Praeterita

Play (1963), by Samuel Beckett Three alone, condemned to speech, to utter the account of an adulterous affair, in all its banality and grievance, the suffering it caused, and not only the pain incurred at the time but the pain caused by remembering. Their voices could be those of people in therapy, obsessively returning to the trauma (whether great or petty) and unable to evaluate it differently, to see it from a different perspective, to get past the sticking points, leaving them overwhelmed by the same words as always. The urns and the encrusted faces suggest the souls of the damned in limbo, or in Dante's Purgatorio (remember that Beckett was a lifelong reader of Dante and that he underwent extensive psychoanalysis in the 1930s), souls locked forever in a place where they will relive their sins forever, knowing that hell is an eternity of repetition, never once being able to feel the sweet release into silence.

After visiting the Giacometti museum in Paris , I read James Lord's biography of the great artist. Two things stayed with me after I finished it. First, was there ever an artist in the last century in Paris whose life was as closely woven into the fabric of one district than Giacometti and Montparnasse? Perhaps the writers Sartre and De Beauvoir, or Samuel Beckett. But Giacometti's life in Paris, almost from the start, was based in Montparnasse, and in particular a building on the Rue Hippolyte Maindron to which he moved in 1926 and stayed until his death in 1967. The second thing is his absolute dedication to his work. He had a reasonable degree of early success in the late twenties and early thirties with the sculpture he made while he was associated with the Surrealists. After he broke with them in about 1935, he found himself making clay models that were smaller and smaller, to the point where they would crumble into fragments. So the next day he would start again, wor...

Today, January 31st, is my birthday. One of my favourite composers was also born on this day: Franz Schubert, in 1797. To celebrate at least one of us, here is a recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert's beautiful song An Die Musik :

Here's another museum in Paris that I have walked past many times and finally visited a few weeks ago: the Musee Zadkine, located in the house, garden, and studio of sculptor Ossip Zadkine, on the Rue d'Assas just to the southwest of the Luxembourg Gardens. Zadkine was born in Russia and emigrated to Paris in 1910, when he was twenty-two. Zadkine and his wife moved into this building in 1928. Regardless of what you think of Zadkine's sculpture (I happen to like it), the house is a lovely two storey villa, and the studio at the end of the garden is a modest-sized structure, well lit by large windows, and with a narrow staircase against one wall that rises to a small mezzanine. At the time I visited, all of the interior spaces exhibited a mixture of Zadkine's work and work by other artists, ranging from Picasso all the way up to contemporary sculptors. Dubuffet Giacometti The garden is populated with Zadkine's sculpture from the post-WWII period, arou...

I've just returned from Paris, France, where I was teaching for the sixth year in a row. Each time I go, I make sure to do at least one thing that I haven't done before. On this most recent trip, that new thing was visiting the Giacometti Institute , which opened to the public only a few months go and which is the newest art museum in Paris. The institute is dedicated to the life and work of the great Italian-Franco sculptor Alberto Giacometti. It occupies three buildings on the Rue Victor Schoelcher in the 14th arrondissement, on a street overlooking the eastern side of the Cimitiere de Montparnasse. It comprises a library and academic archive centre, a restaurant, and a small exhibition space located on two floors of the building at number 5bis. The centrepiece of the museum is a reconstruction of part of the studio space that Giacometti used for nearly forty years, which was in a ramshackle building south of the cemetery near the Rue d'Alesia. Visitors can walk arou...

A few years ago, I ran a series of more than 30 artist interviews on my blog called  Six of the Bes t (click the link to jump into the series). Some of the best responses came from asking each artist this question: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making? In this post and the previous post , I've collected some of the most interesting answers. Click on each artist's name to find out more about their work. Luis Roca : A painted macaroni piece of my left hand on green construction paper in kindergarten. Tim McFarlane : The very first piece of art that I remember making was a cardboard figure of a man made out of a shoebox that my mother had. I was probably seven or so and that was the first thing that I put together by myself, using only my imagination. I remember it being a very spontaneous act: I pulled the box out from a bottom drawer in my mothers bureau, started cutting it up with scissors and wound up with a rough, squared off approximation of a f...

A few years ago, I ran a series of more than 30 artist interviews on my blog called Six of the Bes t (click the link to jump into the series). Some of the best responses came from asking each artist this question: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making? In these posts, I've collected some of the most interesting answers. Click on each artist's name to find out more about their work. Donna Hapac : As a child – maybe 5 or 6 years old – I decided I wanted to make a series of related pictures of a swimmer, like in a storyboard or film strip. I took a length of toilet paper which was already divided into squares that suited my idea and I drew it with crayons. Seth Friedma n : Until I was 38, I never tried making anything that might be called art.  In 2008, thanks to severe malaise and my wife's constant prodding, I carved a rock from our backyard. I am still amazed that (a) the result did not suck, and (b) the waking door to my recurring dream (a hous...