New Film / Cook taught Gertrude Stein to drive / 2022

Duplicated from an identical posting on my alternative blog, CAMOUPEDIA , but important enough to deserve it—

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues. 

 

Devising Dazzle Camouflage by Isolating Details 6

Hypothetical dazzle camouflage

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2017) devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating details from four areas of a single painting by a famous artist from the past. Can you name the artist?

•••

Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964, p. 94—

But the houses he [Le Corbusier] designed [during the late 1920s] were quite different—an attempt to create a Cubist framework for everyday life. They were color compositions without weight, just as intangible as the camouflage ships [in WWI].

New Uses of Dazzle | Stephanie Syjuco

Dazzle-painted Fallingwater (2013) © Stephanie Syjuco

Above In recent years, all sorts of people have adapted disruptive camouflage schemes (or dazzle patterns) for innovative use in surprising contexts. None have been quite as refreshing as the recent work of a Philippine-born artist named Stephanie Syjuco, who is now based in California (BFA San Francisco Art Institute, MFA Stanford University). Earlier this year, she completed a series of digital renderings of "speculative proposals for public works" called Dazzle Camouflage Propositions. Shown above is her dazzle-surfaced version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (she's also done something comparable for Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye). Among her other proposals (see below) are dazzle applications for Silicon Valley "Google buses," IKEA furniture, and a Philippine jeepney.

Camouflaged Google bus (2013) © Stepanie Syjuco

Dazzle-patterned IKEA furniture (2013) © Stephanie Syjuco

Camouflaged jeepney (2013) © Stephanie Syjuco

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016). 

Le Corbusier as Camoufleur

First, one of our favorite passages from Peter DeVries, The Tunnel of Love (NY: Penguin, 1982)—

I imagined myself asking her whether she liked Le Corbusier, and her replying, "Love some, with a little Benedictine if you've got it."

Beyond that, there's a reference to Le Corbusier's use of camouflage in Jonneke Jobse, De Stijl Continued: The Journal Structure (1958-1964): An Artist's Debate (010 Publishers:2005), p. 175—

He [Le Corbusier] described his use of polychromy as "architectural camouflage." By giving walls, ceilings and floors their own color, and modulating the space by means of contrasting colors for doors, windows, cabinets and fireplaces, he accented or disguised certain parts of the structure, thus creating the visual structure he was aiming for.