When I’m in Paris—which isn’t often—I like to go to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to see one of my favourite pictures: Kees van Dongen’s The Sphinx (1920). It’s not the greatest painting, but the attitude it captures … priceless. Dutch-born, Paris-based, Van Dongen was a fauve. Early on, he painted good-time girls, prostitutes and dancers, florid and flirty, in ripe colours, with big eyes. Later, he became a high-society portraitist, celebrating classy ladies in chilly whites and silvery greys. The Sphinx belongs to this later phase, although I haven’t been able to find anything about the sitter, Renée Maha. When I first saw The Sphinx, it disarmed me. Hands come in from stage left offering a vase of chrysanthemums, only to be greeted with a chilly ‘unamused’ glare from the languid, elongated sitter. Sure, there’s a misogynist element here. The Sphinx was a merciless mythic being with the face of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of an eagle, who would kill you and eat you if you couldn’t answer her riddle, solve her enigma. The painting is also a classic example of metonymy. That vase of flowers is like the painting itself, being offered to the ice queen by Van Dongen as the painter-supplicant, seeking her approval. Instead of solving her riddle, he simply reflects it.
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My favourite mean opening for a mean review: ‘One thing you can say for Buzz Spector is that he does his homework. The bummer is he hangs it in galleries and calls it art.’ Lane Relyea, Artforum, May 1992. Can it get any worse?
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I recently dropped in to London’s National Gallery, where a new acquisition—Abraham Bloemaert’s Lot and His Daughters (1624)—was proudly on display. The label was telling: ‘Genesis recounts how Lot and his family fled the destruction of Sodom, with Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt on looking back to the city, seen in the background of this painting. The main scene—a triangle of primary colours—shows Lot’s daughters, believing only they remained alive on earth, taking the desperate measure of seducing their own father in order to perpetuate the human race.’ And there they are, in the artist’s imagination, plying their tired papa with booze, oysters, themselves. Only in the movies.
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