This Date in Art History: Died 2 February 1895 – Berthe Morisot, a French impressionist painter: Part I of II.
Below – “Jeune Fille au Manteau Vert”; “Grain field”; “La Coiffure”; “The Cradle”; “Woman at Her Toilette”; “Portrait of a Young Girl.”
This Date in Literary History: Died 2 March 1930 – D. H. Lawrence, an English novelist, poet, playwright, critic, travel writer, and author of “Women in Love”, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and “Studies in Classic American Literature.”
Some quotes from the work of D. H. Lawrence:
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
“Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.”
“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”
“No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death”
“This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.”
This Date in Art History: Died 2 February 1895 – Berthe Morisot, a French impressionist painter: Part II of II.
Below – “Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight”; “Eugene Manet and his Daughter in the Garden”; “View of Paris from the Trocadero”; “Woman and Child Seated”; “Fillette Jouant Avec Un Chien”; “Apollon Révélant sa Divinité à la Bergère Issé.”
This Date in Literary History: Born 2 March 1930 – Tom Wolfe, an American journalist, novelist, essayist, author of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Right Stuff,” and recipient of the National Book Award.
Some quotes from the work of Tom Wolfe:
“You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”
“A cult is a religion with no political power.”
“Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.”
“Put your good where it will do the most!”
“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a ‘reducing valve’. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man’s potential experience without his even knowing it. We’re shut off from our own world.”
“Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later… that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.”
This Date in Art History: Died 2 February 1945 – Emily Carr, a Canadian painter.
Below – “Odds and Ends”; “Blue Sky”; “The Mountain”; “Old Time Coast Village”; “Above the Gravel Pit”; “Metchosin.”
This Date in Literary History: Born 2 March 1942 – John Irving, an American novelist, screenwriter, and author of “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules.”
Some quotes from the work of John Irving:
“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”
“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”
“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.”
“Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else’s version of themselves–to anyone else’s version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”
“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”
Contemporary German Art – Marita Tobner
Below – “Uma II”; “A Little Taste of Sadness”; “Die Konigin schlaft naben den Magnollen”; “Uma VI”; “A Little Taste of Hope”; “Nora’s Nightmare.”
“Heart”
by Rick Campbell
My heart was suspect.
Wired to an EKG,
I walked the treadmill
that measured my ebb
and flow, tracked isotopes
that ploughed my veins,
looked for a constancy
I’ve hardly ever found.
For a month I worried
as I climbed the stairs
to my office. The mortality
I never believed in
was here now. They
say my heart’s ok,
just high cholesterol, but
I know my heart’s a house
someone has broken into,
a room you come back
to and know some stranger
with bad intent has been there
and touched all that you love. You know
he can come back. It’s his call,
his house now.