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Picasso

POETRY

‘CHILDREN PLAYING ON OMAHA BEACH’: David Seymour

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read507 views

The war is two years over. The tide is out,

and the beach clear of detritus except

for part of an upended landing stage,

like a leviathan’s jaw, in a pool.

Beside it there are four small children,

who are playing the serious, absorbing games

the very young play with wet, fugitive sand.

The photographer, whose parents were murdered

by the Nazis, was killed by machine gun fire

near the Suez Canal. He photographed

Ingrid Bergman with a dove, and Picasso

with ‘Guernica’; covered the Spanish

Civil War, and the founding of Israel.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

INTENSIVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read504 views

‘The body is…an extraordinary laboratory of possibility.’

Anthony Gormley

 

One sunny September Saturday I left

the Welcome Collection’s airy reading room,

stopped at the Picasso mural then took

the wide circular staircase past floors of

exemplary, aesthetic exhibits

of grave clothes, dentist drills, tranquillisers,

body parts, through the café and bookshop

into Euston Road’s fumy hugger-mugger.

 

I heard the siren first, behind me, saw

the traffic, past Euston towards St Pancras,

begin to slow as one of Great Ormond Street’s

acute care ambulances barrelled

down the outside lane then suddenly swerved

through an emergency services gap

in the central barrier and drove towards

the three lanes of oncoming vehicles

paused at the lights where the ambulance

would turn right – and I paused, amidst London’s

extravagant roar, moved by all this

for such a little life.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read703 views

‘Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!’
PEDAGOGICAL SKETCHBOOKS, Paul Klee, 1925

 

Cruising from Westminster to Greenwich, we passed
Tate Modern, the old Bankside power station –
art as regeneration. The current show
was ‘Paul Klee – Making Visible’. “Making
a fool of himself, more like!” called the captain
over the tannoy. There was much laughter
and some applause. The 02 Arena
and the Thames Barrier came into view –
two works of abstract art as engineering.
In the Royal Hospital’s Painted Hall
are Thornhill’s baroque maritime murals –
representational art as décor
and establishment propaganda.

On the return trip, a different captain
made the same remark – to the same effect.
Klee and his peers had been many decades
dead and were, seemingly, still a threat –
despite the sponsor, EY – Ernst & Young –
trusted global accountants and auditors!

Klee catalogued his work precisely.
‘Making Visible’ followed his schema.
In the ‘20s room, I studied his ‘Wohin?’ –
‘Where to?’ – oil on paper, A4 more or less –
a stylised landscape of seven trees –
straight trunks, leaves and branches circular,
six deep green, paint richly daubed, the seventh
a discreet orange – and varicoloured,
irregular fields, no lanes, paths – the title
painted in as part of the picture.

I had seen the work before: exhibited
in Chicago’s Art Institute, built
as part of the 1893 World Fair –
architectural art as marketing.
The exhibition was a reprise –
a sort of victory roll – of the Nazi’s
‘Entarte Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’,
mastered by Goebbels, opened by Hitler
in ’37 in Munich’s Chamber
of Visual Arts. In addition
to Klee’s, there were works by Chagall, Grosz,
Kandinsky, Kokoscha, Mondrian et al –
snatched from the public galleries of the Reich.
One might have expected the exhibition
to have been followed by the public
immolation of the works of art,
like the burning of books in ’33.
Some disappeared as Europe broke apart.
Many, like ‘Wohin?’, travelled safely
abroad. Money makes the art go round.

In ’33, vilified by the Nazis,
he left Germany and returned to Bern.
His was, as he put it, ‘a thinking eye’,
seeing truly the scope and the nature of things;
Picasso’s ‘master of colour’; versatile
in his use of materials; prolific.
In ’36, he was diagnosed
with scleroderma, an incurable
degenerative disease, that affects
motor skills. He died the month the Werhmacht
took Paris. He painted to the end.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

1913

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read539 views

In an art deco theatre on the Avenue Montaigne

off the Champs Élysées – newly built, its exterior

(for style and mechanics in concrete) the interior

(gilt, lead paint and plush) still smelling fresh – there is a riot

on the evening of May 29th at the premiere

of the ballet, ‘The Rite of Spring’, by Igor Stravinsky,

Vaslav Nijinsky and Nicholas Roerich.

 

This is the year the House of Romanov celebrates

its three hundredth anniversary, the year there are two

Balkan Wars, Ford introduces an assembly line,

Pablo Picasso paints his Cubist ‘Guitar, Glass and Bottle’

and the first volume – ‘Swann’s Way’ – is published

of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’

 

Proust and Picasso were in the first night audience – as were

Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Gertrude Stein: luminaries

of a luminous city. The riot began, it is said,

with derisive laughter as the first notes were played.

Vegetables were thrown. The dancers could not hear the orchestra.

Nijinsky, dancer as well as choreographer,

called out the steps. Forty people were ejected – or maybe

no one was. The impresario, Sergei Diaghilev,

was a master of PR, hence, perhaps, the greengrocery.

Modernism in music was so successfully launched

on an eventually calm sea that Walt Disney used

the opening bars in ‘Fantasia’, conveyor belt art

in the year of the Blitzkreig. Yet art’s truth transcends as always.

How such fierce music and brutal dance overtured, by accident,

the sacrificial Eurasian violence of the rest of the century!

 

 

 

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