What is More Dangerous? Salt or Zombie Parents?

Today November 14  is Children's day

Artist: K J Lamb, The Spectator UK, April 2016

वॉचमनच्या नजरेतून मेट... Patrick Bringley's The Metropolitan Museum of Art

After losing his brother to cancer in 2008 Patrick Bringley quit his job in the editorial events office at the New Yorker magazine and spent the next decade as a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 Patrick Bringley, 'All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me', 2022:

"...Looking back, it makes me think of Pieter Bruegel’s great painting The Harvesters. In that picture, a handful of peasants take their afternoon meal against the backdrop of a wide, deep landscape. There is a church in the mid-ground, a harbor behind, gold-green fields rolling back toward a distant horizon. Closer to the picture plane, men mow the grain with scythes and a woman bends low to bundle it. And at the nearest corner of the foreground, these nine peasants—comical and sympathetic—have broken from their labor to sit and sup beneath a pear tree.

Looking at Bruegel’s masterpiece I sometimes think: here is a painting of literally the most commonplace thing on earth. Most people have been farmers. Most of these have been peasants. Most lives have been labor and hardship punctuated by rest and the enjoyment of others. It is a scene that must have been so familiar to Pieter Bruegel it took an effort to notice it. But he did notice it. And he situated this little, sacred, ragtag group at the fore of his vast, outspreading world.

I am sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life."

 

 Pieter Bruegel the Elder- The Harvesters 1565

 

 

Francisco Goya's Junta of the Philippines c1815...Modernity: its Bareness, Staginess, and Deliberate Cultivation of Mystery

 Robert Hughes writes in his book "Goya", 2003:

"... It was the largest picture he ever made—some eight feet by ten—and one of the stranger productions of his long career: the grandfather of all boardroom portraits, crowded with dozens of figures set in a gloomy interior. It was intended to commemorate the patronage extended to the Junta de la Real Companñía de Filipinas by Fernando VII, who made an unexpected visit to the general session of the company’s board that was held on March 30, 1815, attended by fifty-one members and shareholders. Nothing seems to have happened or been resolved at this session; it was merely ceremonial, and dull ceremony at that. Fernando stayed only an hour and a half. However, his appearance at the meeting was meant to affirm his belief in the world designs of Spain and the continuation of its empire. This faith was, needless to add, vain. It was a collective delusion of the royalist right, believed in only by Fernando and his camarilla of incompetent advisers. The Spanish economy had been completely ruined by the war, and though the Royal Company of the Philippines had once been intended as a powerful instrument of trade and control like the British East India Company, it was now so unprofitable and useless that it was hardly more than decorative. Thus Fernando’s appearance was a futile gesture of belief in a hollow empire; a little more than eighty years later, Spain would lose its Philippine empire when the cannon of Commodore Dewey sent its whole navy to the bottom of Manila Bay.

For anyone who has had to endure a full shareholders’ meeting of a large modern corporation, its mood is instantly recognizable. No figure gets real precedence over any other; the king is at the center of the table on the dais, but he and his flanking officials are pushed into the background, and the only emphasis he gets is a small heightening of color in his costume—plus his location at the vanishing point of the perspective. The most prominent single zone in the painting is a rectangle of sunlit, inlaid floor. It is a crowded composition that speaks, paradoxically, of emptiness and solitude; an image of droning discussion that conveys only a sense of silence; a theatrical presentation—for this vast room resembles a stage on which all action has stopped and nothing happens, with light streaming in from the wings on the right, a light that seems almost unearthly in contrast to the gloom of the chamber. Yet the obvious antecedent of this morbid space, with its large orthogonal divisions of ceiling and floor, lies right at the heart of Spanish painting in the “Golden Century,” in the work of the artist whom Goya admired to the point of filial piety: the big, brown, receding chamber in which Velázquez set the figures of Las meninas.

So Junta of the Philippines looks both backward and forward. Backward because of its enormous size, its sense of monumental occasion, and its clear invocation of Velázquez. But forward, too, because of what one could fairly call its incipient modernity: its bareness, staginess, and deliberate cultivation of mystery in the middle of what, by rights, should have been a straightforward narrative of an official event. One hesitates to invoke the word “Surrealist,” and yet there is something about the whole tone of the painting that suggests if not Surrealism iself, then certainly the aching distances and enigmatic half-events of its precursor, the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico."

 

 

Fernández-Armesto explains in his new book 'How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History':

 

"The work belongs in the tradition of what might be called Spanish ‘anti-portraiture’, from Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ to Goya’s own devastatingly candid royal family group, ‘Familia de Carlos IV’, moral as well as physical delineations of regal vacuity. King Ferdinand VII appears amid the company’s directors, who, enveloped in shadow, seem to ignore him while they talk among themselves, apparently clueless as to why they are there or whether it matters."

W H Auden's Stop All the Clocks and R K Narayan's The English Teacher

 I have a feeling that this poem was on R K Narayan's mind when he wrote one of his best ( and partly autobiographical) novels "The English Teacher" where he describes his loving wife's death by typhoid...

R K Narayan:

“There are no more surprises and shocks in life, so that I watch the flame without agitation. For me the greatest reality is this and nothing else…Nothing else will worry or interest me in life hereafter.”

 

 (The English Teacher, 1946)

 

 

राम गणेश गडकरींचे 'एकच प्याला' कशावर आधारित होते? Othello or The Gin Palace (L'Assommoir)?

र वा दिघे (१८९६-१९८०) (रा ग गडकरींशी झालेले बोलणे आठवत):  

"... शेवटी एमिल झोलाच्या 'Gin Palace' ची त्यांना आठवण करून दिली. तेंव्हा गडकरी रागावले. कारण Gin Palace + देशमुख वकिलांची गोष्ट = एकचप्याला होता. गडकऱ्यांना स्तुतिपाठक आवडत. टीका करणारे आवडत नसत..."

(पृष्ठ : सतरा, प्रास्ताविक, "साहित्यिक गप्पा दहा साहित्यिकांशी", लेखक: जयवंत दळवी, १९८६-२०१३)

'संपूर्ण गडकरी', खंड १ ह्या  प्रथम १९८४ साली प्रसिद्ध झालेल्या पुस्तकाच्या १५८ पानी दीर्घ प्रस्तावनेत आचार्य अत्रे काय म्हणतात पहा:

 

1879 poster for an American theatre production of L'Assommoir by Augustin Daly

मला दिघेंचे म्हणणे जास्त बरोबर वाटते...