Last week, I found myself at the Art Institute taking in “Van Gough and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape” (if you catch this in Amsterdam in October, it will appear under the much more unassuming “Van Gough Along the Seine.”)
The exhibit is in Regenstein Hall, which has been cleverly arranged into nested galleries painted a calming aqua. Cut though the center are a series of squares offering perfect windows into the next and the next and the next crowded gallery.
I was overwhelmed by both the crowd and a palette that my mind refuses to uncouple from the 90s.
Toward the end of my confused wander, I came to The Seine at Dawn (1889) by Charles Angrand.
The “modern” landscape these painters were engaged with was the immediate north suburbs of Paris. It was a time of increased rail access and Haussmann’s radical boulevardization of the city.
These five painters, the curators argue, took a changed view of what the countryside could look like and offered landscapes that juxtaposed rivers with industrialization.
The catalogue quotes a letter Angrand wrote a friend in mid-June of 1889:
With the exception of a walk or two in the rue de Rome, I am devoting the good hours of the day to work . .. a morning melody of white and sacred verses. In prose, I would present it very simply as a stretch of river from which the characteristic mist of the dawn of a fine day is rising. Three months of effort have already accumulated as much as succeeded each other in this work—I can notify you in advance of its calm and serene beauty.
In Angrand’s painting the horizon almost floats off the top of the canvas. (Angrand liked to push the sky out of the way—he does the same thing in 1885’s On the Ile des Ravageurs and 1886’s The Seine at Saint-Ouen, Morning.) The fisherman bent over the boat and the industrial towers are the only objects pulled into focus. The Seine at Dawn dissolves impressionisms’ saccharine qualities into something else.
Poor Angrand. Throughout the exhibit text and catalogue he is the afterthought: Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac, Bernard .. and Angrand. “One of the least well-known,” with a known output of just shy of 100 paintings. In the 1890s, he abandoned oil for black-and-white Conté crayon. After the death of his father in 1896, he returned to Normandy. He is praised for keeping up correspondence with his Paris-based companions that is now a key text for historians of impressionism.
And yet, that milky, 7/8 full view of the Seine. When you search for the picture, Google provides a film strip of possible views; so many ways to rip off Angrand’s careful colors:
Cookie Mueller, in Chloe Griffin’s 2014 biography, is someone you realize you already know quite well. She appeared in well-known cult classics like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and less-well-known, like Smithereens and Variety.
(I implore you to watch Variety, which has a script by Kathy Acker and a wonderfully ambiguous ending.) Mueller is the other woman in the photograph of Nan Goldin with a busted nose:
Griffin’s biography is an oral history that mostly plays chronology straight (save a quick dip back to Mueller’s childhood in the middle). I began reading it on the bus home from seeing Angrand, and started near the end: Mueller’s break up with her girlfriend Sharon Niesp and her death from AIDS.
Then I started at the top, with Mueller meeting John Waters in 1960s Baltimore. I wonder now if I was trying to recreate what Chris Kraus did so effectively in her biography of Kathy Acker: get through the death first, so I could focus on this woman’s life.
It’s satisfying to see a woman portrayed without judgement. In Griffin’s telling, Mueller is a loving single mother, the embodiment of downtown chic (Betsy Johnson and Madonna are both accused of stealing her look), photographed in men’s underwear, a v-neck jersey, her hands bound to the staircase while Klaus Nomi hovers.
Director Rachid Kerdouche on casting Mueller:
I spoke to Richard Sole, the keyboard player for Patti Smith, who said to me, “Why don’t you talk to Cookie Mueller?” She was more than what I was expecting. I wanted a simple blonde girl, just a girl who was blonde. When I used Cookie, I realized I could have a real person, in the sense that she could re-write the lines.
Mueller made it as an actress, but hatched a second career as a writer. Her stories are lucid and tight. A mix of Leonora Carrington and a tabloid news item. It feels like she is writing to fit column space in the best way. In “The Mystery of Tap Water,” which first appeared in Bomb, Julie has decided that she will only consume tap water (you are what you eat!) so that she can disappear at will.
I know it’s absurd and ridiculous, but now whenever I take a bath I see Julie pouring out of the faucet, and I begin to wonder just how many other odd people and complete strangers are in the bathtub floating around me.
Mueller died of AIDS in 1989, one hundred years after Angrand finished The Seine at Dawn.
“All of these friends were connected to the arts,” Mueller wrote in “A Last Letter.” “Time and history have proven that the sensitive souls among us have always been more vulnerable.”