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

Alex Podolinsky & Demeter Bio-dynamics

Modern Australia has produced two systems of organic agriculture that are now well-known the world over. One of them is profound and shows the way ahead for natural farming; the other is rubbish and is a retrograde throw-back to hunter-gatherer methods. One is populated by serious farmers, men of the soil, who are producing high quality chemical-free food on an industrial scale for a hungry world; the other is populated by greenies, scavengers, ferals, hobby farmers, retired sociologists and a wide assortment of hippies with dubious standards of personal hygiene, all of whom make a lot of noise but produce very little. The profound system is Demeter bio-dynamics.  The hunter-gatherer throwback goes by the name of permaculture. 

The present author has vented his objections to the second of these in an unpopular post to this journal some time ago and makes no secret of them. See the post here. After nearly thirty years of dealing with permaculturists in southern Australia, he is confirmed in his low opinion of permaculture, its results and its clientelle. On the other hand, he has been actively involved in and also loitered on the fringes of the biodynamic movement for the same length of time, and has recently become reacquainted with long-time bio-dynamic farmers, and his positive experience of that system and high regard for it is undiminished. 

This endorsement requires qualification, though. There is a generic form of bio-dynamics, and then there is Demeter bio-dynamics. It is the latter of these two that deserves every praise. Both have their origin in a series of lectures on agriculture by the Austrian mystic and polymath, Rudolf Steiner, in the early 1920s. These lectures spawned a movement that has since taken many forms. What we will call "Demeter bio-dynamics" is one such form, and is a specific adaptation of Dr. Steiner's ideas to the realities of modern farming, in the first instance as they are encountered in the challenging environment of rain-starved poor-soiled broad-acre Australia. We will call it Demeter bio-dynamics because it operates and sells produce under the Demeter trademark, thus:

This trademark distinguishes this particular system of bio-dynamics from others.  Practitioners of the system found it necessary to set up appropriate legal definitions and commercial safeguards in order to avoid unneccesary confusions. To be frank, many expressions of generic bio-dynamics are rubbish too and attract a similar cohort to permaculture with much the same outcomes. Demeter bio-dynamics, on the other hand, is a first-class professional affair with a long track record of solid results backed up with a coherent body of theory and a tradition of independent research. It goes about its mission quietly and without fanfare. It is, without exaggeration, the premiere mode of organic farming in the world today. There are hundreds of successful, profitable farms and millions of acres of Australian farmland under Demeter bio-dynamic cultivation, along with smaller operations all around the world. Demeter is, in fact, the biggest producer of organic food on the planet today. 

Although many fine people have contributed to the development and refinement of Demeter bio-dynamics, it is finally the child of one man, a post-war European immigrant to Australia, Alex Podolinsky. This post concerns him. Although a versatile genius with many accomplishments to his name - he is an architect, amongst other things - he will go down in history as the man who saved bio-dynamics from half-witted hippies and converted it into a viable system of practical farming for real farmers as Dr. Steiner always intended. Born in 1925 - and so over ninety years old as of this posting - he is the grandson of the pioneering Ukranian eco-economist Sergie Podolinsky. He was himself instructed in the theory and methods of bio-dynamics by direct students of Dr. Steiner in Switzerland in the late 1930s and studied it thereafter, deciding at an early age that farming was his calling. 

Nothing in his early experiences of European farming, though, prepared him for the vastly different conditions under which farming is conducted in Australia. After immigrating to the great south land he bought a dairy farm near the mountain hamlet of Powelltown in the state of Victoria and from there set about completely rethinking the bio-dynamic system for Australian conditions. In particular, he realised that Steiner had said nothing relevant to the broad-acre dryland farming that was the norm in Australia; the whole matter would need to be reconsidered. For decades he worked closely with Australian farmers - real farmers - and honed his methods into a successful system. The turning point in this development was perfecting a mechanical means of stirring the "preparations" that Steiner had outlined in his lectures. Steiner had insisted they be stirred by hand. Podolinsky knew that this was utterly unfeasible in Australian conditions. He defied the purists and, assisted by a farmer named Trevor Twigg, designed a stirring machine that matched hand-stirring as nearly as possible. It was a breakthrough. With such machines it was possible to apply the bio-dynamic "preparations" to Australian-sized farms.

He also realised that Australian conditions, far more than the conditions prevailing in Europe, required special emphasis upon the "cow horn preparation" - enumerated 'Preparation 500" - that Steiner had sketched in his lectures. Steiner had indicated that much experimentation would be required before this preparation, like the others, could be perfected. Having learnt the basic technique of making the "preps" in Switzerland, Mr. Podolinsky set about refining the method through careful observation and application. Others, taking Dr. Steiner's sketch as gospel, went about making the preparations in a slap-dash way and supposed them to be either some form of pagan ritual or else a magic potion. Podolinsky understood them to be adjuncts to the inner processes of nature and approached them in that way. The Preparation 500 he produced on his farm in Poweltown was vastly superior to that being made and used by others.  He called it a "humus preperation", the purpose of which was to increase the consolidation of organic matter into stable humus in the living processes of soil. This, he realised, was exactly what was so lacking in Australia's mineralized, depleted soils, a land devoid of large ruminants for aeons. 

The cornerstone of his farming method became judicious applications of the "cow horn preparation" - a sort of potentized dilution of cow manure - stirred in his stirring machines and sprayed upon pastures using carefully adapted farm equipment. Using Preparation 500, without superphosphate and the other chemicals which are standard in Australian agriculture, he was able to revitalize tired and depleted soils, renovate soil structure and increase the humus content to depth. Combined with other bio-dynamic farm management techniques, in many cases the results were nothing short of miraculous. His own farm in Powelltown was the model. While surrounding farms withered and waned during droughts, his remained green and productive using no chemicals or brought-in fertilizers, artificial or natural. The ideal farm in bio-dynamics is a self-contained organism. It can produce a surplus year after year without any imputs from outside. This is at the centre of Steiner's agricultural vision, a vision that Alex Podolinsky made real: the farm as a living, breathing cornucopia drawing on the vital forces of the wider cosmos.

 

Corn horns. These are filled with cow manure, laid in pits (as shown) and buried over winter to make "Preparation 500". 

No great pioneer is without his detractors, however, and Mr. Podolinsky, it must be admitted, found an unusual number of enemies over the years. To achieve the success he did required upsetting many people along the way. As all who have encountered him over the years will testify, by temperament he is a "my-way-or-the-highway" sort of man, unbending, convinced of his own methods, and not inclined to suffer fools or dilettantes. In character he is more like a temperamental and authoritarian European orchestral conductor or violinist with personal traits that often clash with the more casual and egalitarian side of Australians. His involvement in the Steiner education movement ended in schism and lasting resentment. The monopoly he created of bio-dynamic methods was unwelcome in many quarters. He happily alienated the aforementioned hippie contingent and other useless types who have tended to populate the alternative agriculture scene. Even more, his disgressions from Steiner purism and claims to know better won him a wealth of detractors among Anthroposophists, members of Steiner's Anthroposophical Society. A certain Steinerite of the present author's acquaintance once described Mr. Podolinsky to him as "evil". Others have not hesitated to call him an "egoist", a "Nazi", a "fascist", or worse. This is to say nothing of the fact that the mainstream farming establishment were always ready to dismiss him as a crank or a charlatan and to call his methods "muck and magic." 

Wisely, Podolinsky went his own way and refrained from engaging with his critics; instead he let his success speak for itself. As opposed to his army of detractors, there is a legion of dedicated followers and enthusiasts who regard him as the herald of a coming good. This includes many very sober, down-to-earth, salt-of-the-land, no-nonsense, hardworking Australian farmers, a good many of whom Podolinsky saved from bankruptcy and ruin. Desperate, at their wits end, drowning in debt, facing divorce, living on farms destroyed by artificial fertilizers and pesticides, these men would ring him at Powelltown in the middle of the night, purely on a rumor that he had saved other farms with his unorthodox methods. After hearing their plight, Mr. Podolinsky would inform them that, yes, he could save their farm - and possibly their marriage too - but only on the condition that they do things his way and follow his advice to the letter. Bio-dynamics is a delicate and subtle thing. Some of it might seem strange, but it works if it is done correctly, and, if they complied with the rules, he could offer them the prospect of selling their produce under the Demeter label at good prices in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. In an age when more and more family farms are going to the wall, and agriculture in general is unprofitable, Demeter bio-dynamics has an expanding market. And better still, it rehabilitates the land so that farms are a worthy legacy for future generations. If it is easy to find people who have clashed at some time with Alex Podolinsky, it is also easy to find people who regard him as an agricultural messiah, a man who has done more for honest farmers than almost anyone else. 

Some might say that Podolinsky's methods would work just as well without the "magic potions". If so, well and good. He has, however, conducted extensive research and has built up a considerable body of evidence to show that his "500" - if applied correctly and in the right conditions - has a marked impact upon root growth and soil structure. One of the keys to Demeter bio-dynamics is the distinction between water roots and feed roots in plants. Conventional wisdom says that plants take their nutrients through soil water and that nutirients must be water soluble to be effective. This is only partly true. Rather, it is the case that, ideally, nutrients are held in suspension - that is, in a colloidal form - in humus, and plants draw upon this reserve in proportion to sunlight and other factors. The "cow horn preparation' is said to assist in this important process. This is the area of greatest difference between bio-dynamic farming and what ordinarily passes for so-called organic farming. Bio-dynamics has a different understanding of plant nutrients and place of those nutrients in well-structured soil. What appears to be "muck and magic" is underpinned by a solid body of sophisticated, if unconventional, plant science. Like all of Dr. Steiner's enterprises, bio-dynamic agriculture is based in the scientific tradition of Goethe and a practical application of Goethe's approach to the study of nature. 

The present author has heard Mr. Podolinsky lecture several times, the first occasion in the 1980s. There is no question that he is a charismatic man with an extraordinary knowledge of Australian farming and, more than that, a truly deep acquaintance with the processes of the natural world. No doubt he has very fixed opinions on a wide range of topics and is very ready to share them. What it usually amounts to, though, is simply that he is old school, as they say, and finds much that has come to pass in popular culture to be degenerate and abominable. His hatred of pop music is prodigous, for example. Also his contempt for television and the popular media. As a father, it is said, he was strongly authoritarian and forbade his children even the slightest exposure to the music and manners of their peers. There are stories that as teenagers his children would have to sneak off to the toilet to listen to a transistor radio in secret for a taste of rock n roll. People who worked for him or with him described him as a slave-driver and an uncompromising task-master. Many people could not tolerate his manner and demands, threw up their hands and stormed away. He could scandalize audiences with seemingly old fashioned generalisations about race. He could also slap down interjectors or fools with vicious effectiveness. At one lecture this author attended a hairy hippie tried to make much of a coming documentary on the bestselling permaculture favorite 'One-Straw Revolution' by Fukuoka. Podolinsky was unimpressed and, putting the interjector in his place, dismissed Fukuoka as "unimportant" much to the shock and horror of many in the audience. The great Fukuoka unimportant?! The gentleman sitting next to the author muttered something like "What an arrogant bastard!" And so it may have seemed. But the interjection was a distraction and it was imperative, for Podolinsky, that no one confuse the serious farming of bio-dynamics with the "do nothing" Zen agriculture so beloved by the "do nothing" malcontents of the counter-culture. Arrogant? Forthright, at least. 

Even so, he was also charming, engaging, persuasive, intense, and since his physical stature is slight, almost fragile, unthreatening. He walks with a limp and a walking cane. During the war he fell asleep on guard duty one night and badly burnt his foot on a kerosene heater. This infirmity, matched with his zeal, almost reminds one of the maniacal Captain Ahab. Like Ahab, he wants 110% commitment from those prepared to follow him. This is what the present author found both fascinating and unsettling about Alex Podolinsky in his heyday. He was not merely trying to inform or even impress an audience: a man on a mission, he was looking for those who would nail their coin to the mast and join him on his quest.

This quest, moreover, entailed something far beyond just farming. The invitation to join him is an invitation to embrace an entire package. As his grandfather understood, agriculture cannot be separated from economy, and nor can economy be separated from questions about the value of human labour and the whole premise of human endeavour. Alex Podolinsky, that is to say, is more than a farmer: he is a philosopher. It just so happens that farming is at the centre of his philosophical outlook because he regards it, not unreasonably, as the foundation of human civilization. His lectures would often stray from agricultural matters into areas of art and aesthetics. To illustrate a point about the root growth of clover or rye he might deviate into a long disgression about a certain piece of music by Bach. Many of his lectures are informed by architectural and sculptural analogies. It is wonderful to relate that on several occasions he has taken cohorts of rough, rugged Australian farmers - beef farmers! - and insisted on giving them classes in clay modelling so that they might better grasp his teachings about form, shape and volume. It is also wonderful to relate that his teachings on social organisation mean that he is, as he says, "totally anti-bureaucratic" to the point that the Demeter corporation, though it handles millions of dollars of produce, does not even have an accountant. There is no "middle management", no "human resources department", no "committees", nor any of the usual parasites that clutter up modern organisations and make people's lives a misery. Not only is Demeter bio-dynamics an unorthodox mode of farming, the Demeter organisation is a profoundly unorthodox organisation, run according to Mr. Podolinsky's economic and social philosophy. Just as he regards bio-dynamics as the farming of the future, so he has built Demeter to be a model of how corporations should operate in a better and future world. 

All of this is an extremely ambitious undertaking in any one man's life, and yet Mr. Podolinsky's accomplishments are concrete and undeniable. He has written several books, or rather collected and published several volumes of transcripts of lectures and public talks, and he has been subject of a short documentary made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. See here. But one does not need to believe anything he has written or said. Instead, one need only visit one of the hundreds of farms and gardens that operate according to his methods and with his personal oversight to see the tangible applications of his philosophy. This is where Demeter bio-dynamics is so dramatically distinct to permaculture and this is why the present author is inclined to praise one and decry the other. The latter functions more like a pyramid scheme of expensive courses selling certificates to people who in turn set up expensive courses selling certificates, and yet very rarely does all of this certification translate into real results. Permaculturalists think of themselves as somehow alternative, but in fact the entire permaculture show is very conventional in its epistemology (which is crudely quantitative), its view of human labour (as quantitative "units"), its view of nature (utilitarian and materialistic) and its mode of promotion which is really just an extension of a landscape and planning course from a two-bit university in Tasmania. Alex Podolinsky has never charged anyone a cent for his advice. He lives by farming. The contrast between the trajectory and results of permaculture and those of Demeter bio-dynamics over the past three decades cannot be more stark. The sad fact is, though, that the pioneers of permculture win popular acclaim and are hailed as among Australia's gift to the world while an eccentric genius like Alex Podolinsky will most likely die an unsung hero even though he has made the preparations and planted the seeds for the renovation of a viable agriculture, post-industrial, worldwide and is, by any measure, one of the outstanding figures of our time. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

    

Stars and Trumps

Living, as he has, in the lower southern hemisphere for most of his life the present author has a distinctly southern acquaintance with the night sky. At the southern reaches of the Australian continent the stars appear quite different to how they appear at other latitudes, and especially how they appear in the history-rich temperate zone latitudes of the northern hemisphere. During his recent extended travels, therefore, which have taken him through most of Hindoostan, along the Malacca Straits, across western China, around the Japanese islands and then through the east Indies, he has taken every opportunity to study the night sky from the unfamiliar vantage of northern climes. There were some excellent clear nights when he was in the Himalayas, and again in southern Goa, and in parts of Siam, and in the boat from Shanghai to Osaka, and most recently, in the more equitorial zone, on the long sandy beaches of Bali and Lombok. 

The first thing of interest to a southerner is the pole star: a fixture of the heavens lacking in the southern hemisphere but literally pivotal to the workings of the northern sky. Polar mythology is primary in all the great traditions. The pole star is axis mundi, and the way in which the constellations circle it - notably the Dipper, scooping up the waters of Ocean through the seasons - constitutes the essential motifs of Hindoo and Chinese spirituality especially. This fact was underlined for the present author in many temples and sacred places he visited. The symbolism of the pole star and the cosmology centred on the pole star is everywhere. In some Chinese temples it is perfectly explicit; star maps adorn the altars. Even more ubiquitous, seen throughout the whole of Asia, is the sacred symbol of the hyperborean swastika which depicts the Dipper circling the axial centre, as in this diagram:

You cannot see this from the southern hemisphere. The author was happy to see it with his own eyes. Yet the pole star itself, he discovers, is unspectacular. It is surprsingly dim, isn't it? It is hardly a blazing feature of the firmament. Its importance only becomes obvious through sustained stargazing throughout the revolving tides of the year. 

Some things in the northern skyscape, though, are immediately striking. The three bright stars of Orion draw attention, in the right circumstances, to the enduring importance of Sothis, Sirius, the 'Shining One', which is indeed a blazing feature of the firmament and often dominates the night. It is visible in the south too, of course - the brightest star in the heavens the world over - but in the south it is seen from a different (reversed) perspective. The long history of human fascination with Sothis is not difficult to understand. On one night in eastern India it shone like a diamond high above the Arabian Sea, its light reflecting upon the dark, sedate waters. In Lombok, late at night, it was particularly clear, shining with a steady, intense white-blue light under the black silhouettes of hills, cliff tops, forests and volcanos. There is the Sun, the Moon, and then there is Sothis, the so-called Dog Star, which has loomed large in human mythology and starlore since the beginnings of the human adventure. On one occasion on his travels the author saw it in a classical arrangement with the three stars of Orion pointing to its brilliant presence low in the sky during the depths of the night. This is the arrangement of stars that some suppose is alluded to in the Three Kings and Star of Bethlehem story in Christian mythology, as in the picture below. It is not so obvious when seen in southern climes. In the northern hemisphere, at certain times of the year, it is too plain to be overlooked.

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This star-gazing, in turn, has set the author to consideration (exactly the right word, to con + sider, sidereal = star) of one of the key cultural representations of stellar mythology in the western tradition, the Star trump in the tarot. The possibility that the story of the three kings describes a particular arrangement of stars, and that the 'Star in the East' that the kings pursue is Sothis, reminds him that the earliest representations of the Star trump in the tarot depict that mythologem. Thus:

The first question to be answered regarding this tarot card is: what star is it that is being depicted? The most likely answer, surely, is Sothis. Let us note, for start, that this card is one of three that form a set and a sequence, the 'celestial' trumps: The Star, the Moon, the Sun. These seem to be deliberately arranged in the traditional tarot sequence in order of increasing luminosity. The Sun is the brightest object in the sky. Before it comes the Moon, the second brightest. And before the Moon card is The Star, the third brightest object in the sky - in which case it would follow that the star in question is Sothis. 

The identification of the star on the trump with the Star of Bethlehem is made explicit again in some modern tarot designs, such as this:

But it also seems to be the relevant identification in other early designs that show a handsome youth who, in context, is most likely King David (the star being King David's star, Bethlehem indicating the House of David and the Davidic royal line). Thus:

The context of this iconography, of course, is Renaissance Italy and when we compare this crude sketch of a male figure with the classical David we see the resemblance, thus:

To reiterate: these early designs are concerned with the Star of Bethlehem, the Star of David - simple Christian symbolism. When Christians think of stars it is the star that presided over the birth of Christ that must come first to their minds. The earliest tarot designs have this basic Christian meaning. Arguably, the star in question is Sothis, third most luminous object in the sky, and the star to which the "three kings" of "Orion's belt" point.

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At a certain juncture in the development of tarot symbolism, however, this simple Christian symbolism became complicated with a different iconography and the three kings of the east, or King David, as the case may be, were replaced by a female figure. It seems that this first occurred in northern Italy in the late 1400s. This is the symbolism that became standard and which continues in the tarot to this day. It introduces a second question regarding this trump: who is the female figure on the card? 

Again, many of the early designs deviate quite markedly from the later ones. Here, for instance, is one of the early depictions of the 'Star':

This is not Christian symbolism: it is pagan allegory. The female figure is most likely Ourania, the ancient Greek muse of astronomy in her night-blue attire. The star, in that case, need not be a specific star but is merely generic although, again, Sothis must be regarded as the prime candidate simply because it is the brightest star in the sky. Sothis is THE star, per se. 

Whatever the case, a female figure, rather than kings and David, makes her appearance, and in tarot designs thereafter the star is associated with a woman. Most likely, too, another factor assisted this shift. In some early sets of trumps the Christian virtues, personified in the medieval manner, appear in place of some of the now familiar designs. In such cases, the virtue of Hope (as in the trinity Faith, Hope and Charity) appears in place of the Star. Thus the female figure who later appeared on the cards is an adaptation of Hope, and indeed this positive attribution has continued to be part of the divinatory meanings ascribed to the card by cartomancers. 

On the other hand, this same woman becomes naked in the course of the transformation of the card designs and she thus appears to be the same female figure who appears on the Temperance card, the World card and elsewhere in the iconography of the trumps. In this respect she seems to be a representation of Anima Mundi - the World Soul - of Christo-Neoplatonic cosmology who was routinely depicted as a naked woman in this way. The World card, the last in the sequence of trumps, in particular, seems to confirm this identification. As with all the tarot trumps, the Star card is, we can see, a convergence of many different streams of late medieval and Renaissance symbolism, both pagan and Christian, iconographical and moral.

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It will be noted that in all the various designs of the star trump considered thus far there is no appearance of the waters that feature in the later designs. Historically, this is a late element in the design. First there is the star - some early designs simply show a star with no other details, as in the so-called Rosenwold Sheet, an uncut printing of card designs. See below:

Secondly, the female figure appears with the star, replacing kings and male figures. But only later does this female figure become associated with water. In the design that became normative, of course, she is holding pitchers of water and pouring them out. Star. Woman. Waters. These are the components of what became the traditional design. 

How then do we explain the appearance of water in the Star card, and how is water associated with (a) the star and (b) the woman? This is the third of the three questions to which the trump design gives rise. What are the waters we see on the card? There are three questions to be answered: 

What star is it? 
Who is the woman? 
What are the waters? 

On the face of it, the appearance of the water in the symbolism of the card seems to reinforce the view that the star in question is Sothis. The connection coincides with the ancient Egyptian themes that many have detected in the tarot trumps. No doubt, claims that the tarot is of ancient Egyptian origin are unfounded in themselves, but certain iconographical themes in the traditional designs, albeit of Italian origin, do seem to perpetuate motifs that go back to ancient Egypt. The Egyptian association of Sothis with the cycles of the Nile - and the star with water - is an association that persists in Europe well beyond ancient times. One can make a good case that this is why water appears in the symbolism of the card. The cycles of Sothis are related to the flooding of the Nile and hence, by extension, to fertility and irrigation. What star is it? Sothis. The water symbolism of the card tells us so. No other star has such a long-standing and archetypal association with water.

In that case, as many commentators suppose, the woman depicted may be meant to signify some Egyptian deity related to Sothis, most usually nominated as the goddess Isis. This, at least, would satisfactorily answer our three questions. The star is Sothis. The woman is Isis. The waters are the waters of the Nile. What has happened in the evolution of the card, then, is that these Egyptian motifs have been collected together in conjunction with the other streams of ideas such as Hope and Ourania and the Neoplatonic World-Soul. The final element in the design, the bird in the tree - almost always identified as an ibis - is likely to have been imported as part of this Egyptification at much the same time. 

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There are, all the same, other questions to be answered and other considerations that might count against such neat identifications. The tarot designs are complex and their origins and history notoriously obscure. There is much scope for speculation. Nothing is ever simple. What are we to make of the posture of the woman on the card, for instance, and her act of pouring out the water? In some early designs she holds a single pitcher and pours the water into a river (or other body of water, the sea?) In what became the canonical design she is holding two pitchers or jugs and is pouring one onto land and one into the body of water. What symbolism is afoot here? And why is she positioned as she is? 

As historians of the tarot relate, the prototype for the two vessels of water would seem to be alchemical depictions of the mermaid Melusine of folklore, an allegorical figure representing the conjunctio oppositorum, the union of opposites. In alchemical iconography she is depicted expressing milk from one breast and blood from the other, as below:

This is probably French symbolism, although the legends of Melusine were known in Cyprus and may have come into Italy through certain Milanese-Cypriot connections. Some tarot designs, old and new, are clearly related to this iconography as the following two versions of the Star card show. Without drawing attention to vulgar colloquialisms, the breasts of the mermaid become the 'jugs' of the female figure on the card, a somewhat obvious adaptation: 

In any case, the mere fact of water in the design becomes further complicated with the importation of the idea of duality, two jugs (pitchers) - the two breasts of the female figure - and the idea, by extension, that the two vessels contain two different waters or waters for two different purposes. Blood and milk in the Melusine symbolism signifies the salty and the sweet respectively. It is a fair surmise, then, that the two vessels of water represent the two types of water, salty and fresh (or sweet). This distinction is then formalized in the tarot design by having the female figure pour one vessel into the body of water (the salt water of the sea) and one on land (the fresh water of the rivers). At the time that this further distinction was made the female figure was turned around to be facing the left rather than the right and she was given a distinctive posture. This again, as historians of the tarot have remarked, is not unprecedented. The female figure seems to have been adapted to the typical posture of personifications of the zodiacal sign Aquarius, the Water-bearer, in medieval astrological symbolism, thus:

The basis for this further collapsing together and blending of symbolisms is plain. The evolution of the figure on the card now identifies her as water-bearer and a figure of conjoined opposites represented by the two modes of water, salty and sweet. In this we see astrological and alchemical influences upon the design, co-mingling with all the others we have noted, until it arrives at its canonical form, thus:

   

In a Christian context, this final symbolism is rich in allusions. Let us note, for example, a passage from the Revelation of John, 10:1-2:  

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.  

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It occurs to the present author, all the same, that there are other possible interpretations of this symbolism. One further feature of the design requires an explanation, and it suggests that perhaps a quite different order of symbolism was in play during the development of the trump. In the early designs, as we saw above, there was often just a single star depicted upon the card. It was almost always eight-pointed. In the canonical design this eight-pointed star blazing in the centre of the card is accompanied by seven smaller stars. These, presumably, represent the seven planets, or alternatively, it is conceivable that they represent the seven sisters, the Pleiades, since that grouping of stars is in the same proximity as Sothis. But the seven stars appear quite late in the evolution of the design. As we see in the examples depicted above, when the Melusine motif of two jugs (breasts) - the conjunction of opposites - was introduced there were four stars, not seven, accompanying the central star. Here it is again:

The stages of development, then, were one star, then four, then seven. The question is: how many additional stars should there be and what do they represent? 

If there are seven stars then we have some reasonable answers to the second part of this question. The additional stars represent either the planets or perhaps the Pleiades. But what of the four stars? When four stars were added to the design, what did they represent in the mind of the designer? The additional stars seem to be added to the design at the same time that water became associated with the star, and at first there were four stars, not seven. What, then, do four stars represent? The seven stars of the canonical design, it will be noticed, tend to be arranged somewhat awkwardly and are crowded in the given space. Designs with four stars on the other hand have a natural symmetry: the large star is in the centre and the four stars are arranged neatly around it. Perhaps the four stars are simply decorative devices just as the seven stars are instances of Hermetic exuberance? But that is unlikely. Every detail of all the tarot trumps seem to be deliberate. The designs may be arcane and there may indeed be a confusion, a hotch-potch, of various types of symbolism, but no details seem to be unintelligent or merely aesthetic. 

There is, however, no natural correlative to the four stars. Seven planets or the seven sisters (Pleiades) are natural models, but there is no natural set of four stars except, perhaps, the great Southern Cross, but that is a feature of the southern skies, not the northern. Most likely, then, they represent the four directions and/or the four seasons. The large star that they surround, therefore, takes on the symbolism of the centre, the axis. We have a central star and around it four smaller stars representing north, south, east and west and/or winter, spring, summer and autumn. But if that is the case, then we must question whether the central star is Sothis for it does not naturally carry such four-square significances. The star that does is, rather, Polaris, the pole star. Sothis is the brightest star in the heavens, but it is not, for all of that, axial. The pole star is dim to the eyes but it is the star around which the whole cosmos turns. 

It seems to the present author, in any case, that certain elements in the design of this trump might be better explained if we take the star to be the pole star rather than Sothis, or perhaps what we have is an overlapping of two different orders of symbolism. There are two great stars in the northern heavens. Sothis is the brightest. Polaris is the most axial. They are significant in two different ways. Perhaps, then, both stars come together in the Star trump? Perhaps they are interchangeable? Many of the themes we have considered might conceivably apply to both of these stars. We said, for instance, that Sothis is naturally associated with water, and it is by virtue of its association with the waters of the Nile, but the Dipper that, as we saw, circles the pole star, is conceived mythologically as a water-scoop that dips down into the waters of Ocean and irrigates the heavenly meadows. Thus, although it is perhaps less obvious and less appreciated, we might just as well attribute the water symbolism of the card to the pole star as to Sothis. 

In this respect, let us note - as some commentators have in the past - the fact that the female figure in the later designs is in a peculiar posture of arms and legs that somewhat resembles the swastika. Let us see her again:

It is clear from other tarot trumps - consider the Emperor card or the Hanging Man, for example - that the arms and legs of the figures are often made to form symbolic shapes. The Emperor's legs makle the sign of the planet Jupiter, for instance, and the Hanging Man's crossed leg makes the alchemical glyph for sulphur. Such devices are well established in tarot symbolism. In the canonical design, the naked water-bearer on the Star trump is very deliberately depicted with her arms and legs in a peculiar arrangement, and that arrangement strongly suggests the four arms of the swastika. 

We can explain that peculiarity by assuming that the star above her is the pole star. Other symbolism follows. In the Soofi tradition of the Mahometans - to draw upon another order of symbols for the sake of elucidation for a moment - much is made of various Koranic references to the "two seas" and their meeting place. These "two seas" are the two modes of water, salty and sweet. Their meeting place is the so-called bazahk, a symbolic notion of that place, the "heart", where a being of the physical world (the salty waters) can encounter the spiritual (the sweet). Such ideas are crucial to Soofi spirituality and by extension feature in Mahometan alchemy as well. By further extension, these same alchemical ideas inform the occidental alchemical tradition too, and this is what we find in the symbolism of the Star card insofar as it is alchemical. What this amounts to is this: that the bazahk, the meeting place of the "two seas", the physical and spiritual realms, is in the heart, the centre of one's being, and so to reach that place is to return to the spiritual centre, the axis of one's Self. The pole star has exactly such significances in a cosmological sense. The axis is where the "two seas" meet. 

One can interpret the Star card of the tarot in these terms. There is much more that one can say. Again, the symbolism of the tarot is rich and multivalent. These considerations are, at least, a starting point. In the first instance the meaning of the card is Sothic. The star is Sirius. But other streams of symbolism converge in its iconography. In particular, the axial symbolism of the pole star very well accounts for many of the themes of this card. The star is not only Sirius, but Polaris as well. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Nieuwenkamp in Bali

The earliest European artist to record the landscape and people of the beautiful tropical island of Bali in the Dutch East Indies was Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkamp, who signed himself W. O. J. N. Self-taught, prolific, versatile, a compulsive traveller from an early age, he journeyed to Bali six times among travels to Egypt, British India, Malaya, Sumatra, Java as well as many tours throughout Europe, drawing, painting and writing with sympathetic eyes everywhere he went. He was an especially restless orientalist. It was his life's work to explore the lands of the east and use those experiences as the material for his art. His personal motto was: Vagando Acquiro - As I wander, I acquire. 

His relationship to Bali and the adjacent island of Lombok - unspoilt paradises in his time - was especially strong. Amongst other things, he was the first man to ever ride a bicycle on the islands. This made a lasting impression on the native people; he appears in Balinese temple art as the legendary bicycle rider as in the picture below from a temple in northern Bali:

Nieuwenkamp on his bicycle

The present writer has been travelling through the islands of the East Indies in recent times, and has covered much of the same territory Nieuwenkamp covered in the first half of the XXth century.  Needless to say, over a hundred years much has changed. Bali, and increasingly Lombok, are now tourist havens crowded with beach-goers, tour guides, touts, resorts, hotels, minibuses and bars. Nieuwenkamp's bicycle has been replaced by the incessant noise of a million motorbikes. It is still (just) possible, however, to wander away from the main towns and resorts and to find areas of simple village life that remain relatively unchanged. In particular, the author has taken day treks into the interior of Lombok and found areas that are more or less pristine, populated by villagers still living a more or less traditional life of poultry keeping and subsistence farming. This gives some idea of the type of world Nieuwenkamp must have encountered during his journeys. 

Below is a photograph the author took during one of his walks around Lombok:

Nieuwenkamp was essentially a graphic artist. Drawing and design are his primary arts. In the Netherlands he has left his mark as a designer of boats and as an architect. In the East Indies he turned to painting but in this continued the habits of a graphic artist, never succumbing to painterly techniques. He adapted the graphic skills he had honed in his early life to the new medium of painting while retaining a rhythmical sense of line and decoration. It is this, along with a marked flatness and stylization that gives his paintings a strong oriental sense. This is precisely what makes them so appealing. There is no wedge driven between the graphic and the painterly. 

As we know, the expressionism of his age retreated from graphic elements in painting, ostensibly to let painting be painting. But this ended up with a mess of blobs and smears of paint across the canvas as content and craft surrendered to emotion and the expressive properties of colour. In large measure, this is where European painting in the XXth century went astray, culminating in the talentless vomit of abstract expressionism. Readers of this current journal will note that the tastes of the present writer lie elsewhere, and Nieuwenkamp is a very fine example of exactly the elements in art that he most values. The famous catch-cry 'There are no lines in nature' heralded an aesthetic disaster, for it signalled the end of intellectual art, properly speaking, for the line is exactly the interface of man and nature and to reject it is to abdicate the first premise of human representation. Nieuwenkamp has a beautiful sense of line. Here are some examples:

And here, below, are some paintings - the same sense of line and graphic skills adapted to painting with flat areas of colour and a strong emphasis upon pattern and elements of decorative design. These elements, let us note, are entirely in keeping with the native arts of Bali and other such places. What we find in Nieuwenkamp, as in the work of the best of the orientalist artists, is a beautiful synergy of European observation and skill with an oriental sense of linear rhythm. Orientalist art is uninteresting when it is merely oriental subject matter captured in an unadapted European style. Far more interesting are synergistic meetings of east and west. This is what we find in Nieuwenkamp. 

The present writer, at least, adopts this as a general principle, as various posts to this journal testify. It is the synthesis of east and west, or rather the western appropriation and adaptation of oriental motifs (in art, culture, language and everything else, even spirituality) that he loves, the east seen through western eyes or, even better, reimagined through the orientalist vision.

Click on any of the pictures for enlarged views:

Regrettably, much of Nieuwenkamp's work remains unpublished and unseen. Although he was meticulous and exacting and had a habit of destroying work that did not meet his own standards, he was prolific and produced a very considerable body of drawings, paintings and travel writings. As the examples on this page show, he deserves to be appreciated by a much wider audience and towards this it is to be hoped that more of his work is made available to the public in future years. 

It is also regretable that his artistic legacy in Bali is now increasingly obscured by the crass commercialism of the tourist trade. There are small havens of art and culture on Bali and Lombok today - such as Ubud in central Bali - but in the larger centres, such as Dempasar, Legian, Mataram, there are few signs of a robust artistic culture. The native people maintain their temples and their religious traditions (a fascinating lost branch of early Hindooism), and one can hear gamalan and see statuary of the traditional gods and demons of the islands at gateways and portals, but the tasteless superficiality of the tourist trade is otherwise quite advanced. A sure sign of this is the graffiti throughout the towns. (Graffiti, this author finds, is always a telling symptom of cultural health.) It is the same Afro-American graffiti of urban America that one finds in all outposts of globalized degeneracy. The art stores sell bogus batiks and kitsch portraits of island girls. In the towns, at least, the lyrical beauty of Nieuwenkamp's Bali is very hard to find.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black