Last Remaining Seats: How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

That's right, boys and girls, it's time for another season of Last Remaining Seats, one of my favorite things about Los Angeles. If you've been keeping up with this long-winded blog, you'll know that Last Remaining Seats is a movie series put on for six weeks every May and June by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the local nonprofit that dedicates every fiber of its volunteer soul to preserving, protecting, restoring, and otherwise promoting historic commercial and residential buildings and neighborhoods throughout the eighty-eight municipalities that make up the County of Los Angeles. With such a vast purview, the Conservancy's got all kinds of programs and projects going on at any given time, from restoring a particular historic residence to trying to save a historic commercial building from demolition. My favorite Conservancy initiative, as I've said in previous posts, is Bringing Back Broadway (BBB), the aim of which is to do just that: Revive the Broadway district in downtown Los Angeles. The stretch of Broadway from Third Street down to Ninth is home to no less than a dozen movie palaces built before World War II. It's the single largest concentration of pre-WWII movie theaters in the country. Yes, L.A.'s Broadway was supposed to be the cinematic version of New York's Broadway, and for a long time it was. But for whatever reason--shifting demographics, the suburban explosion--Broadway L.A. started going downhill in the seventies or thereabouts. You've still got plenty of shops, some storefront churches and what have you, but quite a bit of it is derelict. Not surprisingly, the BBB program will take some time.

Last Remaining Seats is the Conservancy's way of promoting BBB while shining the spotlight on these gorgeous old theaters. When they show these old classic flicks, every Wednesday usually starting in mid/late May through June, they typically use the three most fully restored theaters: Los Angeles, Million Dollar, and Orpheum. The Palace Theatre is also fit for duty, but they haven't screened anything there since I became a member in early 2008 after reading the cover story about them and Last Remaining Seats in Westways, the magazine for the Southern California Auto Club.

Up to this point, I've only ever gone to these things by myself, which is what makes tonight extra special. My mom came with me! She lives in North Carolina and is visiting me the second half of May. Usually she visits me in August. Indeed, from 2001 to last year she never missed an August (I've lived in L.A. since '98). She retired earlier this year on her sixty-fifth birthday after twenty-five years of steadfast service to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For the last thirteen of those years she was the personnel manager. No, not one of the personnel managers, THE personnel manager for the entire university. Yes, it's just as daunting as it sounds, which is why there was never a good time of the year for her to visit. August was relatively calm, nestled as it is between the summer sessions and the fall term, but that didn't stop the work from piling up. Every August for the past decade, it's been the same routine: She abandons her station for ten days to visit me....and then flies back to the suck fest backlog. But now she's retired! The icing on the cake is that her state pension and social security add up to a few ducats more than what she made during the rat race. Yes, you read that right: She's taking in more retired than she was as a working stiff. Pretty cool, huh? We should all be so lucky.

At any rate, since she's retired, we decided she could visit during the second half of May instead of waiting for the ceremonial ten days in August. We were already pondering this visit last August when she was here and I was starting to get theater brochures in the mail. At this point, after twelve years in L.A., I've attended shows at my fair share of the city's venues. You only have to go once to end up on their mailing list. And since most theater seasons are structured like school years, from September to June, that makes August a busy month for my local USPS carrier. And it's become a ritual for my mom over the years during her August visits to peruse and salivate over the brochures while bemoaning the lack of such culture in her area. That said, though, her area of North Carolina, called the Triangle (Chapel Hill along with Durham and the state capital of Raleigh) is doing much better than when I lived with her in the late eighties (my middle school years). That they can't compete with L.A. just makes the Triangle part of a large club. A lot of the best actors live here. Lots of people move here to attempt a career on the boards, not to speak of film and TV. So of course we've got a ton of theaters here. Anyway, when Mom was here last August, she looked over all the brochures and saw several shows she was interested in seeing, all being staged in May. We didn't iron out anything, it was just talk at that point.

When I visited her during the holidays four months later, we sat back down to take another look and decided the second half of May would be ideal. By the time she goes home next week, we'll have seen four plays at four different theaters. One of the plays was this past Sunday: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Freud Playhouse on UCLA campus. When not being used by the students, Freud Playhouse is home to the Reprise! theater company led by Jason Alexander (George Costanza from Seinfeld). In fact, that one guy from Seinfeld who played J. Peterman, John O'Hurley, was in the production. He was a stitch as J.B. Biggley, the boss man who heads the World Wide Wicket Company. Rudy Vallee played him in the movie we saw tonight. This was the first time we saw John O'Hurley on stage, but it should've been the second. When Mom was here last August, we saw Spamalot downtown at the Ahmanson. John O'Hurley was cast in one of the main roles. I forget which one. It was either the role played by Eric Idle or Tim Curry in the original Broadway production. Unfortunately he was sick the day we went. We forgot about that soon enough, though. Spamalot was a side splitter. If it comes to a playhouse near you, get ye there post haste.

On our way to the movie tonight, I decided to take Mom to my favorite watering hole in all of Los Angeles: Ye Rustic Inn in Los Feliz. I have to admit I was vacillating about taking her there. It ain't exactly Spago. Or even The Cheesecake Factory. It's a hole in the wall in one of those nondescript stripmalls that seem to exist outside of time. The ceiling's low, the lighting's shitty, and the jukebox is jammin' with the best selection of tunes of any bar I've ever been to. It's just a really fun place. The vast majority of the barkeeps are young women aspiring to be actresses. Read: They're all adorable. Oh yeah, the drink selection is pretty good too. And the food menu's got great variety considering it's just a bar. Indeed, if you ever make it there, try the Buffalo wings. I work with this guy from Buffalo, and he's one of the daintiest, pickiest eaters I've ever known. Team lunches always promise drama when he comes along. His home town is of course the birthplace of the eponymous wings. And he says that Ye Rustic Inn has hands down the best wings of anyplace outside Buffalo. Considering his picky taste plus the fact that he visited many a spot during his touring musician days back in the eighties and nineties, that is extremely high praise. Mom and I got there just before Happy Hour, hence the vacant booth right in front of the bar. We decided to go the sampler route: Six wings, a few cheese sticks and some other stuff. If you're ever there and you want a hearty meal, try the Myrtle burger, named after the woman who founded Ye Rustic. I had that the first time I went there about five years ago. Taking Mom to Ye Rustic wasn't as awkward as I thought. She's a pretty cool and laid back kat. In hindsight my vacillation seems kind of silly.

So with our bellies full, we took the surface streets from Ye Rustic to downtown. It was the first time I'd taken this route, but I knew Wilshire Blvd. was south of Ye Rustic, and once you're on that, it's a straight shot east into downtown. We parked in that garage beneath Pershing Square, right in the heart of downtown. Since tonight's screening was at the Los Angeles Theatre, the closest Last Remaining Seats theater to Pershing Square, the L.A. Conservancy had volunteers outside the parking structure handing out validation stickers to slap on our parking machine tickets so that we'd only have to pay five dollars instead of the usual weeknight flat fee of six sixty. Not a huge difference, I know, but the Conservancy tries.

The Los Angeles Theatre is my favorite theater on Broadway. So far, anyway. A bunch have yet to be restored, but of the few that have been, this one's tops. It doesn't look like much from the outside. It's got a tall, thin, townhouse-type facade with glittering gold and red signage. But when you walk in, as the below photos attest, it's like, "Whoa!" Los Angeles is actually the "newest" of the twelve Broadway "cinema playhouses," as they were called in the beforetimes. It opened in January 1931 with the Chaplin movie City Lights, and when you go in, one of the first things you see on the wall is a photo of Charlie himself attending the City Lights premiere with Albert Einstein of all people. No joke. They're the last people you'd expect to be pals. Anyways, back to the jaw-dropping lobby, the first thing that strikes you about it are those grand, gargantuan chandeliers, right out of a period movie. You've also got mirrors, that crystal fountain up on the second level, and a sunburst motif that supposedly alludes to Louis XIV, France's so-called Sun King. The restrooms downstairs are humongous. If only all movie theater restrooms were that big. That might be another reason I prefer the Los Angeles over the other Broadway theaters. The other ones have much smaller restrooms. Lines are inevitable. Hey, this might be a fine point to you, but you're not the one with the micro bladder.

When the Los Angeles originally opened, it had all kinds of interesting features that hadn't been heard of before and for the most part haven't been heard of since. I'm guessing that's because movies just aren't the big events they obviously were in the thirties, so why spend all that money on something like an electric sign outside the auditorium that tells you how many vacant seats are left? Although I have to say that sounds incredibly convenient. I mean, even today I think people would appreciate knowing, as they hurry into the auditorium with their 'corn and soda pop, how packed the place is so they can brace themselves (or not) accordingly. That lower level where the restrooms are used to have a playroom for the kids, and what is now the ladies' room used to be much more posh, with sixteen private "compartments," as they used to say, each one finished in a different marble. You believe that? Another world back then, kids. But wait, it gets better. Let's say you had to get up to relieve yourself in the middle of a show. Have no fear, movie fan, because when you descended to that super lounge below, a periscope-type apparatus projected the film onto a smaller screen so that you could catch the action on the way to and from the restroom. Is that not awesome or what? Again, like the seat vacancy sign, that would be so bloody handy today. But I reckon that type of thing would only work in a single-screen theater. How the heck would you handle that in today's zillion-screen gigaplexes?

Interesting backstory about Mom's connection to How to Succeed in Business. She actually got to see the original Broadway production back in the early sixties. It was a smashing success and ran for several years. Mom's dad, the grandfather I never knew, died in September 1962. How to Succeed in Business opened about a year before, so she must have seen it in that window. Certainly not after her dad died. The family pretty much went to shit after that (more on that some other time, some other place). Anyway, tonight when we were at Ye Rustic, Mom said that their trip to New York to see the Broadway show was her introduction to the East Coast. They had such a great time that they came back just a few months later to see I Can Get It for You Wholesale, another successful Broadway show that starred an unknown nineteen-year-old named....Barbra Streisand. And just to show you that Mom's dad did okay for himself, on both of those trips they stayed at the St. Regis. You ever stay there? Unless you've got money to burn, probably not. What's more, Mom's family was from L.A., which makes such a trip all the more ambitious. I've been to the St. Regis a couple times to have drinks in the King Cole Bar on the ground floor. It's funny, the first time I went there, in 2005 or thereabouts, I had no idea the place had been Mom's East Coast home away from home. I only heard of it thanks to the James Bond novel Live and Let Die (1954). The plot of the novel, which bares only a skeletal resemblance to the 1973 film (Roger Moore's first outing as Bond), is roughly divided into thirds, and that first third sees Bond staying in New York to investigate the Harlem gangster Mister BIG. Well, when he arrives in New York at the beginning, he holes up in a top-floor suite at the St. Regis. After freshening up, he heads down to the ground floor to have drinks in the King Cole Bar with his American spy pal Felix Leiter. When I read that scene, I knew I had to get to the King Cole Bar somehow, someway.

Interesting how life brings you full circle, isn't it? Mom was tickled to death at seeing the play again as well as the film, both in the same week, back in her hometown. And the gravy, ladies and gentlemen? Before the movie started tonight, there was a Q&A up on the stage with the two leads from the movie: Robert Morse and Michele Lee. And conducting the interview was Matthew Weiner, the brain behind the TV show Mad Men. That makes sense, right? One of the reasons that show's all but critic proof is due to how well it evokes the sixties, the same era as How to Succeed in Business. Not that I would know. Neither my mom nor I have ever watched Mad Men, but it's cool the Conservancy got Matthew Weiner to host tonight's event.

I forgot to mention that the Conservancy started a new initiative this year called the Sixties Turn 50. They set up a whole website for it and everything, separate from their main laconservancy.org site. Tonight before the show, when I went down to use the restroom, I noticed over in that area between the men's and ladies' rooms, that spacious plot of wood flooring that was originally the kids' play area, the Conservancy's Modern Committee (or Mod Com, as they call it) had a bunch of tables set up with various pamphlets and brochures plugging the Sixties Turn 50. Standing around like robotic Conservancy volunteer greeters were those black kiosks, each with a flatscreen monitor looping footage of various sixties architecture around L.A. County. Last fall the Mod Com put on a sixties tour in L.A.'s South Bay area. I kind of wish I'd gone now after seeing the Mod Com's setup tonight. The tour was called "It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod City." I love that. Extra props for alluding to a popular movie...from the sixties! Anyway, the tour, as I later read in a recap in the Conservancy newsletter, took folks to sixties gems such as St. Jerome Catholic Church, the LAX Theme Building (I've always wanted to go in there!), IBM Aerospace HQ, The Proud Bird Restaurant, Imperial Terminal Flight Path Learning Center & Museum, and Northrop Grumman Space Park Campus. These were among the buildings being looped on the kiosks. Bravo to the Mod Com! It really was an impressive setup and a great use of all that space downstairs.

When the lights went down at 8pm, the first item on the program, as always, had Conservancy head Linda Dishman come out and welcome everyone and give a special thanks to the sponsors, the companies and wealthy individuals who sponsored both tonight as well as the Last Remaining Seats series as a whole. After that, she invited Matthew Weiner out to the stage to interview him for a few minutes.

The man in charge of one of the most popular shows on TV today, Matt Weiner is a humble, unassuming guy. He's in his mid forties and balding. He smiles easily, but you can tell he's a smart, serious guy as well. Linda asked him a bit about his background and particularly his interest in conservancy. Matt said that, while he's originally from Baltimore, he did a good bit of his growing up in L.A. When he was eleven (in 1976, the same year I was born), his family left Baltimore and settled in L.A.'s Hancock Park neighborhood. That right there tells me his parents must've done okay for themselves. He didn't mention what they did for a living, but Hancock Park is a beautiful historic neighborhood created in the 1920s by an oil magnate named George Hancock. It's 4400 acres of land George inherited from his dad, who in turn bought up the land when it was part of the larger Rancho La Brea. I know this thanks to the book Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles by Valley native--and sometime Book Fest attendee--Kevin Roderick. Hancock Park really is a gorgeous neighborhood. It's one of those neighborhoods you've probably seen in a movie or TV show, with those manicured lawns and palm trees lining the broad streets in perfect symmetry against the clear blue sky and, if you're facing north, the Hollywood sign off yonder. But seeing it on screen doesn't do it justice. When you're in L.A., it's definitely worth a drive-through and a look-see. Matt credited his growing up in Hancock Park with his interest in preserving historic architecture. It was during those years that he watched a lot of historic structures around L.A. fall into disrepair and decay. I reckon that makes some sense, sad as it is. The Conservancy wasn't founded until 1978, and of course it took them a while to find their legs. Until they came along, L.A. didn't have an organization to protect its history.

Even though Mad Men is set in New York, Matt said he shoots quite a bit of it in L.A. That's not exactly rare. CSI New York is shot entirely in L.A., the Valley specifically. That was why Gary Sinise agreed to do it. The producers wanted to shoot in New York, but Lieutenant Dan didn't want to be away from his family for big chunks of the year. CSI Miami, meanwhile, is mostly shot in Long Beach. So Matt's shooting here isn't unprecedented or anything, but it's nonetheless a very conscious decision on his part to support his adopted hometown's economy. He did share a New York shooting story, though. When he shot the Mad Men pilot in 2006, he used a building on Lexington St. When they returned the following year to shoot the rest of the first season, that building had been demolished. Suffice it to say he was indignant, not just from a producer's standpoint, but from the standpoint of someone who cares more and more about historic preservation as he gets older. I loved what he said when Linda asked him what the message of Mad Men was: "Stop tearing shit down." That got a lot of applause and no mistake.

Okay then, that brings us to the next item on tonight's bill before the movie started: Matt Weiner interviewing Robert Morse and Michele Lee. Matt and Robert already have a strong, friendly rapport from Mad Men. I didn't know until tonight that Robert Morse is on that show. He's been in nearly every episode apparently. For someone turning eighty next May, he sure has a lot of energy. He's still sort of like his character from How to Succeed, all smiling and friendly, but with a shade of mischief. I'm not sure why I say he's mischievous, although that gap-toothed grin sure doesn't help. He talked a little about how he fell into acting, and he certainly fell in early. He saw a play when he was a wee tot and knew acting was his calling. He studied with Lee Strasberg when he was still in high school(!) before scoring his first theatrical role in On the Town when he was eighteen. The only film work worth mentioning from those early years are roles that carried over from his theatrical gigs, playing a character he himself originated in the play on which the movie was based. We're talking flicks like The Matchmaker (he played Barnaby Tucker) as well as Say, Darling, Take Me Along and, of course, How to Succeed in Business. This is why Mom was so tickled to see him in person tonight and why tonight completes a circle of sorts. She saw him when he originated the role of J. Pierpont Finch, the role for which he won the first of his two Tonys (the second one didn't come until about thirty years later, for playing Truman Capote in Tru).

While Robert Morse is an East Coaster born on the New York stage, Michele Lee is L.A. born and bred. She's about ten or so years younger than Robert and looks even younger than that. Although I couldn't tell looking at her (Mom and I were only a few rows from the stage), I have a feeling she's had some work done. I could be wrong, she might just have awesome genes, but someone pushing seventy doesn't usually look so pretty. At any rate, she's definitely got class. While Robert's got the whole playful imp shtick going on, Michele is very composed and mature with a dynamite smile. Like Robert, she starred in the original Broadway version of How to Succeed. Unlike Robert, though, she didn't get her part until about a year into the run, after the original Rosemary dropped out. So Mom didn't get to see Michele Lee on stage. Another difference between her and Robert is that she didn't do much formal acting study. She said the best education she ever got was understudying Rosemary that first year and then playing Rosemary for the rest of the run. "Broadway was my education," she said. Her reprisal of the Rosemary character for the film was her film debut. She was in her mid twenties at that point, and there was no looking back. Her bread and butter didn't come from film, though, but from TV. She worked with legends like Danny Kaye and Dick Van Dyke. She even had her own eponymous show for a year or so in the mid seventies. But it was in the late seventies, when Michele was in her late thirties, that life, and TV, changed forever with the debut of a nighttime soap called Knots Landing. I never watched a single episode during its time on the air, and that's no small feat. You try avoiding one of the most popular shows on primetime that starts when you're three and ends a year before you graduate high school. Wow, that's hard to wrap my brain around. It was a spinoff from Dallas, another popular primetime soap from my youth. I'm not sure why they spun it off Dallas since Knots Landing, from what I've gathered, had virtually no connection in terms of plot or anything. The title refers to the setting, a coastal California town that's a fictional version of Malibu or some such place. It follows a bunch of couples and their various trials and tribulations. One of the couples is related to the Ewings from Dallas, and that's pretty much where the connection begins and ends. See what I mean? What was the point of the Ewing connection? Marketing purposes so people would watch the show? Dallas was pretty popular, after all. That "who shot J.R.?" episode still has some of the highest ratings TV's ever seen. Anywho, suffice it to say I didn't appreciate seeing Michele Lee remotely as much as my mom did, or as much as the older TV buffs in the audience. Michele Lee's a TV legend thanks to Knots Landing.

Matt's interview with Robert and Michele was the last item on the agenda before they started the movie. Pretty interesting stuff, huh? Events like this make living in L.A. fun. And I'm really happy Mom got to be here to see it. She was tickled beyond words at all the memory lanes she got to stroll down. Speaking of strolling, as we were strolling up the aisle after the show, she tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to our right. There was Robert Morse, smack in the middle of a throng of fans, chatting them up, flashing that signature gap-toothed smile. We slowed a bit, and for a second I thought Mom was going to elbow her way in to get Robert's attention. She didn't in the end. Too many people.

Ring Festival LA - At Burbank Library - Wagner vs. Tolkien: Who's the Real Lord of the Rings?

And the Ring Festival continues. I'm still six or so weeks away from seeing the Ring Cycle itself, and I'm still on target with the Ring Festival, the county-wide celebration of LA Opera's first-ever staging of the entire Ring. If you read my recent Getty or MOCA posts, you know all about the Ring Festival and my quest to do one thing per week from the Ring Festival guide. Last week, it was the Getty's thing on mythology. This week, it's the Burbank Library for a lecture on Wagner versus Tolkien.

Tonight after work I drove the couple miles from the Yahoo! office near Burbank Airport to downtown Burbank, one of my homes away from home thanks mainly to the AMC 16 Gigantaplex. The Burbank Library has three or four branches around this fair little city just outside L.A. Tonight's Ring Festival event was at the main branch. It's close enough to the AMC and all the other stuff downtown that I could simply park in the same public garage where I always park.

As soon as I entered the library and saw the middle-aged gals at the front desk, with the library proper on the other side of them, and the folks sitting at all the tables surfing the Web or looking up books or whatever, and the rows and rows of books further beyond them, I was immediately smitten. Not bothering to think how realistic it would be that I'd come back to check something out, since I usually just buy books I want to read, I went up to the desk and asked to become a member. This one gal was all over it. She gave me a brand new card, a copy of the May newsletter, and a little foldout thingee talking about how I can access their system from my home computer using the new PIN she wrote on the front. She also took my e-mail address so I could be on the mailing list for the newsletter going forward. They e-mail it out as a pdf attachment, she said. Awesome.

I almost forgot why I came tonight. Then I wondered where the LA Opera folks would have the room to put on an event here. The library was packed with folks of all ages, which I have to admit inspired me. I may not have much use for the library, but you should've seen this place. And on a Monday night to boot. Whoever says the library is dead obviously hasn't been to the Burbank Library.

The opera lecture was taking place in this big room they have on the second floor. It's one of those catch-all rooms you could use for lots of things. When the woman at the front desk told me how to get up there, she mentioned that it's the same room they use for movie screenings a few times a month. And if I was interested in that, a new movie schedule is published each month in the newsletter.

I was one of the first people in the upstairs lecture/screening room. Several rows of chairs with an aisle in the middle had already been set up. At the front of the room the floor is elevated maybe half a foot to create a sort of makeshift stage. The guy giving tonight's lecture was already there. John Spear is a sixtyish pudgy guy who works for the LA Opera Speakers Bureau as a Community Educator. He also volunteers for the Opera League of Los Angeles as an Assistant Committee Chair. John had already finished organizing his lecture materials, so he killed time chatting with the handful of us already there. He asked us if we had plans to see Die Feen (The Fairies) next month at the Pasadena Playhouse, produced by the Lyric Opera of Los Angeles. I probably won't see it, but that's not my point. With that one question, I could already tell John was a Wagnerite. You know he plans to see Die Feen, and he made sure we knew that.

It is sort of a big deal, though. Die Feen was the very first full-length opera Wagner wrote. And next month's production in Pasadena marks its very first performance in the United States, John said. Wow, really? We are talking about Wagner, right? The Ring Cycle guy? The man behind Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and a whole bunch of other legendary stuff? Well, I guess even Einstein can make lemons. But John insisted Die Feen's not a lemon. It may not be Tannhäuser or anything, but critics generally agree it's half decent. I doubt it'd get any attention at all if it wasn't by Wagner, so I suppose the appeal for folks like John is seeing, or rather, hearing, the kinds of stuff this mad genius wrote before he officially became a mad genius.

Wagner wrote the thing when he was all of twenty, but it was never produced in his lifetime. He subtitled it a "grand romantic opera," which tells you his ego was already in full bloom at that green age. It didn't have its world premiere until the summer of 1888, a good five years after Wagner's death. The opera company that finally took the big risk was Munich. That's not too surprising if you know anything about Wagner. Munich's the state capital of Bavaria, the southern-most state in Germany and the one that's pretty much claimed Wagner as their own ever since Wagner himself started the Ring Festival, THE Ring Festival, in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in August 1876. The festival's been held there every August since then except for a "hiatus" during World War II.

Anyway, it seems it's taken Die Feen a while to catch on. Not only is it just now reaching our shores, it only made it to France last year. That's kind of amazing considering how much closer France is to Germany and that opera's huge in France. While the opera itself is obscure, the overture's been doing pretty well as a standalone piece for orchestra. The New York City Opera was already performing it back in the early eighties. Suffice it to say any Wagnerite would be just as giddy as John about Die Feen's American debut next month.

Interesting trivia about Die Feen. Wagner gave the original score and libretto to Bavarian King Ludwig II (there we go with Wagner and Bavaria again). King Ludwig, by the way, was the guy who "invented" the Oktoberfest (not intentionally) when he married Elisabeth in 1810. After he died, the score and libretto were left to one person after the next and guarded very carefully. Finally, in the 1930s, about a hundred years after it was written, it was given to Hitler as a birthday present. For whatever stupid reason, he kept it with him in that underground bunker where he and his closest people lived toward the end of the war, when it was obvious they were going to lose and it was only a matter of time before the Allies showed up to blow Berlin to shit. And so the Die Feen materials went up in flames along with Hitler, his fellas, and their not-so-bomb-proof bunker.

On a roll with early Wagner, John moved on to the man's second opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). John just saw the USC opera company produce it and thought it was awesome. Wagner wrote it right after Die Feen, when he was twenty-one. Based on Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, this time Wagner didn't have trouble finding any takers. When he was twenty-three, the opera company in Magdeburg produced it. The first performance was a complete disaster. Indeed, it went down so poorly that the second night had to be canceled when the lead soprano's hubby got into a backstage fist fight with one of the lead tenors. By the time it was performed a second time, Wagner was already dead.

It's interesting with these earlier, not-so-great operas. Even though Wagner still had quite a ways to climb to reach his zenith, you can already see him exploring stuff that shows up in his later, much better operas. Stuff like redemption, long-winded expositions, mysterious strangers telling their lovers not to ask about their past, and people throwing themselves headlong into love without considering the consequences. That kind of stuff's all over the Ring Cycle, not to speak of Lohengrin and a bunch of other Wagner gems. John couldn't say enough about the USC version of Das Liebesverbot, especially the production values. He's convinced that if Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot were afforded those same production values when they were written, they would've fared much better with the public.

This led him to talk about the lack of Wagners in our own time. Or rather, classical music composers in general. My father, one of the biggest classical music buffs I know, talks about this every time I visit him, how we don't see any innovation in classical music anymore. Those who study classical music don't really contribute to it. Those who try usually compose stuff that's so atonal that listening to it could be hazardous to your ears. John said that as well, that those who do study classical these days don't seem to be fans of melody, of music you can hum to yourself after you listen to it. "Does anyone write melody today?" John asked. "Or want to?" He bemoaned how musicians who seem to have any interest in melody usually gravitate to movie soundtracks and pop music. He's got a great point. You want a composition that sounds like classical music and has a melody you can hum afterward? Hollywood, baby. This is not a new phenomenon either. If you read my post last month about the Opera League seminar on Die Gezeichneten, you would know that the composer of that piece, Franz Schreker, wrote music that we would today call cinematic. A lot of his pupils left Germany for Hollywood. Lots of European composers from the early twentieth century, including famous ones, came over to sunny L.A. to find work. Even Arnold Schoenberg came over. He taught at USC and UCLA and settled in the Brentwood section of the Westside. USC and UCLA both named a building after him. UCLA's Schoenberg Hall is one of the venues they use for the Book Fest.

As more folks trickled into the room, John switched from talking about the dearth of classical talent to discussing my single least favorite opera ever: Wagner's Parsifal. Actually, I'm not sure I should say it's my least favorite, but I'll say this: The one production I have seen, which LA Opera put on four years ago, was awful. From what I gather, the guy who directed that version, Robert Wilson, put such a unique stamp on it that it may not be accurate to say I don't like Parsifal. I just hated Robert Wilson "remake" of it. When I attended the Opera League's Backstage Magic seminar a couple months ago, I sat next to Ed Schaff, who volunteers as the League's communications manager. He told me that Robert Wilson basically threw out Wagner's libretto and wrote his own. Man, it sucked bad. The longest five hours of my life. John must be a hardcore Wagnerite if he liked it. He saw that production, understands it was on the slow side, but said it had its own strengths. He described watching it as a Zen experience. He actually had one benefit I didn't have: Before he saw it, someone told him to expect an opera with the pace of syrup in the North Pole. He also heard how LA Opera director Placido Domingo, who played the title character in that production, got all excited that he got to move an arm at one point. That, more than anything, tells you how ungodly slow it was. Not only did the plot not move, the singers didn't move, and when anyone moved so much as an arm, "Alert the media!"

I have to admit, though, that maybe Robert Wilson was onto something. Ed Schaff complained that opera has become a stage director's medium, but that's not Robert Wilson's fault. If you're a director and someone taps you to do an opera, especially if it's a reputable big city company like LA Opera, you sure as shit don't say no. If they approach you, it's safe to assume they like your vision. So what do you do? You stick to your vision. Robert Wilson did that, and he seems to have driven a wedge straight through the audience. It's been years since he did Parsifal, and folks are still talking about it. Tonight's event is like the third or fourth time in the last year or so where Robert Wilson's version of Parsifal came up in the conversation. If you're Robert Wilson, that must feel good.

Alright then. It was a few minutes past the hour. About twenty or so people had shown up at this point. John was ready to begin. He started out with some biographical tidbits. He's originally from Seattle, and one piece of Wagner trivia about him is that, of all the various versions of the Ring Cycle he's seen all over the world, he still hasn't seen the Seattle opera company's version. His first musical love was jazz. John was a jazz drummer in New Orleans in his "former life," he said. His initial entry into the operaverse was as a singer. John was a bass-baritone partial to Verdi operas. He retired from singing ages ago but still has a license plate that says "Verdi Lover." In his later years he worked on the administrative side of opera, eventually landing the role of general director of Long Beach Opera. They did the Ring Cycle under his leadership. John said to this day, LBO's Ring remains one of his favorite versions of the Ring. Well, I guess it would be, huh? Regardless of the version, John said his favorite Ring character is Wotan, god of the gods. He loves how mortal and flawed Wotan becomes over the course of the Cycle. How, by the end of the second one, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Wotan's become this broken-hearted dad forced by his own laws to imprison his baby girl Brünnhilde in a ring of fire atop a desolate mountain. Recall that John used to be a bass-baritone. Wotan, you won't be surprised to learn, is a bass-baritone role. Like all opera singers--well, performers in general--John likes those meaty, complex roles. Wotan's about as meaty and complex as they come.

In terms of tonight's theme, juxtaposing the Ring Cycle with The Lord of the Rings, it first occurred to John that such a theme would make good fodder for an opera lecture back in December 2001, when the first of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, The Fellowship of the Ring, came out. Today, after nearly ten years, John said he's got the lecture down pat. He's written and rewritten it to the point that it's now been published twice. He considered it a good sign when, soon after he finished the initial version in 2002, he got something like ten requests right away to give the Wagner-Tolkien spiel. The idea for this lecture should've occurred to him, he said, back in the seventies, when he left jazz for opera. It was around that time when he read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He's been a fan of Tolkien ever since.

To kick things off, John mentioned the obvious parallels between the two opi. Each work is split into four parts. Each was written out of order. Each consumed the life of its author for many years. Each author took long breaks while working on it. In Wagner's case, after he composed the score for act two of Siegfried, twelve years went by before he got around to act three. Tolkien, for his part, worked on The Lord of the Rings in fits and starts and could sometimes go years without touching it. It drove his agents crazy to the point that they became convinced he'd never finish it.

John saved the biggest parallel for last. Both the Ring Cycle and The Lord of the Rings take their themes and plotlines from three principle sources: The Edda, the Nibelungenlied, and, perhaps most of all, the Völsungasaga.

I remember the Völsungasaga (Saga of the Völsungs) being discussed at the Getty Center event I attended about a year ago called German Art and Opera. It's basically a great big huge novel. Similar in size to The Lord of the Rings, now that I think about it, the Völsungasaga is an epic tale of this very unfortunate family called the Völsungs. It's like their rise and fall, if you will, starting with Völsung himself. We start with him, and then follow his descendants. Völsung is killed by King Siggeir of Geatland. Recognize Geatland? If you read Beowulf, you should. Beowulf was from Geatland, an ancient kingdom in present-day southern Sweden. So anyway, Geatland's King Siggeir kills poor Völsung. Völsung's two kids, son Sigmund and daughter Signy, want to avenge dad. Sigmund eventually has a son named Sigurd, and it's Sigurd who eventually serves as the model for Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied and ultimately the Ring Cycle. Signy, meanwhile, just to make things incredibly complicated, marries her father's killer, King Siggeir, proving that the Icelandic bards were pretty good at juicy plots.

While this originally dates back to Iceland, the other Scandic and Germanic countries took the Saga of the Völsungs and made their own versions of it. In fact, the earliest drawings and carvings giving us a visual representation of the tale's eventual tragic hero, good ol' Sigurd (Siegfried), date back to Sweden. Speaking of which, the Beowulf connection to Völsung is greater than Geatland. The character of Völsung himself is, in fact, mentioned in Beowulf. Early on in the story, when all is fine in the state of Denmark, you've got a bard singing in the court of the Danish King Horthgar (the guy who eventually hires Beowulf and the Geatish warriors to deal with Grendel). Among other things, the bard talks about Völsung and his avenging son Sigmund. In the original Old English, Völsung is spelled Wæls.

The Völsung story also has the inspiration for the Ring Cycle's number one Valkyrie Brünnhilde. In the original Icelandic, her name's Brynhild. Wagner makes Brünnhilde a daughter of Wotan, the god of gods. In the old Icelandic story, she's the daughter of some other guy, but she still knows Wotan, or Odin, as he's called in Icelandic. Odin tells her at one point to help this one king kill another king, but Brynhild likes the other king better so she helps him instead, thus pissing off Odin. He exiles her to this castle behind a wall of shields on top of this one mountain in the Alps, where she has to sleep inside a ring of fire until someone with big enough cojones braves the fire to wake her up. Who do you think that is? Yep. Sigurd. It's clever how Wagner takes bits and pieces of this and melds them together. In the Ring Cycle, he makes Brünnhilde the daughter of Wotan, which makes things simpler and less hokey that they can talk to each other. And instead of messing up a fight between two random kings, Wagner has her deciding the fight between Siegfried's dad Siegmund and the husband of Siegmund's twin sister. Wagner, in other words, streamlines everything. Indeed, as long as the Ring Cycle is, Wagner had to leave out quite a bit of the Völsung story.

Now let's talk about the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). This baby is a huge epic poem like Beowulf. John called it the Iliad of Germany. The story is taken from a mishmash of stuff, fiction and non. It started with something that actually happened circa 400 A.D. or thereabouts, somewhere in present-day Germany, something that probably wasn't remotely as dramatic or interesting as the poem turned out to be. As people talked about the event(s) over the years, they naturally embellished and made stuff up. By the time the poet in question came along, the story was a rip roaring yarn. As for when the poem was written, scholars have nailed it down to sometime between 1180 and 1210. They're also fairly certain the poet was someone who worked at the court of this one bishop named Wolfger von Erla, who presided over this town called Passau in present-day southeastern Germany, right on the Austrian border. This was still a couple hundred years before Gutenberg, so they didn't have the printing press. If you wanted to make copies, you had to write everything by hand. Ouch, right? The oldest Nibelungenlied manuscript dates to 1230.

The plot overlaps somewhat with the Völsungasaga's plot. You've got a guy named Siegfried. He's famous for killing a dragon, just as Siegfried kills the dragon Fafner in the third Ring opera. You've got a woman named Brünhild, but she's not Siegfried's love interest. Instead, Siegfried's with this gal named Kriemhild. Brünhild, meanwhile, marries this other guy named Gunther, who I think is Kriemhild's brother. Unlike the Ring Cycle, this has a very specific setting, a kingdom called Burgundy. No, not the Burgundy of present-day France, but a kingdom over in present-day eastern Germany. As I said above, the Nibelungenlied is inspired by real events, and some of the characters are based on real people. For example, after Siegfried is betrayed and murdered and Kriemhild plots her revenge, she marries a Hun named King Etzel, who's based on Attila the Hun. Etzel helps her get back at the folks who killed Siegfried, which includes Kriemhild's brother Gunther. I'm skipping over huge chunks of time that include a lot of political wheeling and dealing between the two power couples. Suffice it to say the ending is a blood bath.

In case you're interested, the kernels of truth out of which the Nibelungenlied was born date to the Roman conquest of the Burgundians in the fifth century as well as a spat between this one queen named, yes, Brunhilda (c. 540-610) and another queen. Attila the Hun did marry a Burgundian woman, but it wasn't Brunhilda or anyone named Kriemhild. Anyway, as I said above, it was mostly boring stuff, but it was enough to light the spark. Those German poets took it and ran with it.

And finally we have the Edda, which I've saved for last because, according to John, it's the most important source we have today of Norse mythology and Germanic legends. The Edda's got a lot of that fantastical stuff we know and love from Tolkien, like orcs and what have you. The Edda actually comes in two parts, a Poetic Edda and a Prose Edda. Like the Nibelungenlied, they were written in the 1200s. And just as the Nibelunglied was taken from German oral traditions, the two Eddas were based on stuff the Icelandic people had been telling their kids at bedtime for hundreds of years. The Poetic Edda is not a single giant poem. It's a collection of poems. Some of the poems talk about how the gods created the world and then didn't get along with each other. Other poems talk about human heroes, including characters the Icelandic folks would've recognized from the Völsungasaga, like Sigurd and Brynhildr.

While no one knows who wrote the Poetic Edda, we do know who wrote the Prose Edda. It was this Icelandic scholar/writer/historian/politician named Snorri Sturluson. He wrote the Prose Edda in four volumes (a prologue plus three main books) around 1220. There we are with four parts again, right? Just like the Ring Cycle and The Lord of the Rings. The Prose Edda has less to do with humans and more to do with the Old Norse deities and all their drama. Snorri took it even further, though. Instead of having separate characters for the gods and the mortals, he combined them. Snorri posited that the gods we all know and love in Norse mythology were based on real people, kings and generals and whatnot. After they died, their followers and subjects started worshipping them. When they went into battle or faced some hardship, they would invoke the names of these dead leaders. They'd venerate them to such an extent that in due time they became akin to gods. And so, for example, when one tribe beat another in battle, the explanation was that the winning tribe's god beat the losing tribe's god in battle up in Valhalla.

This brings us back to Wagner and how he tried to make sense of that wealth of material. John told us about this essay Wagner wrote in the 1840s, when he was in his early thirties. In typical Wagner fashion, it was very long, and he wrote it in dribs and drabs over the course of a few years. It was called something like "World History Saga," and it focused on a conflict over a horde of gold. Other than that, John said most of it wouldn't make sense to anyone today. He said it wasn't historical fiction so much as a warped history. I'd guess in Hollywood parlance, the "World History Saga" would be considered a treatment for the eventual final product, or the first draft of a treatment. To me it sounds like Wagner had soaked up those three main source materials I talked about above, mixed them all up in his mental pot, and tried to give his own spin. He was bursting with story ideas but didn't know which direction to go in.

In the fall of 1848, by which point he'd been kicking around this mythological stuff for some time, Wagner sat down and wrote the first official Nibelung sketch. This was a more organized distillation of those ancient sources into a coherent plot outline for what Wagner thought would be just one opera called Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death). This is the opera that eventually became the fourth Ring opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

One interesting tidbit I didn’t know until tonight is that, in addition to the Siegfried/Sigurd character from the myths, Wagner also based his Siegfried in part on Frederick Barbarossa (officially Frederick I), a German king who ruled the Holy Roman Empire for most of the twelfth century. I first learned about this guy in high school German class. Mr. Wallace introduced him to us by explaining the Barbarossa nickname. It comes from the Italian for "red beard," which is what the Italians, a lot of whose territory was part of the empire, called him. Not to make fun of him, mind you, but because they were scared shitless of him. Fred's being German meant there was tension between him and the Italians almost by default. Ultimately the Italians were quite right to be scared of him, as his reign was defined quite a bit by the military campaigns he launched down there, and how he stole a bunch of sacred stuff from the Vatican.

The whole Vatican thing makes it ironic that Fred was a Crusader, as in the Holy Crusades. In fact, the particular Crusade he went on (there were several) coincided with the one Richard the Lionheart (Richard I) went on. Richard's the king you might remember from the Robin Hood stories. It was Fred and Richard and the king of France, all leading their armies into the Holy Land. Things went great for a while. Fred, like Richard, was a natural-born leader. But he was old at this point, pushing seventy. That's long in the tooth by today's standards, let alone back then. Almost a year into the Crusade, he and the men were crossing some river in present-day Turkey. It was sort of rocky, at one point the horse faltered or something, Fred fell off, and that's that. Like everyone else, he was decked out in heavy armor, which makes it impossible to get back up when you've fallen into deep enough water.

I wish John had gone more into what exactly Wagner was thinking when he connected Fred to Siegfried. On the surface, it's hard to see. Siegfried is basically a giant man-child who grows up isolated from society. In fact, think of Siegfried as the Arnold Schwarzenegger character from Twins. Remember how he was raised on that tropical island and becomes sort of a fish out of water when he ventures to the mainland to reunite with his twin Danny DeVito? That's basically how Siegfried is. He's a big strong guy who's very naive in the ways of the world. When he kills the dragon Fafner, it's not because he's brave, it's because he's an idiot who doesn't know that a massive fire-breathing dragon is generally to be avoided. So again, the question is: What are the parallels between Siegfried and Frederick Barbarossa?

His innocence aside, Siegfried is a natural-born leader, you could say. He's superhuman, charismatic, and knows how to whoop some ass. The same could be said for Fred. He, too, was a natural leader, had great charisma, and was indeed thought to be superhuman by his contemporaries. Most folks pushing seventy back then could barely walk. This guy strapped on armor, hopped on a horse, and led thousands of people across the continent to the Middle East. I should also mention that since Fred was a German king, and that he was phenomenally successful as a war leader/politician/all that stuff, folks in Wagner's time would've naturally clung to him as an ideal. As I've mentioned in other Ring-related posts, when Wagner wrote the Ring, the German states were riven with strife. Lots of war, lots of conflict, with people fleeing in droves. Those who stayed were very proud of their past. The period of Fred's reign, indeed the German Middle Ages in general, were viewed through very thick rose-colored lenses by Wagner and his contemporaries. So even if the parallels between Siegfried and Fred aren't obvious, the fact is, Fred was viewed as the ideal leader they were sorely missing in Wagner's time. And so in creating the character of Siegfried, Wagner was, in essence, creating this ideal heroic figure who literally didn't have "fear" in his vocabulary.

John added that Wagner also based Siegfried partly on Jesus Christ. I don't get it. What was Wagner thinking about specifically? How Siegfried dies tragically at the end, betrayed by those he thought were his friends? And how he's the offspring of gods? He's not Wotan's son, but he is his grandson. I dunno. It just seems that if you look at a lot of tragic heroes, one could argue they were all based on Jesus.

Speaking of sacrifice, John now jumped forward a good sixty-plus years, from mid-nineteenth century Germany in turmoil to the 1910s, when all of Europe was in turmoil with World War I. If you've studied that war for even five minutes, you know what a complete bloodbath it was, a total waste of millions upon millions of lives, young men in their prime being fed--no, stuffed, crammed, jam-packed--into a mechanized meat grinder. This was when Tolkien found his fantasy legs.

Tolkien was in college when the war broke out. England was feeling very full of herself at this point. No one had a clue about the coming nightmare. Men of all ages were enlisting in droves. Apparently Tolkien wanted to finish college first, which pissed off his parents because they wanted him to enlist right away. He finished college about a year into the war and spent the following year in training before being deployed to the continent in the summer of '16. Tolkien saw lots of action. Almost all his pals from childhood were killed. Eventually he got sick with what they called "trench fever," which meant he had lice snacking on him. And so he went back to England and got bounced from hospital to hospital.

This is when he started writing fantasy. Have you heard of Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales? It's basically a collection of short stories that, big picture wise, served as his initial exploration of Middle-earth, the same place where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place. The one story in particular he wrote during his convalescence was called "The Fall of Gondolin," about the rise and fall of this Elven city called Gondolin. It's quite dark. A whole bunch of the good guys die at the end after being betrayed by one of their own.


Like Wagner, Tolkien created mythological worlds with mostly non-human characters through which he could exorcise his demons. John told us about how, later on after World War II, scholars and critics kept looking for traces of World War II in Middle-earth. Tolkien was like, "Are you kidding? Wrong war!" When the second edition of The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien decided to write a preface to address the war question. "One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

As for World War II, John talked about how the Nazis, including and especially Hitler, adopted Wagner as one of their own, even though Wagner died a few years before Hitler was born. Just as Wagner viewed the Middle Ages as the German ideal, so too did the Nazis. And since Wagner's operas had a lot to do with old German myths, the Nazis not only championed Germanic legends, they championed the man who championed Germanic legends. In fact, a lot of people actually think Wagner was, in fact, a Nazi, when of course simple chronology renders that impossible. Of course, it doesn't help matters that Wagner was an unabashed anti-Semite.

Tolkien himself weighed in on the matter. John told us that Tolkien wasn't surprised the Nazis appropriated Wagner and specifically the Ring Cycle for their sinister purposes. Tolkien was convinced the damage inflicted by their appropriation was irreparable. At the time, that may have seemed likely. The fact that Wagner is still omnipresent, though, speaks volumes about how awesome his music is. Say what you will about Wagner the man (and we all do), but you can't deny the man's artistic talent. In an Opera League seminar last year, one of the speakers said Wagner was "incapable of writing a single boring bar of music." True dat.

Just as they do at Opera League seminars, John played musical excerpts. The first two excerpts were from scene three of the first Ring Cycle opera, Das Rheingold. This is one of my favorite scenes in the whole Cycle. The dwarf Alberich, the Ring Cycle's arch villain (tragic hero?), ventures down into Nibelheim, the underworld where the dwarves live and work under the lashes of Alberich's whip. I love how LA Opera evoked Nibelheim. They do something clever with that huge stage rake to make it look like Alberich's going down. And all that hammering, the steady clanging, is integrated into the music. In terms of the plot, the point of the scene is to introduce Alberich's brother, Mime, the dwarf who eventually raises Siegfried in the woods between the second and third operas. Mime is the best of the metalsmiths. When we meet him, he's just finished making a magical helmet called the Tarnhelm. Don the Tarnhelm and you can either become invisible or change shape. Soon Wotan, god of the gods, and his lawyer/god of fire Loge show up. Now that Alberich has both the Tarnhelm and the all-powerful Ring, his ego has grown bigger than Valhalla. He tells Wotan and Loge straight up that he'll be taking over the world in due time. Loge, like any good lawyer, turns passive-aggressive. He pretends to doubt the Tarnhelm's power. Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to turn into a huge dragon. Loge's unfazed. Alberich then turns into a little toad. And that's when Loge and Wotan grab the little shit and whisk him up to Valhalla as their prisoner.


John's main point in playing this excerpt was to talk about leitmotifs. You know what a leitmotif is, right? Watch any movie and you've most likely seen it. Or rather, heard it. You know how in movies, when a certain character shows up, the same series of musical notes or the same part of a song plays? Like in Star Wars, composer John Williams came up with a whole slew of leitmotifs for most of the major characters. Princess Leia had that same little delicate tune. When Darth Vader or the Emperor or the storm troopers were approaching, you always heard that very sinister orchestral piece which has by now become ubiquitous. Sure, you know leitmotifs. Well, Wagner was the leitmotif master. John said he may not have invented the idea of a leitmotif, but with the Ring Cycle, he advanced the cause of leitmotifs by leaps and bounds. This excerpt introduces us to a few leitmotifs. First and foremost, you've got the "Ring" leitmotif. This is at the very beginning of the scene, when Alberich brags about having used the Ring to enslave the dwarves. That leads to the "Woe" motif. I remember that from the LA Opera production, how the dwarves don't sing so much as wail in response to the whip's lash. This takes us to the "Gold's Dominion" leitmotif, Alberich's response to the wailing. And finally the scene comes full circle back to the "Ring" motif when Wotan and Loge show up.

Before continuing with the excerpts, John talked about the stark contrast between how the two epics begin--Das Rheingold and The Hobbit--and how these beginnings tell us a lot about the two authors. He picked up the copy of The Hobbit he brought with him and read us the first page.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats--the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill--The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it--and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage...

I hadn't thought about it before, but John's dead on. When you look at how The Hobbit begins versus Das Rheingold, right away it seems Tolkien is the noon to Wagner's midnight. Of course it's more complicated than that, but anyways. John didn't play us the opening to Das Rheingold, but that's just as well. When he said the beginning of the Ring Cycle, he didn't mean the first page of the score. He meant the entire first opera. Whereas Tolkien was content giving us a quick rundown of Bilbo's house before diving into the plot with the arrival of the dwarves, Wagner snowed his audience under the complete portrait of the Ring's mythological origin. That's basically what Das Rheingold is: A one-hundred-sixty-minute exposition in four acts.

The next excerpt was the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" song from the beginning of the third and last act of Die Walküre. Even folks who know nothing whatsoever about Wagner or the Ring Cycle have heard "Ride of the Valkyries." It's in that one scene in Apocalypse Now when Robert Duvall leads a chopper attack. Otherwise, it's a pretty ubiquitous song. Seriously, if you think you've never heard it, go to YouTube and do a search for "Ride of the Valkyries." When you hear it, you'll be like, "Of course!"

In the context of act three, the song usually starts as a prelude. In the opera lexicon, a prelude is similar to an overture. Only, an overture is the piece they play before the opera starts. The prelude is what they play before act two or act three or whatever. Not to be confused with an interlude, which is played between scenes. Anyway, "Ride of the Valkyries" starts when the curtain is still down, but that's only for a few seconds. Soon enough the curtain rises to reveal the divine sisters. Not all of them yet. At first we've got four who've gathered on the mountain. See, what the Valkyries basically do in Old Norse mythology is, they fly back and forth from Valhalla and earth to collect heroes who've died in battle. Accordingly, each of these four Valkyries has a dead warrior in her steed's saddlebag. Soon enough, four more Valkyries show up with dead heroes of their own. Finally, they're joined by the ninth and final Valkyrie, Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde's sisters are shocked to see she's brought a human woman with her, Sieglinde, the gal from act one who fell in love with her long lost twin brother Siegmund. Gross, I know, but let's get past that. Anyway, what no one says in this scene, but what you would know if you've been following the Cycle from the beginning, is that Sieglinde is half-sister to the Valkyries. Right? The Valkyries are the divine daughters of Wotan. He had them with, I think, Freia or someone. One of the goddesses. But the twins Sieglinde and Siegmund? Wotan had them with a mortal woman. Despite this kinship, the Valkyries are totally against protecting Sieglinde even though she's pregnant with the third opera's title character. This is where Wotan shows up and gives Brünnhilde the third degree. The other eight Valkyries fly away. Most we never see again except for Waltraute, who figures more prominently in the fourth opera.

John mentioned another pop culture touchstone where you may've heard "Ride of the Valkyries": What's Opera, Doc? It's one of those Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd shorts from the fifties. You've got Bugs as Brünnhilde and Elmer Fudd wearing that Viking helmet and singing, with the same "Ride of the Valkyrie" notes: "Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit, kill da waaaaaaabbit, etc." John related seeing Robin Williams at the Hollywood Bowl several years ago. "Don't ask me why he was there," he said. It wasn't a one-man show but was part of a larger program. The Hollywood Bowl is primarily the summer home of the LA Philharmonic, and I'm guessing they must've played Wagner that night, perhaps even "Ride of the Valkyries." When Robin Williams took the mic, he said it was impossible to think of Wagner without thinking of What's Opera, Doc?

Part of John's point in playing "Ride of the Valkyries" was to introduce us to yet another leitmotif, called "Walkürenritt," which literally means "Valkyrie Ride." The end of act three, which is the end of the opera, sees Wotan stripping his daughter of her divine Valkyrie status, rendering her as mortal as her half-sister Sieglinde. Then he leaves her asleep and surrounded by fire, saying she'll be stuck there until someone's got the cojones to brave the fire. The way John described his relationship to the end of Die Walküre comes close to mine. It's very effecting, especially the way Achim Freyer stages it with the scrim. There's Brünnhilde, asleep in the fire, no longer a mighty warrior. And there's Wotan, just outside the fire, reluctantly turning his back and stalking away, from his daughter and from the audience. He too seems human. And to us, at that moment, he is. This isn't Wotan the god of Norse gods. It's Wotan the heart-broken dad, decreed by his own laws to abandon his baby girl. John said he always cries when he sees that. If I ever become a father, I'll probably cry too.

From Wagner we go back to Tolkien. Just as Wagner was part of a group of artists espousing the Medieval German and mythical German as the ideal, so too did Tolkien belong to a clique of minds like his. In this case, I'm referring to writers who promoted narrative fiction, especially fantasy. You know C.S. Lewis, right? The Chronicles of Narnia guy? Well, he and Tolkien were pals. They hung out at the pub every week. John talked about their being part of this group called the Inklings, a bunch of writers and professors who gathered regularly at this Oxford pub called the Bird. You had Tolkien as well as his son Chris, C.S. Lewis and his older brother Warren, and a whole bunch of others. The way Warren Lewis described it was: "Properly speaking, the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." Right. It was like a Sunday book group or something. Only, instead of gabbing about a book they'd all just read, they'd talk about and read from books they were in the process of writing. This is where Tolkien read early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Is that not awesome or what? To be a fly on the Bird's wall...

John went into how Tolkien used archetypes in The Lord of the Rings to prefigure some of the great cultural and historical events. So for starters, you've got Númenor as Atlantis, right? It was this island west of Middle-earth that basically sunk and killed most of the folks who lived there. Then you've got Aragorn kissing the hot elf Arwen when she's asleep, which alludes to Sleeping Beauty, of course. And finally, we have my most favorite allusion in The Lord of the Rings: The Crack of Doom. Tolkien's Middle-earth wasn't as overtly Christian as Lewis's Narnia, but the Crack of Doom is a glaring exception. In the Christian mythos, the Crack of Doom is when they play the trumpets announcing the Day of Judgment. Well, Tolkien took the Crack of Doom and made it literal with Mount Doom, that volcano in Mordor where Sauron forged the Ring. That's where Frodo has to get to to destroy the Ring. He has to venture into the bowels of Doom and drop the Ring through the literal crack in the floor so that it'll fall into the lava. Those are but three of several examples of Tolkien alluding to stuff in our culture. John said Tolkien, in plotting the Middle-earth timeline, drew from archetypes residing in the British subconscious and made them conscious.

This led John to talk about a lecture Tolkien delivered in 1936 called "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." He was in his mid forties at this point and had been teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford's Pembroke College for about ten years. The Inklings were in full swing. The Hobbit was a year away from publication. Tolkien was on a roll. The gist of the lecture was that Tolkien was taking to task the majority of Beowulf critics, who insisted on viewing the epic poem purely as a historical document, to be used for studying Norse life while completely ignoring the fantasy elements. Like, say, Grendel. And the dragon. Both of whom constitute a fairly significant portion of the story. Scholars also used the poem as a vehicle for studying Old English. Don't get Tolkien wrong, he was definitely a language man. He invented Elvish for Pete's sake. And of course he had nothing against history. Dude invented the most comprehensive history imaginable for Middle-earth. His point was that the critics shouldn't stop there. Beowulf, he said, has tons and tons to offer from a fantasy and artistic standpoint. He said Grendel and his mom and the dragon were totally key to the poem and that the writer was using them as an allegory for human destiny. "Beowulf is among my most valued sources," Tolkien said.


This lecture was a watershed for Beowulf scholarship. It's been reprinted and republished innumerable times. The first I heard of it was in the summer of 2000 when I read Irish poet Seamus Heaney's then new and very well-received translation of Beowulf. In his introduction, he cited and praised Tolkien's lecture for drawing everyone's attention to the poem's literary qualities, validating its inclusion not just in history classes, but in English lit classes as well. Suffice it to say Beowulf's influence is fairly stark in the Middle-earth stuff. In 2003, the same year The Return of the King came out, they found literally two thousand or so pages of Tolkien's handwritten notes about, as well as his own translation of, Beowulf, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, thus revealing the extra dimension of his fandom (fanaticism?).

The Beowulf critics Tolkien was taking to task reminded John of one of his English teachers, who apparently missed the point of Poe's "The Raven." Of course, "The Raven" is much shorter and less complicated than Beowulf, so I'm not sure how anyone could screw it up. But apparently John had a teacher who was more interested in "The Raven" for strictly linguistic and historical purposes while completely ignoring the horror and fantasy aspects.

With the next pair of excerpts, John compared and contrasted the scene in The Hobbit when Bilbo first meets the dragon Smaug versus Siegfried's meeting the dragon Fafner in Siegfried. He picked up The Hobbit and flipped open to chapter twelve ("Inside Information"). Chapter eleven ("On the Doorstep") ends with Bilbo going down into the Lone Mountain. John started reading about two or three pages into chapter twelve. Bilbo's been venturing deeper into the mountain and has now reached, as Tolkien wrote (and about where John started reading):

...the great bottom-most cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain's root. It is almost dark so that its vastness can only be dimly guessed, but rising from the near side of the rocky floor there is a great glow. The glow of Smaug!

There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.

Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed. Behind him where the walls were nearest could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed.

To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.

And then Bilbo, invisible thanks to the One Ring, steals a cup or something, which Smaug soon detects when he wakes up and "smells" the fact that his horde is now less one cup. Bilbo and the dwarves haul ass out of the mountain as Smaug rips shit up. Our heroes spend the next few pages camping and debating their next move. Bilbo, who at this point in the adventure has become the group's undisputed leader, proposes to go back down there, invisible, to see if he can find a weakness with Smaug that they can exploit. This time Smaug only pretends to sleep as the invisible Bilbo enters his chamber. Smaug smells him and starts talking to him. The conversation they have is hilarious, although I'm not sure how much of that hilarity is intentional. It's just the way this huge scary dragon talks like a very proper Englishman. Here's an excerpt, starting toward the beginning of the conversation.

"No thank you, O Smaug the Tremendous!" he replied. "I did not come for presents. I only wished to have a look at you and see if you were truly as great as tales say. I did not believe them."

"Do you now?" said the dragon somewhat flattered, even though he did not believe a word of it.

"Truly songs and tales fall utterly short of the reality, O Smaug the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities," replied Bilbo.

"You have nice manners for a thief and a liar," said the dragon. "You seem familiar with my name, but I don't seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?"

"You may indeed! I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen."

"So I can well believe," said Smaug, "but that is hardly your usual name."

"I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number."

"Lovely titles!" sneered the dragon. "But lucky numbers don't always come off."

"I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me."

"These don't sound so creditable," scoffed Smaug.

"I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider," went on Bilbo beginning to be pleased with his riddling.

"That's better!" said Smaug. "But don't let your imagination run away with you!"

This of course is the way to talk to dragons, if you don't want to reveal your proper name (which is wise), and don't want to infuriate them by a flat refusal (which is also very wise). No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it. There was a lot here which Smaug did not understand at all (though I expect you do, since you know all about Bilbo's adventures to which he was referring), but he thought he understood enough, and he chuckled in his wicked inside.

"I thought so last night," he [Smaug] smiled to himself. "Lake-men, some nasty scheme of those miserable tub-trading Lake-men, or I'm a lizard. I haven't been down that way for an age and an age; but I will soon alter that!"


You get the idea. Now let's compare that to when Siegfried confronts Fafner in act two of his eponymous opera. If you've followed the Cycle from the beginning, you know that Fafner was one of the two giants who built Valhalla in Das Rheingold. And then at the end, in a squabble over the Ring, Fafner kills the other giant, Fasolt. Now we get to see what Fafner's been up to. He's taken the Ring and the Tarnhelm and found this cave where he can guard them in the form of a dragon. As I said above, Siegfried's an innocent kid in a man's body. He's not a courageous hero in the traditional sense. While waiting outside the cave, he forgets about the dragon and fiddles around with his reed pipe. He tries and fails to mimic the song of a bird in a nearby tree. The racket wakes up Fafner. The ensuing fight is very short. Siegfried takes his sword Nothung (yes, even swords have names here, as they do in The Lord of the Rings) and stabs Fafner in the heart. Just before he expires, Fafner warns Siegfried about people who will betray him to get the Ring. When he tastes the dragon's blood, Siegfried can suddenly understand the bird he'd been trying to imitate. The bird tells him to go get the Ring and the Tarnhelm.

One obvious difference between the two scenes is that, in The Hobbit, we get some insight into Smaug's thoughts. Smaug is also friendlier, even playful. He loves that riddling talk. Fafner, meanwhile, has no humor whatsoever. It's all gloom and doom with Fafner. Also, Biblo's confronting Smaug is a clear act of bravery. He uses both his courage and his wits to get Smaug to lower his guard. He's got no choice, right? He's a tiny little hobbit. Certainly he can't rely on brute strength like the borderline idiot Siegfried. This makes the Smaug scene a tête-à-tête filled with both humor and suspense. Night and day from Siegfried versus Fafner.

John switched gears to talk about Fafner from the point of view of stage design. He said that if the stage designers aren't careful, the Siegfried-Fafner scene can turn into a Chinatown parade, with the dragon looking more hokey than threatening. This is when he brought up Stacy Brightman, PhD. Stacy's head of LA Opera's Education and Community Programs. Among other things, she's the one who partners with schools and volunteer groups to promote LA Opera. She's also an adjunct professor at USC's music school, specializing in the music industry, arts management and education and community programs. John told us that when she was getting her doctorate at UC Davis in theatre research, half the work she did was on Wagner. From Stacy's point of view, Wagner changed stage design forever when he wrote the Ring Cycle. That's why he started the festival in Bayreuth, right? Specifically because, in his opinion, there didn't exist at that time any theater on earth that could handle it.

John went a bit more into the differences between Wagner and Tolkien as people. Well, mainly he talked about Wagner, telling us stuff that I've by now heard at just about every Ring-related seminar or lecture I've ever attended: Wagner was an asshole. "Despicable" was the word John used. He "ruined a lot of people." And, of course, as I've heard umpteen times by now, Wagner was an egomaniac. "Exhibit A: Bayreuth," John said. "Exhibit B: Every Wagner society on Earth was created by Wagner." Then he talked about Wagner as the bold-faced anti-Semite and womanizer. Among many other affairs, he slept with this one woman named Cosima, who was the daughter of Franz Liszt and wife of Hans von Bülow, one of the greatest pianists/composers/conductors of his day. Wagner and Cosima had two kids before she finally divorced Hans so she could marry our man here. This is all smothered with irony since Hans was a big promoter of Wagner's work and did quite a bit to get the work known. Even after Wagner stole his woman, Hans didn't hold a grudge, and was even sad when Wagner died. Cosima ended up in charge of the Bayreuth festival and ran it for another thirty years after her husband's death (she was twenty-five years younger than him). Hans wasn't the only ironic supporter of Wagner's. John told us that even Jews stood by Wagner and supported his work.

Now and again throughout his lecture, John talked about the centennial Ring Cycle production at Bayreuth in August 1976. I remember one of the speakers talking about it at a recent Opera League seminar. It was the one directed by a thirty-two-year-old prodigy named Patrice Chéreau. Patrice's vision for the Ring came from George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, a book-length essay wherein Shaw talks about how awesome Wagner is, especially the Ring Cycle. He posited that the Ring Cycle is an allegory about Communist revolution. The dwarves are the workers who are oppressed, tormented, and motivated to keep going only by the "invisible whip of hunger" and the chance that their rich bosses will free them someday. Shaw looked at Wotan's family as representing capitalism. So just as Wotan's family eventually implodes from greed and jealousy and betrayal, so, thought Shaw, would capitalism, due to its "internal contradictions." He said the Ring Cycle shows "the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today."

And so when they tapped him to direct the centennial Ring at Bayreuth, Patrice, drawing inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, set the story during the Industrial Revolution. The gods and goddesses were factory bosses in business suits. The dwarves were the workers. The Rhine River was a hydroelectric dam. John referred to Patrice's Ring as the "Red Ring." Adding to the fun was the casting of European rock star Peter Hoffman to play Siegmund. Hildegard Behrens, a German soprano who just passed away last August at 72, played his twin Sieglinde. She eventually won a Grammy for Best Opera Recording for Die Walküre at the Met. As you can imagine, audiences were a little perplexed at first by Patrice's vision, but it worked. The Bayreuth organizers called Patrice back four more times. At the final performance in August 1980, the audience gave a ninety-minute standing ovation.


When someone in the audience asked John about character development in the Ring Cycle versus The Lord of the Rings, John referenced Patrice Chéreau's production yet again as a great way of seeing how Wagner developed character. He specifically referred to the way Patrice staged the last scene in act two of Die Walküre. This is when Wotan, at the behest of his wife Fricka, lets his own son Siegmund get killed by Sieglinde's husband Hunding. Fricka was mad at the twins for having sex because A) It's adultery, and B) It's incest! Here's how Patrice staged the scene. After Hunding cuts down Siegmund, Sieglinde kneels on the ground next to him and wraps a sheet around him several times to create a makeshift shroud. He'll be dead any minute. With what little strength he has left, Siegmund says he won't go to Valhalla without her. Sieglinde stops winding the sheet abruptly. And then Siegmund expires. "Well, at least he gets to see Valhalla now," she says. Watching all of this play out, Brünnhilde sees true human love for the first time. "Brünnhilde's world is rocked," John said. This is more than just character development. This is what Wagner liked to do: Develop character while at the same time forever altering the course of the story due to the character's new trait/new way of seeing the world.

This is when John talked about different singers he's admired in the role of Wotan. He specifically called out this fortysomething Welsh bass-baritone named Bryn Terfel. Bryn has apparently specialized in Mozart stuff since his first big break twenty years ago. But he's branched out and done other stuff, including Wagner, Strauss, and Puccini. This fall he'll be tackling Wotan again at the Met in a brand new Robert Lepage version of the Ring Cycle. The best Wotan John's ever seen was a German bass-baritone named Hans Hotter, a suitable surname, I reckon, since this guy's practically a legend to Ring fans. He lived almost a hundred years, from 1909 to 2003. In the early sixties he sang the role of Wotan in the first-ever commercial recording of the Ring. You can also hear live recordings of him as Wotan from Bayreuth in the fifties. John said it was not only his powerful voice but incredible height that gave him that god of gods quality. Hans epitomized the concept of stage presence.

John talked about this timeshare he's got in Hawaii where he's been going every summer since 1980 or thereabouts. Originally this timeshare was next door to a bar called Tom Bombadil's. And next to that was a bookstore called Middle-earth. Both bar and bookstore were owned by the same guy, and both went belly-up about seven or eight years ago. John still has Tom Bombadil's T-shirts that he jogs in wherever he goes. At this point the shirts have been all over the country, including New York City. This tells you what a hardcore Tolkien fan John must be. Only the true fans know who Tom Bombadil is.

Speaking of true fans, John told us that Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh have read The Lord of the Rings twice a year every year since they were fourteen. They truly love the language of the books, which made them the perfect couple to make the films, I now see. While John loves the films (he's seen them many times and has all the special editions), he's worried people will lose access to that language. When they want to experience The Lord of the Rings, they'll skip the books and go straight to the awesome movies. He told us that Amazon.com and the magazine Bibliophile cited The Lord of the Rings as the most important fiction of the 20th century. Here's hoping that'll keep the books on people's radars.

He ended the lecture by coming back to LA Opera's current Ring Cycle. He's seen all four productions and thinks Achim has done a terrific job. He also loves how candid Achim is about the work. Some artists do stuff that's really clever and artsy fartsy and open-ended, and when you ask them what the hell it all means, they refuse to say. Of course, sometimes it's because they don't know. Achim knows, though. John said that when someone asked him about the weird light that changes colors at the beginning of Das Rheingold, Achim was like, "Oh, that? That's just my way of showing Loge being born." If you think about it, John said, Achim's got two separate productions going on here: Singing and painting. The constantly moving elements add up to a series of paintings, inhabited by the singers and accompanied by the gorgeous music. The painting angle makes sense. Achim Freyer is first and foremost a painter. That's pretty cool how unpretentious he is. In fact, genius artists who are straightforward and down to earth seem very rare.

Ring Festival LA - At the Getty - Mythology: Classic and Contemporary

From the program: "Explore mythology in European art by considering how artists distill literature in a visual language. Participants will consider major themes of life that are found in classical mythology. A comparative study of objects in the Getty collection offers a careful study of the human experience that is timeless - both classic and contemporary."

That's the official version of what I did on this beautiful sunny May Saturday at the Getty Center in Brentwood. This is what the Getty calls an adult gallery course. They offer these things regularly. I see them plugged in their eGetty newsletter all the time, both these gallery courses as well as lectures, seminars, symposia, and hands-on art classes and whatnot. If you love art--looking at it, talking about it, doing it--you will lah-lah-lah-love the Getty museums, both the Getty Center as well as the beautiful Getty Villa out in Pacific Palisades. I reckon I'm a casual art fan. The vast majority of the time, when I read about this stuff in the eGetty, I think, "Gee, that's nice," and don't go. Once in a while, though, I do. In fact, sometimes I can get pretty hardcore about it. A year ago March, on a gray, dreary, overcast Saturday, I attended a fascinating all-day event on German art and opera at the Getty Center. I blogged about it if you want to take a look-see.

Indeed, you could say German opera was the impetus for my attending today's course. This course had no direct connection to opera, but it was one of the events the Getty put on in connection to Ring Festival LA. If you read my April 15 post about the Ring Cycle lectures at the Museum of Contemporary Art, you'll have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. LA Opera is, for the first time, staging Wagner's four-opera Ring Cycle. As I said in the April 15 post, producing the Ring is the truest test for any opera company, and the first time is always a watershed, a mark of maturity. So as LA Opera, just now finishing its twenty-fourth season (LA Opera's a baby compared to east coast and European opera companies), achieves this milestone, it's making the most of it. Ring Festival LA goes from April 15 to June 30.

Today's adult gallery course wasn't quite as immersive as the German art and opera one. It lasted from 10:30am to 2:30pm. From 10:30 to 11, we were in the lecture hall, which is over in the Getty Research Institute, a separate structure from the main area. From 11 to 12:15, we split into two groups and went on separate guided gallery tours. From 12:15 to 1:15, we fended for ourselves for lunch, and finally from 1:15 to 2:30, the two groups changed places and went on the gallery tour the other group had taken before lunch. Yes, that sounds like a lot, but you don't pay attention to the time during the gallery tours.

Today's course was led by two kids who looked to be in their twenties, both part of the Getty Education Department: Bill Zaluski and Anna Sapenuk. After registering in the lobby, the fifteen or so attendees all convened in the lecture hall. Okay, they call this room a lecture hall, but it's too small for that label. It's basically your standard size classroom. No desks, though. Just a few rows of chairs set up facing a screen that Bill was going to use for the thirty-minute lecture while Anna sat over on the side providing commentary when needed. This opening lecture was called an "Illuminated Introduction," a slideshow of about fifteen works of art for which Bill and Anna gave us the backstory. They talked about how each piece tied into today's overall theme of the artist's interpretation of mythology, and what that interpretation said about the artist as well as mankind in general. Heavy stuff, I know, but any excuse to look at great art is a good one, right?

A mild-mannered kid with a voice that's sort of a mix between soft, dorky, and deadpan sarcastic, Bill kicked off the "Illuminated Introduction" by giving us a rundown of how the day would play out. One of the main takeaways he wanted to make sure we had was that, for all of these depictions of gods and mythical figures and whatnot, if you look at these works long enough and think about them enough, they aren't teaching you so much about gods and legends as much as they are about humans. One aspect about a lot of the paintings we saw today was that the artists used models. Ostensibly, artists use models for convenience, but Bill was saying how the artists also sought to hammer home the very human characteristics (e.g. flaws) these so-called immortals had.

To help illustrate his point, Bill talked a bit about André Malraux, a 20th century French jack of all trades. Born in November 1901, André had some ideas about art that were pretty radical for his day. But it took him the first fifty action-packed years of his life to arrive at those ideas. First of all, André had Tourette's. He never made it to college, but he was an avid reader and became mostly self-taught. He practically lived in the library and eventually became interested in writing. One of his first paying gigs was for this magazine called Action. He also found work with a limited edition publisher that turned out stuff by the likes of the Marquis de Sade. No joke.

André was restless, though and, barely legal drinking age, he and the wife left France for Cambodia, which at the time was a French colony. After getting in trouble for messing with artifacts during a jungle adventure, André grew disillusioned with the French colonial government and started sympathizing with the locals. He founded both a resistance group as well as a local newspaper to be the voice of the people, L'Indochine.

He and the wife moved back to France after about four or five years. André drew heavily on his Asian adventures for his writing. The best example of this would probably be his 1933 novel La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate), which was a dramatization of the failed Communist revolt in Shanghai in 1927. This novel scored André the Prix Goncourt (Goncourt Prize), a prestigious literary prize in France given every year to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year."

If you think all of that's cool, wait. We're just getting started. André didn't just write about anti-colonial/anti-government stuff, he walked the walk. He became a pilot(!) for the Spanish Republican Air Force during the Spanish Civil War and made quite a name for himself with a whole mess of kills. When World War II started, he didn't waste a minute enlisting in the French Army. Of course, France bowed out of the war fairly soon because they didn't want to relive the unspeakable horror of the First World War. You may have seen documentary footage of the Nazis marching into Paris and passing through the Arc de Triomphe. That was June 1940, the end of the Battle of France and, with it, the end of any official French involvement in the war. The Nazis captured André during the Battle of France, but he escaped in no time and joined the French Resistance. The Gestapo finally caught up with him in '44....but he escaped again! What's more, he was given a tank command when the Nazis attacked Strasbourg, and later again when the Allies attacked Stuttgart as the Germans finally started falling back to Berlin.

Awesome, huh? André clearly had balls bigger than Gibraltar. Both the French and the British were grateful. The former gave him a couple prizes for his awesome efforts, the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de guerre (Cross of War), and the latter gave him the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).

Now after the war, right? This is where André reaches the phase of his life that overlaps with why Bill brought him up. Two things were going on here. First, to make ends meet, André served as a minister in the French government. Remember, he was hot shit at this point, and De Gaulle knew that as well as anyone. He appointed André Minister of Information for about a year, then Minister of State, and finally Minister of Cultural Affairs. André was the first Minister of Cultural Affairs that France ever had. They couldn't've picked a better guy for culture because it was during these government stints that André started writing again. That was the second thing going on here. Only this time, he preferred nonfiction over fiction, with a big focus on art. His first big effort was a three-volume collection called The Psychology of Art. He later revised this trilogy and repurposed it into a single tome called Les Voix du Silence (The Voices of Silence). This was pretty heady stuff. Check out these excerpts:

"Art is an object lesson for the gods."

"The art museum is one of the places that give us the highest idea of man."

"Humanism does not consist in saying: ‘No animal could have done what I have done,’ but in declaring: ‘We have refused what the beast within us willed to do, and we seek to reclaim man wherever we find that which crushes him.’"

Neat, huh? Remember, this was a guy with Turret's who didn't go to college. Rather than let himself be a victim of that, he became a world traveler and adventurer and avid reader who spent his first fifty years having all these incredible experiences, learning so much and thinking quite deeply about all of it. And now as a capstone, he was putting his deep thoughts on paper while serving in the French ministry. Seriously, it's all so amazing, isn't it? He hobnobbed with JFK and whatnot. How has Hollywood not made a movie about this guy yet?

Bill mentioned another trilogy André wrote later in life called La Métamorphose des dieux (The Metamorphosis of the Gods). It took André a good while to get through this magnum opus. He published the first book, Le Surnaturel, in his late fifties, but he didn't get to the second and third ones, L'Irréel and L'Intemporel, until his mid seventies, a couple years before he died. Here's a quote from L'Intemporel: "The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival."

Here's one last quote from André, from a TV interview in 1975: "In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it."

He passed away around Thanksgiving 1976, barely three weeks after his seventy-fifth birthday.

Now you can see why Bill called André radical for his day. He clearly thought about art and humankind's relationship to it in far deeper terms than the vast majority of people. This, finally, brings us full circle to Bill's original premise: Artwork that depicts gods doesn't teach us about gods so much as about people.

Here are the artworks Bill took us through during the slideshow. For each one, I've listed the title, artist, the year(s) it was produced, and some notes taken from Bill's commentary.




























Venus and Mars Surprised by the Gods
Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael (pronounced Uetvall)
1610-1614

Wtewael adapted this from a scene in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Not sure how familiar you are with Metamorphoses. It's a great big giant poem spread across fifteen books, starting from the world's creation and ending with Julius Caesar. Like I said, it's huge, and you've got a whole ton of drama packed into it. It's like Ancient Rome's version of a soap opera, with so many narrative threads going on and on and on and involving so many characters.

Anyways, so this painting's about, well, what the title says. You've got Venus and Mars making out when Venus's blacksmith hubby, Vulcan, with that red and blue headwear, catches them in flagrante. Not sure if you can see it, but Vulcan's casting this net to trap Mars. Meanwhile, you've got Cupid and Apollo hovering above, pulling back the canopy. And then way back in the distance is another visage of Vulcan, this time at his blacksmith job. Bill pointed out that the bed, still life, and armor are all from the 17th century, when Wtewael was around. So you've got these mythological figures from Ancient Rome....in a present-day scene. Interesting. Bill also said it's important to note that the deities not only have human forms, but that their human physiology is idealized to the highest.



Cupid and Psyche
Jacques-Louis David
1817

This comes from a novel called The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, the one and only Latin novel that has survived to this day in its entirety. It's basically about this guy, whom historians think is based largely on Lucius himself, who lets his curiosity for magic get the better of him. While trying to cast a spell to turn himself into a bird, he misfires and turns himself into a donkey. And then he goes on this grand adventure filled with various dramatic episodes, kind of like Metamorphoses. At one point, while being held prisoner in a cave, he hears an old woman tell the story of Cupid and Psyche to a younger woman who's crying because these thieves have kidnapped her and locked her up in the same cave. This is the first written record of the story of Cupid and Psyche.

Bill pointed out some interesting trivia here. First off, Jacques-Louis got the seventeen-year-old son of a friend to pose as Cupid. The girl was also based on a real seventeen-year-old. The one stipulation Jacques-Louis had for the kid was that he wasn't allowed to see Psyche. They each posed alone, and then Jacques-Louis married (pardon the pun) the two images together. Just as Hollywood producers take liberties with material they adapt, so do painters. Bill said the biggest liberty Jacques-Louis took was making Cupid look mischievous. He hardly looks like a kid in love, right? It's like they've had sex, and now he's out of there. In the original myth, though, Cupid and Psyche were very much in love. This might explain why the painting flopped when it first came out. The public didn't like it at all. Isn't that funny? That's yet another Hollywood parallel. Lots of old movies that are timeless today flopped during their original release (e.g. It's a Wonderful Life).



Taddeo in the Belvedere Court in the Vatican, Drawing the Laocoön
Federico Zuccaro
c. 1595

The "Taddeo" referred to in the title is an artist named Taddeo Zuccaro, older brother to the guy who drew this. By the time Federico drew this piece, he was in his fifties and Taddeo had been dead a good thirty years. They were over a decade apart in age. Taddeo was sick a lot of his life and didn't even make it to forty. Indeed, the context of this drawing here is that Taddeo has come back to Rome after recovering from an illness. Here he's sitting in the Vatican Belvedere courtyard doing a sketch of that sculpture you see there, in front of him to the right, called Laocoön and His Sons. Yes, Laocoön is another figure out of mythology, in this case Greek mythology. He was a priest of Troy who was ostensibly supposed to worship Poseidon, god of the sea (Neptune in Roman mythology). Only, he was sort of a rebel priest who broke a lot of Poseidon's rules. For starters, he got married and had kids, which Poseidon priests, kind of like certain priests today, weren't supposed to do. That's not what did him in, though. Laocoön may have been a rebel, but he was smart. He saw the Trojan horse for the trap it was. Before he could expose the invaders, though, the goddess Athena sent those snakes to take him out as well as his two sons. Harsh, but that's Mount Olympus for ya.

Bill gave us some interesting backstory about Laocoön and His Sons. Not sure how well you can see it up there, but you see how Laocoön's raising his right arm? Well, apparently the original arm broke off. It had already fallen off when the sculpture was discovered in 1506 in this guy's vineyard near the original location of Emperor Nero's Domus Aurea. The Pope at that time, Julius II, was so excited about the discovery, he decided to put on a contest to see who could come up with the best way to replace the right arm. With so many awesome artists in the population (remember we're talking 1500s Italy, the High Renaissance), how could he resist? And so Julius tapped his main man Raphael to administer and judge the competition. Raphael was only in his early twenties at this point but was already considered awesome. I don't think Bill said who the winner was, but guess who entered the competition and didn't win....(wait for it)....Michelangelo! Yes, that Michelangelo. Dude lost! That's okay, though. Call him a late bloomer. He didn't become awesome as quickly as Raphael did. He was in his early thirties and still had a lot left to accomplish in his long life.

Another thing about this drawing is that it's not an accurate representation of what you'd see if you were at the Vatican's Belvedere Court. All of the stuff here in front of Taddeo, including Laocoön, are actually in niches. Laocoön and His Sons is parked in a niche in Belvedere Court, not exposed like that where anyone could put their hands on it and potentially damage it. But as you can see, you've got that sculpture and a bunch of others Federico has "moved" out of their niches and parked right in front of his brother. With that, and with Taddeo depicted as drawing so meticulously, Bill said that, to him, it all added up to two main themes: Classical learning and the artist's need to draw.




























Laocoön and His Sons
Giovanni Battista Foggini
c. 1720

And here we have yet another version of our man Laocoön and his two kids getting killed by Athena's snakes. I probably should've mentioned above that Laocoön's been kind of a popular subject for artists over the millennia. That one in the Vatican featured in Federico's drawing above is pretty much held up as the ideal version. More on that below (yes, we have one more Laocoön to talk about after this).

As for this one, Foggini did this toward the end of his life. He was pushing seventy in 1720 and passed away five years later. Bill talked about how Foggini gave expressions on these guys' faces that carried a bit more emphasis on "unwarranted hope" relative to other versions of Laocoön. I would never have seen that, but that's why Bill's teaching this course and I'm not. He also said the hollowness of their eyes reflects the hollowness of the Trojan horse. Remember, it was Laocoön who knew the truth about that horse. Anyway, Bill didn't say much else about this except that by the time Foggini did this, over two hundred years after the original had been discovered without Laocoön's original right arm, people forgot that the original arm had never been found. They assumed the way Laocoön raises his right arm here is the way the original sculptor had done it thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, it's looking like we'll never know how Laocoön's original right arm was positioned, which is a crying shame the more I think about it.




























Laocoön and His Sons
Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus
Sometime between 42 to 20 BC

The plain and simple truth is that no one is a hundred percent certain when the original Laocoön and His Sons was made, or who exactly made it, or what material it was made from. Of course, little doubts like that apply to quite a bit of classical history, right? And let's not even talk about prehistoric stuff. All that said, historians and archeologists have done a yeoman's job on their meticulous research, so while their claims may not be airtight, we can assume they're pretty darn close.

Thank God, therefore, that Ancient Rome had writers and historians of their own who could document a lot of what was going on at the time, and that quite a bit of their writings have survived. Pliny the Elder is one shining example, and I cite him because he's the main reason we know anything about Laocoön and His Sons. Pliny was sort of the Ancient Rome version of that guy André Malraux I talked about above. He was a writer, philosopher, statesman, and military guy. I won't go into too much detail about this guy's amazing life, which was all the more amazing since he had his life cut short by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD, when he was in his mid fifties. Suffice it to say he entered the military in his early twenties, saw a lot of action, climbed through the ranks, and survived Nero. Indeed, Nero's successor, Vespasian, became pals with Pliny. They served in the army together, toughed it out, got promoted based on merit instead of who their friends were, and held some public offices and whatnot. Anyways, Pliny was pretty cool.

And he liked to write. You can't talk about Pliny without mentioning his floor-crushing Naturalis Historia (Natural History), the comprehensive source of knowledge in antiquity. Think about that for a second. Wrap your noodle around that idea: The source of all knowledge in antiquity. It's a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia that became the template for all future encyclopedias. Yes, that's right. With Naturalis Historia, Pliny basically invented the whole idea of an encyclopedia: A multi-volume set of books covering every nook and cranny of knowledge, complete with an index and references to original articles and their authors. Not only is this the only writing of Pliny's that survived, it's also one of the largest works of any kind from Classical Roman days that has survived to our day. Even more amazing is this: It's only a draft. Pliny wasn't even done yet. Like any good writer, he knew that writing is rewriting, that it takes multiple revisions and polishes before arriving at the proverbial final draft. Well, with Naturalis Historia, he wasn't there yet. Mount Vesuvius killed him before he could finalize this bad boy, just after he decided to dedicate it to the brand new emperor Titus, Vespasian's son.

Naturalis Historia is the reason we know anything about the genesis of Laocoön and His Sons. See those three names I listed above as the sculptors? Thank you, Pliny! It's in the thirty-seventh and final volume that he talks about a lot of artistic stuff, stuff like silver casting, bronze casting, painting, modeling, marble sculpture, you name it. He even gets into stuff like minerals, gems and stones and what have you. Laocoön and His Sons, he says, was carved from a single piece of marble by those three guys from the island of Rhodes. Its original home was Titus's palace. Since then, though, scholars have found evidence that those three sculptors from Rhodes never really did original work and that their stuff was usually modeled or adapted from previous stuff. In this case, the original Laocoön and His Sons seems to be a bronze sculpture from the Ancient Greek city of Pergamon in present-day Turkey. But ya know, who knows if that's original, right? You gotta give Pliny some leeway here. He was a soldier, politician, and writer, but we can't expect him to be an art expert or anything. He was, in fact, wrong about Laocoön and His Sons being a single chunk of marble. When it was unearthed in that vineyard in 1506, it was discovered that it was made of seven pieces interlocked together. But how can you tell how many pieces make up a sculpture, just looking at it? I was at a sculpture exhibit at the Getty Center not too long ago, and when you're looking at it, if the sculptor's done their job right, you'd have no way of knowing how many pieces they were working with. Okay, so Pliny didn't get everything right with Laocoön and His Sons, but he got the ball rolling, certainly.

In his comments about this piece, Bill framed its emotional traits in the context of antiquity. You've now seen three different versions of Laocoön and His Sons, so no doubt you can see that it's chockfull of emotion. How could it not be? It's depicting a dad and his two kids getting killed by giant snakes. So in this case, it's not an Apollonian piece of art. As the god of stuff like truth and medicine, Apollo represents logic and reason. But this sculpture is all about pathos, right? You've got pathos in spades here. Bill called this the "other side of the dumbbell from logical Apollo."



Venus and the Wounded Adonis
Massimiliano Soldani Benzi
c. 1700

This here bronze piece shows Adonis dying in the lap of his lover Venus. You can tell from the way everyone looks that the attack by the boar, lying dead under Adonis, just happened. And you can also surmise, based on how her little bit of clothing is swept back, that Venus just landed. So it’s like, Adonis and the boar fight, Adonis kills the boar but takes a nasty, lethal gash, and collapses just as Venus swoops down. Like that first painting above, Venus and Mars Surprised by the Gods, Venus and the Wounded Adonis is adapted from an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Bill pointed out a couple interesting things here that show a sort of clash of cultures. On the one hand, this is bronze, a medium reminiscent of the Ancient Roman era, or the classical era, as they say. Remember above how I said some people think Laocoön and His Sons may have been adapted from an earlier bronze piece? Exactly. Bronze was a popular medium in those BC times. Soldani-Benzi used it not just as a tip of the hat to his classical forebears, but because he was very handy with bronze. Apparently he was one of the best bronze casters in his native Florence. The culture clash occurs in the style of the sculpture. It’s textbook Baroque, chockfull of emotion and drama and movement. Indeed, Bill said it's very theatrical, like actors on a stage. Baroque, by the way, was the style of Soldani-Benzi’s day. In other words, this piece marries a classical medium with a modern genre. Even more than that, though, Bill said this piece could be viewed as the end of Baroque and the beginning of the next artistic movement, Rococo, which basically took Baroque’s theatricality even further. Out the window went balance and symmetry. Rococo art was more all over the place, even more emotional and ornate. Suffice it to say that if you study this piece long enough, as Bill obviously has, you can see there’s quite a bit going on here.




























The Entombment
Peter Paul Rubens
c. 1612

I remember The Entombment from an Opera League seminar I attended two years ago. I know how long it's been because I blogged about it right here, and I just dug through my archives to find it: An Opera League seminar on Puccini on May 10, 2008.

The speaker that day, UCLA theater professor Michael Hackett, a funny, fiftyish white-haired guy who speaks regularly at Opera League events, was specifically lecturing us about Tosca, the Puccini masterpiece that LA Opera was about to stage as the conclusion to the 2007-08 season. To kick off his lecture, Mike talked about the setting: Rome. He said Rome figures so prominently in Tosca's plot that trying to imagine Tosca without Rome would be like imagining North by Northwest without Mount Rushmore. The big reason for this is all the religion Puccini weaves throughout the opera's subtext. The plot itself doesn't have much to do with religion, but you can't escape the tug-of-war stewing beneath the surface. Specifically, Mike was referring to the tug-of-war between Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, was the god of wine, fertility, partying, and orgies. Apollo, meanwhile, as I mentioned above in the notes on Laocoön and His Sons, stood on the other end of the pole from all that revelry. Apollo was all about truth, healing, music and poetry, all good stuff, but very formal and rigid relative to Dionysus. Thinking about Rome means not only thinking about all that, but also considering the Vatican. In that lecture two years ago (I'm so glad I archive all this stuff), Mike mentioned a particular Pope (Gregory?) who outlawed wind instruments. Apparently in Greg's day, wind instruments were considered Dionysian instruments. Hilarious, I know, but those were different times, boys and girls. Now let's go back to Tosca. You've got the main guy, Mario. When we first meet him, he's painting a portrait of Mary Magdalene (a Dionysian character from the Bible). And then you've got Tosca herself, who wears a lot of red in the opera. Red, the color of wine, is considered a Dionysian color. Added to this is Tosca's penchant for wine. Now the subtext isn't so, well, sub, is it? The Dionysian stuff's getting pretty obvious. But wait, there's more. Tosca and Mario want to have kids, another Dionysian thing to do. The Apollonian side of things, I guess, is represented by the Roman police chief Scarpia, the villain of the piece who screws up Tosca and Mario's plans.

This brings me back to The Entombment and Mike's reason for referencing it. He brought it up to hammer home the divide between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. You take paintings of Jesus Christ, for instance. There's no shortage of them. Browse any gallery of Renaissance art and you've got Christ all over the place. Here's the thing you may not have noticed, though, which Mike pointed out. Most paintings of Christ are Apollonian: Very formal, symmetrical, and clean. Once in a while, though, you'd get a Dionysian Christ. That means, in a word, a realisitc Christ. Look at The Entombment up there. Look how real Jesus' corpse is, it even has that slight greenish tint from death decay, while John the Baptist, decked out in his vivid red (Dionysian) robe, looks very healthy. And you've got Jesus' mom Mary there, and behind her in the shadow you've got Mary Magdalene looking distraught. And let's not forget the blood. Again, most portraits of Christ are too formal to convey the true horror of what the Romans did to this guy. They'd show, for example, Jesus on the cross, skinny and sad looking. Here, though, you've got the blood gushing. And Jesus is hardly skinny. Look how built and toned he is. Mike took it even further in that Opera League lecture. He said the slit in Christ's abdomen looks like a, well, a slit. As in vagina. Now I'm not saying it doesn't, but wow, how long do you have to look at this painting before you think of something like that. The slit's being in the dead center of the painting helped him think of it, apparently.

Anyways, so that's The Entombment. Bill didn't say anything about the vagina imagery, but he did point out Christ's muscular, Laocoön-like physique. It's not totally Laocoön, though, Bill said. Laocoön's dying in a very active way, right? He's wrestling those snakes as they take him out. Here, though, Christ is already dead. And yes, if you're wondering about the whole Baroque versus Rococo thing I brought up in the above notes, Bill said this would be Baroque. Not Rococo. It's too symmetrical for that (e.g. the slit's in the center). Plus, Rococo didn't really catch fire until another hundred or so years after Rubens did this.

Besides giving us another example of how someone interprets a popular story, Bill wanted us to consider The Entombment because of Rubens' connection to what we'd already seen. Rubens, who was originally from Flanders, traveled to Italy in his early twenties to study all the great art there. Suffice it to say he loved what he saw. Laocoön and His Sons in particular made a big impression on him. Not only did he become a Baroque practitioner, but Bill said that it's thanks in large part to Peter that people north of Italy knew what Baroque even meant, and that artists up there jumped on the Baroque bandwagon. Cool, huh? Way to go, Pete.



Simon Hurtrelle
Pietà (a.k.a. Christ Mourned by the Virgin and Angels)
c. 1690

You know what Pietà means? I didn't know either until today. It's the Italian word for pity, and as a proper noun, it refers to any scene--painting, drawing, sculpture, whatever--showing Jesus being mourned by Mom and some angels. Lots of artists have done their own version of the Pietà. The most famous version is probably this huge five-and-a-half-by-six-and-a-half-foot sculpture Michelangelo did about two hundred years before this one.

Bill told us that this particular Pietà by Simon Hurtrelle, based at the Louvre, was recently at the Getty as part of an exhibition on French bronze sculpture. I remember reading about that in their monthly eGetty newsletter. French bronze sculpture is not something I ever thought I'd be interested in, but that applies to so much of what the Getty puts on. I remember being intrigued, but alas, it fell through the cracks. I can't do it all, folks.

Like a lot of Renaissance artists not from Italy (see Rubens above), Simon, originally from France, knew that the best way to learn art was to go to Italy and learn from the masters. As you can imagine, the admissions folks at the Italian art schools held applicants to fairly high standards. They took no one green. You had to have already done some awesome stuff just to get them to look in your general direction. Simon's dad was a sculptor, so Simon himself knew early on that he'd be a sculptor too. By his mid twenties, he was already pretty skilled and had done some great work. To reach the next level, he applied for a scholarship to the Académie de France in Rome. Sure enough, they let him in on a full scholarship. Simon was twenty-five when he got there. He studied there for nine years, but he wasn't done yet. At thirty-four he transferred to this other art school in Rome called Accademia di San Luca, which was sort of the Harvard or Yale of art, if you will. It was a huge deal if you could get into that place.

Just as Peter Paul Rubens eventually went back north and spread the gospel he learned, so did Simon. Eventually he went back to France and found work at Versailles. Yes, that Versailles. King Louis XIV was basically his boss. He continued the classicizing style he'd practiced in Rome, and the style caught on with others. Simon did sculptures, vases, you name it.

Speaking of sculptures, that leads us back to his version of the Pietà here. Bill told us that when Simon went back to France in his late thirties, he was admitted on a preliminary basis to this very prestigious art academy called Académie Royale. Over the next few years, he decided to do his own version of the Pietà to convince the academy to make him a full member. That's this piece here. Simon was forty-two when he completed it, and it did the job of swaying Académie Royale to grant him full membership. That he was admitted to the academy and achieved full membership in only a handful of years at that relatively young age was a huge deal, Bill said. And while Simon's Pietà may not be as famous as Michelangelo's, it's pretty awesome enough for a bronze piece, right? Yet another great example of Baroque art.




























Doryphoros (Spear Bearer)
Roman marble copy of original by Polykleitos
Unearthed at Pompeii
120-110 BC

More bronze! Not this particular piece. Like it says above, this one’s marble, but the original Doryphoros was a bronze sculpture by this guy Polykleitos, who lived in the 400s BC. For all we know, in fact, Polykleitos was the guy who did the original Laocoön and His Sons. Remember above how I said many scholars believe those three sculptors from Rhodes whom Pliny the Elder cited in volume thirty-seven of his Naturalis Historia were thought to be copyists and that it was hypothesized that they'd copied Laocoön and His Sons from a bronze original from Ancient Greece that dated back a few centuries? Well, there ya go. I'm just putting two and two together here.

Actually, I'm glad I brought up Pliny because he talks about Polykleitos in his encyclopedia and calls him one of the most important sculptors of his day. The original bronze Doryphoros, like the original bronze Laocoön and His Sons, is long gone. The above marble copy is one of innumerable marble copies made during Roman times. In fact, none of Polykleitos's stuff survives today, which is a shame since he's pretty much credited for inventing the artistic style known as Classical Greek. Thank God the Romans made tons of copies of his work so we can at least try to appreciate it, right?

Bill didn't talk too much about this piece, but one key feature he pointed out about it and about the Classical Greek style in general is this notion of contrapposto. Know what that means? Me neither at first. But don't worry, it's not as fancy as all that. Contrapposto is an incredibly fancy way of describing a human form standing with more weight on one foot than the other, which means the rest of the body is slightly off axis. In other words, this makes the human sculptures look more human. Seems like an obvious thing nowadays, but you have to put Polykleitos in context. He basically represents the dawn not just of Greek sculpture, but of Western sculpture. Heavy, huh? After he did contrapposto the first time, he kept doing it, with Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer), Discophoros (Discus-Bearer), and a bunch more. If you think about it, the way a human stands can convey emotion. The best sculptors know this and take full advantage of it. Think about it, if you've got a sculpture of a person standing perfectly rigid and still and stoic, like the Frankenstein monster or whatever, how can you possibly deduce what the person's thinking? But if they're standing in a particular way, like humans do, you could at least try to glean the emotions. The best sculptors have taught us how the human body can convey emotions without words. Michelangelo's David is probably the best example of contrapposto. And, lest I forget, Laocoön and His Sons is also a terrific contrapposto piece.

With all this in mind, Bill asked us to think about what this guy Doryphoros is thinking. Oh and by the way, in case you're wondering what happened to his spear, this particular marble copy lost it. The guy's supposed to be holding it in his left hand. The way it looks in the original is, he basically has his left arm in a ninety-degree angle with the spear resting on his shoulder. It's a very relaxed pose. Indeed, he doesn't seem very much into the spear at all. It's relaxed on his shoulder while his head's turned away from it in a sort of distracted way, as if something's going on in the other direction that's much more interesting. He's in terrific shape, as well. So that tells me he's had the spear-bearing job for a long time. He probably takes it for granted and finds it boring and would rather be doing whatever's happening over yonder. My two cents anyway.



Penelope Unraveling Her Web
Joseph Wright of Derby
1783-84

We're jumping way ahead in time here, from the 1600s Baroque to the late 1700s. Joe was in his fifties when he did this one. Yes, as I'm sure you've figured out, based on the trend thus far, this is yet another adaptation of a scene from classical literature. In this case, it's our man Homer's Odyssey. The Trojan War's in full swing, and most males of fighting age have gone off to fight. Penelope here is the wife of none other than Odysseus. Not all the men are gone, though. With rumors spreading that Odysseus drowned in a shipwreck, a lot of the local guys are competing to court Penelope. They're persistent as all get-out, which would piss off a lot of gals I know, but Penelope's a gentle heart. She agrees to marry one of them, but first she wants to weave a shroud for Odysseus's dad. It's a trick. Penelope's not as pliant as her suitors would like to believe. Every night, after she's done weaving for the day, she undoes all the weaving so she has to start over the next day, holding out against hope that Odysseus will come back. Meanwhile, she gazes with a certain mournfulness at her son Telemachus. That statue there on the right, just outside the light's influence, is a statue of Odysseus.

Speaking of just outside the light, Bill commented on the way Joe uses light and shadow. I was struck by it myself. The more I look at this painting, the more I feel how quiet that room must be, filled with so much hope, heartache, sadness, and fear. It's kind of a paradox, isn't it? Bill didn't use that word, but it sort of is. On the one hand, it's such a peaceful scene. Joe's use of light and shadow is brilliant in enhancing the soft silence of the room. And yet, at the same time, the light and shadow also give you that sense of drama, right? Even if you didn't know the backstory, you can see that all is not right in this household.

Joseph Wright of Derby was renowned for light and shadow. He experimented constantly with chiaroscuro, painting a person or group of people in dark rooms at night with a lamp or a candle splashing a bit of light on one particular area within the darkness. Rembrandt was one of Joe's favorite painters, and if you've seen even one painting by Rembrandt, you'd see the connection. Joe, though, took it even further. His big claim to fame was not depicting scenes out of antiquity. As a huge fan of science, Joe became the first painter of his age to specialize in painting manifestations of the emerging technology: New machinery, scenes showing scientists running experiments, and portraits of some of the top figures in science and industry.




























Portland Vase
Josiah Wedgwood
1789

Alrighty then. We've got a lot going on here with the Portland Vase, kids. Where to begin? Well, first thing's first, I guess. More gods. More myth. This is yet another interpretation of some story or tale. Only, we don't know which one. Nor do we know who made the vase. Scholars are pretty sure it was made between 20 and 30 A.D. We also know for sure that the vase depicts two scenes, clearly delineated by the handles. While we don't know what the scenes are about, that hasn't stopped anyone from guessing. That one scene with the woman on the ground reaching out to the guy is thought by some to be Cleopatra seducing Marc Antony. Notice the snake there. And the whole lusty vibe going on. Now the other side, some think it's Ariadne chillin' on Naxos. Others think it's another Marc Antony scene, that it's his abandoned wife Octavia, with her brother Augustus on the left and Venus on the right.

Whatever the case, Bill said this vase represents an effort to perfect antiquity. How could he possibly have arrived at that interpretation, you might wonder? First, you have to consider that this vase, a copy of the original one, is made of jasperware, a type of stoneware pioneered by the guy who made this copy, Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah apparently spent four incredibly painstaking years trying to get this replica just right. That's what Bill meant by perfecting antiquity. In interpreting the original vase, with classical scenes about which no one can agree, Josiah went to great lengths to make everything perfect and pristine. Literally black and white. It certainly paid off, I'd say. When he finally finished this piece, his last major piece of work as a potter, people lined up around the block to see it. They literally had to cap the number of tickets to the first show, which was a private show, before the vase was moved to a public showroom. Today it's at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Interesting bit of backstory about Josiah here. Besides being awesome at pottery art and inventing jasper and all that, he was awesome at the business side of pottery. It's thanks to him that pottery could be produced at the mass industrial level. He was also very active in the anti-slavery movement and became famous for making this medallion with a black guy on it paired with the slogan "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?". It's said to be the most famous image of a black person in 18th century art.

The plot thickens a bit more with Josiah, if you can believe it. In addition to all the amazing stuff I just told you, get this: Among his seven kids was a daughter named Susannah Wedgwood. Susannah ended up marrying a guy named Bob Darwin. They had a son named....you guessed it....Charles Darwin. Yep, Josiah was Darwin's grandpa. I can't point out the Darwin connection without pointing out that another of Josiah's kids, Josiah Jr., got married and had a daughter named Emma....who married Charles Darwin. Yes, I know. Cousins. Did you know Charles Darwin married his cousin? Did you know President Franklin Delano Roosevelt married his cousin? Different times, kids.



The Corinthian Maid
Joseph Wright of Derby
1782-1784

And back we go to Joe Wright of Derby, a few years before he painted Penelope Unraveling Her Web. Now that you know who Josiah Wedgwood is, I can tell you that Josiah commissioned Joe to do both Penelope as well as this one. Like I said in the Penelope section, Joe's big interest was modern science. In today's parlance, he was a techie, always into the newest gadgets and whatnot. Josiah, on the other hand, loved the classics, as the vase above testifies. Bill called him a patron of the classics. Joe knew this, which is why, when Josiah commissioned him to do paintings utilizing his awesome chiaroscuro techniques, Joe chose to adapt scenes from the classics. The Corinthian Maid and Penelope Unraveling Her Web were done back to back as companion tips of the hat to Josiah's patronage of the arts.

This painting's got a lot going on. First, let's talk about the adaptation. This scene comes from chapter thirty-six of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, which I talked about above in the section on Laocoön and His Sons, which comes from the thirty-seventh and final chapter. Well, in the chapter just before that and among other topics related to the arts, Pliny goes into the story of the Corinthian maid. Her name was Dibutade. Like Penelope, she faced the prospect of her beloved heading off to foreign lands on a dangerous mission for an extended period of time. Only, we're not talking about the mighty Odysseus. These are the lower classes, I guess. Dibutade's a maid, and this guy, I'm not sure who he is or what he does. Well, we know he's about to head off on a mission of some sort. Also, he and Dibutade aren't married yet, but they're in a pretty committed relationship that's headed in that direction. I don't think the boyfriend's going to the Trojan War, though. Bill said he's "headed off to war" while the website for the National Gallery, where this painting resides, says he's "about to embark on a perilous journey to foreign lands, taking only his spear and dog."

So that's the setup. Now what is the maid doing? Well, she's not part of the middle-upper classes like Penelope and Odysseus. If you recall from above, Penelope at least had that marble statue of Odysseus in her bedroom. Well, maids couldn't afford marble statues. So what did she do? She sat him next to the wall so she could trace an outline of him in profile. What happened after that was, according to Pliny's account, Dibutade's father Boutades, a potter (like Josiah), used that wall drawing to make a clay relief, which he then baked in that kiln you can sort of see to the right in the background. That gave the maid a nice life-size ceramic "photo" of her boyfriend. Neat, huh? Very creative. But wait, it's more than just creative. By making this keepsake for his baby girl, Boutades invented the whole idea of earthenware. Josiah Wedgwood, in other words, is basically a career descendant of Boutades. It's thanks to Boutades that the whole genre of pottery exists.

In his usual way, Joe Wright was very clever with light and shadow here. He's hidden a hanging lamp behind that curtain there which, as they say in film school, creates an implied lighting source. We have to assume it's that lamp casting the boyfriend's shadow on the wall. As a great contrast to the lamp's diffuse tones, you've got Boutades's flaming furnace over on the right, staring right at you from the other room. The paradox of this painting, if you want to call it that, is that by turning the boyfriend's shadow into pottery, Boutades takes the more subtle light and shadow play of Dibutade's original souvenir, something Joe would've loved as a fan of light and shadow, and ruins it. I doubt Dibutade is thinking about that, though. Besides, of course she'd want something more concrete--or more ceramic--to remember her boyfriend by than an outline on the wall that could potentially fade over time.

One last layer I should point out is all the research Joe did to get the historical details right. As the world's master potter, Josiah had access to all the best stuff. He let Joe borrow a bunch of vases so he could get the shapes just right. The clothing Dibutade and her boyfriend are wearing are based on sculptures made during the classical era. And it's all very balanced and symmetrical, right? You've got the curtain on the left, the doorway to the kiln on the right, and Dibutade and her boyfriend dead center. This kind of perfect balance is itself another nod to the classical era.




























Saturn Devouring His Son
Peter Paul Rubens
1636





























Saturn Devouring One of His Children
Simon Hurtrelle
c. 1699























































Saturn Devouring His Son (after Francisco José Goya y Lucientes, c. 1823)
Vik Muniz
2005





























Silenus Holding the Child Dionysos
Roman copy
1st-2nd century A.D., after a Greek original of the late 4th century B.C.

To finish off the "Illuminated Introduction," let’s tackle the final five pieces in one fell swoop, since they all basically depict the same thing, the maniacal god Saturn eating one of his babies. The Silenus one is obviously different, but I’ll include that here since that was both Bill's format and it provides a nice counterpoint in terms of how artists often depicted the gods. That is to say, in a not very flattering light. "And now for another divine family drama," was how Bill introduced this set.

This is yet another adaptation of a myth. Actually, this is one of the oldest mythical tales anyone knows of. We're talking about this ancient epic poem called Theogony, which was written by the Greek poet Hesiod way back in the eighth century or so B.C. Scholars don't have exact birth and death dates for Hesiod, but they've pinpointed his life to somewhere between 750 and 650 B.C. Theogony is the genesis story for most of the mythical stuff we've seen adapted so far in this intro.

From a high level, it goes like this. It starts with Chaos. And I don't mean a disorderly mess. Chaos as in the cosmos, a huge gaping vacuum which, according to Hesiod, was the conduit through which appeared everything that now exists. The first thing that popped out of Chaos was Gaia, goddess of Earth. It should be noted that Earth itself was also called Gaia. Gaia (the planet, not the woman) was supposed to be a nice safe place where humans could live, and gods too if they wanted.

Now here's where it gets weird, and might explain all the family dysfunction soon to come. Gaia (the goddess this time) gave birth to this one god named Uranus (don't bother with the Uranus/your-anus jokes, I've heard them all and they're so goddam old). She didn't have sex with anyone to pull this off. She just gave birth to Uranus, god of the sky, or Father Sky, as he was known in some circles. When Uranus came of age, he had sex with his mom Gaia. See what I'm saying? Life as we know it had just started, and already this happens. Anyways, they had sex a bunch of times and gave birth to the twelve Titans. You've heard of the Titans, right? They basically ruled everything before the Olympian gods came along.

Soon enough, Uranus hated all of his kids. I have no idea why. Maybe he just felt guilty for having knocked up Mom. So he kicked them out of whatever divine realm they were living in and told them to move to Gaia to live with their mom Gaia (I really wish those early gods didn't share the same names with inanimate objects). Gaia got pissed off at her son's/husband's treatment of their twelve Titan kids and asked them to go kick Dad's ass. Eleven of them were too chicken. Who do you think the brave one was? Yep. Saturn. Gaia gave Saturn a sickle, and he used it to cut the balls off Dad. He cut the balls off Uranus (now that, I admit, is hilarious). Saturn castrated Uranus and chucked his nuts into the ocean....where they churned a lot of foam that eventually turned into Venus, goddess of love. Hilarious, huh? I have no idea what the logic is there, if Hesiod was high when he wrote this shit or what.

Anyway, Saturn took over the Cosmos. Or Chaos. Whatever you want to call it, Saturn was in charge. Just as he took over, Mom and Dad warned him that one of his kids was going to do to him what he'd just done to Uranus. Bound and determined not to lose his nuts, every time his wife (and sister!) Ops gave birth, he'd eat the baby. He ate all of them. Well, almost all of them. He ate the first five. After this, Ops asked her in-laws Uranus and Gaia to help her out. So they helped her give birth to the sixth kid, Jupiter, in secret, and gave Saturn a rock swaddled in cloth to look like a baby. Saturn ate the rock and got pissed. He got even more pissed when he couldn't get Ops to give up the baby's location. Jupiter, meanwhile, grew up to be a man and made Dad drink some kind of potion that caused him to barf up the other five kids. All five kids emerged whole and still alive. Crazy, isn't it?

And so the six kids became the core Olympian gods: Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, and Vesta. Recognize those names? Yep. We're getting into familiar territory. Now that you have the backstory, let's get to these various depictions of Saturn going nuts over the prospect of losing his nuts. What are the differences in these adaptations?

Let's start with Rubens. That's pretty graphic right there, especially the way he shows the baby's head leaning back as it cries out in pain. And look at Saturn, look at what a pathetic old man he is, all hunched over with his staff, all flabby and horribly ugly. Everything about that piece is hideous.

Simon Hurtrelle one-ups that, though, with his bronze sculpture. You remember Simon, right? He was the guy who did the Pietà up above. Whereas that belongs to the Louvre, though, his Saturn Eating Baby belongs to the Getty. See? We get the juicy stuff ('scuse the pun). Anyway, look what he's done. Whereas Rubens shows the toothless old Saturn gnawing on his kid's flesh, here we can distinctly see one of the baby's arms already partway into Saturn's mouth. And look what Saturn's got in his left hand. What is that, do you think? No, it's not a stick. It's a bone! He's so goddam ravenous, he didn't bother throwing away all the bones of his last toddler before diving into the next one. That's a perfect example of less is more. All Simon did was give Saturn a bone, and right away it totally ups the yuck factor. There's another key difference here, though, right? The wings. Saturn's an old guy like in the Rubens one, only here he's winged, and he's a bit more built and muscular. This is supposed to be about how Saturn was the god of, among other things, time, as in the passing of time. Bill also pointed out that Saturn was the god of agriculture, a key piece of irony since agriculture is about growing things, while Saturn won't let his babies grow up lest they lop off his nuts and take over the joint.

Okay now let's jump ahead a hundred-plus years to Goya's incredibly disturbing version. This one is balls-to-the-wall messed up. I mean look at it. Saturn's already eaten the kid's head and is diligently working on the left arm. It looks like the right arm's already been munched off, although I reckon it could be pressed against the toddler's chest by Saturn's massive thumb. Whatever the case, you can't escape the eyes. Saturn is clearly insane, right?

To put this into context, Goya was at a pretty messed up time in his life when he painted this horror show. He was in his late seventies, thirty years deaf, and completely alone. You might even say he was a broken man, broken by all the strife and conflict ravaging Spain at the time, broken by all the corruption and hypocrisy he witnessed among the very religious and royal figures who paid him to paint stuff. Goya used his work to criticize the very people he worked for. He was kind of like the painter's version of an op-ed writer if you like. You know? Never missing an opportunity to give his two cents. Not only did they not mind so much, they paid him well. No shit, Goya was the number one painter in Spain for a while. He achieved this status by his fortieth birthday in 1786. Rembrandt's work was a big influence on Goya. And so was, as Goya put it, "nature."

It was in 1792 when things started going downhill for the guy, at least health wise. That was the year he came down with this God-awful fever that left him stone deaf. It didn't put a crimp in his work, though. A few years later he became lead painter for the king. Then Napoleon did his thing, and things went to shit for Spain. The whole country was pillaged. The invading French were real assholes who spared no one. Goya, naturally, channeled his indignation into his art with a series of etchings called Disasters of War, as well as a painting called The Third of May 1808. This was pretty graphic stuff, boys and girls. That Goya made his Saturn painting so graphic isn't an accident. It's kind of like, the older he got, the more pissed off he got, the less subtle he got, and sometimes, as in the Napoleon case, it was with good reason.

At any rate, Napoleon eventually went away. Goya went back to being in charge of painting the royals, but it didn't take. He just didn't like them at all, and he hated himself for taking their money. A lot of his portraits made them look ugly and stupid. I'm not sure if they canned him or he quit, but eventually he left.

This leads us to the end of his life, when he painted Psycho Saturn and a bunch of other dark stuff. In 1819, when he was seventy-three, he did what any person pissed off beyond words at the world would do: He became a hermit. He relocated to this little two-story house in the Madrid 'burbs called Quinta del Sordo (Villa of the Deaf Man), so called 'cause the previous owner was, like Goya, stone deaf. Goya lived there a good four years or so. Dude was so crabby and cranky that, when he painted, instead of taking the time to prepare a canvas and easel, he just painted on the walls. Keep in mind that, while Napoleon was history, Spain was still having a tough time staying stable. Goya was all but surrounded by civil unrest and what have you. Again, like an op-ed columnist, he soaked it up and channeled his emotional reactions into his work. Those reactions, combined with everything else going on with him psychologically, make paintings like the Saturn one make more sense.

During his four years in the Deaf Villa, Goya painted a grand total of fourteen pieces, collectively known as the Black Paintings. It's funny 'cause part of his consigning himself to a hermitage in the suburbs was to get away from it all and cheer the hell up. Didn't take. After painting a couple happy paintings on the walls, he capitulated to his moodiness and overpainted them with the Black Paintings. The Saturn painting was one of six that he painted in the dining room. Keep in mind that no one commissioned these, right? He was done earning a living and just painted for kicks. I'm guessing, therefore, he didn't want anyone to see this freak show.

One last touch of "ew" Goya added that you can't really see here is that Saturn's dick was hard. Right now there's just a black gap, but apparently when they first looked at all this stuff after Goya died, Saturn had a Woody Johnson. Good grief, Charlie Brown, and you thought it wasn't fucked up enough. Nonetheless, the fine folks from Madrid's Museo del Prado thought anything Goya did should be made public...after some editing. Seriously, though, they thought the Black Paintings were just as vital to the man's oeuvre as everything else. From Fred Licht's 1983 book Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art: "[Saturn Devouring His Son] is essential to our understanding of the human condition in modern times, just as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling is essential to understanding the tenor of the 16th century."

As that quote suggests, Goya's got more going on here than you might think. Probably the most obvious thing is Saturn as the god of time, meaning this painting shows time "devouring" the human race. You've also got to consider Saturn as Spain, right? Goya was never shy about criticizing Spain whenever possible. So here you could say that the fatherland is devouring its children, the way Spain at the time was being riven with conflict and such. But then it gets really deep. Remember how Saturn had six kids and ate five of them before Ops caught on? Goya, too, had six younglings....five of whom never lived to adulthood.

In that Goya book I cited above, Fred Licht wonders if this is supposed to be Saturn at all. It could just be some giant crazy guy eating a human adult. That "little" person in his hands doesn't really look like a chubby little baby the way it does in the Rubens painting. Other Goya scholars say that not only is this an adaptation of the Saturn myth, Goya was inspired to do this specifically by the Rubens painting. To hammer that theory home, both the Rubens version and this one live at the Prado in Madrid.

Now this Vik Muniz piece, right? Check that out. Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist based in New York who, back in 2005-06, did a series of works called Pictures of Junk. He basically arranged random stuff in a big empty room and left gaps in certain places to form the image. This room must've been huge. Check out that piano over at the far left center. Look how far away it is. Now that the scale's clear, we can appreciate how long this must've taken. Bill said this piece is "layered with meaning," although he didn't go too much into what the meaning could be. I guess one obvious interpretation is that Vik thought the Goya original was junk. Or, on the flip side, maybe he's a big Goya fan and wanted to give viewers an idea of how you can make beauty out of trash.

Finally, we have the marble sculpture of Silenus holding the wine god Dionysos when Dionysos was still a toddler. Now why do you think Bill would include this in the Saturn discussion? As I said above, he prefaced this section by saying something like, "And now for another family drama." What all these Saturn pieces show, big picture, is how utterly irrational the gods can be. Bill said the Saturn stuff hammers home how the gods liked to make people perfect....and then destroy them. Look back at a lot of the stuff we've talked about in the intro. Oftentimes the gods aren't shown in a very flattering light, are they? Way up top you've got Venus and Mars having a fling and getting busted. After that, Cupid and Psyche, with which the artist Jacques-Louis David took great liberties in completely changing Cupid's, well, psyche. In the original story, Cupid and Psyche were very much in love, no doubt about it, like those two kids in The Notebook. But in this painting, Cupid's obviously just in it for the sex and looks ready to make a break for it now that Psyche's taking a nap. Then of course we've got all the Laocoön stuff, right? Look how perfect the artists always made him, he's got that perfectly toned physique....and then the gods snuff him out.

Now take a gander at the Silenus piece here. Like the Spear-Bearer above, this is a marble Roman copy made during the first or second century B.C., based on a much older Greek copy. Here the relationship is in the reverse. You've now got the god as a little kid at the mercy of the mortal adult. I should say that Silenus, while mortal, isn't human. I'm not entirely sure what exactly he's supposed to be. The closest I can come to is one of those fauns from The Chronicles of Narnia. Remember Mr. Tumnus? Like that. Where it's like, he's got the upper body of a human and the lower body of a goat. And he pretty much stays in the woods. Silenus is something like that, although it depends what version you're reading. With this sculpture, you can see that he pretty much looks all human, with legs and arms and all that. In some versions he's got human legs with a goat's tail. Whatever he is, what he isn't is a god. He lives in the woods and likes to drink a lot. Sounds great to me. And again, depending on what version you read, not only is Silenus a big drinker, he gets really smart when he drinks. He can even see into the future. No, I'm not kidding. Wine makes him a prophet. This is probably why he and Dionysos got along so well. Not only that, but in most versions of the story, Silenus becomes a sort of mentor to Dionysos, hence Dionysos becomes the god of, among other things, wine.

The very tender, caring way Silenus cradles the little baby god in this sculpture is such a stark contrast to the old maniacal god Saturn eating his baby, huh? Think about the points of view of the artists we've talked about during the intro. They mostly seem to think the gods are out of their minds. We do our best to worship them and respect them and what have you, and then they shit on us. We even take care of them and protect them and mentor them when they're babies, and still look what they do to us. By capping the intro off with a juxtaposition of Saturn and Silenus, Bill wanted to bring these themes home.

And that does it for the Illuminated Intro. You've now had a nice little taste of the seminar's title. You've seen how classical myths were adapted by artists who lived during the time when those myths were very much contemporary, when you had an empire full of people who believed that, say, there really was a Saturn. And you've also seen art by artists more contemporary to our times, who in some cases emulated a classical style, but took it further with the tools and technology that weren't available Before Christ.

Okay then, enough with the intro. Let's get to Bill and Anna's guided tours.


Bill's Tour - 11:00am-12:15pm















































































Paneled Room
Architect: Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
Painters: Jean-Siméon Rousseau de la Rottière and Jules-Hughes Rousseau
1795

The twenty or so folks from the intro were split into two groups of about ten each. I was part of the group that started with Bill. After lunch, our groups would swap.

Our first stop on Bill's tour was not a painting or a sculpture but an entire room, simply called Paneled Room. Yes, it's just as ornate and pretty as it looks in the photo, although I don't think it's quite as big as that photo makes it look. In fact, I'm almost certain they used a wide-angle lens for that bad boy. No matter, good stuff. And modern, right? At least relative to most of what we saw in the intro. The Saturns by Goya and Vik were the only two pieces made after 1800.

Anyway, this is a modern piece with some imagery from classical myths. The French architect who designed the room, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, was pushing sixty when he did this. Interesting story about him is that he started out as a government worker drafting stuff for Paris's Department of Water and Forests. It was practical stuff like deciding on repairs, designing cemeteries, schools, roads and whatnot. It was only because he married this gal whose dad was a musician at court did Claude-Nicolas gain entry into that high society and start landing contracts for private residences and what have you, like this piece here. He'd more than made a name for himself in that regard by the time he did this room.

This room was originally the reception room of a townhouse Claude-Nicolas designed for this rich farmer from the Dominican Republic. I didn't ask Bill, but I have to assume what was considered a townhouse back then is not what we would think of a townhouse, right? Show me a townhouse nowadays that has a reception room for Pete's sake, let alone a reception room like this. At any rate, this was a real boon for Claude-Nicolas, since he was not only working on this "townhouse," but fifteen others as well, a little housing development for rich folks. These townhouses must've been huge because the official name for this particular one for the Dominican farmer was called Maison Hosten. Maison's French for mansion, so there ya go.

The real shame here is that he didn't have time to finish it. Claude-Nicolas kicked off the project in 1790. When the French revolution started gathering steam, the Dominican guy went back home. This was around 1795, the year given for this piece. In those five years, Claude-Nicolas got about halfway there, with seven of the sixteen townhouses complete. After that, as with Goya's Villa of Deafness above, the awesome work just sat there. A full century passed before this paneled room was rescued, and only because they were set to demolish the seven townhouses and didn't want all this great work to go to waste.

Now the room itself has some stuff going on in terms of mythology. Those two painters were obviously enjoying themselves. You've got a pair of winged centaurs over each pair of doors, solemnly gripping....what is that? Earthenware, of course! A nice pottery vase called an amphora. Sorry, I just had to call out the connection to the Corinthian Maid by Joseph Wright of Derby that we saw during the introduction, which depicts the very invention of earthenware. On the doors themselves and scattered throughout the room you've got more centaurs as well as sphinxes. In addition to those mythical creatures, you've got a decorative nod to the classical era in the form of those palmettes. Palmettes are this kind of decorative shape that looks like the spread leaves of a palm tree or something. Why is that significant? Because palmettes were all the rage in both Ancient Greece and Rome.

Bottom line, kids: This room screams classical mythology. But it's more contemporary as well in terms of the general arabesque style. Know what that means? That's where you have a shape or a fancy shape combo or pattern and repeat it. It was a style born in the Middle East in the seventeenth century or thereabouts. The Arabic people made it mainstream. I've seen and heard of arabesque before but didn't know the Arabic backstory until today.






















































Long Case Musical Clock
Furniture worker (in charge of the case): David Roentgen
Metalworker (in charge of all the metal stuff): François Rémond
Instrument maker (in charge of the clock movement): Peter Kinzing
1786

It's Saturn again! Jeez, right? We can't even look at an awesome ornate clock without running into that wily character. Can you see him in the photo? That's him under the clock. It looks like he's carrying it on his back. Seeing's how this was made around the same time as that paneled room above, it's safe to say that classical mythology was alive and well in Europe at that time. This piece in particular was made in a German workshop run by two of the three names above, David Roentgen and Peter Kinzing. Not surprisingly, it proved to be one of their most popular products. The wood is a maple veneer, and the clock itself, as you can see, is chockfull of bronze. Besides telling you what time it is, you've also got the garland over the dial marking the year's passage: Flowers for spring, wheat for summer, grapes for fall, holly for winter. Nice. Hammering home the mythological connection, you've got a lyre up top. What's so special about a lyre? That's Apollo's instrument. Apollo, god of the sun, truth, light, all that good stuff. And he's connected to time. Saturn's the god of time, but Apollo's like his boss, making sure time's passing the way it should. Although we don't know for sure, it's likely they had a figure of Apollo himself standing at the top, based on the fact that other clocks made at the same time had Apollo playing the lyre up top and that this particular clock has holes in the top where such a figure could've been inserted. This clock also originally played music, thanks to Peter Kinzing, the instrument maker. At the bottom and top of the hour, Bill said, the clock wouldn't just chime, it would play a whole song.

You won't be surprised to know that David and Pete were pretty successful. As with Claude-Nicolas above (and Goya and so on), these two weren't those types of artists only appreciated after they died. During their day, they were hailed as the top of their craft. Dave in particular was dubbed the best "ébéniste" (cabinetmaker) by the French. Their customers came from all over Europe, but France loved them the most. Like Claude-Nicolas, Dave found a steady stream of business with the French royals. After his dad passed away and left him the furniture business around the time he turned thirty, Dave didn't waste a minute looking for customers outside the German states. Like any good businessman, he knew where the largest demand was: Gay Paree. Nothing happens overnight, though, of course. It took almost ten years, but in his late thirties, Dave finally made his first big sale, to King Louis XVI himself. The ensuing ten years were a boon. Marie-Antoinette made Dave her personal ébéniste. He became a master ébéniste in the cabinetmaker guild. Russia's Catherine the Great was a big fan too and bought lots of stuff from him.

What does it tell you that so many people were interested in stuff like this clock? Everyone, including and especially the most important people of Dave's day, bought furniture decorated with mythological motifs. People ate it right up. The quality was awesome too, of course. With this clock, for instance, you've got oak veneered with maple, those gilt bronze mounts, enameled metal, some glass, and blued steel. Awesome, huh? And you've got Saturn there, and Apollo was probably up top. And while those mythological add-ons might seem secondary, Bill told us to make no mistake: The royals and all the other customers specifically asked for stuff like that. The ancients were alive and well thousands of years later.




























Wall Clock (Pendule à Répétition)
Clockmaker: Jean-Jacques Fiéffé
Designer: Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier
Clock case: Unknown ébéniste
1735-40

Look at this piece of work. Wow, huh? This is a perfect example of Rococo. Remember above in the intro how I was saying Rococo was the next big artistic movement after Baroque? With Baroque, things were already starting to get fancy and ornate and what have you. Not too much, though. Balance and symmetry were still esteemed. With Rococo, the style became even more decorative, and very fluid, and by fluid I mean that folks didn't care as much about balance and symmetry. I mean, just look at this clock. This sums up Rococo for me. Look at the leaves for starters, how they sort of swirl all around like that. See what I mean about fluidity? I wasn't surprised to hear that the designer whose work inspired this piece, Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, was one of the most highly regarded designers and goldsmiths of the Rococo realm.

This particular type of clock was known as a pendules d'alcove (alcove clock). Because they were made to be hung in alcoves above people's beds, clocks like this weren't that big and didn't chime regularly. You'd have this string connected to it that would chime the nearest hour and quarter hour when you gave it a yank. This not only eliminated the constant chiming that would have made sleeping very difficult, but also meant you didn't have to light a candle to see what the time was. While this clock isn't nearly as big as the wall clock, it's the biggest example of an alcove clock anyone knows of, meaning the bedroom it was made for was probably huge and the original owner was therefore wealthy and lived in a huge house.

Now what about the mythology? Are you kidding, it's all over this clock. It's probably tough to see in the photo because of how the gold mythological symbols blend into all the swirling gold leaves. Up top there, if you squint hard enough, you've got cherubs carrying away a scythe and an hourglass, objects associated with....(wait for it)....Saturn! Yep, it's him again. Good ol' Papa Baby Eater. Now if you squint just below the clock itself, sort of to the left and just below the clock face, you can see the upper half of a figure lying there. Guess who that is. Yep, Saturn. What I'm sure you can't see is that the defeated Saturn's got his globe, protractor, and a couple compasses. In other words, with the cherubs flying away with some of his stuff and Saturn himself just lying there, we have a scene of love conquering time. Interesting, huh?

Like the paneled room and the first clock, this was done in Paris, albeit about a half century earlier. Point being that the French love of classical mythology must've been incredibly strong. What a different world it must've been then. Show me a clock or a piece of furniture made nowadays decorated with classical mythology. Most folks today have no idea who a lot of these gods and goddesses are, what cherubs are, or sphinxes or centaurs.

Anyway, a thing of beauty, huh? Like the other clock, it's all about the gilt bronze, in addition to the glass, enameled metal, and wood carcass. As for the designer, while his name looks incredibly French, he was, in fact, Italian. Again, France was where the business was, so you won't be surprised to know that Juste-Aurèle eventually left his home town of Turin to set himself up in Paris. As a Rococo master, everyone wanted a piece of him. He was in his twenties when he immigrated and in no time found steady work for a manufacturing company. He wasn't even thirty when King Louis XV officially declared him a master goldsmith. A couple years later, Louis made him the official designer of his bedroom and cabinet. That might not sound like a lot of work, just being in charge of a bedroom and cabinet, but have you seen what Louis's bedroom looked like? I haven't been there in person, but I've seen photos. Look it up. Louis also gave him ad hoc projects, like designing the festivities for his eldest daughter's wedding. Like Dave and Pete above, Juste-Aurèle had customers all across Europe: England, Portugal, Poland, you name it. His designs spanned the spectrum. Juste-Aurèle drafted designs for stuff like room paneling, picture frames, tables, chairs, snuffboxes, lanterns, clocks, even crucifixes.

The clockmaker behind this piece, Jean-Jacques Fiéffé, never did hit the big time. He had his workshop, though. In fact, lest you think he was disappointed or anything, quite the contrary. It could be he kept his purview intentionally modest. His work was highly regarded, people loved it, but Jean-Jacques worked at his own pace. One cool thing about him was that he was in charge of maintaining all the clocks in the Paris Observatory. I'm a bit of an astronomy buff so, to me, that sounds like an awesome job. In fact, his official job title was "Clockmaker of the Observatory." Take a look at that second photo above, the close-up of the clock face. The central enamel's got Jean-Jacques' surname written underneath, while above, it says "de l'observatoire." That's cool, he did his own thing and liked outer space. He and I would've gotten along famously.

Before moving on, Bill told us that, before the recession and the layoffs, the Getty Center had someone on staff whose job it was to go around and wind every single clock, including the art pieces that were clocks or included clocks. Now I think of it, I can't remember if these two clocks were showing the correct time. No matter, it's the art that counts, right? These clocks were easily two of the most attractive clocks I've ever seen.




























Saturn Devouring One of His Children
Simon Hurtrelle
c. 1699

Okay, well, I'm not sure how much I should go into this considering I (and Bill) already talked about it quite a bit during the "Illuminated Introduction." I can see why Bill included this on his tour, though. It's one thing to look at a picture of an artwork, and quite another to see it up close and personal.

For starters, look at that close-up of Saturn's face. Dude's taking this task so seriously, isn't he? It's quite a stark contrast from the balls-out lunacy of Goya's piece or the crotchety stooped old geezer from Rubens. Here he's very poised and dignified and physically well toned. Yet he's also getting old, right? Which Simon conveys via the balding pate. Saturn, the god of time, shows here that time passes on and, in so doing, consumes us.

I guess one thing you can tell when you see it in person is that it's not just a single hunk of bronze. Simon took separate hunks, sculpted them and then melded them together. You take the wings for instance. Each wing had to be made separately. That had to be a job and a half. Then you've got the figure itself. All the parts were sculpted in either wax or metal, Bill said, before they were joined and cast in bronze.

Now that we were all standing around looking at this disturbing piece, a few folks couldn't help giving their impressions. One person said this couldn't possibly be literal, that it was symbolically conveying what I said above, that time passes on and "eats us up." This other woman said she "couldn't stand the sight of it." Bill told us not to forget that ultimately the story's a happy one. Funny how knowing that doesn't make the imagery any less disturbing. It is a beautiful piece of bronze, though, isn't it? It's a paradox, I reckon, gorgeous and ghastly in a single glance.






















































Spring
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
1894

For the final stop before luncheon, Bill led us to this painting by Dutch-born British painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Besides the obvious relevance to classical times with this scene of women and kids in Ancient Rome, Bill specifically wanted to cap off his tour with a painting to get us primed for all the paintings Anna would be showing us this afternoon.

As you can see in the header above, this was painted toward the end of the nineteenth century, or late Victorian era, if you will. And yet the painting screams Ancient Rome....sort of. Actually, what the people in this painting are doing is a very Victorian thing. You've got the women and kids going down the stairs with all the bright flowers and so on, while people from the windows cheer them on. This is all a Victorian thing, a custom called May Day. On the morning of every May 1, the younglings would go off into the countryside to collect flowers. Of course, lots of different countries and cultures have a May Day of one sort or another, and it can be quite different depending. For some, it's a public holiday or a bank holiday. It even has a Communist connotation, the International Workers' Day and all that stuff.

For the purposes of this painting, let's stick with the flowers. You've got women and kids celebrating a custom that was very current in Sir Lawrence's time, but they're doing it in an Ancient Roman setting. Every detail here is classical: The architecture, the clothes, sculptures, even the musical instruments. As with the clocks being adorned with various gods, this yet again hammers home just how beloved the classics were by the Europeans. And mind you, this isn't pre-Revolutionary Paris, like the clocks were. This is a good hundred years later, near the turn of the twentieth century. Peoples' appetites for this stuff was no less insatiable. I'm including the painter of this piece in that statement.

Sir Lawrence loved Ancient Rome more than I like pizza. When he wasn't painting, he studied Roman history. Check this out: Sir Lawrence painted over three hundred pieces in his career, and just about all of them have an Ancient Roman theme in one way or another, especially in terms of the architecture. At first, he was more into Ancient Greece, but that didn't last long. In his late twenties he took a trip to Pompeii. It changed his life. Thereafter, he was devoted to Roman architecture and reproducing it in his work as precisely as he could. He was obviously good at it because in due time he made so much money from his paintings, he custom-built a villa for himself modeled after the villas unearthed in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. That's pretty awesome because the Getty Center's sister museum out in the Pacific Palisades, the Getty Villa, is also modeled after such a villa. When he had it built back in the sixties and seventies, Mr. Getty modeled the Getty Villa after this particular villa in Herculaneum called the Villa dei Papiri (Villa of Papyri, as in papyrus scrolls), which had originally belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law. If you live in L.A. or plan on being in this area, do include a trip to the Getty Villa in your itinerary. It's awesome.

As you can see in the painting, the details are pretty great, especially the marble. In fact, critics called Sir Lawrence a "marbellous artist" because of how great he could paint marble. Dude knew his marble and no mistake. Granted, his vision of Ancient Rome was sort of idealized, and some critics were down on him for that, for being all fluffy clouds with no real message or moral, but really, who cares? The past is always prettier, it seems. Sir Lawrence said about his love of the classical era: "Now if you want to know what those Greeks and Romans looked like, whom you make your masters in language and thought, come to me. For I can show not only what I think but what I know."

The whole May Day flowers ceremony wasn't just a Victorian tradition, by the way. The Ancient Romans had something similar as well. As I said above, the idea of celebrating something on the first of May is all over the globe. For many cultures, it's about spring and fertility. In Ancient Rome, the first of May was to celebrate Flora, the goddess of flowers. So you see? Ancient Rome is more relevant to this painting than you first realize.

One cool thing about Sir Lawrence that is of particular interest to me as a movie buff is the influence his paintings have had on Hollywood set design. A lot of Ancient Rome-set movies have used this guy's paintings to get a good idea of how everything should look. That's pretty awesome, and certainly I'm going to think about this from now on every time I catch an Ancient Rome flick, not that Hollywood's making too many of those right now since getting the period detail right means spending a fortune, while audiences these days seem cool to the so-called sword-and-sandal flicks. No matter, there's plenty of classics (pardon the pun) I can still enjoy. I love Ben-Hur, for instance, which I discovered in seventh grade Latin back in 1988-89.

Sir Lawrence, like Queen Victoria, was up there in years by the time he painted Spring. A few years after this, the Queen knighted him. She passed on about a year or two later, while Sir Lawrence still had ten years left.

And that does it for Bill's lecture. We saw a lot of good stuff: A room with awesome paneling, a couple clocks, a sculpture, and a painting, all by very different people, albeit many of them in roughly the same time and place (Sir Lawrence being a big exception), and all tied together by their public's adoration for the classical era.


Anna's Tour - 1:15-2:30pm


Venus and Adonis
Titian
1555-60

I like what Anna did. She took the theme we'd been exploring all day, how different artists adapt different myths, and took it even further with pairings. Her tour consisted of six paintings, two each showing a different version of the same myth. Recall that this whole event is tied to LA Opera's Ring Cycle production. What's the Ring Cycle? Well, for starters, it's Wagner's interpretation of a myth. Several myths, actually. He drew from several sources in crafting his Ring libretti. The interpretation goes even further. When I see the Ring next month, I will not only see Wagner's version of these myths, I'll also see how stage director Achim Freyer interprets all this stuff. That's why I think Anna's idea to show us three instances of a myth being adapted two different ways was a great one. It brought it all home.

To start off, we have the myth of Venus and Adonis, right? Adapted from an episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The way Titian shows it, you've got Venus literally clinging to her man as he gets set to go hunting. She's so desperate for him not to go, she didn't even bother getting dressed before running after him. Adonis, for his part, looks completely indifferent, cold even. It's like he couldn't give a shit how scared she is. It's ironic as hell, really. Venus is a goddess, so she's basically immortal for the most part, right? Well, gods can get taken down too, I reckon, but it's more complicated. Adonis, meanwhile, is an all-too-mortal human. Yet, by the looks of this, he appears to have forgotten his mortality. In the background you've got that obvious symbolism there with Cupid out for the count. In other words, love's not part of this. Those dogs, meanwhile, are chomping on the bit to get going.

Anna talked about the painting's "spontaneous" look. She told us that Titian used his finger to paint some of this, including part of one of Adonis's arms. Even the clouds seem sort of spontaneous. When you talk about spontaneity in paintings, you usually mean movement, right? So taking in the people and the dogs and the clouds and so on, you get an awesome sense of everything in motion. Or, in the case of Adonis, about to be in motion.

Titian was Da Man in his day. By the time he did this, he was seventy-ish and a close pal to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He'd been Chuck's court painter for twenty years at this point. In other words, he had more than enough confidence in his own abilities and talents that he'd think nothing of improvising a little with the occasional finger stroke and whatnot. Actually, though, he didn't paint this piece for Chuck, but another important guy: King Philip II in Spain. Phil, like just about everyone back then, loved mythology, so he tapped Titian to paint him a whole bunch of stuff adapted from classical myths. Even though he was pushing seventy, Titian still had room to grow. His work for Phil represented yet another step in the evolution of his talents just when everyone thought he was already at the top of his game. This has especially to do with the way he shows human flesh. It looks more natural than his earlier works. The colors are better and evoke more emotion. His taking dabs with his finger may have contributed to that. Perhaps basing his characters on other works helped. His depiction of Venus, for instance, is taken from a sculpture from ancient times.





Venus and Adonis
Massimiliano Soldani Benzi
c. 1700

Look familiar? Yep, this was one of the pieces Bill showed during the intro this morning. Of course, at that time I had no idea about the Titian painting we just saw. Now I can appreciate that this piece is basically a sequel, or continuation, of that same episode. Adonis eventually got away from his woman, went on his hunt, and promptly got attacked by a humungous wild boar. He’s history.

In terms of style, another thing I can appreciate more now is the whole Baroque thing. That is to say, this is Baroque, which I knew before but didn’t fully appreciate in terms of how it was different from previous styles. Sure, the Titian painting had all that movement. Here, though, the movement is taken to a new level. Venus has that slip she was almost wearing in the previous painting, only now it's sort of blown back, as if she just flew down from that turbulent sky. You've also got those two cherubs, or putti, as some folks call them (the plural of putto), who also seem to have just zoomed down from the sky. Then of course you've got Adonis, who may not be so regally poised like he was in Titian's painting, but who nonetheless looks....poised, like he's an actor performing a death onstage. That's one thing Bill said during his intro this morning, how melodramatic and theatrical this sculpture is, which is yet another Baroque delineation between this piece and Titian.

Another thing I can appreciate, seeing it in person, is how meticulous Benzi was with the bronze. Look how rough he makes the surface of the boar, which he situates right next to the very smooth-skinned putto so you can see the stark contrast in the casting. Also, you see those little flower things on Adonis? Those are indeed flowers. They're anemones. In the original Ovis tale, when the boar took out Adonis, the blood flowing out of him spontaneously bloomed with a whole bunch of anemones. Interesting, huh? Magical realism, like out of a Garcia Marquez novel or something.



Coast View with the Abduction of Europa
Claude Lorrain
c. 1645

The next pair of paintings also adapt a scene from Metamorphoses, the part where Zeus, disguised as a bull, kidnaps Europa. Know who Europa is? Depending on which myth you read, which in turn depends on which ancient civilization you're studying, she can be either a human or a goddess. Here, she's very human. She's an aristocratic woman from a place called Phoenicia, a slice of coastal land that constitutes present-day Lebanon, Syria, and part of Israel. Europa was from the town of Tyre, which still exists today in present-day Lebanon. Zeus didn't really care that she was rich. He just thought she was hot and wanted to have her. So what he did was, he turned himself into a bull and furtively blended in with Europa's dad's herd. Her dad, by the way, was the king of Phoenicia, guy called Agenor.

So one day, Europa and her attendants leave the castle and go for a stroll to pick some flowers. The bulls are out and about as well, milling around, eating grass, being lazy. A lazy day for all. As they continue picking flowers and chatting, the girls eventually find themselves by the water, where a lone bull loiters. They pet the bull and talk baby talk. Soon Europa gets goofy and hops on the bull's back. You've obviously figured out this particular bull is Zeus, who wastes no time in spiriting Europa away, across the water and eventually landing on the island of Crete. Europa becomes the founding queen of Crete. She and Zeus have a long-term relationship during which they have three kids. Anyway, no need to get into that. I just wanted to put these next two paintings into context. As a side note, if you're an astronomy buff like me, you might like to know that the Zeus bull is the particular bull after which the constellation Taurus is named.

So with that, let's check out this first painting by Claude Lorrain. You've got Europa and her girlfriends and the bull, all gathered by the water there. Looming behind them is Europa's dad's castle in Tyre. Beautiful, huh? This is obviously before the abduction. Europa et al. have no clue at this point who the bull really is. As with Venus's swept back garment in the above sculpture, Europa's blue clothing has a windy look to it. Clothing was obviously a good way for artists to convey motion.

Anna explained that, even though the abduction hasn't happened yet, you can still sort of surmise that not all is well in the state of Phoenicia. Lorrain included details in this otherwise peaceful bucolic setting to convey a sense of foreboding. For starters, look at that ugly, craggily tower there. It's like something out of Poe, right? Check out the water more closely, you can see it's a bit turbulent. It's also dark thanks to the shadow. The splash of sunlight on the women and bull is the only direct light. And the day's fading, which you can tell from how much the shadows stretch to the right. See that? See how much you notice the longer you look at something? Oh and one last thing: Look at the bull. See how he's got that one hind leg sort of braced for takeoff? Our man Zeus isn't wasting a minute. Soon as Europa's on his back, it's off to the races.

As far as Claude Lorrain himself, Anna told us that, while originally from France (in fact his surname is the name of the French province where he was born), he spent a big chunk of his life in Italy. In aggregate, Claude lived about half his life there, starting when he was a tween. As you can guess, based on this painting, his focus was landscapes. He studied under the pros and pretty much let himself get consumed by the art of landscape and evoking nature. Indeed, you could say Claude turned his art into a science, the way he studied outdoor lighting so meticulously. He did this to the detriment of his other studies. Claude sucked at math and writing, but he could talk about lighting the way a scientist would. Show me a painter who appreciates their craft to that extent. You don't meet many. Suffice it to say by the time he turned thirty, he had his landscape technique honed to a T. Like any good artist (artist in the general term), he practiced every day. He never let a day go by where he didn't at least do an outdoor drawing of one sort or another. His perpetual goal, which he largely accomplished in most of his stuff, was to make nature look even better on canvas than it looked in real life. He was incredibly prolific. By the time he kicked off in his late seventies, Claude had churned out over 1,300 drawings and a whole ton of paintings.





The Abduction of Europa
Rembrandt
1632

I love Rembrandt. Whenever the Getty puts on a Rembrandt exhibition, I almost always go. I dunno. I just like his style.

Here we have Rembrandt's interpretation of Europa's kidnapping by the Zeus bull. Interesting because Rembrandt hardly ever did mythological stuff. Go check any Rembrandt exhibition. The guy was obviously much more interested in the here and now of his native Holland. Landscape wasn't really his thing either. Well, he was Rembrandt after all, there was probably very little he couldn't do with a brush and canvas, but it wasn't his forte the way it was Claude Lorrain's. Claude was the undisputed landscape master, to the extent that landscape designers have drawn from his work for ideas. That's why you've gotta admire Rembrandt for stepping out his comfort zone here.

Just as the Venus and Adonis sculpture continued the scene from Titian's painting, here too we get a sort of sequel to Claude's painting. In terms of mood, this one's much darker and more dramatic. One of Europa's attendants is practically falling over, she's so hysterical, letting go of that flower garland she was going to put around the bull's neck. Then there's that other attendant hiding up by the horses. And then look above her, in the carriage itself. You can just barely see the carriage driver standing up and watching it all go down. He's almost camouflaged into the background, though, it's all so dark. Check out the background itself. Desolate, right? You don't even have the spooky, craggily tower. You've got nothing, really. It's like a wasteland of ruins, closer to what Tyre looks like today (and during Rembrandt's time) than what it looked like during its prime.

You could say a paradox is at work here. The scene is so film noir, yet the women's clothing is so exquisite that the gold practically glitters. One thing I asked Anna was about how pale the women looked. Look at them, right? They look almost sickly with their pallid complexions. Anna said Rembrandt probably didn't mean to make them look sick, but perhaps I had a point. Perhaps he did make them extra white to emphsize their terror. Anna also said that Rembrandt based his Europa on a particular woman he knew. She modeled that pose for him while he painted this. In fact, it was the same woman he used in another portrait, which hangs on the opposite wall of where this Europa painting hangs in the Getty. Anyways, the whole scene has the gloomy atmosphere of a horror movie. The sky, while "bright" enough to contrast the very dark right half of the scene, is still a very gloomy sky.

Anna took this opportunity to remind us of what we learned during the intro. You could take the same scene from the same story, let two different painters adapt it, and come away with very different emotions. She wanted us to remember that artists back then were just as liberal in adapting stuff as Hollywood is today. I'm a movie buff so I'm pretty aware that Hollywood rarely does anything original. Anna said that painters, even the awesome painters like Rembrandt, didn't always come up with their own ideas. They adapted other stuff, and in so doing revealed a part of who they were, including their vision of the world around them.

Anyway, great stuff, huh? Nice and dark and moody, just like a lot of his portraits. I love Rembrandt.



Penelope Unraveling Her Web
Joseph Wright of Derby
1783-84

Here we are again with another piece Bill showed us during the "Illuminated Intro." Seeing it in person, my eyes immediately went to the bright part of the scene, nicely situated in the center of the canvas. It's just as well the sleeping kid's right there. As I said in the intro, that's Penelope and Odysseus' son Telemachus, and it's he that Anna wanted to talk about with this next pair of paintings.

Remember that everyone thought Odysseus was dead. By the time he came home, he'd been gone twenty years, during which time his boy grew up. Indeed, Telemachus becomes a central figure in the Odyssey when his father finally gets home. They decide to go after all the dudes who tried to get Penelope in the sack. So the Odyssey sort of becomes a revenge story. That's another thing I didn't know this morning. I was thinking Penelope had, I dunno, a few guys hitting on her and wanting to marry her. But no, it was much more complicated than that. Get this: Over a hundred guys were vying for this poor woman's hand in marriage. You read that right. A hundred plus. Maybe not all at the same time, but stretched out over twenty years. They'd come over to Odysseus' huge spread (remember he was a king) and eat all the food and hang out and just be hangers-on while Penelope said she'd consider which one to marry just as soon as she finished knitting a shroud for Odysseus' dad Laërtes. As I said in the intro section, she had no intention of ever finishing. Every night after everyone went home, she "unraveled her web," as the painting says. How she managed to buy so much time with this trick is beyond me.

And so eventually Telemachus grows up and goes looking for Dad, finds him, and they plot revenge against all hundred-plus suitors. And yes, father and son eventually do kill all of them.

So there's more backstory for ya, which I didn't know until this guided tour with Anna. That certainly explains all the light shining on Telemachus. The effect of light and dark is even more striking up close. That statue of Odysseus looms impressively over his family. Penelope looks terribly sad. Telemachus is really the only source of peace here. The rest of the scene simmers with drama and disturbance.




































































The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis
Jacques-Louis David
1818

Recognize the name of this painter? Jacques-Louis did Cupid and Psyche way up yonder, the second one during Bill's intro. He did this one right after that.

Here we have Telemachus all grown up. This is kind of like Cupid and Psyche, isn't it? In terms of the emotions here? In Cupid and Psyche, the very liberal way Jacques-Louis adapted it depicted Cupid as only in it for the sex. I don't think Telemachus is being that cold. I'd say he's torn, yet determined to uphold his duty to find Dad. On the one hand (literally), he holds onto Eucharis' leg and leans into her while she rests her head on his shoulder. She's bummed out, yet resigned to what she knows he must do. Speaking of which, look at Telemachus' other hand. He's gripping the spear upright as if braced to pull himself to his feet.

Remember above in the Europa section when I talked about painters adapting stories the way Hollywood adapts movies? Well, this painting takes liberal adaptation to a new level. Jacques-Louis wasn't adapting the Odyssey, he was adapting this French novel called Les Aventures de Télémaque by François Fénelon. See, Eucharis isn't in the Odyssey. François made her up. Now it is true that the island of Calypso, where the couple is supposed to be in this painting, does figure quite a bit in Homer's original epic. François was basically embellishing, I guess, showing us scenes from the story Homer "left out." This painting, therefore, is an adaptation of an adaptation.

I included close-ups of Eucharis's quiver and Telemachus's gold horn so you can see how Jacques-Louis left his mark. On the quiver you can see his surname toward the top, and on the gold horn you've got when and where he painted it: Brussels (or Bruxelles in French) 1818.

Interesting story about his being in Brussels. Seventy years old when he did this piece, Jacques-Louis wasn't living in Brussels by choice but was exiled there after Waterloo. Yep, he'd been a supporter of Napoleon. Jacques-Louis was apparently quite the troublemaker. He'd been all for the French Revolution and sometimes used his paintings as a way to get his point across about the obligations of the Revolutionaries. That credo "state before family" can be seen here, right? Telemachus is putting love in the backseat to serve his father and, by extension, Ithaca.

It should also be noted that Jacques-Louis was painting during the Baroque-Rococo era, which I went into above. Well, stare at this painting for even one second and you can tell this is the total opposite of Baroque and Rococo, right? Like a good Revolutionary, he was challenging the establishment. This here style of his is called Neoclassicism. In stark contrast to Baroque and Rococo, Neoclassical paintings are usually very clean and crisp with clearly defined edges and borders. The colors are pure. It's darn near a photograph. Neoclassicism wasn't Jacques-Louis's invention, but he definitely helped put it on the map as an alternative to those wild and theatrical styles. Neoclassicism's name mainly comes from that "classic" part, as in the Roman and Greek classics. Jacques-Louis and his fellow Neoclassicists wanted to bring viewers back to the origins of the Western artistic and literary canons. Instead of depicting them in any sort of "modern" way (then as now, the word "modern" could easily be twisted into a pejorative), they wanted to visualize the classics in a very clean and idealized way.

Don't worry about Jacques-Louis. In spite of all his troublemaking, he did quite well for himself. He won prizes and what have you, and earned a very robust living. Even after getting kicked out of his native land, he landed on his feet in Brussels, did awesome work like this and passed on his wisdom to the next generation.


Conclusion



The Return from War: Mars Disarmed by Venus
Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder
c. 1610-12

And that wraps up Anna's tour, showing us three pairs of paintings, each pair adapting a particular episode from the classics. Cool, huh? Very illuminating for me. Well shit, this whole day has been a monster-sized education in mythology and how we've interpreted it over the centuries. Just look at the size of this post.

Now while Anna's tour was officially over, the education itself wasn't quite over. Bill showed up with his folks. As one big group, we followed Bill and Anna to this one huge painting called The Return from War. As you can see above, it was painted by not one, but two fellas. You've got Rubens, who you should definitely know at this point, as well as a new guy, a Dutch painter named Jan Brueghel the Elder. If you think it's unusual that two guys, especially two very well-known kats like Peter and Jan, would paint something together, that's because it is. "A very rare instance of team painting," Bill said. Also, remember how, in Anna's pairings, the second one of each pair was a continuation of the scene from the first? This one's the opposite. It's a prequel to the very first painting we saw in this morning's intro, Venus and Mars Surprised by the Gods by Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael.

Here we have Mars obviously just coming back from a hard day's fighting, ready to unwind with Venus. Where are they, you ask? They're in Vulcan's forge. Yep, as you saw in the other painting, Venus and Mars get busted when Vulcan shows up. So it's right after this particular scene that Venus finishes helping Mars get undressed as they go into the master bedroom, do their thing....and we arrive at Venus and Mars Surprised by the Gods by Joachim. I'm not sure if Joachim knew Peter and Jan. He could've known Jan. They were both Dutch and about the same age. What's more, both Joachim's painting and this one were done around the exact same time.

As you can see, we've got quite a bit of activity going on here in the ol' forge. That's what I love most about this one, the depth of field. Besides Venus and the putti undressing Mars up close on the right, you've got all that military gear and other detritus, the spoils/leftovers of war, scattered across the foreground. Behind that to the left is a cannon. Beyond that, more to the left, it gets kind of dark, but the painters certainly added enough shapes to imply more action back yonder. And then further straight back you can see a white horse with an attendant holding its harness. All the way back looks to be the outdoors, right? A dark, gloomy, moody sky looms, which I, in my storyteller mode, interpret as a foreshadowing of Mars and Venus getting busted later on.

Let's go back up front with Mars and Venus, shall we? As the god of war, you can probably imagine that, say, an hour before this scene, Mars was in full war mode, decked out in his armor and weaponry and ripping shit up. Venus, as the goddess of love, has instantly disarmed him with her gaze, while she and those two putti disarm him literally. Those little putti already have Mars's sword and shield and seem to be relating to them like babies to toys. Venus, meanwhile, has one arm around the man while slipping off his helmet. Obviously we can surmise that love conquers war, right? As the theme?

It's a bit deeper than that, though. Bill and Anna told us that when this painting and the other one from this morning were both made, Holland was in the throws of its eighty-year war for independence. Holland, you may not have known, was a property of Spain in the beforetimes. And as happens, the natives grew pissed off because of the usual reasons: Very high taxes without the commensurate attention paid them by the government. And let's not forget religion. Spain was Catholic, but up in Northern Europe, the further you got from Rome, the more Protestant people became. Well, the Spanish Inquisition wasn't going to tolerate that. So there ya go, you've got very high taxes, poor government services, and Catholic totalitarianism. Spain owned quite a large chunk of Northern Europe. It wasn't just the Dutch who were pissed off. A whole slew of provinces banded together to kick off the revolt in 1568. Together they were called the Seventeen Provinces. We're talking present-day Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Northern France, and a small chunk of Western Germany. Their leader was this guy called William of Orange. Think of him as the George Washington of Holland. Seriously, to this day he's called the Father of Holland just like we think of George as the Father of our country. When you watch the Olympics, you ever wonder why the Dutch athletes wear orange even through their flag is red, white, and blue? Well, there ya go. William of Orange. He founded a major branch of the House of Orange called the House of Orange-Nassau when he was crowned prince at the age of eleven (!).

A little over ten years into the war for independence, King Philip II of Spain decided he'd had enough of this William character and officially declared him an outlaw. Spain made mince meat of ten of the provinces, but not the Dutch ones. The seven provinces left to the revolutionaries are the seven that pretty much make up present-day Holland. They banded together to form the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. They drew up an official constitution and everything. In fact, their constitution eventually served as the template for the guys who wrote the U.S. Constitution. Three years after the Republic's formation, in 1584, William's outlaw status caught up with him. He was assassinated that summer at the age of fifty-one. The war for independence was eighteen years running. As you can probably guess, William's death didn't do a thing to discourage the provinces. Quite the contrary, it only made them more determined. The Spanish had made William a martyr.

And so the war waged on. In 1609, a truce was signed. It was the beginning of the twelve-year truce Bill and Anna told us about, when our two Venus and Mars paintings were done. Bill and Anna told us that Mars and Venus were sort of a fad at this time, as artists continually recycled them as a symbol of peace. This was how they protested against war in those days, I guess. Today we hold up placards and burn stuff. Back then, they painted. With this particular painting, though, Peter and Jan weren't just showing us peace. They were showing us how fragile peace could be, right? Do you see that? Venus and Mars are there, but as I said above, it's impossible to miss all the action happening around them in Vulcan's forge. Peace is being encroached upon by war. I guess you could say Peter and Jan were skeptical that the truce would last. Lots of people were, and they had good reason, right? Hence, it became the twelve-year truce, not a permanent one. The war resumed about a decade after this painting and dragged on another thirty years or so, when the late great William's republic finally became recognized as an independent republic.

Now in terms of the work here, how do you suppose Peter and Jan divvied it up? I wasn't really familiar with Jan until now, but of course we all know about Peter. Looking at Entombment, it's obvious Peter's forte was painting human figures. Bill and Anna said he brought that forte to this piece as well as the other stuff he did with Jan. While team painting was "rare," Bill said, Peter and Jan teamed up quite a bit. They did something like two dozen paintings together. Peter usually painted the people while Jan handled the still life.

Jan was to still life what Peter was to the human form. Individual flora and fauna were his main strength. Studying under Grandma (he came from a veritable dynasty of awesome Flemish artists), Jan would bring home these rare flowers and use them as models for his paintings. He did this every year. And then when summer gave way to fall, it was landscape season. Jan liked his landscapes to be lush and rich, which earned him the nickname "Velvet Brueghel." He hailed from a school called Mannerism. This preceded Baroque. The Mannerist painters subscribed to a sort of restraint on naturalism while marrying the ideals into a colorful, visual, rich harmony. Mannerism, in other words, meant artificial, but not in the pejorative sense. Au contraire, I'd say artificial in the beautiful sense. They made nature more beautiful. Don't think that meant Mannerists were simpletons, or that they were in denial. Again, the opposite is the case. The Mannerists were usually well-learned folks, and this came across in their work.

Look at this piece here. As I've said a couple times now, it has a lot going on, and a lot of what's going on is the result of Jan. Look at all the still life here. He did all that, and in doing it, he's bringing to bear his knowledge of the classics as well as modern warfare. See the temporal mishmash? The armor and helmet worn by Mars are from a past time. Medieval times, perhaps. Now look at the armor and weaponry lying on the ground to the left. That's straight out of Jan's time. You've got a rifle, a crossbow, very modern Dutch armor, a cannon back there. This was typical Jan. Besides this piece, the Getty's got two other works by him: The Sermon on the Mount and The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark. Look at both of those and you quickly discern the same characteristics. They're Mannerist and artificial and laden with still life details that mix past and present, fantasy and reality. In The Sermon on the Mount, which Jan did about ten years before this, the trees and the whole woodland setting are gorgeously artificial. Now look at the people. Even from a distance, their wardrobe is lush, both the folks dressed in garments from Christ's time, as well as those modern folks toward the front dressed in black with those white collars.

And so that was Bill and Anna's spiel on The Return from War: Mars Disarmed by Venus, the prequel to Venus and Mars Surprised by the Gods. Awesome, huh? Look at all the different styles we've seen: Mannerism, Neoclassicism, Baroque, Rococo, you name it. We've seen a whole bunch of examples of ancient myths adapted for more modern times. Don't forget this is a Ring Festival event. LA Opera's current Ring Cycle is probably a new paradigm of a very modern artist like Achim Freyer interpreting Wagner, an artist of the nineteenth century whose Ring Cycle is, in turn, an adaptation of several very old Germanic and Icelandic myths. How storytellers--composers, painters, writers, etc.--adapt a particular story or myth can say quite a lot about them and their own time, perhaps more so than it says about the time period of the source material.


Bonus



























Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods
Joachim Wtewael (pronounced Uetvall)
1610-1614

I guess Bill and Anna couldn't resist showing us this, seeing's how it continues the story from the last painting, and it's the piece Bill used to kick off the "Illuminated Introduction" this morning. Now we really are coming full circle, aren't we? The circle is officially complete.

I won't spend too much time with this one since I already talked about it up top. Plus, Bill and Anna didn't spend much time with it either. They were like, "Hey, you guys wanna see that other Mars and Venus piece we talked about this morning?" It was in the same gallery as the Mars and Venus painting we just saw. And whereas that piece was huge, this one was tiny, six inches by eight inches on copper. Now I appreciate what a magnification that slide projection was this morning. Man, you really have to lean in to catch those same details. How did Joachim do that?

Having a copper surface helps. You'd have to see this in person to appreciate what I'm saying, but the copper turns out to be a great surface for bringing out all the details Joachim crams in here. Bill and Anna said it's thought that the original owners who bought it from Joachim kept it hidden in a drawer, or otherwise out of sight, because of the soft porn quality of it. That concealment helped the copper maintain its shiny appearance. I have to say the tiny little painting looked in pretty great shape for being four hundred years old. It pays to hide the porn, I reckon.