Arty Farty Friday ~ 2 artists born 13 April, both with "scandalous" reputations.

Glancing down the list of births on 13 April, through the decades, I noticed two artists whose work had been considered by many as scandalous: James Ensor and Pierre Molinier. The two artists were born 40 years apart, Ensor in Belgium in 1860, Molinier in Agen, France, in 1900.

In his final decades, James Ensor was an international celebrity showered with official honors in his native Belgium. But in the 1880s and 1890s, the young Ensor was a scandalous and defiant figure.

This was a period of great social and political unrest in Belgium, and also of incredible cultural ferment. Bursting with mad creativity sparked by the latest developments in the avant-garde, Ensor freely mined artistic sources both high and low, old and new, familiar and exotic, and oscillated unpredictably between painting, drawing, and printmaking. From an advanced mode of naturalism in step with broader European trends, Ensor's art quickly morphed into something so fantastic, bizarre, grotesque, and satirical that even his avant-garde peers had difficulty accepting it. To this day, Ensor's art continues to baffle in its psychological complexity, internal contradictions, and sheer eccentricity.

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/scandalous_ensor/index.html

An account of French artist Pierre Molinier’s colourful life reads like that of the protagonist in an Oscar Wilde novel. A product of France’s oft-fictionalised fin de siècle degeneration, Molinier defied all societal norms to live a life of hedonistic excess. Both homosexual and a transvestite in an era when both were frowned upon – he asbcribed himself the title of ‘lesbienne’ – Molinier pursued fetishism and the latent eroticism of the subconscious mind to its most extreme degree......................
By 1955 Molinier had begun a fruitful correspondence with André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, who dubbed him 'the magician of erotic art' and decided to include his sensual, and at times violent, works in the International Surrealist Exhibition. This marked the artist’s official induction into the movement, and he soon earned a reputation as an artist who would dare to execute the ideas his reputable contemporaries, who included the likes of Salvador Dalí, only dreamt of.

His investigation into fetishism and depravity, both through painting and photography, steadily gathered momentum, culminating in an extensive series of portraits and self-portraits in which Molinier himself often features as a many-limbed woman, a dominatrix, or a devil. When his dwindling health prompted his death at the age of 76, it was executed with the all the charisma his character would suggest; a great lover of guns, he died from a single self-inflicted gunshot wound.
http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8019/the-forbidden-photo-collages-of-pierre-molinier

James Ensor, 13 April 1860, Ostend, Belgium at 4.30AM.

Pierre Molinier, 13 April 1900, Agen, France at 8.00AM.

There aren't many clear similarities. The obvious factor in Ensor's chart, reflecting his rather rebellious and uncompromising style is Venus(planet of the arts) conjunct Uranus (planet of the unexpected and the rebel). In addition Neptune, planet of creativity, dreams and the mysterious was sitting right on his rising degree - if time of birth is correct at Astrodatabank - it has AA rating so is reliable.


In Molinier's case, data from Astrodatabank, also AA rated, look at the chart shape as a start! It's made up of oppositions forming a cross, and involving the important points in a natal chart: the ascendant/descendant, mid-heaven and nadir! Oppositions can signify irreconcilable differences in a personality, or sometimes a kind of balancing act, an effort to reconcile opposites. Molinier had Pluto (eroticism, intensity) sitting close to his Gemini rising degree, with Venus and Neptune in Gemini also - what better "trade mark" for his style? In opposition to the Gemini planets are Uranus and Jupiter, an excess of the unexpected/futuristic, perhaps attempted balancing of the artist's runaway sexual intensity with an excess of the unexpected, using avant garde methods of photography.

Their common Aries Sun position seems secondary!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Vivian Maier - Another Eccentric

We watched the documentary film
Finding Vivian Maier on Netflix recently. Amazing story of a woman who worked as a nanny, took photographs on the street, good ones - thousands and thousands of them, but kept them hidden, sometimes not even printed. She was, or became, a compulsive hoarder. After her death her photographs and negatives were acquired by a young man who has undertaken the vast job of sorting them, and trying to discover who Vivian Maier really was. The film tells his story, and hers.

A New Yorker article on the topic is HERE, and a piece about legal problems arising from Maier's estate HERE.

Vivian Maier official website, lots of her photographs can be viewed there.

So, here was another type of eccentric personality - Arty Farty Friday has seen at least a couple of these in past weeks. In Ms Maier's case her eccentricity might have been the result of some unknown childhood problems, or perhaps even abuse - this is hinted in the film during interviews with people who knew her, but is now impossible to verify.

Vivian Maier was born in New York City on 1 February 1926. Her family came to the USA from France. Chart below is set for 12 noon, her time of birth isn't available.

A few points:

When dealing with eccentricity, first look to Uranus and Aquarius. A very clearly highlighted Aquarius is found in Ms Maier's chart! Sun plus three personal planets all in Aquarius. A good start - but not everyone with multiple personal planets in Aquarius is an eccentric (those born in February 1962 will attest to this - think Garth Brooks for instance). There has to be more.

Ms Maier's particular kind of eccentricity involved an addiction to hoarding, her urge to extreme privacy and secrecy about her undeniable talent as a street photographer - and her excessive, though secret, output.

The T-square linking an opposition from Venus (art) to Neptune(creativity, addiction) and squares from each to Saturn (restriction, rigidity) reflects discomfort of some kind involving those features.

Jupiter (excess) within her Aquarius cluster, conjunct Sun and Mercury, might relate to both her excessive output of photographs (millions of prints and negatives, all stored, unknown to the public during her lifetime) or to her possibly related habit of hoarding stuff - particularly vast piles of newspapers, the huge weight of which damaged the floor of her apartment.

I notice there's an emphasis on degrees between 21 and 25 around the chart; not sure that is of interest, except that a variety of aspects flow from it - semi-sextile, sextile, square, trine. Usually, this kind of thing indicates a well-integrated character, which Ms Maier, in her own peculiar way was, I guess.

Arty Farty Friday ~ Edward Gorey - Quirk without Qualm, Outstandingly Outlandish.

Whatever else he did, cartoonist, illustrator and writer Edward Gorey inspired numerous other writers and artists to use multiple adjectives when describing his work, and himself: merry but macabre, eclectic and eccentric, whimsically wicked...and more. He's a good candidate, then, as Arty Farty Friday subject for the week leading to Hallowe'en.

Edward Gorey was born on 22 February 1925 in Chicago, at 7:25 PM, according to Astrodienst. He suspected that he had inherited his, mainly self-taught, artistic talents from a great grandmother who had been a popular nineteenth-century greeting card writer and artist. Sources describe Gorey as having been something of a child prodigy, exceptionally bright for his age. He grew up in Chicago and in teenage years started his artistic career early, publishing illustrations in the local newspaper. His time in Art School was cut short by world War II when was drafted into the U.S. Army. After the war he attended Harvard, studied French, was involved in the theater, graduated in 1950. He spent some time in Boston before moving to New York City to work for Doubleday Publishers, illustrating books and book covers.


Gorey published his own first book in 1953, an illustrated novella, The Unstrung Harp...or Mr Earbrass writes a novel. While continuing to illustrate for magazines and other authors, he began producing his own work, selling it in New York's Gotham Book Mart. In 1961 he founded his own publishing firm, Fantod Press.

“Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards...”

Edward Gorey used many pseudonyms over the years, often based on anagrams of his own name. His pseudonyms included Ogdred Weary, Raddory Gewe, Wardore Edgy and Eduard Blutig… He never married and said he considered himself "asexual". He was a fan of ballet and theater, worked on stage design for a company in the town where he had a summer home, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In 1977, his design for a Broadway revival of Dracula won him a Tony award for costumes.

Gorey's cartoons and illustrations depict a weird Edwardian world inhabited by formally dressed men and women, often alongside strange but relatively harmless fantastical creatures. He occasionally offered thinly veiled cynical comment on the social scene. Alphabets, a parody on tarot cards, stories of children, not necessarily for children, limericks - all were treated to Gorey's signature whimsical weirdness, always with a faint hint of benign or comical menace.

Gorey, personally, is described like this at a PBS website devoted to their Mystery series for which illustrations of his are used as introduction:

Tall and lean, Gorey was bearded, but otherwise gloriously bald. He wore earrings and used to go about in long fur coats before his conscience got the better of him and he earned the blessing of animal rights activists by shedding his furs permanently. Gorey never married and admitted to no romantic relationships. He lived by himself in a rambling home in Yarmouth on Cape Cod, that dated back nearly 200 years. When he was not working on the 100 or so projects he had outlined for himself at any given time, he cared for his brood of six cats or indulged himself in one of his many special interests, mostly sedentary pursuits like watching old movies he taped off his satellite dish or zoning out on his favorite television shows, such as The X-Files.

Though Gorey has was called a recluse, he really did not behave like one. For nearly 30 years, he attended every performance of the New York City Ballet until the death of his artistic idol, choreographer George Balanchine. He ate both breakfast and lunch each day at Jack's Out Back restaurant in Yarmouthport, where he happily signed autographs for the occasional fan.

Often mistakenly labeled as "morbid," Gorey is was in fact a rather cheerful individual, whose sharply pungent observations were laced with a ready wit. He was a superbly entertaining conversationalist who frequently enlivened a chat by humorously slipping into a falsetto voice or punctuating his remarks with a "turkey gobble" sound that one isn't likely to hear ever again.

Gorey's friend, author Alexander Theroux, wrote about him:

" Gorey was a man of very peculiar habits: "I still see myself just sitting in his kitchen. There was always a melancholy tone to his voice, and he would give you white toast with a cinnamon shaker...........He was very campy, in the Susan Sontag sense," Theroux continues. "He could also be very serious. He read every book possible. He had wide interests. There wasn't a subject that didn't interest him. I always said I wondered which Edward Gorey would show up on a given day. He was a film critic, he was interested in cooking. He was a man that would seem to be a bird of paradise, very ornate — but he could be a quiet and subdued and fairly shy person." And you wouldn't know it from looking at his drawings, but Gorey also loved soap operas, especially All My Children.

"He would sew beanbags while he watched television," Theroux says of Gorey's eclectic habits. "He went to the movies almost every night. He could segue from reading a book on Wittgenstein to watching The Golden Girls. He was curious about everything, which is a great virtue in a person. He needed to have a lot of movement in his mind, a lot of water going over the stones in his mind."

Theroux says his old friend was a true free spirit; a curious, kind and adventurous soul.
"Edward was one of the few people I ever knew who did exactly what he wanted," he says. "He went his own way."

Edward Gorey died in April, 2000.

Other sources: Wikipedia; Info please; The Comics Journal.


Please click on any image for a sharper, clearer view of it.

These are my two favourites...

ASTROLOGY

Data from Astrodienst:
born on 22 February 1925 in Chicago, at 7:25 PM. (AA rating - very reliable)

What do you get when a heavily concentrated dose of Aquarius and Pisces is mixed with multiple aspect patterns linking up any stray, spread, planets harmoniously or otherwise? A weird and rather wonderful personality such as Edward Gorey!

It'd be hard to find another chart with such a strong mix of Pisces/Aquarius - his Sun and Moon conjoined, and Uranus are in Pisces. Mercury and Venus are next door in Aquarius, Venus (the arts) making semi-sextile aspect to Uranus (eccentricity). Gorey simply had to develop into some manner of creative eccentric didn't he?!

His rising sign, Virgo, has reflection in his artwork - in the meticulous hatching and detail present in a lot of his drawings.

Pluto in Cancer and Saturn in Scorpio link by harmonious trine to one or other of the Pisces planets, forming a Water Grand Trine, adding hints of a certain darkness to an established creative eccentricity.

There's a chart configuration astrologers call a "mystic rectangle" (the green oblong with red diagonal cross), and a Grand Square (the red square with red cross), both quite easy to see in the illustration. Rather than going into detail about planets and signs involved, which could take many paragraphs(and become confusing for both writer and reader), I think it's sufficient to say that his chart is so well-integrated, his personality, eccentric though it may have been, would not have been a difficult one for him to deal with - he was able to embrace it, warts and all.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Mystical Mountaineer, Maurice Wilson ~ Another English Eccentric.

In Friday's post the subject was an English eccentric - here's another one!

On 21 April in 1898 was born Maurice Wilson, to the owner of a Yorkshire woollen mill and his wife in Bradford, England. I doubt that his family, early on, appreciated what an extraordinary individual this child of theirs would become!

In the beginning his life followed a fairly normal pattern. In the Great War (1914-1918), he served and rose through the ranks to become a Captain. He fought at Passchendaele, won the Military Cross, sustained a permanent arm injury from machine gun fire. When the war ended he travelled to New Zealand, worked on a sheep farm and later ran a ladies’ clothing store. On the boat back to England he met a group of yogis, became interested in their disciplines. Back home, when he contracted tuberculosis he cured himself by fasting and prayer.

Nothing too eccentric so far? But wait.....

Maurice read newspaper articles about British expeditions aiming to climb Mount Everest, and was inspired. He resolved to climb the then unconquered mountain himself! He decided that he was divinely inspired and had "a job to do".

Maurice had no climbing experience whatsoever, but he dreamed up a plan. He'd buy a small plane, fly to Tibet, then crash the plane as high on the mountain's side as he could, then... walk to the summit. Easy peasy! He bought a Gypsy Moth, named it "Ever Wrest", took some flying lessons, obtained his pilot's licence after two attempts, then crashed his plane near home and had a flying ban slapped on him by the Air Ministry. As for climbing skills, his training comprised of hiking in the Welsh Hills -among baby mountains of Snowdonia - never mind all that stuff about about crampons and the essential skills required for highest mountain climbing!

Amazingly enough, Maurice managed to fly to India. He flew via Cairo, Bahrain and Persia, with only a simple map of coastlines to guide him. On arrival, "Ever Wrest", and presumably Maurice, were promptly impounded by the British Government of India.

In May 1933 newspaper headlines back home declared: "Everest Airman Missing". They were unaware of his arrest and temporary detainment. It seems that he spent many months in Darjeeling with Indian mystics who taught him more about Yogism and "subordinating the body to the will of the spirit until he could live for days without food, and endure cold and hardship sufficient to kill an ordinary man.”

Maurice Wilson eventually began his attempt to climb Everest accompanied by three guides for the 300 mile trek to the foot of the mountain, after which he was to climb solo.

Reports were that the last sighting of Wilson had been as he set out alone up a glacier, equipped with a tent, three loaves, two tins of oatmeal, a camera, and a Union Jack. His body and diary were found by a British expedition 21,000 feet up on the East Rongbuk Glacier on 9 July 1934. His last diary entry of 31 May 1934 was: "Off again, gorgeous day." His body was buried in a crevasse, a cairn marks the spot.

Rumour had it, perhaps based on his New Zealand sojourn running a ladies' clothing store, that when his body was found, he was wearing female underwear, and had women's clothes in his pack. A Chinese expedition in 1960 found a woman’s dress shoe around the same location. That gossip might have simply been some hack's headline-seeking attempt - but who knows when considering a guy like Maurice Wilson?

Sources
flymicro.com
mycolleaguesareidiots.com
zagria.blogspot.com
climbing.about.com

ASTROLOGY

Maurice Wilson born on April 21, 1898, in Bradford, United Kingdom.
Chart is set for 12 noon, no time of birth is known. Moon position and ascendant not accurate as shown.

As in the case of Edward James, Friday's English eccentric, I'm concentrating mainly on astrological source of Wilson's eccentricity. Epicentre? I see it as the Yod formed by Uranus (eccentricity) at 2 Sagittarius (excess); and Jupiter (excess) at 2 Libra; and Sun (core self) at 1 Taurus. A Yod is made up of 2 sextiled planets forming the base of a long slim triangle, via two quincunx aspects; planet at apex of the formation being the "business end" to channel reflections of the two sextiled planets. That seems to speak for itself, doesn't it?

His determination to fly a plane long distance, with next to no experience and only basic skills; similarly his determination to climb the planet's highest peak with no experience or skills both reflect excessive daring, verging on the lunatic, driven by an ultra stubborn pigheaded nature. The cluster of planets in Fixed Taurus underlines this! His apparent draw to matters mystical can be traced to Jupiter's inclusion in the Yod described above.

Arty Farty Friday ~ Edward James and His Folly, Las Pozas.

Commenter "mike" alerted me to today's Arty Farty Friday subject - thanks mike!
Edward James and his creation in Las Pozas, Mexico.

My goodness, though, this guy was such an amazing character, where to begin, there's so much!?
For any passing reader with just under an hour to spare, this video is excellent, and features the man himself:

For passing readers in more of a hurry: I'll begin at the end, at Las Pozas and work backwards.

Las Pozas was Edward James' folly. In England it's not unusual to find follies, they're smallish ornamental structures such as a tower, sculptured column, or a fancy quirky gazebo, they're always in the middle of nowhere, constructed by wealthy landowners or members of the aristocracy, and for reasons best known to themselves. Follies. Los Pozas was a folly of huge proportion, a peculiar but beautiful sculpture garden covering acres of Mexican jungle where Edward James had originally intended to breed orchids, but after unexpected frost killed off his plants, he began creating his wonderful folly.

A few examples - for more just type Las Pozas into Google Image search box, or at YouTube (if you can stand the adverts now almost universally inserted before content!)

Edward James was the epitome of an eccentric Englishman. Born in 1907 into a wealthy family background. His grandfather, an American millionaire had married a mining heiress, before the couple moved to England. One of their sons was Edward James' father, who married an English gal said to have been the illegitimate daughter of Edward VII, she became Edward James' mother.
James went to Eton, and Oxford University but was unhappy in both environments, despite his wealth and privilege. He wandered into the then London literary high society of Sitwells, Mitfords and Cunards, Noel Coward and John Betjeman, of Agustus John and Randolph Churchill. James was said to have been charming, lively and a good raconteur, ridiculously generous on occasion, with periods of introversion.

 Hat-tip Mondoblogo

He wrote poetry and some novels, became friends with avant-garde artists of the day, such as Dali and Magritte. He appears in one of Magritte's well-known paintings:

 Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite, 1937)  by  Belgian surrealist René Magritte.  It was commissioned by poet and Magritte patron Edward James and considered to be a portrait of James .

Quinky-dink sidelight - in a DVD set of a past TV series, Eli Stone we're watching currently, during the opening credits what seems like a loose version of this painting is shown. We recognised it as a nod to Magritte's painting, but had no idea of the painting's connection to Edward James - until I began preparing this post.

He met and married dancer Tilly Losch. The marriage was doomed. Tilly sued for separation, charging homosexuality among other things. James countersued, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky. Back then, this was not something a gentleman did. James moved to Europe. Polite society had shunned him. In 1939, with war brewing, he moved to the USA. In Taos, New Mexico, he lived among a community of artists there including D H Lawrence and his wife, Frieda.

Throughout his life he gave money freely to all manner of painters and writers; he built clinics for poor nuns, bought houses in Hollywood and Malibu, land in Mexico, and supported an assortment of freeloaders. In the late 1940s James eventually found his dream situation in the Mexican jungle. There he adopted a local family and set about building a “stairway to imagination”, as he once put it, in plant and stone. He himself lived in a tiny apartment, a bedroom, living room and porch on two stories. On one wall he scrawled in pencil his poem "This Shell": "My house grows like the chambered nautilus...." His huge and incredibly valuable collection of artworks, his lands in England , America and Mexico, houses from California to Scotland all abandoned for a tiny "doll's tree house where a man could hide".

He died in 1984 after a stroke, while on a return visit to Europe. In 1964, Edward James had conveyed his family mansion, West Dean, art collection and Estate to The Edward James Foundation, a charitable educational trust. The creation of such a trust averted the fragmentation that death duties would have dictated and allowed the materialisation of Edward's vision: creating a community where the Estate supports a college dedicated to the arts and crafts. In 1971, Edward James's vision became a reality when the gates of his family Estate were opened under the auspices of West Dean College. (See HERE).


(General information sources HERE and HERE)


ASTROLOGY

Born on 16 August 1907 in the south of England, probably at his family's mansion, West Dean, near Chichester, Sussex.

For brevity's sake I'm looking only for indications of eccentricity in the natal chart of Edward James. It's set for 12 noon as birth time isn't known. Moon would have been somewhere in Scorpio though, whatever time he came into the world.

Eccentricity in astrology is usually reflected by the position of Uranus; here Uranus conjoins Mars in Capricorn, the duo is opposed by Neptune (imagination, creativity) in Cancer. That, I'd say, was the "epicentre" of James' eccentricity. The three intensely personal planets (Sun, Mercury, Venus) in dramatic Leo, though not harmoniously situated in relation to Uranus, had to have input into the way his eccentricity would manifest. What could be more dramatic and theatrical in nature (pure Leo) than his beautiful jungle follies?