This is almost "modern", but it speaks to me. I think it is the combination of the hair (I love it), and the slender, delicate, childlike figure, which do remind me of (grown) women I have actually seen, though the type is rare, as well the slumbery blueness and stars. It also reminds me--is really of a piece with--the famous and, to me, haunting musical compositions of Debussy and Satie that date from the same period and of which, though I make no profession to being a musical man, I am extremely fond. The direction in which certain aspects of the arts appeared to be moving at this time, needless to say, from my present vantage point, appeals to me greatly, and it is not clear to me why, among several competing paths, this particular one seems to have been so thoroughly snuffed out. Its worldview is still something that informs, and I think necessarily and fortuitously so, my dealings and engagements with the various great matter outside my own skull, though doubtless hampered by the twin curses of sensitivity and a sentimental rather than intellectual nature.
As my knowledge of this picture is courtesy of a little book of poems and artworks called "Art & Love" published by the Metropolitan Museum that I picked up somewhere in the course of my wanderings (I think I may gotten it in Brattleboro. I find I am often inexplicably inspired to buy things in Brattleboro that I would not think of buying anywhere else), I have always associated it with New York and the romantic notions I used to carry of that city, but really the associations could be of any ideally exciting cultural place full of beautiful and intelligent and, yes, sensitive young people like one's self, or rather one's ideal would-be, or would-have-been self. This is all very melancholy and self-pitying, and perhaps is an argument against the artwork by the more hardheaded and warlike among us, but the fact is that the picture does induce a sensation in me of great loneliness and sadness, albeit a very pleasing and beautiful and whimsical loneliness and sadness, to which I am admittedly too susceptible. Nonetheless I cannot leave it off the list.
I recently watched a film with my wife called "The Music Teacher" ("Le Maitre de Musique" for those who require original titles whenever possible). It is a Belgian movie about opera singers set around 1900. The "pitch" as given on the box of the film itself is "Amadeus meets Rocky". To give a quick review, the plot, writing and characters are pretty weak, and the governing POV of what it means/takes to be a great artist or to associate with the same, is Gallic to the core, or at least that which seems to have held sway in the official intellectual and high-middlebrow circles which have dominated the French cultural atmosphere for most of the last century, which I generally think is crap. On the pro side however, there are many beautifully filmed scenes and wonderful, even rather merry-sounding songs from the opera repertoire with which I was not previously familiar (if I can figure out what they were, I might list them here in a later post). The point of this digression, however, is that at one point in the film, late the night before the big singing competition that provides the `Rocky` element of the story, the 18-year old ingenue enters unnoticed and unchaperoned the room of her fellow pupil and budding star (who was discovered while picking pockets at a train station) to complete the last necessities of her artistic training, as the French mind would have it, in a horizontal position. (Some back story is necessary here: she had previously fallen in love with the old master, which everyone, including the master himself, had deemed beforehand to be necessary to her singing education. The master however being practically on his deathbed, was not up to the requirements this entailed on him, which occasioned the necessity for his finding the pickpocketing protege.) While I was enraptured by the glories of the classical artistic life, the inimintably sensible Mrs. S said `Pause the tape right there!` (Yes I still watch tapes. My children have broken both of the DVD players I have owned within a month.) She pointed out that modern movies cannot seem to help themselves in making well-bred and upper class young women from remote time periods as devoted to the practice of free love as modern shopgirls on package vacations to Ibiza, citing `Titanic` and a recent adaptation of `Mansfield Park` (in which some incest that is probably only even suggested in the book by the luridness of the modern imagination is presented in fully consummated glory by the edgy modern director) as other examples of the type, though she expected better from the French-speaking world (Why?). Her point was that if women, especially wealthy women, even intelligent and strong ones, had had such freedoms, even in matters of speech, let alone sensual ones, and such human regard as are depicted in these modern movies, the feminist movement would have been considerably less fervent, and perhaps would not have occurred at all. All the while I was thinking naturally of my current infantile romanticizing of the conceptions of feminine beauty which persisted in this time that was in fact highly unenlightened and chauvinistic, and wondering, as I often do in the face of my wife`s mature observations on all matters, first, `why am I so infantilized?` and second, `It is really because I did not spend enough time in my childhood handling and using firearms and engaging in brutal physical contest with other boys (for noble and educational purposes), as so many conservative thinkers seem to attribute the current crisis in American manhood to?`
Just last week it was snowing, but today it was 85 and the girls, as the song goes, were out dressed in their summer clothes. 2 pictures left.
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