"The Hare with Amber Eyes"

[fiefoe]

The Dreyfus affiar is so gloomy the more you know about it. I feel justified giving up on Robert Harris's "An Officer and a Spy" now. Still, it's heady to read about impressionists' Paris and Secessionist Vienna.

• It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.
• Ownership seemed transposed. These objects seemed to induce insatiability, to own you, make demands on you.
• This idea of the miniature was often held as the reason that Japanese art seemed to lack ambition. They were brilliant at the laborious fashioning of rapid feeling, but fell down when it came to the grander feelings of tragedy or awe. That is why they lacked a Parthenon, a Rembrandt. What they could do was everyday life.
• Kipling: "...winked at the shade of the dead carver! He had gone to his rest, but he had worked out in ivory three or four impressions that I had been hunting after in cold print."
• The chance to pass round a small and shocking object was too good to miss in the Paris of the 1870s. Vitrines had become essential to the witty and flirtatious intermittencies of salon life.
• But the vitrine – as opposed to the museum’s case – is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.
• young poet to get a job in Berlin as reader of French to the Empress – Charles had a casually impressive social reach
• Picking up a drawing enables us to ‘catch the thought of the artist in all its freshness, at the very moment of manifestation, with perhaps even more truth and sincerity than in the works that require arduous hours of labour, with the defiant patience of the genius’... This is a wonderful manifesto for drawing. It celebrates the moment of apprehension and the fugitive moment of response – a few traces of ink or a few strokes of the pencil. It is also a beautifully coded claim for a conversation between a particular kind of the old and the very new in art.
• These were all paintings, Charles wrote, that could ‘present the living being, in gesture and attitude, moving in the fugitive, ever-changing atmosphere and light; to seize in passing the perpetual mobility of the colour of the air, deliberately ignoring individual shades in order to achieve a luminous unity whose separate elements melt together into an indivisible whole and to arrive at a general harmony even by way of discords’.
• The structure of Japanese pictures seemed to rehearse the meaning of the world differently. Inconsequential gobbets of reality – a pedlar scratching his head,
• As in the netsuke, everyday life went on without rehearsal. This almost violent conjunction of storytelling with graphic, calligraphic clarity was catalytic. The Impressionists learnt how to cut life up into glances and interjections. Rather than formal views, you have a trapeze-wire dissecting a picture,
• Like the repeated themes in the netsuke, Japanese prints also give the possibility of the series – forty-seven views of a famous mountain suggested a way of returning in differing ways and reinterpreting formal pictorial elements. Haystacks, the bend of the river, poplars, the cliff face of Rouen Cathedral – all share this poetic return.
• Whistler, the master of ‘variations’ and ‘caprices’, explained that ‘On any given canvas the colours must, so to speak, be embroidered on; that is, the same colour must reappear at intervals, like a single thread in an embroidery.’
• the decadent Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a man dedicated to achieving a totally aestheticised existence, finessing the details of his house so that every sensory experience would immerse him totally. The apogee was a tortoise whose shell was encrusted with gemstones so that its slow passage across a room would enliven the pattern of a Persian carpet.
• Proust has also become a presence in the offices of the Gazette in the rue Favart.
• I think of what it must have been like, and recall Proust writing of the Duc de Guermantes’s anger:  as far as Swann is concerned…they tell me now that he is openly Dreyfusard. I should never have believed it of him, an epicure, a man of practical judgement, a collector, a connoisseur of old books, a member of the Jockey, a man who enjoys the respect of all, who knows all the good addresses and used to send us the best port you could wish to drink, a dilettante, a family man.
• To produce this spectacle meant colossal engineering works. For twenty years it was dust, dust, dust. Vienna, said the writer Karl Kraus, was being ‘demolished into a great city’.
• Hansen and ‘his vassals…the Jews’. It was no conspiracy. He was just very good at giving his clients what they wanted; his Reichsrat is one Greek detail after another. Birth of democracy, says the great portico. Protector of the city, says the statue of Athena. There is a little something everywhere you look to flatter the Viennese.
• Hitler appreciated how the space could be used for dramatic display. He understood all this ornament in a different way: it expressed ‘eternal values’.
• In Vienna the most outrageous statements were met with a feeling from the assimilated Jews that it was probably best not to make too much fuss. It looks as if I am going to spend another winter reading about anti-Semitism.
• Schnitzler’s list of reasons for shooting yourself in The Road into the Open encompasses ‘Grace, or debts, from boredom with life, or purely out of affectation’.
• Pips appears as the protagonist of a highly successful novel of the time by the German Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann, a sort of Mitteleuropa version of Buchan’s Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
• The cards are the work of Josef Olbrich. He was the artist at the heart of the radical Secession movement and designer of its pavilion in Vienna with an owl relief and a golden dome of laurel leaves, a quiet, elegant place of refuge with walls that he described as ‘white and gleaming, holy and chaste’.
• The traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in Kövecses on his walk across Europe in the 1930s and described it as still having the atmosphere of an English rectory.
• Once married they never came, no matter how good the dinners were, or how pretty the hostess. Did this matter at all? These seem such gossamer threads of rudeness.
• She has to be sewn into some dresses, Anna, kneeling at her feet, producing thread, needle, thimble from the pocket of her apron.
• Was it Ephrussi who kept identical clothes in two different households so that she could start her day either with her husband or her lover? The gossip is still so alive: the Viennese seem to have no secrets at all. It makes me feel painfully English.
• it is the fifth turning to Dr Freud’s house at Berggasse 19, where he is writing up the notes on Emmy’s late great-aunt Anna von Lieben as the case of Cäcilie M., a woman with a ‘hysterical psychosis of denial’
• I worry that I am becoming a Casaubon, and will spend my life writing lists and notes.
• Herzl, who starts out writing them, talked of the feuilletonist ‘falling in love with his own spirit, and thus of losing any standard of judging himself or others’, and you can see this happening. They are so perfect, a riff of humour, a throwaway, glancing look at Vienna, ‘a matter of injecting experience – as it were, intravenously – with the poison of sensation…the feuilletonist turns this to account. He renders the city strange to its inhabitants,’ in the words of Walter Benjamin. In Vienna the feuilletonist renders the city back to itself as a perfect, sensationalised fiction.