Many admirers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and the author of this column is among them) may not know that before he became identified with the cultural underground, his area of concentration was underwater.
Although Lawrence Ferlinghetti is most known as an American poet and liberal activist, he was also a commanding officer during D-Day. Photo by Paul Duclos
By Paul Duclos
Published: December, 2015
Many admirers of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and the author of this column is among them) may not know that before he became identified with the cultural underground, his area of concentration was underwater.
As a commanding officer on a U.S. Navy sub-chaser during D-Day, Ferlinghetti became intimately acquainted with the pathology of war, and became a pacifist after doing his duty and leaving the service with an honorable discharge.
The Normandy invasion, it would seem, whetted his appetite for travel and adventure:
And in the very first light on the western horizon behind us were just beginning to see a forest of masts rising up from below the horizon, first just the tops of the masts and then the hulls – a huge armada of thousands of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels steaming together from separate ports, converging with the first light off the coast… And fair stood the wind for France!
These anecdotes and scores of other gems are contained in Ferlinghetti’s latest book, Writing Across the Landscape, which chronicles his physical and spiritual journeys around the world. The subterranean elements, as one might imagine, are often the most compelling.
Readers must keep in mind, too, that these impressionistic musings are jotted down in a journal. The author of carefully crafted poetry takes license here to indulge in stream of consciousness, sharing the moment by relating immediate and profound recall without too much reflection.
The book, edited by Giada Diano and Matt Gleeson from Ferlinghetti’s notebooks, which are now collected at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, also features about 50 reprints of Ferlinghetti’s childlike sketches, mostly crude self-portraits and nudes. The illustrations, such as they are, might seem unnecessary, until the reader arrives at an entry from a trip to the “Roman Carnival” in the 1980s.
“I have to get a sketchbook and start doing heads,” he enthused, “nothing but heads and faces... Faces and hands, what a universe. No need to draw anything more.”
We sincerely hope that he does not feel the same way about limiting the scope of his writing, and indeed, he tells us that “a new novel is in the works.”
Exhibit of Japanese Influence
The San Francisco Bay was key to reaching Japan when it opened for international trade in the 1850s. This was after two centuries of self-imposed isolation set off a craze for all things Japanese among European and North American collectors, artists and designers.
The phenomenon, dubbed japonisme by French writers, radically altered the course of Western art in the modern era.
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum surveys this sweeping development in the traveling exhibition Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists. The exhibition traces the West’s growing fascination with Japan, the collecting of Japanese objects, and the exploration of Japanese subject matter and styles. Looking East is on view through February 7, 2016 with the exhibition’s final weeks marking the start of the museum’s 50th anniversary year in 2016.
Looking East features more than 170 artworks drawn from the acclaimed collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with masterpieces by the great Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, among others. The art and culture of Japan inspired leading artists throughout Europe and the United States to create works of renewed vision and singular beauty.
The exhibition is organized into four thematic areas, tracing the impact of Japanese approaches to women, city life, nature and landscape. Within each theme, artworks from Japan are paired with American or European works to represent the West’s assimilation of new thematic and formal approaches. Japanese woodblock prints by such celebrated masters as Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai are shown in dialogue with oil paintings, prints and photographs by a diverse mix of Western artists, demonstrating regional variations on japonisme. Bronze sword guards and paper stencils from Japan are juxtaposed with metalwork by Western manufacturers Boucheron, Gorham and Tiffany. Other objects used in daily life, like a chair designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, also show the wide-ranging impact of Japanese design in the West.
Additional highlights in the exhibition include Vincent van Gogh’s painting Postman Joseph Roulin; Claude Monet’s The Water Lily Pond; Five Swans, an elegant wool tapestry designed by Otto Eckmann; Paul Gauguin’s canvas Landscape With Two Breton Women; and Otome, a print by Kikukawa Eizan.
Follow Paul Duclos’ Cultural Currents online with his blog at: paulduclosonsanfranciscoculture.blogspot.com
