What Jane Saw

What Jane Saw is an online exhibition that reconstructs, meticulously, like engineers would, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as they would have been displayed in an art gallery in Pall Mall on May 24, 1813.

Jane Austen, basking in the success of her stupendously bestselling novel, Pride and Prejudice, visited the gallery, not simply to gawk at the paintings themselves, but also to do some celebrity-spotting.

Austen was an avid celebrity-spotter and would be quite at home today in the celebrity-obsessed TMZ culture.

The online gallery celebrates the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and is a superb progeny of the marriage between the humanities and technology. As the NYT says of the gallery that used the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, to reproduce paintings based on precise measurements recorded in an 1860 book: 

If the notion of a Wii-ready Austen offends purists, others may be happy to see 21st-century technology harnessed in the service of the Divine Miss Jane.

Recently, scholars like Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and conceiver of the project, have re-introduced Jane Austen as a history-minded, worldly woman, who isn't quite the country mouse writer preoccupied with revealing timeless truths.  

Bush baths

Just as there is the bubble bath, there is now the "Bush bath." I coined the term to indicate, not the luxurious and largely feminine undertones that accompany the bubble bath, but a more matter-of-fact kind of bathing under the shower. 

The bather in a "Bush bath" is characterized by a certain kind of "introspective self-absorption."

Where am I deriving such stuff from? 

From a recently posted cache of the paintings of George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. 

The "Arts Beats" segment of the NYT brought the fact of Bush's amateur persuasion to my attention. I liked the paintings and so did the critic who reviewed them, enough to discuss the form, content as well as the possible intellectual and painterly tradition to which George Bush the painter might belong (though there is still that wariness that the painter under scrutiny is none other than the boyo Prez, who was considered to have minimal intellect).

The forms, the critic opines,

[Are] handled with care, but awkwardly, which is the source of their appeal. Things are recognizable but just: you can detect posh details like the shower’s chrome hinge and glass door. Everything is honestly accounted for, not sharply realistic, certainly not finicky.

As for the influences working on Bush, the critic speculates that he might be familiar with Jasper Johns' "The Seasons

[Where] each of the four paintings is shadowed by a male, seemingly unclothed silhouette, or Pierre Bonnard’s strangely chaste, luminous paintings of his wife reclining in a bathtub. And one can imagine them being not too out of place in a group show that might include the figurative work of Dana Schutz, Karen Kilimnik, Alice Neel, Christoph Ruckhaberle and Sarah McEneaney.

Women as readers

I don't know much about the symbols/typology that inhere in Renaissance painting on Christian themes.

Yet, the 17th century painting of the Virgin Mary ("The Annunciation and Two Saints" by Simone Martini), distracted from her reading by the entry of the angel Gabriel into her room, tells me something--not about religion, but about women, knowledge and power in the Renaissance--because it is so intelligently put in context by Joan Acocella in her review of The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack.

I had never thought of Mary as a reader, or as a woman who had any role outside of her role as a bearer/vessel of the son of God. But this painting, interpreted differently, grants Mary an intellectual life.

The painting has a remarkable detail: Mary keeps her thumb in her book, as though Gabriel's presence is an intrusion on her private time which is devoted to the reading of a book. She will revert to the book once Gabriel is gone. God's words are secondary compared to the pleasures of a book.

If Mary weren't required to listen to Gabriel's spiel, she wouldn't. But reading is volitional on the part of Mary.

A traditional painting can become provocative, even subversive, if seen through the lens of a detail that isn't accentuated.