Showing posts with label Mathieu Laca. Show all posts

Saturday, October 15, 2022

My hero / Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak

Walter Benjamin by Mathieu Laca

My hero: Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak

'One doesn't read him to feel better – one reads him to feel'

Elif Shafak

Friday 27 April 2012

Iwas a student in college when I first starting reading Walter Benjamin. Literary critic, philosopher, essayist, he was a man of words. As a German Jew he had been born in turbulent times, at the end of the 19th century, and in the most dangerous of places, Berlin.

The Missing Person / Kafka the Tourist

Franz Kafka
by Mathieu Laca

The Missing Person

Kafka the Tourist

KATE ZAMBRENO

Winter 2019

BACHELOR JOURNEY

In July 1908, a twenty-five-year-old Franz Kafka quit his post at the Assicurazioni Generali with a medical note claiming he was suffering from “nervousness” and something potentially complicated having to do with his heart. This despite passing the medical examination when hired less than a year before (height: 5’11”; weight: 134 lbs.; nutritional status: “moderately weak,” digestion and appetite surprisingly normal; an “even,” “buttery yellow” urine stream). Now a trainee at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, he had a certain amount of vacation every year (two weeks, taken in late summer or early fall, which he stretched to three with a medical note about his nervous exhaustion). He was lucky—a six-hour position, no second shift. For a Jew to find, no less. He began the first of his holidays with the Brod brothers, Max and Otto, in northern Italy (the airshow at Brescia, the waters at Riva). The next trip they took was to Paris, in the fall of 1910. The plan was to stay for three weeks, though he would only last for one.

The Distorted, Absorbing New Portraits of Mathieu Laca

The Distorted,

Absorbing New Portraits of Mathieu Laca

by Andy Smith

Posted on June 7, 2017

Canadian artist Mathieu Laca crafts oil paintings that use texture and abstractions that toy with the conventions of portraiture. Whether it’s famous subjects or the vague everyman or everywoman, the artist packs both meticulous, odd flair and personality into each of the paintings. In his historical portraits, he’s given this treatment to anyone from Henry David Thoreau and Albert Einstein to arts figures like Vincent Van Gogh.

A past statement on his work said this about the artist’s portraits: “The artist cares very little about resemblance. If he evokes historical icons and artists of the past, members of his informal pantheon, it’s as much to pay tribute as to vandalize visually. His process includes abstract digressions, monstrous impasto, unpredictable spatters. The result stands as invigorating totems of culture, mad faces in front of the existential nothingness.”

Margaret Atwood
Mathieu Laca

Attract and repel: Mathieu Laca’s portraits channel Francis Bacon’s “intensity”

BY PAUL GESSELL

POSTED OCTOBER 26, 2016 10:35 AM

Mathieu Laca is back. Or, more precisely, his paintings are making an Ottawa comeback.

You may remember the Montreal-based Laca as the star of the long-gone Patrick John Mills Gallery in Hintonburg. Laca painted dramatic and often graphic allegories involving people, animals, and devils. The eroticism and critiques of religion were intense. Laca was the gallery’s best-selling artist, Mills said. Some Ottawa collectors could not get enough of him. Then Mills’s gallery closed in 2012.

Now, some years later, Laca has signed on with Dominik Sokolowski’s Alpha Gallery in the Byward Market. His first solo exhibition is scheduled to run from Oct. 27 to Nov. 13.

In a pre-exhibition interview, Laca said he expected to be creating 30 paintings for the show and most were to be portraits of famous people, including some head-to-toe canvases.

These are portraits with a twist. Some heads are extravagantly distorted; others are in the process of exploding. They simultaneously attract and repel. Energy and mystery abound. There’s a definite influence here from the late, great Francis Bacon.

Arthur Schopenhauer

“He’s my favourite painter,” Laca says. It is not a question of imitating Bacon, he says, but rather there is the goal of conveying a similar “intensity” to his paintings.

Among the portraits for the show, naturalist Jane Goodall, psychologist Sigmund Freud, and artist Paul Cezanne are included. Portraits of author Virginia Woolf, composer Johannes Brahms, and politician Rene Levesque can be viewed on his website.

Great dynasties of the world / The Freuds

Lucian Freud

Great dynasties of the world: The Freuds

Analyse this – the psychoanalyst's family tree by Ian Sansom

Ian Samson

Saturday 7 August 2010

n 1909 Sigmund Freud published a short essay titled Der Familienroman der Neurotiker. In James Strachey's famous English translation of the complete works of Freud, the essay is titled Family Romances. It begins:

"The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary, though one of the most painful, results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that the liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognisably determined by their having failed in this task."

The Freud family seems to have been no more or less neurotic than anyone else.Freud was the eldest of eight children, a fact he felt not insignificant. "A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother", he is quoted as saying, "keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success which often induces success." Needless to say, Freud's own mother, Amalie, seems to have adored him. In his An Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud is brisk and businesslike in relating his family history. Of his family background, for example, he remarks merely: "My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself." In The Interpretation of Dreams, meanwhile, he is lavishly, complexly self-revealing – the book is a kind of living autopsy in which Freud dissects and discusses his own and others' dreams and fantasies.

In 1886 Freud married Martha Bernays, whose grandfather was Hamburg's chief rabbi. James Strachey describes the Freuds' domestic arrangements as "devoid of episode", though Peter Gay, in his biography Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), offers plenty of interesting episodes to mull over. There is, for example, the unresolved matter of the exact nature of Freud's relationship with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. Carl Jung put about a rumour they were having an affair – but he was probably just mischief-making.

Sigmund Freud
Mathieu Laca

What we know for sure is that Freud and Martha had six children, and that only Anna, their youngest, became a psychoanalyst. One son, Oliver, became a civil engineer. Another, Ernst, became an architect. The Freuds' eldest son, Martin – of whom there were high hopes and expectations – ended up running a tobacconist in Bloomsbury. He also wrote a book, Glory Reflected: Sigmund Freud – Man and Father (1957), in which he said: "The son of a genius remains the son of a genius, and his chances of winning human approval of anything he may do hardly exist if he is to attempt to make any claim to a fame detached from that of his father."

Freud's grandchildren are perhaps better known than his children. Among the famous British Freuds – the sons of Ernst – there was Clement, the politician and broadcaster, and there is Lucian, the painter. Among their children are Matthew Freud, the PR guru married to Elisabeth Murdoch; Emma Freud, the broadcaster married to Richard Curtis; Esther, the novelist; and Bella, the fashion designer.

Freud’s Reflection With Two Children (Self Portrait)
Lucian Freud

And this is not to mention Clement and Lucian's older brother, Stephen, one of the many forgotten Freuds, who ran an ironmongery business just off Baker Street. In a rare interview in 2008, Stephen, proving himself to have been one of the sanest of the Freuds, told the Daily Telegraph: "Golf has played quite a large part in my life." Clement Freud boasted of never having read a word of his grandfather's work. And Lucian Freud once said: "Family is not important to me. It doesn't bother me in the slightest."

THE GUARDIAN

Monday, November 17, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 61 / Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 61

Murphy

by Samuel Beckett (1938)

Samuel Beckett’s first published novel is an absurdist masterpiece, a showcase for his uniquely comic voice

Samuel Beckett's Murphy draft bought by Reading University for £1m

Robert McCrum

Monday 17 November 2014

“T

he sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.

Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.

Murphy, which would soon become overshadowed by the international success of Waiting for Godot, is the first in a series of novels whose titles – Molloy; Malone Dies – begin with the 13th letter of the alphabet. Beckett, always nomadic, had returned to London from Dublin in September 1934 and taken lodgings in Gertrude Street, West Brompton. The novel draws extensively on his experience of living in London and the character of Murphy has plenty of Beckett in him.

Samuel Beckett
Mathieu Laca

The workshy eponymous hero, a “seedy solipsist”, adrift in the alienating metropolis, realises that his desires can never be fulfilled conventionally. He withdraws from life in search of a personal stupor. When the novel opens, Murphy has tied himself to the rocking chair in his flat with seven scarves and is rocking to and fro in the darkness. This practice, apparently habitual, has become Murphy’s way of achieving an existential state of being that gives him deep private satisfaction. Even his lover, Celia, cannot lure him back into the world. As Murphy’s comico-philosophical meditation unfolds, we meet his circle of fellow eccentrics, notably Mr Neary, from Cork, who has the ability, through what he calls “Apmonia”, to stop the action of his heart.

Samuel Beckett
David Levine

Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness. Eventually, after many vicissitudes, Murphy finds refuge in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (an asylum). Foreshadowing the title of Beckett’s second play Endgame, the novel ends with a game of chess between Murphy and Mr Endon in which Murphy resigns and then soon after dies, setting fire to himself in his lonely room and reducing himself to dust and oblivion.

A note on the text

Murphy was written in manuscript in six small exercise books over 10 months from mid-August 1935 to early June 1936. Beckett sent the typescript to his editor Charles Prentice at Chatto& Windus, the London publishers of Proust (1931) and a collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1933). After some inevitable prevarication, on 15 July 1936, Chatto turned Murphy down, followed by Heinemann on 4 August. The novel now entered the bleak limbo of serial rejection on both sides of the Atlantic, during the rest of 1936 and most of 1937. Occasionally, there were flurries of interest mixed with suggestions for the changes Beckett might do to his text to make the book more commercial. Beckett, however, refused to revise what he had written. Eventually, having returned to Paris, he heard on 9 December 1937 that, thanks to the recommendation of Jack Yeats, Murphy had been accepted by Routledge whose editor T Murray Ragg’s enthusiasm was subsequently confirmed by Herbert Read.

Then, echoing the random absurdism of his novel, on 7 January 1938, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed in a Paris street when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp, named “Prudent”. Joyce arranged for medical treatment, and Beckett received his page proofs in hospital where he made a few alterations and insertions. Fifteen hundred copies were printed and Murphy went on sale on 7 March 1938 price 7s 6d. The reviews were mixed. Dylan Thomas, writing in the New English Weekly combined approval with criticism but did Beckett the favour of taking his work seriously. The Spectator’s critic wrote: “Rarely… have I been so entertained by a book, so tempted to superlatives and perhaps hyperboles of praise.” Predictably, the sales of Murphy were not good. Routledge records show 568 copies sold in 1938, 23 in 1939, 20 in 1940 and 7 in 1941. In March 1943, Murphy was allowed to go out of print.

Within months of publication, however, Beckett was hard at work translating his novel into French, partly to liberate his imagination from the shackles of the mother tongue, but mainly because his future seemed to lie in Paris. Then the war came, and the French translation would not be published until 1947 by Bordas, a publisher with whom Beckett subsequently fell out. Finally, after the success of En attendant Godot, Beckett’s main publishers, Editions de Minuit, took over the publication of Murphy and absorbed this edition into his oeuvre as a whole.

My reading of Murphy for this series has been based on the 2009 Faber & Faber edition, edited by Professor JCC Mays, a text derived from the first Routledge edition of 1938, but expertly corrected with reference to several typescript versions. None of the above should obscure the fact that Murphy is a deeply original, comic masterpiece by a giant of 20th-century European prose.