Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Pulkstens: 02:00

gabriel jacques saint-aubin's (1724-1780) extraordinary productivity was regarded by his contemporaries as neurotic, perverse, or unhealthy. greuze even spoke of "priapism." saint-aubin drew as if afflicted by an itch, and people tired of seeing him drawing "all the time and everywhere". he was a passionate and unconventional observer of the sights of the paris streets and of the social scene. in his many drawings he combined pencil, black and red chalk, bistre, ink and watercolour to create dazzling spontaneous effects. he drew incidents that struck him as he wandered the streets, or entertainments that he attended. he recorded them, noting dates and times, in sketchbooks or sometimes in the margins and blank pages of printed books that he was carrying. finally, he earned a soubriquet monsieur croquetel (mr. sketch-all). still more dismaying was his reluctance to finish. unsuited to the solemn programms of salon painting - mythologies, idealized landscapes - and rejected by the academy, saint-aubin created, as if in spite of himself, a genre out of incompletion. for him drawing was less a professional practice than a fever. but that he belonged to painting is borne out by the many sales catalogues in whose margins he sketched, with an incomparable gift for synthesis, the pictures sold before his eyes during the auction. he went regularly to the salon exhibitions of the academie royale and to art sales, covering the margins and flyleaves of his sale catalogues and Salon livrets with tiny sketches of works of art and the passing scene. one hundred of these illustrated catalogues were among his effects when he died. the catalogue of the mariette sale alone contains 1.200 such sketches. according to the biography, written after painter's death by his older brother, gabriel saint-aubin in his lifetime executed around one-hundred thousand images. "the salon of 1765", (c.1765), black pencil, pen, black ink, gray wash, watercolour

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Pulkstens: 19:26

adolf menzel's pupil carl johann arnold had seen the artist in 1850 "when he was going to have a foot bath, painting a study of his foot, life size, so that he completely forgot his initial intention". the lively curiosity for this subject never lessened and, eighteen years after the painting described here, menzel drew a large format picture of his half-bare right leg, adding the image of his left foot in a mirror. its perfect working and apparently autonomous movement, like a puppet, and at the same time the strange animal quality and cartilaginous aspect of this despised part of the body - and for this reason the object of fetishism - exerted a fascination over him "comparable to that of old dog-eared books or a wobbly scaffold". adolf menzel, "the artist's foot", (1876), oil on wood"

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Pulkstens: 15:22

in 1805 hölderlin was delivered into the clinic at tübingen run by dr ferdinand authenrieth, inventor of a mask for the prevention of screaming in the mentally ill. the following year he was discharged as incurable and given three years to live, but was taken in by the carpenter ernst zimmer (a cultured man, who had read his "hyperion") and given a room in his house, which had been a tower in the old city wall, with a view across the neckar river and meadows. zimmer and his family cared for hölderlin until his death, 36 years later. wilhelm waiblinger, a young poet and admirer, left a poignant account of hölderlin's day-to-day life during these long, empty years. as time went on he became a kind of minor tourist attraction and was visited by curious travellers and autograph-hunters. often he would spontaneously write short verses for such visitors, pure in versification but almost empty of affect, although a few of these (such as the famous "die linien des lebens", which he wrote out for his carer Zimmer on a piece of wood) have a piercing beauty and have been set to music by many composers. die linien des lebens sind verschieden wie wege sind, und wie der berge grenzen. was hier wir sind, kann dort ein gott ergänzen mit harmonien und ewigem lohn und frieden.

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Pulkstens: 01:16

lucian freud: my mother was ill for eight or nine years. she was in her nineties when she died. she had tried to kill herself when my father died. she did a perfectly good job, but she was found by her sister, who lived next door and brought her back to life when she was virtually dead. after that, even though my mother had amazing health and was really fine, she pretended she was very ill. she was just terribly depressed to be still alive. i started painting her, because she had lost interest in everything, including me. before then, i always avoided her because she was so intuitive that i felt my privacy was rather threatened by her. "the painter's mother iii",(1972), oil on canvas "the painter's mother (final version)", (1982), etching

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