“A lady hanging from the ceiling by her teeth”

Part One
 
Although the French Impressionist Edgar Degas is widely known as a painter of ballerinas he did, on one occasion, depict a circus acrobat. 
 
The story of this masterpiece, titled “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” is extraordinary.
 
 
 
When Degas encountered Miss LaLa (real name Anna Olga Albertina Brown) she was performing  at the legendary Circus Fernando located on the southern edge of the bohemian quarter, Montmartre. 
Her signature “iron-jaw act” consisted of a dangerous ascent of the aerialist to the roof of the circus by clinching a rope between her teeth. 
 
She also entertained her audience by hanging upside down from a “trapeze” and holding, by a rope in her mouth, a little boy, then a woman, and later a man.  
The climax of the performance included lifting with her mouth a “cannon barrel” weighing more than 300 kg which was “packed with gun powder and lit”. Miss LaLa never lost her grip. 
 
In simple words, in the winter of 1878 Miss Lala was more famous than the artist and a local journalist wrote “…to admit that you have not seen her is to lose your reputation as a Parisian”.
Degas lived just a few blocks away from the circus and visited most of Miss LaLa and her troupe’s performances and rehearsals during the season.

He completed the painting and offered it to the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition which took place in an apartment on the Avenue de L’Opera. 

The exhibition opened on 10th April 1879. 

To the great annoyance of his peers, Degas did not bring the painting until 27th April. 

No one knew the real reason for the postponement but if that was a marketing strategy by Degas, it backfired badly. 

The painting did not attract the expected attention. Two art critics wrote uncomplimentary reviews of the depiction. 

After two weeks of public exposure, a disappointed Degas took the picture back to his studio where it remained for the next 23 years, gathering dust.  
Eventually, in 1902 Degas gave the painting on consignment to his regular dealer Paul Durant-Ruel under the name “L’acrobate” and under this name it joined an exhibition in Berlin in 1903. 

In January 1905 Paul Durant-Ruel organised an extensive Impressionist exhibition in London presenting 315 paintings including Degas’ “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando”. Only 13 paintings were sold. 
 
 
On the last day of the exhibition Cawthra Mulock, a 22-year old Canadian man, also known as “The Boy Millionaire of Toronto” visited the gallery and bought the acrobat’s painting. 
 
Mr. Mulock, who inherited a vast fortune from his aunt at the age of 15, was on a business trip to London at the time of the exhibition. 
 
To recapture, for a period of 26 years the Miss LaLa painting was publicly displayed on only  THREE occasions and in 1905 it sailed to Toronto, Canada. 
 
For the next 15 years it hung in  Mulock’s mansion on Jarvis Street in Toronto, admired only by visitors to the house.
In 1917 Degas died in Paris. The sensational Miss La La had long been forgotten. She had settled in Brussels, managing a cafe and an inn for stage artists. 

In 1918 the Toronto millionaire died in New York from Spanish flu. 
 
His widow sold Degas’ painting to an Art Gallery in Toronto. 
It was then bought by an art dealer for $6,500 and in 1923 it figured publicly for the FOURTH time in 44 years in an exhibition in the French Gallery in London.

 

That same year, the philanthropist Samuel Courtauld established his Fund for purchasing modern paintings for the National Gallery in London. 
 
In 1924 the Fund bought the painting. 
 
“A lady hanging from the ceiling by her teeth” had found her home. 
 
To be continued…

Crafting lemonade with Michelangelo

London is stealing the hearts of art lovers this summer. The city offers unlimited and worthy options to immerse oneself in the creative world of renowned painters. 
My choice fell upon two eminent artists from the Renaissance era – Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) and Michelangelo Merisi (1571- 1610), better known by the name of Caravaggio – the name of his home town in Lombardy in Northern Italy. 
The British Museum presented the drawings from the last three decades of Michelangelo’s life in Rome and the National Gallery showcased Caravaggio’s last painting “ The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula”. 
Both Old Masters loved painting figures (including figures of handsome young boys). Yet, they depicted them using completely different techniques. 
Michelangelo painted in a fresco manner. 
Literally, fresco means fresh in Italian. 
The artist pioneered a method of applying the paint straight on a still-wet wall plaster producing a result that was highly resilient to environmental factors. 
 
The exhibition is a real eye-opener of the hard work involved in this technique. 
 

 

Michelangelo set up a meticulous process of creating preparatory sketches. 
He figured out the composition of the artwork by drawing a succession of studies. 
In them he experimented with the figures, displaying remarkable precision in outlining the smallest details of human bodies. 
Figures and faces were drawn again and again until the intended emotional intensity was achieved. 
Then these studies were used to produce a full-size drawing called cartoon. 
Patiently and accurately little holes were punched on the outlines of the cartoon, the drawing was then held against the wall while chalk was applied to it several times. 
The chalk would go through the holes to the wall, creating guidance for the artist. 
 
The exhibition displayed the cartoon Epifania, the only complete Michelangelo cartoon that has  survived. 
It is 2.32 metres tall,1.65 metres wide and contains 26 sheets of paper. 
Eventually, Michelangelo abandoned the Epifania project but offered the cartoon to one of his pupils who completed the painting. 
The exhibition presented the cartoon and the painting, reunited for the first time since the 1550s. 
The other Michelangelo preferred oil painting on canvas. Caravaggio did not discriminate when it came to his canvases. He often painted on fabrics with already existing depicts.
The artist also did not execute a preparatory phase.
 That does not mean he entirely skipped the step of detailed studies or drawings. 
The truth is he developed a technique attuned to his artistic temperament and time management. 
Probably he came about this method in his early years as a poor artist in Rome. At that time he worked for a painter from Sicily who paid him for “each head” drawn, so time was of the essence. 
Caravaggio gradually mastered his ability to paint without preparatory drawings and employed this technique throughout his career.

 

His work began with painting the surface of the canvas with grey, brown or black colours. 
Then he scratched fine lines on the suffice by using the handle of the paint brush to outline the most important details of his compositions. 
Next, he painted directly with colour while the models posed in front of him.

It seems to me that both Michelangelos have put forward the idea that not originality but self-belief in “My Way” is a crucial ingredient in the mastery of making lemonade from life’s lemons. 

Caravaggio – the darkness and the light

In the first decades of 17th century Caravaggio meteorically rose to fame and achieved the status of one of the most commissioned painters in Rome. 
He revolutionised the art for ever, and inspired other European artists, called Caravaggisti, to adopt his innovative style of painting. 
 
Yet, in the middle of 17th century Caravaggio was forgotten. He remained forgotten for three centuries until 1951 when the art historian Roberto Longhi organised an exhibition of Caravaggio’s work in Milan. 
The Old Master was re-discovered.  
 
The National Gallery in London recently exhibited two masterpieces of Caravaggio. 
Both of them have unfamiliar religious titles “The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula” and “Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist”. 
Both were painted in the last year of the artist’s life. 
The latter is part of the permanent collection of the Gallery.  

The exhibition’s design parallels the dramatic and naturalistic manner of Caravaggio. 
The hall is small and shady. Diminished lights reveal the artist’s favourite earthy colours – black, brown and red. 
From the shadows two paintings mysteriously emerge and captivate the spectator. 
It feels easy to understand Caravaggio’s world. 
Standing in front of the “Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist” the viewers grasp immediately that a murder has been committed. 
Only three figures and one head are in the painting. Actually half-figures surrounded by threatening blackness. The murderer  has a “boxer’s broken nose”, redness on his chicks and his torso is strong and muscular. The brute holds the head by its hair and clutches his sword with the cruel pride of a job well done.
An old woman with a wrinkled, sorrowful face and praying hands peers over the head of the dead man. 
A beautiful girl in front of her grips the tray on which the murderer is placing the head. She desperately tries to avoid looking at it. There is some guilt and regret in her facial expression and some awkwardness in her half-turned body. 
The head on the tray conveys terror and cruelness coming from the meticulously painted white-yellowish lifeless face, wounded ear and flowing blood. 
A light from a single source, external to the painting highlights the faces and hands enhancing the dramatic effect. 
If art lovers like detective stories and thrillers like me  – they have it all: drama, mystery, threats, barbarism and sorrow, beauty and ugliness. Like real life. 
It does not matter whether the religious story and/or the religious characters are known to the audience. The human story unfolds and the observer participates in it. 
Martin Scorsese, the Hollywood director of the movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” felt “Immediately taken” by the “cinematic effect” of Caravaggio’s art and regularly visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to study his work.
Many film-makers and photographers have studied and adopted the painter’s unique way of contrasting light and darkness. 
 
Caravaggio’s art has been resurrected like a mystical Phoenix. 
The painter not only moved the European art towards the new Baroque Age of the 17th and 18th centuries but in some strange way Caravaggio influenced two contemporary art genres that even did not exist two century ago.
 
 
An interesting fact in this connection  is that Caravaggio’s patron in Rome, 
Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who helped catapult the artist to glory was a very educated and progressive Renaissance man. 
He enthusiastically supported new trends in art and science.
 
 
 
In his Palazzio he kept a telescope given to him by Galileo Galilei who as we well know was distrusted by the Church and the Inquisition but enjoyed the protection of the visionary Cardinal. 
 
 
 
When blackness threatens, be a Cavaraggisti, create your own light!