The Emperor of Ice Cream

The title comes from a famous American poem, by a writer who epitomized paradox in avocation and appearance, as exemplified in the portrait shown left, from 1952.

“Poet” would not be the first description that comes to mind in this photograph of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who looks more like a buttoned-up CEO than any cliché image of a creative type. Indeed, Stevens’ day job was as an insurance executive, but he became one of the great voices of modernist poetry. (The image is among those featured in Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets, on view through April at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

As I read through that great compilation of his work, The Palm at the End of the Mind (including the aforementioned “Emperor,” with the indelible line: “bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds”), there were two poems that especially brought me back to the percipience of Stevens, both offering intriguing connections to the realm of art.

In an analysis of the astonishing “Sunday Morning” the writer Robert Buttel saw Stevens as establishing himself as a kindred spirit to Henri Matisse, in that both artists “transform a pagan joy of life into highly civilized terms.” Based on a languid woman’s spiritual reveries on a Christian sabbath, and replete with religious allusions, its opening lines are among the most descriptively scene-setting in modern American poetry:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

And while the kindred-spirit aspects that Buttel alluded to in the connection to Matisse were no doubt philosophical, it’s not a stretch to see a visual bridge between the opening tableau of “Sunday Morning” and a piece like Interior with an Etruscan Vase (left) by the French painter, which followed many years later.

If the Matisse comparisons are subtle and under the surface, “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an overt homage to another artistic soulmate, Pablo Picasso, whose The Old Guitarist was painted in 1903. Again, a poem that features a striking Stevens opening:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

David Hockney played that guitar forward when he reexamined the Picasso work after being fascinated by the Stevens poem, in a series of drawings from 1977 (one of which is seen right), entitled The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney Who Was Inspired by Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired by Pablo Picasso.

Talk about full circle. Which, incidentally, is so much of what art is all about.

Watching a Window

An image that many Malaysian Catholics believe resembles the Virgin Mary appears in a seventh-floor window at a hospital near Kuala Lumpur, in a photograph taken on November 11, 2012. The onlookers in front of the clinic in the city of Subang Jaya grew large enough to potentially interfere with essential medical services, prompting officials to announce that the panel would be moved to a church to be evaluated by religious authorities. (Adding to the mystery, some claimed that the figure could not be detected from inside the hospital walls, but could only be seen from outside the facility.) The glass was transported to the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in the nearby town of Klang over the weekend.

(Photo: Reuters)

Tangled Up In Blue

Step onto the campus at the University of Florida these days and it’s likely you’ll soon be singing the “blues” — but not of the musical kind. “Blue Trees,” a public-art project conceived by Konstantin Dimopoulos, has awareness of the critical importance of trees in the environmental landscape as its primary goal, bringing attention to the troubling issue of deforestation that is taking place on a global scale.

The Australia-based artist, who describes the undertaking as a “social art action,” has previously dressed up arboreal settings (the trees are colored with harmless pigments that degrade naturally) in such cities as Vancouver and Seattle. “In order for me to get people to see the forest, I had to get the trees visible,” he says. “Trees are largely invisible in our daily lives, and it’s not until it’s too late that we realize how important they are to us both aesthetically and environmentally.” As for the offbeat choice of color, Dimopoulos explains that, “The fact that blue is a color that is not naturally identified with trees suggests to the viewer that something unusual, something out of the ordinary has happened. It becomes a magical transformation.”

Depending on the weather, the “transformation” in Gainesville is expected to last through this May, while the woody perennials of Houston are scheduled for their own splash of color later in 2013.

No Place Like Home

As if dropped from the sky in the most casual fashion, this installation that recently appeared at the UC/San Diego School of Engineering, by South Korean artist Do Ho Suh, is more than just a conversation piece. Like most of his projects, Fallen Star, as it’s called, addresses notions of physical space and impermanence, eliciting questions regarding boundaries, identity, and displacement. (Modeled after a cottage in Providence, Rhode Island near where Suh once lived, the one-bedroom house is pitched at a 17-degree angle, complete with a front yard and well-furnished interior. Visitors get a real taste of what it’s like to live on the edge after a walk-through.) What I find most interesting is its contrast between bucolic and disturbing, and larger still, how it makes you wonder about so many symbols of comfort that are based on fleeting foundations, along with their fragile underpinnings. (And on a more pop-culturish level, it brings to mind a certain topsy-turvy house from The Wizard of Oz…)

(Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann)

The Kubrick Eye

An exhibition setting from “The Shining” (1980)

It’s a testament to the breadth of the genius of film director Stanley Kubrick that even the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to his work barely touches on one of his most extraordinary ancillary talents: the uncannily perfect choices in music he so exquisitely utilized for his classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to his final opus, Eyes Wide Shut. Just this aspect alone would probably require an exhibit in itself.

Diane Arbus, “Identical Twins”

So we’ll leave his brilliant musician’s ear for another occasion and take in some of the visual-arts influences that permeated his films and are among the themes explored in Stanley Kubrick, which has opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a six-month residency, after appearing at a number of European cities before landing in the U.S. this month.

An installation comprised of over 600 objects and materials including props, cameras, scripts, and sketches, it’s the largest compilation to date of the director’s contributions to modern cinema. (Kubrick died at the age of 70, in 1999.)

It’s no surprise that the relationship between the filmmaker and art would pervade any examination of the Kubrick legacy. A striking example is revealed in the ghostlike twins, top, who made a memorable appearance in The Shining; it’s safe to surmise that the seminal photograph, Identical Twins by Diane Arbus, above right, made an impression on the director, who was a photojournalist early in his career.

Likewise, another scene from the same film, which has Jack Nicholson slumped over next to his typewriter before he begins a nightmarish descent into psychosis, harbors elements of the creepy 1799 etching by Francisco Goya, with the unforgettable title, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. (Also featured in the collection are the geometric planks by artist John McCracken that are believed to have influenced Kubrick in the creation of the mysterious black monoliths that figured so prominently in 2001.)

Film as canvas: “Barry Lyndon” (1975)

But the artistic apotheosis is probably the long-neglected masterpiece Barry Lyndon, now considered one of Kubrick’s greatest achievements, where the 18th Century was brought gorgeously to life in settings — inspired by such painters as Gainsborough and Watteau — that are stunning in their period beauty. Kubrick scoured numerous art books devoted to the epoch in order to accomplish the effect.

I can’t think of another director with quite as many levels of sensibility as Kubrick. I ran across a quote from colleague Martin Scorsese where he said, “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?”

And how lucky for film lovers, who’ve been privileged enough to share the incomparable views.

A young Kubrick with camera, in the ’40s