Rebecca Nemser

Madame Vigee-Lebrun revo­lu­tionized the portrait. She despised the powder and stiff clothes that women wore; she let their hair down, and draped them in soft, flowing shawls and painted them looking soft, dreamy, natural, alive. Her paintings helped to create a new look, a new style, a new attitude to life in pre-revolutionary Paris.

When Berthe Morisot met Édouard Manet at the Louvre in 1867, he was 36 years old and married; she was ten years younger and still living with her parents at home. She was lively, intel­ligent, charming, talented. He was bril­liant, difficult, fickle, famous, fasci­nating. She had long admired him from a distance; he imme­di­ately wanted to paint her portrait.

All that we know of Greece has come to us in ruins – armless, headless, faded, fallen, broken, battered, lost in trans­lation. What we have are frag­ments, frag­ments that have lost almost every­thing – except their poetry. But, gener­ation after gener­ation, that poetry has never lost its thrilling, visionary gleam.

It is art that acknowl­edges the struggle of its own making, and conveys a sense of life as composed of frag­ments, where not every­thing is legible, and some things are irrev­o­cably ruined or lost. The past haunts and enriches the present. Memory and imag­i­nation are inter­twined. It is a mirror of the soul.

Madame de Pompadour always managed to look graceful, even in the most constricting clothes — corsets, bustles, and stays. Like Madonna, she created a Look that was supremely arti­ficial — the powdered hair, the heavily applied make-up, the elab­orate gowns. Like Madonna in her John-Paul Gaultier bustiers, La Pompadour in her negligée proudly displayed her sexu­ality as the source of her power.

On film, JEAN ARTHUR is impulsive, but truthful ‑‑ true to the moment, while the moment lasts. She is chaste, but not prudish; she truly inhabits her small, athletic body, and she moves like a dancer with an easy natural volup­tuousness. Her soft, gravelly voice is aston­ishly expressive. And some of her greatest lines aren’t words at all, but an aston­ishing reper­toire of whimpers, sighs, sobs, giggles, and moans.

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own conve­nience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impres­sions that composed our life at the time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

“It can be fright­ening, but that’s life,” said Doug. “Art is part of life,” said Mike. “It’s a real part — it’s the essence of life,” said Doug. “There’s no reason to make it perfect,” says Doug. “We want to show the physical nature,” said Mike. “The physical nature,” said Doug. “Of every­thing, but in particular, Art,” said Mike.

Standing at the center of the spiral, I see the backs of all the chairs facing away from me, and feel a tremendous shock of lone­liness and loss. Looking down from the balcony, I see that the chairs are the beginning of a spiral that could go on forever.

From the window of the studio ED RUSCHA had in the 1960’s, he could see a sign reading HOLLYWOOD. The big white letters are as flat an fake as an old, aban­doned movie set, crumpled and peeling, with some of the letters falling down. But Ruscha’s many images of that sign make it a real sign, luminous and charged with light.

FRANCES HAMILTON has refash­ioned much-loved images, memories, and dream­strans­forming them into a fully re-imagined universe. It is this trans­for­mation – the serious, difficult task of art – that gives her work its power to enchant.