Musings. Ex Libris

History is punctuated with moments of chaos and beauty. Seemingly antitheses by nature, in aesthetics there are myriads examples of how these two manage to converge in single works and enter a pleasing balance. Amongst them there is Tintoretto, a consummate devotee of violence and drama, whose bewildering depictions of many biblical episodes redefine the meaning of “chaos” as a synonym to sheer “epicness” or “monumentality.” Rarely does his pictorial crowdedness amount to an unrelenting sense of knottiness; as fastidious as is his exactitude on the minutiae, Tintoretto never failed to see the forest for the trees. Every single brushstroke and colour he applied onto the paintings was sure to be conducive to an immediate effect of harmony and order. In the early 19 th  century France entered Eugene Delacroix, an exponent of what would come to be known as French Romanticism. Most of Delacroix’s renowned works of large-scale historical scenes were considered a scourge to the...

1867 was a fateful year for  Édouard  Manet in that his art, hitherto idyllic and placid, shifted drastically to the moods of poignancy and relentlessness. Two deaths signaled the change: his old friend and enduring champion, Charles Baudelaire, and the tragic emperor Maximilian I, who was executed by the Juaristas after a failed foreign initiative in the Mexico empire. The seminal work,  Execution of Emperor Maximilian , would not see its completion until two years later, as Manet’s progress and insistence on a faithful portrayal were incessantly impeded by the inaccurate accounts of the event. The intervening period yielded a result that continued this preoccupation with grief: in the weeks followed Baudelaire’s death Manet summoned his godson, Leon Koella, to blow soap bubbles in his studio on the Rue Guyot. The soap bubble, with its brittle form and enchanting presence, has been a popular subject of the  vanitas , a genre that serves to remind o...

In  Life ’s feature on the bizarre case of Christopher Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero, a bashful, honest, family-loving string bass player of the then snazzy Stork Club, who was arrested for crimes he never committed, Herbert Brean, the writer, supposes the inconceivable event possessing the “somnambulist quality of a bad dream.” Alfred Hitchcock, basing a film on the incident three years later, conferred on the “bad dream” a touch of Kafkaesque disquietude. Though jettisoning much of the suspenseful streak that characterises his style, Hitchcock introduces in  The Wrong Man  (1956) a new suspense that is induced by a palpable sense of emotional detachedness. For years to come this would ultimately evolve to a semi-documentary approach of impassive-observing that culminates in the menacing sobriety of Psycho . To enhance the desperation of a tangled, never-ending nightmare, Hitchcock pardonably distorts a few facts to give rise to the dramatic. In the film, Manny’...

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) comes as a perfect antidote to the seemingly endless crises and depression of present age. It celebrates love and happiness at their incorruptible states; affirms the existence and possible prevalence of “pure-at-hearts” goodness, and restores hope to a world that has shown signs of incurable damages. Even when seeing the film now under a slightly different social context, its counter-Depression positivism can seem at times too implausible a pipe dream. Ellie’s (Claudette Colbert) utilitarian kindness towards the hunger-stricken mother and son is largely induced by and acted on the strength of Peter’s (Clark Gable) disposition to boastful jests- he flaunts the money and pretends to be a millionaire; she responds on cue and squeezes that money into the hand of the son. Ironies like this indicate a discrepancy between the privileged and the destitute that is only going to widen: charitable instincts come more easily for those who are impe...

Baby Olga took a gulp of air before letting out another scream. It was a wintry morning and the window was wide open. Cool, crispy air rushed into her lung like that fizzy drink she was fed one afternoon, which was exciting at first but later kept her up all night gagging, insofar as she could’ve been suffocated had it not been her mother, who was thus stirred awake and alarmed enough to call the doctor. Olga coughed a little, and felt her lung expanded and filled with cold breeze. Imagining her mouth as a bottomless hole, she contrived from the depth a primordial, blood-curdling noise. The result was a howl that was instantaneous and possessive of enough volume, akin to that of a newborn lion awakening to the horrifying sense of existence. She continued the screaming and awaited the imminent success, whilst timing in her head about how long before her mother would be alerted and came bustling. 1…2…3...her high register was suddenly caught short, followed by a succession of vio...

Amongst many of his reflective musings, the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time once meditates on the eternal majesty of the moon. Conceiving of a wane moon in an afternoon sky as an actress who, not wanting to attract notice, dresses in ordinary clothes and mingles with the audience as she watches a play from the wing, the narrator marvels at the ineffaceable beauty of nature that, even in its most obscure and lustreless state, one is hard not to notice its reigning presence, shimmering from afar. He is thus reminded of a landscape painting by Charles Gleyre, in which the figures are silhouetted against a sky illumined by a silver sickle. A composite of realism in methods and mysticism in themes is what characterises Gleyre’s individual style. Having travelled extensively for some time the countries of eastern Mediterranean, there runs through his paintings a streak of oriental influence that conveys an ennobling quality of numinousness. Lost Illusions (1865-67) dep...

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...