Henri Rousseau

The first artist I loved as a child was Henri Rousseau (1844 – 1910). I remember encountering him in one of the many children's books illustrated in imitation of his style and wanting to paint my room like one of his jungles. (The Equatorial Jungle, 1909)

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French customs officer who took up painting in middle age. When he started showing his works they were roundly mocked, but soon they started to grow on people and within a decade of picking up a brush he was successful enough to quit his job and paint full time. However, most of the art world still despised him.

Until I started working on this post I knew only his jungle scenes, but they are actually only a small part of his output. (A Vase of Flowers)

Around 1905 Rousseau was discovered by some of the younger artists in Paris, notably Pablo Picasso. Picasso bought one of Rousseau's paintings for 5 francs and kept it for the rest of his life. He introduced Rousseau to his avant garde friends at a wild banquet in 1908 that became a legendary event in the Parisian art world. (The Sleeping Gypsy, 1907)

This of course made Rousseau famous and for the next sixty years or so he was one of the most valuable and sought after of the "post-Impressionist" French painters. The Met, the Tate and MOMA each have several of his works. His paintings appear in poems by Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath and in a song by Joni Mitchell; hippies loved him. (A Carnival Evening, 1886)

And then he went into an eclipse; I hardly remember seeing anything of his or reading about him since my childhood infatuation. The childlike quality that endeared him to hippies went out of fashion in an art world that valued rebellious cool. (Tiger in a Tropical Storm)

His most famous painting, The Dream, 1910.

I still like those, although I don't think I would consider painting my bedroom in this style any more.

Some Small Revenge

Ahem:

Looking to get yourself a present this Valentine's Day? The El Paso Zoo has you covered. It will name a cockroach after your ex and then feed it to a meerkat live on camera.

You can message the zoo on Facebook with your ex's name, then wait patiently for February 14 to watch the roach get devoured during the "Quit Bugging Me" meerkat event, which will live-stream on Facebook and the zoo's website. The names of those exes will also be displayed around the meerkat exhibit and on social media starting February 11. The zoo calls it "the perfect Valentine's Day gift."

Girault de Prangey's Grand Tour

Pioneering photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) took a grand tour from Europe into the Middle East in 1842-1844, creating many glass plate negatives of famous monuments. Some of these are now in a show at the Met. Above, the view from the gate of Antioch, 1844. To see these correctly you'll have to click on them. They don't wow me as art but they are among the earliest photographs of some of these places.

The Roman Forum in 1842.

Philae, 1843.

Istanbul, 1843.

Birth Control and Fertility Decline

As people worry about declining fertility and the aging population, these sociologists found that a major contributor to the decline is better birth control:

After roughly 10 years of decline, the U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2017. However, aggregate trends in fertility mask substantial heterogeneity across different demographic groups. Young women and unmarried women have seen the largest declines in fertility in recent years while women older than 30 and married women have actually experienced increases. In this paper, we explore the role of changes in unintended births in explaining fertility patterns in the U.S. from 1980 to 2017, with an emphasis on the fertility decline of the last decade. We begin by documenting heterogeneity in fertility trends across demographic groups, using data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Natality Detail Files. We then use data from the National Survey of Family Growth to describe trends in unintended births and to estimate a model that will identify the maternal characteristics that most strongly predict them. Finally, we use this model to predict the proportion of births in the Natality Detail Files that are unintended. We find that 35% of the decline in fertility between 2007 and 2016 can be explained by declines in births that were likely unintended, and that this is driven by drops in births to young women.

So some of the fertility decline is about choices but a lot is just technology.

Olivuccio di Ciccarello, The Temptation of Eve

c. 1400. Now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

A Real Conservative

Here's an interesting bit from a Times article on French conservative Éric Zemmour, one of those children of immigrants who has become fanatically anti-immigrant himself. People often say (the Times even says at one point) that Zemmour is a Bonapartist who longs for the days of Napoleon's victories, but apparently he really longs for an earlier period:

One student asked Zemmour about his belief that France’s defeat in the Seven Year’s War, between 1756 and 1763, was the beginning of the nation’s decline. “It seems like a long time ago,” the student said, “but for you, the history of France has been a succession of failed attempts to compensate for this defeat. Is there still any meaning in asserting the existence of a grand French destiny?”

Zemmour was ready with a response, observing that France’s colonial conquests were an attempt to compensate for that defeat. Today, he went on, French elites have decided, ignobly, that a new kind of French power can be obtained only by entwining the country within the European Union. For him, the process of writing his most recent book, he explained earlier that evening, recalled “the legend about the person who is dying and sees each major stage of his life pass before his eyes: Now we are reliving the main crises we experienced during a thousand years of history.”

So for Zemmour, conservatism seems to be about longing for the days when France was the most powerful nation in the world and floundering around for some way to bring that feeling back.

Old Dresden

One of my favorite blogs is Archi/Maps, which posts plans for buildings built and unbuilt, and old photographs of architecture. Over the past year they have posted a number of photographs of old buildings in Dresden, Germany that have greatly interested me. Some of these buildings have been reconstructed since World War II, especially the churches and palaces, but many others were lost. Above, the Frauenkirche (St. Mary's Church) in 1897.

Doorway of a residential building. These photographs include several architectural styles: Baroque, Neoclassical, Neo-Renaissance, and Jugendstihl or Art Nouveau.

The Zwinger Palace, now a public park and art museum.

An iron gateway.

The Court Chapel.

The Diana Baths.

Side entrance to the Saechsische Handelsbank.

The Garden Palace, 1880.

The Opera House. Altogether an amazing assemblage of grand buildings for a rather small city.

The Unrepresented

Interesting note from Paul Krugman on the groups missing from American politics. We have long had a habit of dividing voters into liberal vs. conservative along two axes, economic and social. The chart above (stolen from the Times) shows that there are a lot of voters in three of the four quadrants: liberal along both axes, conservative along both axes, and socially conservative but economically liberal. Few voters identify with what you might call the libertarian quadrant, economically conservative but socially liberal. This is why the presidential campaign of Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz is going nowhere; he explicitly announced himself as the candidate of those people, who make up only 4 percent of the electorate. On the other hand they are very well represented in the American elite, especially on the west coast. I remember hearing a consultant who helps big tech companies respond to public relations blowups say that everyone in Silicon Valley is socially liberal and economically libertarian, and since everyone they know feels the same way they are startled to learn that the rest of the country does not agree with them. Welcome to America, Mr. Schultz.

Meanwhile there are a lot of voters in the opposite quadrant, socially conservative and economically liberal, but very few politicians:

The other of the two great absences in American political life is the lack of economically liberal, socially conservative politicians — let’s be blunt and just say “racist populists.” There are plenty of voters who would like that mix, and Trump pretended to be their man; but he wasn’t, and neither is anyone else. . . .

Once upon a time there were racist populists in Congress: The New Deal coalition relied on a large contingent of segregationist Dixiecrats. But this was always unstable. In practice, advocating economic inclusion seems to spill over into advocacy of racial and social inclusion, too. By the 1940s, Northern Democrats were already more pro-civil rights than Northern Republicans, and as the Northam affair shows, the party now has very little tolerance for even the appearance of racism.

Meanwhile, the modern Republican Party is all about cutting taxes on the rich and benefits for the poor and the middle class. And Trump, despite his campaign posturing, has turned out to be no different.

Hence the failure of our political system to serve socially conservative/racist voters who also want to tax the rich and preserve Social Security. Democrats won’t ratify their racism; Republicans, who have no such compunctions, will — remember, the party establishment solidly backed Roy Moore’s Senate bid — but won’t protect the programs they depend on.

Personally as you all know I think “racist” is an inadequate way to characterize that quadrant of American politics, which also has major elements of nationalism, love of the military and its values, fear of crime and disorder, and a nostalgia for simpler times. I admit, though, that it is certainly a major element in that coalition and it would be very hard to carry that group without a tolerance for racial language and thinking that no Democrat can possibly endorse.

Thus these people feel homeless in American politics. That explains, I think, their love of Trump; he seemed to take their side and endorse their values at a time when nobody else did. Now that Trump has shown his colors on the issues of taxes and health care and generally behaved like a buffoon, he will probably get their votes but not their love. One of the big questions in American politics over the next decade will be whether any politicians emerge who really are socially conservative and economically liberal, and whether any of them mount a nationwide challenge in the George Wallace mode.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Yogyakarta

Today I cast my mind to unfamiliar territories on the other side of the world, to Yogyakarta, a city on the Indonesian island of Java. It has long been the capital of a Hindu sultanate and the name comes from Ayodhya, the sacred Indian city said to be the birthplace of Rama.

The sultans survived from the 1500s to the present day because they have cleverly caught multiple waves of history. In the 1750s civil war broke out between two brothers of the ruling family, one of whom chose to ally himself with the Dutch colonists. After the Dutch helped him win, the new sultan recognized Dutch suzerainty and thus kept his throne down to World War II. (Above, the Taman Sari or water palace.)

After World War II the Indonesians revolted against the Dutch and the then sultan of Yogyakarta played a leading role in the revolution. Yogyakarta was the capital of the revolutionary republic in 1946 to 1948, after the Dutch captured Jakarta, and after the rebels were victorious the sultan secured a special status for his city, which is nominally still ruled by the family. (Sultan's audience hall)

The city reaped another benefit from its time as the capital: Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia's largest with 55,000 students. Not waiting for the war to be won Indonesia's leaders went ahead and set up the college in 1948 on the site of a medical school founded by the Dutch, and it was up and running by 1950.

The great volcano of Mount Merapi looms over the whole district.

The commercial heart of Yogyakarta is Malioboro Street, a shopping district with many Dutch colonial buildings. I imagine it was named by the Dutch for the first Duke of Marlborough, the British general who led combined Anglo-Dutch armies to victory against Louis XIV. These days it is notable as one of the best places to buy traditional Indonesian crafts like batik prints.

Malioboro Street in colonial days.

On the outskirts of Yogyakarga is Prambanan, a famous Hindu temple complex dating to the ninth century.

The temples were "discovered" by the British after they took over Dutch Indonesia during the Napoleonic wars; British governor Sir Thomas Raffles, a famous character in British colonial lore (founder of Singapore, winner of several small wars, author of A History of Java), sent surveyors to document the site. You can see that the temples were in a ruinous state in the nineteenth century.

Rebuilding of the temples was begun under Dutch rule in 1918 but little progress was made until the 1930s, and then World War II brought everything to a halt. Reconstruction was completed after independence and the temples were opened by President Sukarno in 1953.

Twenty miles further from Yogyakarta is the Buddhist temple of Borobudur, the largest in Indonesia. It was built a few years before Prambanan by a Buddhist king; his successors converted to Hinduism and built Prambanan to announce the change.

A common tourist trip is to leave Yogyakarta in the very early morning to see the sunrise at Borobudur, then visit Prambanan in the afternoon.

If you're in the mood for something more physical you can hike around Mount Merapi or be lowered into Jomblang Cave and take your picture with Heaven's Light.

Seems like a fascinating place to explore.

Summing Up Must Farm

The wonderful dig at Must Farm in England's Fen District came to an end in 2016, but of course the laboratory work and publication continue. Fortunately Must Farm was the first British dig I know of to have a really robust internet presence, so there is a lot to read online.

Must Farm was a settlement built over a slow-flowing river, with at least two large houses raised on stilts. Around 950 BC the settlement burned to the water line, and the charred remains of the houses and their contents fell into the water. No bodies have been found, so it seems that everyone got out. On the other hand nobody went back to retrieve the many valuable objects that were just sitting there covered by only a foot or two of water, which makes me suspect that violent conflict may have been somehow involved.

The inhabitants certainly had a lot of weapons. Some of these may have been lost in the fire, but at least some were probably cast deliberately into the water as offerings.

Ax with handle still attached. The preservation at the site is remarkable.

Look at these wooden posts from the palisade that surrounded the site.

Or this fragment of knotted textile, made from strips of bark.

The settlement may only have stood for a short time before it was destroyed. The excavators think the residents were just tossing their trash into the river, where it sank to the bottom, but there was remarkably little of it; roughly speaking, the discarded items at the site numbered much fewer than those that were found within the houses and therefore presumably still in use. So no more than a couple of years, and perhaps only months.

Pottery. Some of the pottery was well made but none of had more than minimal decoration. The same is true of the wooden utensils found at the site, and the bronze tools and weapons. No sculpture has been found. The only spots of color have been a few glass beads that came all the way from the eastern Mediterranean.

So far as we can tell, the place was remarkably drab: no carving on the wooden posts, no glaze on the pots, no objects made of shell or feathers, hardly any jewelry. At most archaeological sites one would speculate that artistic activity was focused on things that don't survive, like the feather cloaks that we know were valued objects among the Indians of eastern North America. But at Must Farm, even feathers survive. Perhaps the people were too focused on keeping away from the enemies who eventually chased them out of their home.

The Horror