Xul Solar

Someone once unkindly but not inaccurately described surrealism as "the rotting corpse of Western art." The surrealist fetishism of the lower realms of the human psyche was at the cost of forgetting the higher and more noble reaches of the human state. The dripping clocks and the bloated significance ascribed to the trvial contents of undistinguished dreams was the indulgence of Freudian fadism. The supposed "discovery of the unconscious" overshadowed the loss of the super-conscious. Salvador Dali, after all, was just an over-rated landscape painter. 

It is unfortunate therefore that the Argentine artist Xul Solar is usually counted as a surrealist and that the content of his work is mistaken for an exploration of the motifs of the unconscious. The prominence of Dali imposed a strong surrealist influence upon the Spanish-speaking world, no doubt, and Senor Solar would exhibit his work alongside others who fit more precisely in that category. But in fact he is not a surrealist painter in any proper sense. Stylistically, he is more akin to Kandinsky and Chagall - musicality and playfulness, respectively, are two of the strongest elements in his work - and what is mistaken for surrealist interests in his content is actually a deep and intelligent engagement with esotericism and the occult. The surrealists would sometimes exploit the esoteric and the occult but in this only achieved parody and pastiche. Xul Solar was an esoteric artist, a mystic (although technically speaking this is probably an incorrect label) and a student of the occult imagination in its more traditional sense. It is this that makes him interesting. He is not, like the surrealists proper, just a painter of nightmares. 

His intellectual interests were extensive and he shared many of them with his close friend Jorg Luis Borges. Indeed, he appears in some of Senor Borges' stories and many of the same stories celebrate their shared interests. Largely, we might describe these interests as a fascination with esoteric systems, the most fundamental of such systems being language iteself. Solar was an inventor of imaginary languages. This is reflected in his visual work as well. He develops a visual language of marks and shapes and symbols and lines and colours (without any of the randomness and denial of system that characterizes surrealism.) Where it does not have ignoble motivations the intellectual principle of system is at the root of the occult. Solar was fascinated with language, games, number systems - much to his credit he was a dedicated duodecimalist - and by extension, qabbalah, tarot and above all astrology, the occult language par excellence.  It has often been difficult for the art world to place him correctly: this is because these interests are outside of their usual purview. Fine artists are sometimes dabblers in the occult. Solar is more than that. He is not merely stealing a symbol here and there to impart a spurious aura of mystery: he is an occult artist in the fullest sense. 

His tarot cards are quite charming and are surely one of the better creative renderings of the tarot made in the XXth century. Alongside the traditional symbolism of the arcana, which he renders with a child-like Chargallesque simplicity, he has added elements of his own symbolic developments, qabbalistic and astrological. Here are some samples:

The qabbalistic background to these images is found in his many explicitly qabbalistic drawings and paintings. In Western occultism, as it is normally presented in modern times at least, the Hebrew qabbalah represents a sort of matrix for the varied and sundry symbols of a wide range of esoteric systems. It is a sort of filing system, and of interest for both Solar and Borges for exactly that reason. 

Note in these diagrams how the artist has made the qabbalistic system of ten (spheres) into a system of twelve planes - see the numbering on the sides and note that the numbers extend beyond 1 - 10. Solar was a duodecimalist - an advocate of a base 12 number system. Ordinarily, the qabbalah is a decimal system. Not for Xul Solar. 

As it happens, the present author himself departs from the modern occultists on this point - he would prefer not to match the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the twenty-two trumps of the tarot purely because there are twenty-two of each, for example - but that is another matter. Senor Solar stays within that modern convention, and then uses it as the core structure of his art. In his time in Paris in the 1920s, Solar became acquainted with the mad mage Aleister Crowley and his foul-breathed mistress Leah Hirsig, and for a time they groomed him to become a member of their occult 'Orders'. The qabbalistic matrix is the core of Mr Crowley's system too. Sensibly, though, Solar headed back home to South America and apart from that brief encounter was not unduly influenced by the Crowley cult. Certainly, Borges made much better company and offered a far healthier occult intellectuality. We should be thankful for this. Crowley was a parasite who destroyed many fine minds and considerable talents - Victor Neuberg, for instance - and whether he knew it or not at the time Xul Solar saved both his soul and his art by side-stepping the self-styled 'Beast'. 

The influence of Mr Crowley in the modern Western occult is so pervasive today that it is important to identify and celebrate those not under his sway. Xul Solar is one. Just as he is not properly classified as a "surrealist", neither, fortunately, is he an "occultist" in the Crowleyean sense. This is to say that just as he was not a painter of the dross of his own nightmares as were the surrealists, neither was he a cheap purveyor of the 'Dark Arts' like so many Crowley wanna-bes. His art has integrity, and his interest in esoteric systems - like that of Senor Borges - was genuine and elevated. His adopted name, Xul Solar - his real name being 'Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari' - signals his benevolent disposition. Xul - a homonymn for 'Schulz' in Spanish - is L.U.X. backwards, the Latin for 'Light'. Xul Solar = the light of the Sun. There is nothing dark or menacing or sinister in the occult art of Xul Solar. He is not an explorer of an underworld. He is, rather, an explorer of the elevated imagination. 

Not all of his work is quite to the present author's taste, but there is a sense of joy and wimpsy and a delight in imagined worlds that characterizes his best paintings, that makes him a modern favorite. There is music and mystery. And like Borges, the city-as-labyrinth - as opposed to the over-worked city-as-distopian-hell-hole - is one of his preferred themes. 

Senor Solar was himself a practising astrologer. Often his astrological charts are exhibited alonside his watercolours and sculptures and treated as works of art in themselves. Here is one:

And here, below, is the present author's rendering of Senor Solar's natal chart according to the methods the author prefers, notably the square chart and the insistence on the seven ancient planets. Without resorting to in-depth analysis, the notable feature of the chart is, surely, the conjunction of the two lights, Sun and Moon, in the midheaven. Solar , that is to say, was born towards noon at a New Moon. As we see in his chart, this configuration is culminating.  In this sort of chart the so-called "angles" reveal all. In this case the native is indeed a 'New Moon' type, and we see at a glance why he went by the name of Xul Solar. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Bouguereau Revisited

Blind Homer led by his Guide, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 

Anyone who was tutored in the history of art before, say, 1990 - as was the present author - would almost certainly have been subjected to the standard narrative regarding the beginnings of modern art. In this narrative a cadre of courageous, forward-looking innovators in France in the latter half of the XIXth century, collectively referred to as the "impressionists" (a loose term, in fact, embracing many disparate artists), stood up to the stuffy, backward-looking, bourgeois art establishment which until then had maintained a virtual monopoly on what could and could not be accepted as "art" through their control of academic schools and the public exhibitions called the "salons". These "impressionists" introduced new techniques, employed a new pallette of colours, painted outdoors (in contravention to the studio tradition) and embraced new subject matter - workers and ordinary people rather than myths and gods. Breaking the constraints of tradition they paved the way for the modern art which was to follow, heroes of the brave new world.

In this narrative, one figure stands out as the arch-villain, the artist who represented everything that was wrong with academic art, who embodied the old and obstructed the arrival of the new - William Adolphe Bouguereau. He was by far the most popular and esteemed painter of his age, acknowledged as the greatest of the salon artists, but was despised and reviled by the "impressionists".  In what became standard art history the name "Bouguereau" became a term of abuse, if he was mentioned at all. His fall from grace was spectacular and says much about the rise of modernism. At his death in 1905 he was famous throughout Europe and America. His paintings were hung in all major galleries and were the pride of public collections. They were eagerly purchased by the wealthy, commanding extraordinary prices. Yet by the 1920s - on the other side of the watershed that was the Great War - his reputation had been completely eclipsed by the modernists. His name no longer appeared in art books - except as the antithesis of "real" art; his paintings were removed from galleries, put into storage, or destroyed, or sold for a pittance. He became a mere footnote in the history of art. The progressive narrative prevailed. The "impressionists" and those who came after them, an endless succession of new styles - post-impressionism, expressionism, cubism, dadism, etcetera - had boldly torn down the art of tradition and were the advocates of "progress" who had made a new art for a new world. After that, several generations of students were taught to loathe and despise Bouguereau and everything for which he stood. 

It was only towards the close of the XXth century, when modernism's angst was finally exhausted, that Monsieur Bouguereau's fortunes began to wax once more. Collectors began to develop new interest in his work, some of his greatest paintings were rescued from storage and dank cellars, and several notable well-curated exhibitions reintroduced him to the public. The greatest traditional painter of the XIXth century had finally reemerged from obscurity. In large measure this was a response to the public's revulsion at the degeneracy of what had come to pass as "art". The "impressionist" adventure had ended with self-proclaimed "artists" smearing their own faeces on a canvas and offering at Southby's for hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the characteristics of modern art is the artist's disdain for the public. In the end, the public's disdain for the artist won out and the traditional art of painters such as Bouguereau was back in vogue. From the 1990s onwards his paintings were fetching prices of two or three million dollars at auction, prices rivalling those of the works of the "impressionists". 

Much of the slander to which Monsieur Bouguereau had been subjected was re-examined too. It was not true that he had actively obstructed the "impressionists", and the fact that it was he, almost single-handedly, who opened the Academic schools to women students is completely overlooked. A sober assessment reveals that it was much more the case that the "impressionists" invented scurrilous lies about him and defamed him with viciousness and malice. The greatest lie was that he was nothing more than a commercial painter motivated by money. In fact, he was a deeply dedicated, serious painter who lived for his art. Towards the end of his life he said, "Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come." This is not the Bouguereau who was routinely dismissed as a shallow phony by the likes of Paul Gaugin. Bouguereau's biography is redeeming. He was a tireless teacher of hundreds of students (men and women) and laboured with patience and perserverance for the principles he valued until the day he died. The hostile propaganda to which he has been subject is feeble and without substance. When the slurs of the "impressionists" and the later modernists are recontextualized, Monsieur Bouguereau reemerges as an important artist, a painter of great stature in the Western oil painting tradition who, like Rembrandt, was wrongly maligned for nearly one hundred years. 

For the present writer and all who were indoctrinated with the modernist art narrative a reassessment of Bouguereau necessarily involves a degree of unlearning what they were taught. It requires a new openess to ways of seeing and thinking - and feeling - that they were trained to hate and avoid. One is often not cognisant of the orthodoxies to which one has been subjected and that constrain one's worldview within a particular frame. The modernist frame largely consists of misrepresentations of past eras. It can take a great deal of mental effort to push those frames aside and to reimagine the past free of the constraining narratives. This is what is required if one wants to view the work of Bouguereau with fresh eyes rather than the tired, cynical eyes of the heirs of "impressionism". 

Much the same effort is required if one wants to re-engage with the broad project of European orientalism without the vicious, cynical frame imposed by Edward Said and his Marxist post-colonialist followers. Much of our education, indeed, consists of a systematic denegration of the XIXth century: its politics, its art, its values, its endeavours. Modernity in general is built upon the negation of what came before it. It is a remarkably negative enterprise. The key term "deconstruction" says it all. Modern art "deconstructed" Bouguereau.  Ours is an age of deconstruction. It is by no means easy to think outside of such parameters. It is clear, though, that in the end this "deconstruction" yields nothing but a pile of dust, or in the case of art a canvas smeared in excrement. Similarly, post-colonial deconstructions of "orientalism" finally yield nothing but failed nation states, ideologies of hateful vengeance, armies of terrorist barbarians and hordes of refugees. 

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Bouguereau was a prolific artist. Some 820 completed paintings are known. Among them are many fine portraits and works concerning the familiar themes of academic painting in the neoclassical style, along with religious works, but also a surprising number of depictions of common workers contrary to the "impressionist" narrative that supposed that academic painters were indifferent to the labours of ordinary people. Here, for example, is the very fine Young Shepherdess, 1885:

And here is a painting of a young girl fetching water from a spring from the same period:

And another. The Spinner, 1873:

The standard narrative that says that the conventions of academic painting forbade the depiction of the lower classes and their occupations and only permitted portraits of the wealthy with their property is not only an exaggeration, it is simply untrue. Yet another example, The Beggars, 1890:

These depictions are, no doubt, idealised - but that is just to say that Monsieur Bouguereau did not indulge in the cult of ugliness that came to typify modern art. The modern worldview is bleak. It regards any preoccupation with beauty and nobility as "elitist": only the ugly is real. It is truly remarkable that such a destructive and degenerate world-view could ever take hold of a civilization. Bouguereau was unashamedly an artist who pursued beauty in the belief that beauty and truth are synonymous and he has been condemned accordingly. 

What is even more remarkable is that Bouguereau and his fellow neoclassicists have been subject to the deeply corrosive and hypocritical critique of the feminists who see nothing but sexism in his Victorian idealisations of the feminine. Bouguereau is best known for his mythological paintings, and nearly all of them feature the naked female form. It was his rendering of the female form, and flesh, that his contemporaries admired most about his work. In this he was unsurpassed. He is first and foremost a painter of the feminine. Some examples:

Biblys, 1884

The Bather

Pandora

The Oreads

No painter has been so dedicated to the feminine and capturing a female ideal of beauty as Bouguereau. What is remarkable is that, while feminists are vociferous in their condemnations of the artists of this "old style" and its values, we rarely hear a voice raised against the ugliness and excesses of modernism. This confirms that the agenda of such critics is purely negative. Their motives are essentially vandalistic. They are concerned with tearing down the old order. The brutality and barbarism of the new order is invisible to them. There is remarkably little incisive intellectual criticism of the modernist order and, for example, the dehumanization, mechanicization and dismemberment of the female form in the celebrated paintings of Picasso. E. Michael Jones makes this point in his damning study The Degenerate Moderns, where he writes:

“Picasso’s mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice; they presage simultaneously in a visual way the concentration camp, the abortion clinic, and the pornographic film, and may well have helped pave the way for all three.”

Yet the feminists are more concerned with "deconstructing" Bouguereau's ideal of female beauty. Such double-standards and hypocrisy is endemic in Whig intellectuality. There is a deep, irrational hatred of the old. The vandalism of the new gets a free pass, precisely because it is vandalism and in this it finds its value. 

For a major French artist of the XIXth century Monsieur Bouguereau painted surprisingly few paintings on oriental themes. He was not a traveller and he was surprisingly free of the lure of the exotic. This counts against the accusation that he was motivated by the market. There was high demand for depictions of the Orient and oriental subjects in France and Europe generally throughout the period in which he lived and painted. Had he wished Bouguereau could have catered to this demand very profitably. His interests were elsewhere and he pursued those interests regardless of his clientelle. There is, all the same, one series of paintings of an Algerian model that counts as an instance of oriental art. The young woman is shown selling fruit in one - the painting is known as the Merchant of Granada - and the other, with the same model, is known generically as Girl with Pomegranite. See below.

The rehabilitation of Bouguereau need not be uncritical. In his extensive ouevre there are undoubtedly lesser paintings and, on the whole, he is open to the charge of an unbecoming sentimentality beyond what one might expect in his era. There are certainly works by Bouguereau that are not to the present author's tastes - and equally there are modernist works that he prefers for that matter. But there is, all the same, an injustice that needs restitution: Monsieur Bouguereau has suffered an historical wrong. More than that, the modernist narrative that consigned his paintings to the storerooms of art galleries everywhere and removed his name from the text books needs to be challenged and situated in the broader history of cultural vandalism and self-harm that has beset European civilization since the early years of the XXth century and has degenerated into outright farce in our own times. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Three Painters: Evola, Crowley, Schuon

There are serious painters – artists – and then there are dabblers, those who paint as an aside to their major occupation, and it is often the dabblers who are more interesting than the bona fide artists. A previous posting to these pages (see here) concerned the watercolours of three notable amateurs, Prince Charles, Winston Churchill and Chancellor Herr Hitler. The present posting follows much the same format, but we will be contrasting the paintings of three purported spiritual luminaries: Baron Julius Evola, hero of Right-wing perennialism, Frithjof Schuon, touted by his followers as the ‘Messenger of the Religio Perennis’, and the English occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-declared ‘Master Therion’, Prophet of the Aeon of Horus. All three of these characters - men of spiritual pretensions - took to the canvas at certain junctures in their lives, and as well as the writings for which they are better known left behind a legacy of visual art. Largely, such works are of concern only to devotees, but all three conducted official exhibitions during their lifetime and in all three cases their work continues to be exhibited and can command healthy prices whenever they go to market. They are assuredly very different thinkers, and accordingly very different artists, as we shall see:

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BARON JULIUS EVOLA

In his misspent youth, before he had discovered the writings of Rene Guenon and realized his vocation as a spokesman for political perennialism, Baron Evola dabbled in Dada. In fact, he was a major force in bringing the Dada avante guard to Italy in the 1920s. He exhibited in Rome and caused a stir with his brash radicalism. His paintings, however, now appear to be quite ordinary examples of Dadist abstraction, though here and there we find hints of symbols and motifs that foreshadow the esoteric interests to which the Baron later devoted himself with distinction. 

In truth, though, many of his paintings are beneath ordinary and fall into the category of horrible. It is only die-hard Evola enthusiasts who find much in them that is redeeming. The present author, in any case, only likes one or two – indicated below – even though he is a reader of Evola’s writings and has a high regard for them. Indeed, Baron Evola’s books and essays become more prescient and relevant every day; they are worthy of every attention. But the paintings? No. And the Baron recognized this himself and, to his credit, later dismissed Dada as decadence. His paintings, unfortunately, are ill-matched to his written ouevre. He dabbled in poetry as well - equally undistinguished. 

Senza titolo 1921

Composition No. 3.

Paesaggio interiore

For whatever reason, this is the Evola painting that takes the present author's fancy. Colour, composition, intensity. It is not entirely successful, but it is, all the same, almost musical. 

Nudo di donna (afroditica) - a painting with no redeeming qualities at all!

La libra s’infiamma e le piramidi

In this work we see the appearance of the alchemical symbol for sulphur. The painting itself has no great qualities. It is a completely undistinguished attempt at Dada abstraction. But it was in this period that Baron Evola began delving into esoteric symbolism. Thankfully, he turned away from painting and embraced esotericism instead. 

A Bunch of Flowers, 1918. There is, perhaps, something to be said for this composition. Lyricism, like Kandinsky. 

Paesaggio interire, aperture del diaframma 

(“Interior landscape, the opening of the diaphragm”

“Piccola tavola (vista superiore)” (“Small table (upper surface)”) 1920

Dadist composition (1920s)

There is perhaps something to be said for this composition as well. 

Portrait cubiste de femme, 1919-20

This is a genuinely horrid painting. Many of Evola's paintings are bland or contrived but some, such as this, are manifestly ugly. 

Abstraction

The Generator of the Universe. (What can one say about this? It is hard to believe that any follower of Rene Guenon could ever have painted such a thing!)

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ALEISTER CROWLEY

Numerous posts to these pages feature or make mention of Mr Crowley, often in unflattering terms. The present author is clearly not a Thelemite (follower of Crowley’s ‘Law of Thelema’) and in fact has a suitable disdain for every effort Mr Crowley made to concoct a religion around himself. His so-called ‘Book of the Law’ is bunk and his creed of ‘Do what thou wilt’ is libertarian nonsense dressed up as ancient Egyptian profundity. Moreover, Crowley – diametrically contrary to his own inflated regard for himself - must rate as one of the worst poets in the English language. W. B. Yeats – one of the best – once quipped that Crowley had managed to write maybe three or four lines of decent verse. This is to be generous. Although, he was a very fine – and always entertaining – prose writer and his edifice of occultism can be seen as a remarkable creative endeavour in toto. He also turned his hand to painting, adopting a sort of expressionist style. Examples can be seen below. And, in fact, they are rather good. Of recent times they have attracted the attention of the art cognoscenti, and rightly so for they are quirky, mysterious, potent, raw, amongst other qualities. They illustrate the strength and power of Mr Crowley’s personality and his unique, though always dark, vision. 

Landscape with Coral & Jade Pagodas. One of Crowley's better paintings. 

May Morning. A typically macabre theme. Crowley wrote: "The painting represents the dawning of the day following a witches' celebration as described in Faust. The witch is hanged, as she deserves, and the satyr looks out from behind a tree."

The moon, study for the tarot. It is a great pity that Crowley did not complete a set of images for tarot designs. He later employed the services of Lady Freda Harris and instructed her to design his tarot cards, subsequently published as the 'Thoth' deck. Although Lady Harris' designs are widely admired, the present author finds them typical of a type of turgid modernism that is not to his taste. Crowley's own tarot paintings are somewhat more interesting and would have revealed much more of his magickal personality. 

Van Gogh-like expressionism. Despite being derivative, it is nonetheless a potent painting, a vision driven by the overtly phallic-solar cultus that Mr Crowley constructed around himself.

Self-Portrait. Like most self-depictions, this flatters him. He was actually a flabby Englishman wiuth beady eyes and a whiney high-pitched voice - here depicted as a phallic-headed hero from another dimension. 

Ladies of the Liberal Club

Crowley's vicious satires of middle-class respectability are always entertaining and incisive. (Read, for example, his short work entitled 'How to Fake Horoscopes'). He shows a piercing ability to stare into the empty pit of blank souls. In that respect, there is something to be said for this portrait of 'Ladies of the Liberal Club'. Such ladies populate liberal clubs to this day! 

The BABALON door. Many of Crowley's paintings remain on the doors and walls at his so-called 'Abbey of Thelema' in Cefalu, Sicily, which is today dilapidated and ramshackle. It is a pity - and quite remarkable - that no great effort has been made to preserve these works. 

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FRITHJOF SCHUON

The Swiss-French Soofi religionist Monsieur Schuon was a trained fabric designer by profession, and so he brought a degree of artistic expertise to his painting lacking in the case of the two other completely amateur artists considered above. His work is more polished and technically competent, but also far less revealing for all of that. It is steady and controlled, iconographic rather than expressive. Schuon relocated to Bloomington Indiana in the 1980s to take up residence as pontificating guru to a community of well-to-do Americans. But he had always felt a strong affinity for the American native traditions, and the relocation brought him into contact with representatives of the Plains Indians. This becomes the central preoccupation of his paintings, with a particular emphasis on naked Indian girls rationalized as a metaphysical concern for the ‘Divine Feminine’. 

Schuon penchant for nudism led him into morally dangerous terrain, however, and he was, late in the piece, investigated for inappropriate dealings with minors. All charges were dismissed, but critics maintain that his well-to-do clientele used their wealth to rescue him from legal proceedings. There are, even so, photographs circulating privately on the Internet – always subject to legal threats by the same wealthy followers – of Monsieur Schuon and his various wives (vertical and horizontal) involved in some odd naked antics which suggest at very least that things became quite strange down there in Bloomington towards the end of his life. There is a stolid dignity in his paintings – a quality the present author admires – although it must be admitted that it is, all up, just a passable imitation of Gaugin (who also had a thing for the exotic flesh of native girls.) Some of the more explicit paintings of Schuon, which the present author has seen, and which betray a somewhat lurid eye are not easily found on the Internet (again because his followers keep a very tight control upon his legacy.) He is, finally, a painter of quasi-Amer-Indian icons with New Age appeal. 

It is surprising that there is so little Mohammadan content in his work, but it underlines the fact that, once in Bloomington, the interests of the self-initiated ‘Sheihk Jesus’ shifted increasingly to a neo-paganism of his own invention, complete with quasi-Indian rituals and pow-wows, and drifted further and further from any mainstream version of Soofism. The present author has been a reader of Schuon's works, and values them in many respects, and admires many of his paintings too. Like Evola and Crowley as well, Schuon fancied himself as a poet. Like them, his poems are terrible. 

The flatness and above all the silence of these works - well-rendered, it must be said - is strongly reminiscent of the works of Gaugin (with both artists showing a strong philosophical debt to Rousseau's "noble savage" ideology.)

Although not obvious in this work, Schuon's depictions of the horned elk are conceived as types of self-portraits. He took the elk as a "totem" in the Indian manner and the proud male elk guarding the females and young of the herd was Schuon's fantasy of his role as leader of his followers in Bloomington. There is a series of such works with this sub-text. 

Laylat al-Qadr. The Night of Power. One of the few overtly Mohammadan paintings in the oeuvre of Monsieur Schuon. He spent time in the company of Soofis in North Africa and through those associations later promoted himself as "Shayk Isa (Jesus)", although his credentials and claims to a genuine Soofi lineage are widely disputed. 

The Virgin Mary meets Pocahontas - a quintessentially Schuonian conflation. 

Schuon was a lover of the feminine, and should not be faulted for that. His depictions of the female form show great insight into feminine archetypes and the contemplative nature of female beauty. This, more than the "noble savage" theme, is one of the strongest recommendations for Schuon's paintings in the opinion of the present writer. 

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Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black