Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Goethe travels

The travels in the title of this post do not refer to Goethe's own travels, a subject I will write about at some point. It concerns the travel of "Goethe," the person, the concept. I have posted on various occasions concerning the many places outside of literature or German letters that Goethe pops up (including in Korea), but today I would like to consider his presence in Japan. Goethe, it seems represents an icon of style, to judge by the life style magazine, launched in 2006, entitled GOETHE.

Make that ゲーテ

As I glean from the "About Us" function on the webpage of the magazine (with helpful assistance from Google Translate), the market niche is "the positive and motivated business person." Why Goethe? Here again, only slightly edited, I let the magazine speak for itself:

"Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- The world writer who everyone knows.
Actually it has a variety of faces such as politicians, natural scientists, theater director.
In addition, travelers and those who love women (broken hearted at the age of seventy-eight years old at the age of 73 was also broken heart!).
Ideal for such a way of life like Goethe, a magazine to enrich life."




Lionel Messi
Indeed, who else better exemplifies such ideals as Goethe? And the aim of a person influenced by Goethe:

"Desire to become acquainted with business persons like themselves.
It is a Salon where "knowledge," "learning" and "experience" will help one's ambition for success.
At the Goethe "Salon," acquire the necessary knowledge, interact with many people, a place full of intellectual curiosity and vibrancy."


The Langen Foundation
The issues of the magazines include portraits of very successful men and women, including Lionel Messi, who is the richest soccer player in the world, with a net worth of $400 million. But also the architect Anda Tadao, whose Wikipedia entry is extremely impressive. Above is an image of one of Ando's commissions, the Oriental Art Museum at the Langen Foundation in North Rhein-Westfalia.


Monday, November 19, 2018

Delacroix's "Faust" lithographs

Auerbachs Keller
Today I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with friend Philippe from Reutlingen. He comes every year at Thanksgiving, and we spend at least one day at the Met. I spend a lot of time at the Met, as I continue to do editorial work there, but when I accompany a friennd I really pause and look at the works of art. In this season the Met has outdone itself. But that is nothing new. Besides the Masterpieces of Dutch Art in the Robert Lehman wing, there is a spectacular show of Armenian art, focusing on the Christian influence, with manuscripts from as early as the eleventh century. I will post some pictures later. Also in the Lehman wing is a small exhibit of Tintoretto portraits.

Faust and Mephisto in the Harz Mountains.
The Delacroix exhibition is one of the blockbusters for which the Met is famous and handles so well, even if lots of paintings by Delacroix in European collections did not travel, as they are too fragile. Still, an interesting selection. What most struck me is that Delacroix, despite being consider a Romantic artist, is so thematic in his choice of subjects. Most of the themes are historical or biblical/mythological. Although he came of age after the fall of Napoleon, there is no painting commemorating that period, not even the French Revolution. I am not a student of his oeuvre, however, and it could be that the Louvre, which is a co-producer of this exhibition, has some "contemporary" works.

Ich bitt' Euch, nehmt Euch meiner an!
An entire room was devoted to the Faust lithographs by Delacroix. I post photos of a three here, one only in detail: a scene featuring Mephisto as he and Faust travel in the Harz Mountains. I particularly like the scene of  Mephisto giving the student ("was man schwarz auf weiß besitzt/ kann man getrost nach Hause nehmen") some bad advice. The Goethezeitportal has a good piece on the series, with the Delacroix series seen in postcard format. (As always, click on images to enlarge.)

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Gingko in the snow

This is becoming an annual thing, if a post last year on the subject constitutes the beginning of a series. Really cold weather causes leaves to fall practically overnight. The first snow fell on Manhattan two days ago. Entering Central Park, I captured the fate of the gingko again. Click to enlarge.

Dark falls so early now. I walked home shortly after 5 p.m. Manhattan looks at its best at night, with all the electric illumination, but the resulting photo from my little Nikon camera offers an eerie prospect.

Monday, November 12, 2018

The representational Goethe

Bouguereau, The Shepherdess (1889)
I have been neglectful about posting in recent months, as most of my waking thoughts are given over to the novel I am writing. For those who do not know Goethe Girl, it may be of interest to learn that, before Goethe came into her life, she published two novels. That occurred ages ago, after which, for reasons not to be gone into here, she went to graduate school and wrote her dissertation on Goethe. The dissertation concerned the pre-Weimar Goethe, before Goethe betook himself to Weimar and never looked back. My focus was on the poetic genre known as the idyll -- alternately, pastoral -- which appears throughout Goethe's oeuvre, from the Rococo lyrics of the Leipzig student years to the Philomen and Baucis episode in the last scenes of Faust. Like other traditional genres, the idyll is set in a communal world and displays reverence for the order of that world as well as for the regular movements of the heavens, the changing seasons, the regularity of festivals and harvests. Any ripples that disturb the regularity of the pastoral world -- a lost ribbon, a lost sheep -- are part of a larger wave of time in which everyone and everything are merged in a continuous human cycle.

Hermann Ramberg, Hermann and Dorothea
Such a conception of life was being undermined already by Goethe's time, a breakdown that also undermined traditional poetic genres. Who writes an epic in the style of Milton anymore? Goethe had a great fondness for traditional genres, however, and thus he often drew on the idyll, but in doing so the idyll is always portrayed as endangered. One example is Hermann und Dorothea. in which the French Revolution casts its shadow over the loving interlude of wooing a wife And, of course, Philomen and Baucis must be destroyed in order to make way for progress, the most modern of modern conceptions.

While this theme of the destruction of the idyll runs through Goethe's oeuvre, the move to Weimar brought about a departure in his poetic production. Goethe gradually left behind the "Genius" mentality that characterizes the production of the pre-Weimar works. Indeed, I have often thought about what Goethe might have been like had he not secluded himself for another fifty-plus years in the backwater of Weimar. Evidently, Goethe thought he had a lot to learn there, but what he produced was eigenartig: exclusive to himself. Goethe was of course familiar with the works of contemporaries, but one only has to consider his novels after The Sorrows of Young Werther to understand that he was not working the vein that has played such an important role in the conceptualization of the modern novel. I am thinking in particular of the British tradition.

I was again looking through Hermann Hesse's essay "Dank an Goethe" (1932), in which Hesse also refers to the split, if one can call it that, between the pre-Weimar poetry and what came thereafter. Hesse writes that he came to know Goethe as a boy, when it was easy to succumb to the power of the early lyrics and to Werther. That Goethe was "der Sänger, der ewig junge und naive," who brought "samt dem Duft von Wald, Wiese und Kornfeld, und in seiner Sprache, von der Frau Rat her, die ganze Tiefe und die ganze Spielerei der Volksweisheit, die Klänge von Natur und Handwerk, und dazu einen hohen Grad von Musik" (the scent of the forest, of meadow and cornfield, and, in a language inherited from his mother, the entire playfulness of folk wisdom, the sounds of nature and of craftsmanship and, in addition, a high degree of musicality).

Goethe and Carl August on Swiss journey, 1779
Yet in time Hesse also began to encounter a different Goethe: the great writer, the humanist, the ideologue and educator, the critic and the literary man, the friend of Schiller, the collector of art, the journal founder, the author of countless essays, the correspondent. This is not the fresh, youthful poet we know from his Sesenheim lyrics. Indeed, his appearance (attested in contemporary portraits, but even more so in contemporary accounts) is bourgeois, somewhat stuffy, official, miles distant from the wildness of Werther. Hesse doesn't say so, but this was Goethe "becoming Goethe," a transformation that took place only after he went to Weimar. This Goethe was what has been called "suprapersonal" ("überpersönlich). He became a representational person, somewhat like in Habermas's use of that term.  Though this be madness, according to Hesse, yet there was method in it: "die Ermöglichung und Begründung eines vom Geist regierten Lebens, für ihn selbst nicht nur, sondern für seine Nation und Zeit" (the facilitation and justification of a life dominated by Spirit, not simply for himself, but for his nation and his era).

Image credit: Goethezeitportal; Die Weltwoche (AKG Images, Keystone)