In the Meantime:
A Playroom of My Own
Paris & Paris, Again

Yuko Otomo
December 2014

#5 (Part One)

I’m still planning to write about Jeff Koons — although his show is down & the summer is gone & the winter is here & nobody talks about him any more & no more media attention & no more big billboard ads hovering over us in NYC. In the meantime, I want to write about Paris before I forget certain details. But, believe it or not, Jeff Koons is not done with his mission. Now he is in Paris with a big retrospective in Centre Pompidou!!! (which opened on Nov. 24^th). We left Paris right before Paul McCarthy did his stint there.  I wonder how Paris is taking the arrays of “Infantile Art Americana” one after another. It’s like a territorial game of conquest. He needs to have a show there. It’s on his map to be conquered & marked off. He already did Versailles a few years ago. Now, his target is the temple of contemporary & modern Art. Very aggressive & very militaristic. He’s creating a war map of his own. What’s next?

***

For some reason “fate” takes S & me back to Paris again & again. This time, we also went to Bordeaux, to Hall (Austria) & to Lille, being in & out of our beloved City of Light. Meeting old friends, new friends, seeing places you know & you don’t know, traveling is exhausting, but always inspiring. It’s one of the best ways to challenge yourself & its boundaries. This trip was long, but very rewarding as any trip should be.

***

Right after we got back from Paris, we saw Diplomacy, a film by Volker Schlöndorff (France 2014). It focuses on the “decisive night” in one room at the Hotel Maurice on Rue de Rivoli shared by 2 characters: one, Nazi general Dietrich von Choltitz & another, a Swedish consul-general, Raoul Nordling. Their chillingly heated moral discourse consequently changed the course of history, not just of Paris, but also of the world. Hitler loved Paris, & his love had turned into twisted evil emotions at this moment in August 1944. He knew his defeat, & he was obsessed with a will to destroy the Paris that he so adored.  He “had to” destroy the city, especially the Opera & the Louvre: Music & Art, what he most loved. It was like a broken hearted man’s dense, dark desire to kill the woman he cannot attain. He’d rather kill her if he can’t get her. Totally psychopathic, dark beyond dark, negatively romantic & twisted, his desire to demolish Paris to dust so that nobody would recognize it had been REAL, niether a dream nor a wish. This was Hitler’s last military mission to accomplish. We should never forget that he “was” an artist to begin with.

Out of nowhere, Nordling walks into the hotel room where Choltitz is staying & using as his commanding office. He tells the Nazi general teasingly that Napoleon III had created this hidden pathway to the room in order to have secret affairs with his courtesan-mistress when he would appear. In the same room where Napoleon had been meeting his lover to have sex, two men argue over the fate of the city. Choltitz is the one who has the sole power to change the course of history. Hitler had ordered him to destroy “Paris.” Everything was set. Dynamite had been placed on the bridges, including the Pont Nuef.  Everyone was waiting for Choltitz’s command to“Go,” which should have been coming at any moment. Two humans dive deep into the discussion on the fate of the subject: Paris from every possible angle in an almost Shakespearian dramatic intensity.

It was quite intense to see this film as we were still breathing the Paris air inside us. Hearing names of the places we had been walking around less than a week before as the targets of destruction was a terrifying & spooky experience. I tried to imagine Paris having gone to dust & rubbles. The horror of this “could have been” alternate reality gave me an inconceivably dark fear. Nordling by the end succeeds in persuading Choltitz not to follow Hitler’s order & Paris was saved.

One man’s dark desire to love & destroy what he loves; one man’s pride, love & fear of losing his family & one man’s determination to stop the insanity. It was impressive to see how one human’s personal psychology, emotion, fear & desire really affect the flow of history. A tipping point of any historical shift never depends itself on some abstract generalized notions such as “people,” “society” or “world,” but on the very personal nerves of one individual. One human body; one human mind; one human’s emotions & psychology; one human with personal doubts, fear, arrogance, confusions & an ability to “choose.” If Choltitiz had followed Hitler’s order to help the fuehrer accomplish a personal vendetta of an unrequited lover, I would not be writing this line now. How strange everything seems!

#6  (Part Two)

As usual, we saw some wonderful shows. The way this city offers art is a bit different in its vibe & psyche from NYC & we enjoy the subtly different nuances.

Let me list up what we saw:

Boyhood (by Richard Linklater  2014) & the latest Oliver Assayas film: Sils Maria both @ Louxer. Finally, this old Art Deco theater has opened as an art house film venue after a long renovation period under the scaffoldings. Good international film works shown.  National Gallery opened right after we left. A great addition to the area.  Barbes-Rochechouart. Pigalle. The neighborhood is definitely changing.

4 very interesting shows @ Centre Pompidou.

Man Ray/Picabia et La Revue Litterature  1922-24
Magicien de la terra: A look back at a legendary exhibition
Un Histoire: Art, Architecture, Design des Annees  1980 A Nos Jours
Modernites Plurielles (Multiple Modernism)

Then, very moving & amazing, Kati Horna @ Jeu de Paume

Interestingly intriguing Emile Bernard @ L’Orangerie

Well conceived & well prepared, Marcel Duchamp. Painting, Even (Le Peinture, Mème), also @ Pompidou.

A community garden audio/photo installation “N’y allons pas par quatre chemins: Un portrait du quartier par ses métiers” @ Jarden Banane Pantin, Pantin.

We tried twice to see Niki de Saint Palle @ Grand Palais but missed both times.

We also missed 2 shows @ Musee d’Orsay. Van Gogh/Artaud. The Man Suicided by Society that just closed before we arrived & Sade: Attacking the Sun that opened after we left. We also missed Hokusai @ Grand Palais that also opened right after we left. I was heartbroken by missing these 3 shows, especially the Van Gogh/Artaud & Sade shows since these 3 figures are an essential part of my principle core mentors on Life & Art.

Festival d’Automne a Paris 2014 opened on Sept. 4 & will go on till the end of the year. Although you don’t feel the aggressive staccato rhythm banging in the air like NYC, Paris is very busy offering many fantastic shows this season.

La Revue:

1922-24. #1-13. Donated. Resurfaced in 2008 as part of the Breton collection. Pre-Surrealists reviews. #8: Benjamin Peret’s poem, Man Ray’s photo of Proust’s death mask taken on 11.22.1922. Louis Arragon’s words putting down Proust as a con-writer. Breton as a boss (as always) to do “commissions.” “Anti-Ingres” campaign. “We still have Picabia, Duchamp & Picasso.” #11-12 issues dedicated to poetry. #13 opens with unpublished work by Rimbaud, Lautremont. Mic Soupault, Simone Breton (only woman participating by typing the manuscripts). The revue closed in 1924, June. Not too big & a very curious show to observe.

Magiciens de la trerre:   

1989=2014. A re-enactment of the hailed original 1989 show. Mostly, enlarged digi-photo panels & artifacts/books/magazines from the original show. With the listening devices/headphones set for further involvement. Chairs & benches to sit on. Educational. It’s kind of strange to realize that this “pioneering” show for examining the multicultural/pluralism of art & culture took place only 25 years ago.

Un Histoire: Art, Architecture, Design des Annees  1980 A Nos Jours:

No surprise to see Japanese aesthetic influences keep on affecting design & architecture in general.

Modernites Plurielles (Multiple Modernism):

Multi-Culturalism & Post-Colonialism survey on Modernism to show how Modernism was happening all over the world at the same time in a plural form. A challenge to the orthodoxy of Modernism as a European cultural phenomenon. Fascinating, but a bit too trendy & too vast as a curatorial idea. Too big, too wide open & too exhausting.

<N’y allons pas par quatre chemins> Un portrait du quartier par ses métiers:

We went to see this community garden art show in one of the Paris suburbs banilieue, Pantin, with the dear friends & gracious hosts of our Paris stays over the years, Michel (Dorbon) & Christine (Barreau). Michel’s niece Pauline was part of the artists collective that created this show of portraits of the people in this shifting neighborhood in a humble & heart-warming setting. Chickens running around & tomatoes growing, the whole thing reminded us of the community gardens in the East Village, especially 6B Garden. Then M & C took us to the anarchist theater in Montreuil for a reading of World War I letters & poems by  August Stamm, a German poet. This year is the 100^th anniversary of this first modern war. In Paris, there are quite a few visual images of its memories here & there.

#7 (Part Three)

Kati Horna:

This is a kind of show where you really feel that Paris does offer something different & special, compared to NYC. 1912 Hungary to 2000 Mexico. 6 decades of her photographic developments chronologically displayed. Kati Horna, being forced by the non-stop aggression of the violent history of the 20^th century, moves from Budapest to Berlin to Paris to Spain to New York & to Mexico. A childhood friend of Robert Cappa & Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, she moves on to a new place leaving everything behind in order to escape persecution.

As she moved on with her life from one city to another, she encountered amazing people such as Constructivist thinker Lajos Kassak who saw photography as a tool for social change to Bertrolt Brecht to Simon Guttman to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Jozesf Pesci to José Horna (an Andalusian artist, her future husband). Interesting to remember that Horna left Paris in 1933 at the height of the Surrealist movement & ended up in 1939, at the end of her  journey, settling down in Mexico, which Breton called the most Surrealistic place on  earth. Surrealism traveled far, reaching to Mexico forming the Mexican Surrealists group (Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Peret, Wolfgang Paalen & others) although these Mexican surrealists are not as well known as their Paris counterparts. Paris is strongly associated with the birth of the movement, but Mexico was the soil where the seed was sown for the future to grow. There is so much left to be investigated regarding this twisted fate of Surrealism.

The history of the world forces her to be on the move non-stop. The Nazis, the Spanish Civil War. In Mexico, the home of José & Kati Horna became a central gathering place for creative intellectuals: the Mexican surrealist group, Alejandro Jodorowsky & his group, & other artists & writers. She published her work in various magazines & taught photography, influencing the new generation of photographers in that region. I can well observe how deeply contemporary Mexican photography has been enriched by her influences.

Her photographic language is poetic, surrealistic, experimental & personal, with a strong philosophical principle for Humanism & Justice. 6 decades’ of work displayed chronologically in a simple curatorial format, mostly in B&W, ends with Muros de Mexico (1976): abstraction in colors.. One of the highlights of our Paris art experiences on this trip.

“I’m in an existential crisis; everybody rushes about these days; everybody drives these days. My images? They were the product of a creative love linked to my experiences & fulfillment. I was never in a hurry.”

-Kati Horna

Bram Van Velde (1895-1981). Geer Van Velde (1898-1972). Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957). Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955):

Whenever we are in Paris, we encounter these 4 names & their work quite frequently. Irony is that we rarely see their work nor hear their names in NYC. It is as if they don’t exist in the New York art world. Occasionally, you run into Kupka in Abstraction related shows, but, you almost never see the Van Verde Brothers nor Nicholas de Stael. Why? I always wonder. In Paris, they are visible enough to feel their presence in the flow of art history.

As a matter of fact, we just saw a beautiful show of Bram van Velde (gauche & lithographs) at our friend Tristan Cormier’s Galerie Hus in Montmartre. The show had just came down when we walked into the space, with some work still on the walls & some already on the floor. But he kindly showed us all Van Verde’s (Blue)Gray works done right after WW2. Beckett & Paul Celan’s presence was another pole of the show. The main theme of this show was the color (Blue)Gray, the color of shadows & limitless possibilities in the limited colorations beyond nothing.

My first encounter with Bram van Velde was through Beckett’s writing on him (1960 Grove Press). Intuitively, I knew he had some kind of a clear sense of Abstraction that nobody had ever presented before. Nothing forced, nothing manipulated, but emerging out of an inborn necessity of organic breaths, proclaiming their own existence of nothing/everything-ness for no reason. In his work, every element was alive & true to its own quality.

Almost 2 years ago, we ran into his younger brother Geer van Velde’s (much less known than his brother) show also in Paris. It was moving to see his late work manifesting another unfamiliar sense of Abstraction. Geer’s sensitive, almost fragile irrationality made his late work so peculiar that we were at a loss for words. Even in Paris, Geer’s works were not that easy to see. Here in NYC, it’s totally non-existent. The point of my praise for both van Velde brothers’ abstract works is not just based on the motif making, but more on the fact that they knew how to let the breaths of painted surface be totally organic & eternally alive with their own autonomy intact as if they were “living” matter.

Also, Frantisek Kupka. His work shows up whenever we see a show relating to Modernism or Abstraction in Paris. We just ran into his work in a Duchamp show at Centre Pompidou. We also saw his work in a Music & Art show a few years ago; also in the Origin of Abstraction show (much better show than MoMA’s Abstraction show, & he was in it, by the way…). He is always treated as one of the most important key abstract thinkers & practitioners in every major show there, but we rarely see his work here. For me, he is another figure who holds some secrets for us to learn from as far as abstraction is concerned.

& Nicolas de Stael. I love his work, especially his colors. He has a condensed visual philosophy, to say it bluntly. A little like Matisse’s pure colors, but de Stael has a sense of perpetual tragedy in them that makes his colors a little more realistic in the strangest abstract mode. It’s not about the abstraction of reality; it’s more the reality of abstraction (do you get the point?). I just saw one of the most amazing gray paintings by him in Centre Pompidou. Why don’t we see his work in NYC at all? I wonder. Nobody talks about him or his work in our city, which is supposed to be the capital of the art world! Incidentally, Godard’s latest work: Adieu au Language/Goodbye to Language, focused in one segment on a de Stael book, with pages being turned over one by one. He has used de Stael’s work/image many times in his past cinema work as well, one of his favorite artists.

Bram & Geer van Velde from Holland; Kupka from the Czech Republic & de Stael from Russia, all moved to France, lived & died there.

#8 (Part Four)

Emile Bernard:

My personal association with him is based on the collection of letters between him & VVG. More than the fact that he was a major figure in the Pont-Avon School, he was a pen pal of my beloved Vincent in my world. Interestingly, I’ve never studied his work for some reason. So, when we saw a chance to see his retrospective, we were ecstatic. It took place in L’Orangerie where Monet’s Water Lilies breathe the eternal spirit of water, light & darkness, day & night, all seasons.

This Bernard Show ended up to be one of the most peculiarly indigestible shows I’d ever experienced. He started out being an avid “avant-gardist” & ended up being an ego driven, confused “classicist.” His journey was as if time were winding up backward. His early Brittany works done in 1887-1888 in gauche, pastel & crayon on paper are exquisitely fresh with flatly abstracted form/color. Gauguin & Bernard worked hand in hand trying to open the new door through Cloisonnism & Synthetism. A Portrait of VVG 1891 shows his deep love for his artist friend. In 1892, he was the one who organized the posthumous retrospective of VVG who’d killed himself in 1890.

Then, before you know it, his whole philosophy brings in a major change, shifting his aesthetic direction into something unthinkable. He makes a trip to Turkey, Egypt & to Italy. While he was traveling, he decided to turn his head against the early voice of Modernism that he himself had created with Gauguin & other fellow artists. The reasons for this shift were supposed to be rooted in his anger toward Gauguin for not having given him the credit as the founder of the idea of Cloisonnism. He abandons the avant-garde aesthetics & theory he firmly believed to reclaim “the return to order to paint a state of grandeur & beauty.” He decides to “self-sacrifice” his own “personal art” for “the esthetic renovation of art.” The shift was so drastic that we almost could not believe our eyes. To make matters worse, Bernard was able to prove that he was a superbly skilled, technically capable painter who knew how to paint in an old masters manner.

Redon & Cezanne were two important figures in Bernard’s creative life. Redon influenced him regarding the Symbolism that helped him to conceive the idea of Synthetism. He discovered Cezanne, encountering his canvas in Montmartre in 1886 & then visited him while visiting VVG & Gauguin in Arles in 1888. Soon he’d totally immersed himself in Cezanne as his grand master to be guided by. What an amazing scene it must have been! VVG, Gauguin, Bernard & Cezanne all in the south of France at the same time; the painters of the north trying to form a collective, & Cezanne, the painter of the south working tirelessly in solitude. The course of art history was moving into the future: Modernism was right around the corner as all these artists struggled in their own worlds.

Bernard corresponded with Cezanne frequently till the grand master’s death in 1906. He even visited him a few more times.  In one letter, Cezanne expresses to Bernard some rather shocking words on VVG & Gauguin.

From Aix-en-Provance, April 15, 1904, he wrote:

“Must I say that I have looked at your study of the ground floor of the studio again and it is good. You just need to carry on like this, I think. You are aware of what needs to be done and you will soon be able to turn your back to Gauguin and Van Gogh…”

In 1905, Bernard writes in his theoretical writing, Le Renovation Esthetique:

By affirming our attachment to the eternal tradition, we define our attitude toward routine & negation, our confrontation (?)(I can’t read my quick & messy hand writing in my notebook…) will be the battle between those 2 hybrid deviations: by contrast, we will proclaim the need for a prompt (?) (I can’t read this word either…) and considered return to the eternal and consequently evergreen tradition.

When he returned from the exotic trips, he was a different man with a different conviction about art. It’s fascinating to think that this was the time when Modernism was gaining momentum. Cubism was soon giving birth to itself. Bernard, pulling himself so hard back to the past, became an ardent believer in Classicism or Traditionalism (the term he preferred). Retrogressive religious themes & subjects decorated his canvases with a vengeance. He aspired to gain a solid position in the art establishment of the day; the conservative art world embraced him as their champion & he enjoyed that reputation till the end of his life.

The Cezanne connection took on a new intensity when he claimed “Cezannism” (a new term he’d invented) to promote Classicism through the motifs Cezanne used. His Still life with Pear & Orange (oil on canvas, 1938) tells everything he fought for & against, knowingly or not knowingly. Bernard painted Cezanne’s “still life,” not his own. This small still life shows the true fruit of his artistic thought or logic run amok. He sacrificed his personal art. He thought he was painting a common subject in the manner of a grand master to promote the state of grandeur & beauty. But the irony is that Cezanne was a painter who did nothing but pursue his own “personal art” whether he was conscious of it or not. When Bernard was returning to the evergreen tradition, Cezanne was breaking through the wall of tradition painting pine trees: every-green.  What a tragedy! & the saddest thing is that there is no space for comedy in Bernard’s failure.

Eternal & personal, it is a simply complicated matter to think about. 1868-1941.

“Through ideas, not technique, the truth is found.”             Emile Bernard

Marcel Duchamp. Painting, Even:

This show was conceived & organized with a definite purpose. That was “to correct the myth of Duchamp as an iconoclast who killed painting.” The curator wanted to reverse the general image & idea of who/what Duchamp was to us & to art history.

(from the giveaway leaflet)

Marcel Duchamp has often been seen as a constantly provocative iconoclast who killed painting and challenged the very nature of art. Yet, he was first of all a painter, and it is in his painting that we can see the complexity and extreme consistency of his work from the very beginning.  

This challenging big show starts with an enlarged wall panel of a 1926 b&w Man Ray photo of Duchamp & Bronica Perlmutter in the nude. It was taken as a cine-sketch: Adam & Eve. He is very slender or even skinny, & he is wearing a rose to hide his genitals & a wristwatch in one of his wrists. Otherwise, he is totally naked. What a good way to start our journey into his painterly world! Then follows his erotic drawings after Ingres; after Courbet; after Rodin… & a photo of Fountain with the signature “R. Mutt” (1917)…Yes, Marcel is a Frenchman with a long history of French aesthetics & sensitivity in his being through & through. Room after room, a different thematic development of his history as a painter is displayed.

An Erotic Climate (room 1); Nude (room 2); The Appearance of an Apparition (room 3); De-Theorising Cubism (room 4); Mechanical Modesty (room 5); The Organic Unconscious (Visceral Mechanics) (room 6); Precision Painting and the Beauty of Indifference (room 7) and Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass) (room 8)… the whole show was designed for us to face The Large Glass (a replica of a replica that is in Stockholm) at the end of our journey. As we walk through his development as an artist phase by phase, we’ll consequently be standing in front of this piece as the natural result of his creative investigation.  With a perfect backdrop of the “Luna Park” image as Duchamp himself had directed, the large glass hovers over us with a recorded loop of Marcel’s own words being recited in French by the murmuring low voice of an actor.

“It doesn’t matter whether taste is good or bad, because it is always good for some and bad for others. Whatever the quality, it is always taste.”

“I believe that today, more than ever, the artist has a para-religious mission to fulfill: to keep lit the flame of an inner vision, of which the work of art seems the closest translation for the layman.”

“I think that art is the only form of activity through which man shows himself to be a real individual. Through it alone, he can move beyond the animal stage because art opens onto regions dominated by neither time nor space.”

“And yet I have drawn people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.”                                                                                                                                                                                      

(Duchamp’s words, also from the leaflet)

In 1905, at 18, Marcel encountered Manet & Fauve at the same time, then, having been introduced to extra-retinal phenomena associated with radiation & showing signs of a desire to paint what was invisible, explored Symbolism to create “anti-retinal” painting. Joined the Cubist group at the end of 1911; meetings at his brothers Jacques Villon & Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s homes. Created Sad Young Man in a Train & Nude Descending a Staricase (syntheses of Cubism & Futurism) inspired by Marey & Muybridge. Involved in theories on optics & the fourth dimension: “the invisible dimension” that cannot be seen “with the eyes.” Nude rejected by the Salon des Independants & exhibited in Golden Section Salon in October 1912. (A few months later in 1913, a great success in the Armory show in NYC. The modest size of the Nude is quite amazing for the roar it caused.) & to go beyond Cubism.

Visited the Air Show in the end of 1912 with Leger & Brancusi. A belief in a link between the body & machine germinates. Crystalizes a personal iconography, mingling of movement, eroticism and the mechanics of the game of chess.

Spent the summer of 1912 in Munich. Formed early thoughts on Le Grand Verre: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme. Ubu Roi. Raymond Roussel. A car journey from Paris to the Jura with Picabia & Appollinaire in October. New sources for Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée & La Mariée. The polysemy of the idea of the passage in geometrical, chemical, psychological, physiological, sexual and metaphysical terms.

Worked at the Sainte-Geneviève library from May 1913 to June 1915 till he left for US. Built the knowledge of geometry, mathematics, perspective & optics, making preparatory notes for Le Grand Verre. The Chocolate Grinder no. 1 (1913), Bicycle Wheel (1913) & The Nine Malik Moulds (1914-1915). Adopted a dry objective style & re-established a symmetrical, frontal perspective. The beauty of indifference. Introduced an element of chance & subjectivity into the object: the stoppages etalon – a strictly personal unit of measurement – his first ready-mades that defined a meeting between an object, an inscription & a given moment.

NYC.

Appolinaire Enameled (1916-17) & Le Grand Verre. 1915 – 1923.
La Boîte Verte (the Green Box), “not (of) the thing, but its effect” (Mallarme)
Then, French Window (1920/1964) & Etan Donnes (1946-1966/1994-2011)

As we go thru his changes & development spurred by his personal curiosities, we understand the logic of his search. When we reach the Large Glass at the end, we are in awe, not because of its illogical content, but its logical content.

As for my favorite paintings of his, I love his Fauve works. 2 landscapes, Bateu-Lavour (1910) with Braque influence & Paysage (1911) with Kandinsky influence. Dent Nus: unfort et un vide (pencil on paper, 1912) & Le Roi et la reine traverses par des nus vites (pencil on Japanese paper, 1912), Vierge #1 & #2 (1912) & a revolutionary work: The Chocolate Grinder (1913). When we reach out to this work, the whole world starts to illuminate with a different spark. We are in “our” time jumping over one century. The drastic physical/metaphysical/alchemical shift at this point is totally breathtaking.

One of the funniest discoveries for me was to see the wall full of caricatured Mona Lisa jokes. It was a fad of the period to make a joke out of this eternal smile & Duchamp did his version, not inventing the concept as I used to think.

Various works by various artists including his 2 brothers, Jacques Villon & Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Kupka, E. Bernard, Leger, Picasso, Picabia, Brancusi, Boccioni, Jean Crotti, Kandinsky, Man Ray, R. Delaunay… help support the concept of the show. Duchamp keeps moving on to new directions in the most personal objective/subjective way, looking for 3D in 2 dimensions & the 4th dimension in 3D, to paint “the invisible,” never stopping being a painter.

This show carried the concept well with enough good materials to prove its point & we thoroughly enjoyed the whole journey. Naturally, at the end, we ended up sharing the idea that he did not kill painting, although he did like to say “I am sick of the expression ‘stupid as a painter’.”

Remedios Varo, Kati Horna, Mexico 1957 courtesy Jeu de Paume Gallery Paris © 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández
Self-Portrait with Portrait of Gauguin, 1888, Emíle Bernard, courtesy of WikiArt
The Exotic Dancer, 1915, Emíle Bernard, courtesy Wikimedia Commons