Fine Arts - Visit to Scripps College Senior Art Studios

The Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation had more than 30 members visit the Senior Art Studios at the Art Department on the afternoon of Feb 14, 2011. Treasurer Mike Layne handed out checks for seven expense grants to those students participating. Professors Susan Rankeitas (the blond lady in the center of the following picture) and Ken Gonzales-Day guided the members through the galleries while Professor Nancy Macko was in the studios explaining and greeting. We saw a preview of an animation project by student Isabel Anderson in the animation studio (she is kneeling in front of Professor Rankeitas). Other students were Candace Kita, Shayna Friedman, Sarah Dick, Jordan Mopstein, Suzanne Calkins, Bailey Busch.

The tour consisted of a lot of ladies speaking with and having the various projects explained to them by the students. So it was a very nice afternoon of pleasant interaction and seeing these vivid young imaginations at the work of play, or the play of work.

Also shown below are simply some snapshots of some of the art hanging on the studio walls picked out of my photos of the day for their colorfulness and aesthetics. At the bottom is a very interesting use of cutouts placed in a vacant studio space. Two of our members are standing inside.



After the studio tour, we all met out on the balcony of the Art Department and had delicious cupcakes, cookies, and coffee and bottled water prepared by our Refreshment Committee of Minche Myers and Joyce Lamphere and ably assisted by Jeri of the Art Department office. The students and professors joined us for a pleasant interlude of talk. Professor Day got the Williamson Gallery to open up and many of our members went and saw the Ceramics Annual, the national recognized show currently "up" at the Gallery.

We look forward to visiting the exhibition of Senior Art projects in May at the end of the school year. My personal observation is this has been our most successful interaction with the Senior Art students over the past half dozen years.

Book Review - A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York by Andre Schiffrin

This is a charming memoir by Andre Schiffrin, long-time publisher at Pantheon Books and later The New Press, published in 2007. For me, the memoir breaks down into two parts: the childhood story of leaving France in 1940 and coming to New York and growing up. The second part is Schriffin's intellectual development in America into a strong social democratic and Leftist political intellectual. I will take up the second part in a later blog.

Schiffrin was born in Paris in 1935 to a Russian emigre father and French mother. The father's family had been wealthy oilmen in Baku but the family fortune was swept away in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The father came to Paris and became a successful publisher and then editor at the prestigious Gallimard publishing house, apparently on the recommendation of Andre Gide. The father escorted Andre Gide, the preeminent man of French letters in the 1930s, on his famous trip to Russia in 1936. This was the trip that led to Gide's break with Communism, a much commented upon literary event. Gide did go on to work heart and soul to support the Spanish Republicans in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

With the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, the elder Schiffrin was dismissed because of his Jewish background in August 1940. This began a one-year odyssey for the Schiffrin family to the south of France where they came under sponsorship of Varian Fry, the famous American who was organizing the flight of Jewish and other endangered European artists and intellectuals out of France. The sponsorship was prompted by Gide's intervention, who sort of hovered over the Schiffrin family as a guardian angel for a large number of years. The family followed the refugee trail to Marseilles, Casablance, Lisbon and finally New York, arriving in August 1941. At critical junctures, Gide had provided support and money.

In 1948, and age 13, young Andre was sent back to France for a long stay. He stayed in Paris and later spent a lot of time in the south of France living in the Gide household. Schiffrin here reflects on the effects of the German occupation and the poverty of post-war France. His father never was able to return to his beloved Paris, mostly due to declining health. But also the exiles were not really wanted back. Jean Paul Sartre, who visited the Schiffrin family in New York in 1945, observed that most had been "forgotten." Andre visited the Gallimard publishing operations and Gaston Gallimard's grand apartment in the Palais Royale, but there is a lingering distaste that his father had not been invited back after the war. Schiffrin observes that the history of publishing during the Occupation was a "complicated one."

Schiffrin returned from France, continued on to Yale and then two delightful years at Cambridge University in England. He returned to a career in progressive politics and publishing.

Third Republic Lives - French ministers accept free travel

I thought I had great material for kicking off a new thread - The Third Republic Lives! Prime Minister Francois Fillon and Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie have admitted taking some "free" travel and lodging to visit Tunisia and Egypt. This would have been keeping in the rich tradition of canoodling of the great Third Republic politicos as they careened towards total defeat in the 1930s.

Alas! I read the article in today's New York Times and all the "free" travel turned out to be sensible precautions and measures that a visiting minister should employ when visiting a foreign country. There are security concerns and these were pretty standard practices. Supposedly these were "embarassments." Looked sort of sensible to me.

Saved! Rather than not having a story here, President Sarkozy entered the fray and said henceforth ministers would stay in France for vacations. This is genuinely stupid. Ministers should be encouraged to go visit the world, particularly around the Mediterranean where two great cultures meet. I couldn't help thinking what Charles de Gaulle's response might have been, such as sticking the grand nose high up into the air and saying, "The state travels where it will." So, Sarko has once again come across as a pogo stick!

Fine Arts Foundation - Visit to John Svenson some photos

Photos from our visit to artist John Svenson's home and studio yesterday. At the top, my wife Minche stands next to "Deep Sea Madonna." In the next photo, Paul stands next to "Sea Sprite," another of John's impressive sculptures in wood. At the bottom, Paul and Minche are with John Svenson in front of a relief carved into redwood of an octopus.

Fine Arts - A visit to John Svenson' house by Scripps Fine Arts Foundation

Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation. We had 35 members and guests for a tour of artist John Svenson's home and studio today Saturday Jan 29, 2011. We raised more than $1,000 for our Senior Art Grants program, which will be awarded to the students on Monday, February 14 during our visit to the Lang Arts Studios at the Scripps College Art Building. Seven senior art students are slated for grants. The tour was followed by a buffet lunch served on John's beautiful patio in brilliant California sunshine in San Antonio Heights overlooking Upland. Minche Myers, Connie Layne, and Marci Stewart put on a beautiful spread of salads, sandwichs, chips and salsas, desserts, coffee, fruit salads and a beauitful cheese plate. The artist's son David and his wife, sculptor Reese Williams, and the mother-daughter team of Norma and Cindy provided docent talks on John's magnificent collection of art that he and his late wife collected from around the world plus his many own original works. The singular striking thing about John's work is its originality: it is rare in my experience for so many pieces of art to just get inside your head and heart and imagination the way John's work does.

Book Review - "Lords of Finance" by Liaquat Ahamed

This is a fascinating look at the personalities and beliefs of the top central bankers of the US, Britain, France, and Germany from before World War I through the Great Crash and the Great Depression beyond. The personalities shaped the beliefs upon which these bankers acted and more importantly the huge blind spots in their thinking that caused these men to be unable to master the complexities and fundamentals of the Great Depression. Many of their erroneous beliefs have re-surfaced in the modern Republican party's rants against the stimulus and its primitive need to go back to "the ol' time religion" of budget balancing in the face of depressed demand. So the morality tale is hugely relevant to today's economic debate.

The voice of reason out in the wilderness to this tale is that of John Maynard Keynes, who by the end of the book has risen to worldwide preeminence and is a major architect of the worldwide prosperity that followed World War II, the prosperity from which we have all enormously benefitted.

A profile of Keynes early in the book describes his position as one of the most influential figures in the British Treasury during and after World War I. There is a fascinating summary of his thinking: "As the war dragged on, he himself became increasingly disillusioned with its terrible waste, the relentless loss of lives, the refusal of the politicians to contemplate a negotiated settlement, and the steady erosion of Britain's financial standing."

I am utterly fascinated by the wisdom of the Western leaders throwing away the opportunity to negotiate a settlement with Germany in 1916 or 1917 or even early 1918. Keynes made a hugely wise observation about one of history's great missed opportunities. A negotiated peace would have meant that a new equilibrium could have been established. Kaiser's Germany was not Hitler's Germany. A lot of lost lives could have been saved. The Second World War could have been avoided because its underlying driving forces would simply have not been present. That is because World War II did not become some inevitability at Munich in 1938 but rather it became an inevitability in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference with its Treaty of Versailles. Keynes miraculously prophesied the coming of the Second World War in his book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," which came out in November 1919.

This will be a book I will blog about again in the future, particularly the rise of French central banker Emile Moreau. And we will come back to Keynes acidic portraits of the Allied leaders meeing in Paris in 1919.

Fine Arts - A visit to John Svenson's house

Yesterday, I and several other board members of the Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation went up to sculptor John Svenson's house in beautiful San Antonio Heights overlooking Upland. Above is a view from his patio towards Cucamonga Peak. We are planning an open studio tour and buffet lunch for the last Saturday of January. Details to be announced later.

It is always nice to see John, one of the colorful characters from the Claremont Golden Age of Art after the Second World War and that runs up to the present. He and his wife built the house and it is simply loaded with charm. Besides many examples of his own art, he has a fascinating collection of artifacts from ancient Peru, the Far East, Alaska, and Europe. He and his wife travelled the world.

What makes visiting the house so unique is that the tremendous originality and uniqueness of his art sort of bowls you over. To sit and take tea in that magnificent living room is to sit in the middle of a visual feast. This "ain't visiting the museum."

I also got a copy of John's new book, a beautiful story of his life and his art spanning the eight decades or so of his life. This is also one of the best art books by one of the art greats of Claremont.

Attached link to a recent exhibition of John's gives a good view of some of John's distinctive works over the years.

John Svenson exhibition at Oceanside Museum of Art