divinity, the quintessence of modern life and the Machine Age.” (Whitney Gallery notes, 6th link below).
2. “His fascination with the bridge began with his first sight of it shortly after his arrival in America in 1896 from his native Italy. He described it as the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America. It was not until moving to Brooklyn and actually living in the bridge’s shadow that he committed his feelings to canvas: “Many nights I stood on the bridge — and in the middle alone — lost — a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness — crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers — here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites — shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in the arteries — at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulfurus voice of the trolley wires — now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below — I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.” ( Yale Gallery notes, 7th link below)
3. “Stella was born to a middle class family in Mura Lucano, a village in the province of Potenza.” Potenza is located in the region of Basilicata in southern Italy which you can think of it as the instep of the Italian boot between the toe of Calabria and the heel of Apulia).”
NB: “His grandfather Antonio and his father Michele were attorneys, but he came to New York City in 1896 to study medicine, following in the footsteps of his older brother Doctor Antonio Stella…However, he quickly abandoned his medical studies and turned instead to art, studying at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase.” Life is full of surprises!
THE SYDNEY HARBOR BRIDGE — JOHN D. MOORE (1936)
1. I have never been to Australia, but I love the Sydney Harbor Bridge and this is the most appealing painting I could find this morning while surfing the web. Do you know of a better one?
2. Other iconic sites of Sydney are the Opera House, Bondi Beach, and Manly Beach. Is there a great painting of either of the three?
3. “Although practicing as an architect, Moore also maintained his career as a painter. Like his fellow artists in the Contemporary Group founded by George Lambert and Thea Proctor, he contributed to the development of the modern movement in Sydney through an approach which emphasized formal construction. Using the framework of architecture, Moore’s view of ‘Sydney Harbor’ was taken from the balcony of his house in the eastern Sydney suburb of Vaucluse. His well-regarded landscapes, more often in the medium of watercolour, arose from a love of sketching out-of-doors and for the watercolours of English artists John Sell Cotman, Constable, James Innes and Wilson Steer.”
NB: The most visited Australian art galleries are the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney. Have you been to either? Any memories?
Le Pont-Neuf (Renoir) — Wikipedia
Pierre-Auguste Renoir — Wikipedia
Bal du moulin de la Galette — Wikipedia
Luncheon of the Boating Party — Wikipedia
Joseph Stella | The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme
Brooklyn Bridge | Yale University Art Gallery
https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/6382/
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/moore-john-drummond-7638
Art Gallery of New South Wales — Wikipedia
National Gallery of Victoria — Wikipedia
Key Bridge (Washington, D.C.) — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned recently or ever related to art, sculpture, design, architecture, film, or anything visual.
This is your chance to make some one else’s day. And to cement in your own memory something cool or important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that is close to your heart.
