मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, February 06, 2023

स्मित करणारी अपूर्वाई....Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

पूर्व आणि पश्चिमेतील मध्ययुगीन कालातील स्त्रीयां मध्ये फरक काय? याचे एकाच शब्दात उत्तर द्यायचे असेल तर मी म्हणेन Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (१७५५-१८४२) सारखी स्त्री चित्रकार पूर्वेमध्ये नसणे आणि फ्रान्स मध्ये असणे ....

स्वतः चे पोर्ट्रेट 
जोनाथन जोन्स या चित्राबद्दल लिहतात :
"Modelling herself after a portrait by Rubens that is also in the National Gallery, this artist, whose friendship with Marie Antoinette later forced her to flee France, gives herself all the conventional attributes of 18th-century beauty – but she’s holding the palette, she’s in control."

पण या मोठ्या कलावंत बाईं जरी फ्रेंच राज्यक्रांतीमुळे देशधडीला लागल्या असल्या तरी त्यांच्याकडे दुसऱ्या एका क्रांतीचे श्रेय जाते असा दावा करण्यात आला आहे. 

Kathryn Hughes , review of ‘The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris’ by Colin Jones , 2014 for The Guardian, October 2014:
“ In the autumn of 1787, gallery-going Parisians didn't know where to look. On the walls of the Louvre hung a self-portrait by the eminent artist Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. In some ways the painting was deeply conventional. Mme Vigée Le Brun was dandling her infant daughter on her knee in a gesture that managed to invoke both the Virgin Mary and the new bourgeois ideal of "natural" motherhood. The problem was her mouth. It was smiling. Not just an enigmatic Mona Lisa smirk, but a proper one which showed her teeth. Was Vigée Le Brun mad, a slut or some kind of wild revolutionary? The only thing to do was rush past, and pretend you hadn't seen.
In this compelling Cheshire cat of a book, Colin Jones charts the moment in the mid-18th century when Paris learned to smile. Until that point, the court, tucked away at Versailles, had insisted that everyone kept a straight face. This was partly because France's most privileged mouths had been spoiled by too much sugar, and no one wanted their black stumps flashed to infinity in the Hall of Mirrors. But it was also because smiling in general risked making you look either plebeian or insane....”


Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie, 1786
Courtesy: Wikipedia
 

जो अमेरिकेत गेल्यावर माझ्या सारखा भारतीयाला दुकानात , बाहेर 'कारण नसताना' तिऱ्हाईताकडे बघून स्मित करणारी माणसे बघून जो धक्का बसतो त्याची सुरवात कदाचित तेंव्हा झाली...

प्रसिद्ध लेखक जुलिअन बार्न्स त्यांच्याबद्दल लंडन रिव्यू ऑफ बुक्स मध्ये लिहतात:
"... Her father was a painter; she showed much early promise and made the right connections (her husband being an art dealer); by 23 she had painted her first picture of Marie Antoinette, for whom she became the portraitist of choice. She was very accomplished, excellent at flesh and all the varieties of material that covered it: the muslin and lace, the satins and silks, the straw hats and the flowers that lodged in them; she was good at and with children. She was also very professional, knowing how to disguise physical fault and accentuate any hint of beauty; she knew the most winning relationship between parted lips and visible teeth. She pleased her sitters; her sitters pleased her. She was expert at a kind of formal informality...."  (italics mine)


Isabella Teotochi Marini, May-June 1792
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