John French Sloan, McSorley’s Bar, 1912
I was sitting in mcsorley’s
E. E. Cummings 1923
I was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and
beautifully snowing.
Inside snug and evil. the slobbering walls filthily push
witless creases of screaming warmth chuck pillows are noise
funnily swallows swallowing revolvingly pompous a the
swallowed mottle with smooth or a but of rapidly goes gobs
the and of flecks of and a chatter sobbings intersect with
which distinct disks of graceful oath, upsoarings the break
on ceiling-flatness
the Bar.tinking luscious jigs dint of ripe silver with warm-
lyish wetflat splurging smells waltz the glush of squirting
taps plus slush of foam knocked off and a faint piddle-
of-drops she says I ploc spittle what the lands thaz me kid
in no sir hopping sawdust you kiddo he’s a palping wreaths
of badly Yep cigars who jim him why gluey grins topple to-
gether eyes pout gestures stickily point made glints squint-
ing who’s a wink bum-nothing and money fuzzily mouths
take big wobbly foot-
steps every goggle cent of it get out ears dribbles soft
right old feller belch the chap hic summore eh chuckles
skulch. . . .
and I was sitting in the din thinking drinking the ale, which
never lets you grow old blinking at the low ceiling my be-
ing pleasantly was punctuated by the always retchings of a
worthless lamp.
when With a minute terrif iceffort one dirty squeal of soil-
ing light yanKing from bushy obscurity a bald greenish
foetal head established It suddenly upon the huge neck
around whose unwashed sonorous muscle the filth of a col-
lar hung gently.
(spattered)by this instant of semiluminous nausea A vast
wordless nondescript genie of trunk trickled firmly in to one
exactly-mutilated ghost of a chair,
a;domeshaped interval of complete plasticity, shoulders,
sprouted the extraordinary arms through an angle of ridicu-
lous velocity commenting upon an unclean table.and, whose
distended immense Both paws slowly loved a dinted mug
gone Darkness it was so near to me, i ask of shadow won’t
you have a drink?
(the eternal perpetual question)
Inside snugandevil. i was sitting in mcsorley’s
It, did not answer.
outside.(it was New York and beautifully, snowing. . . .
(Mostly)
From Wikipedia
McSorley's
Old Ale House, generally known as McSorley's, is the oldest "Irish"
saloon in New York City. Opened in the mid-19th century at 15 East 7th Street,
in today's East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, it was one of the last of
the "Men Only" pubs, admitting women only after legally being forced
to do so in 1970.
(
"The place had long been a men-only establishment until 1970, when Ms.
Shaum became the first female patron admitted under a new city ordinance
banning discrimination against women in public places ...")
The aged
artwork, newspaper articles covering the walls, sawdust floors, and the Irish
waiters and bartenders give McSorley's an atmosphere reminiscent of "Olde
New York". No piece of memorabilia has been removed from the walls since
1910, and there are many items of "historical" paraphernalia in the
bar, such as Houdini's handcuffs, which are connected to the bar rail. There
are also wishbones hanging above the bar; supposedly they were hung there by
boys going off to World War I, to be removed when they returned, so the
wishbones that are left are from those who never returned.
Two of
McSorley's mottos are "Be Good or Be Gone", and "We were here
before you were born". Prior to the 1970 ruling, the motto was "Good
Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies"; the raw onions can still be had as part of
McSorley's cheese platter.
McSorley's
is considered to be one of the longest continuously operating ale houses in the
city due to the fact that during Prohibition it served a "near beer"
with too little alcohol to be illegal.
When it
opened, the saloon was originally called "The Old House at Home".
According
to a 1995 New York Times "Streetscapes" article by Christopher Gray, the
census taker who visited the Irish-born McSorley in 1880 recorded the year the
founder of the pub first arrived in the United States as 1855, but immigration
records show that he arrived on January 23, 1851, at the age of 18, accompanied
by Mary McSorley, who was 16.
Founding
owner John McSorley passed daily management to his son, William, around 1890,
and died in 1910 at the age of 87. In 1936 William sold the property to Daniel
O’Connell, a retired policeman and longtime customer. After O'Connell's death
three years later, his daughter Dorothy O’Connell Kirwan assumed ownership.
Upon her death in 1974 and that of her husband the following year, ownership
passed briefly to their son Danny before the most recent proprietor, Matthew
"Matty" Maher, who purchased the bar in 1977 and owned it until his
death in January 2020.
Women
were not allowed in McSorley's until August 10, 1970, after National
Organization for Women attorneys Faith Seidenberg and Karen DeCrow filed a
discrimination case against the bar in District Court and won. The two entered
McSorley's in 1969, and were refused service, which was the basis for their
lawsuit for discrimination. The case decision made the front page of The New
York Times on June 26, 1970. The suit, Seidenberg v. McSorleys' Old Ale House
(1970, United States District Court, S. D. New York) established that, as a
public place, the bar could not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the
United States Constitution. The bar was then forced to admit women, but it did
so "kicking and screaming". In 1970 Barbara Shaum became the bar's
first female patron. With the ruling allowing women to be served, the bathroom
became unisex. Sixteen years later, in 1986, a ladies room was installed.
Until
2011, McSorley's maintained a mouser cat within its premises until a law was
passed ending the practice.
In 2017,
McSorley's added Feltman's of Coney Island Hot Dogs to their menu, the first
time the menu was altered in over fifty years. Feltman's owner, Michael Quinn,
was a long time employee at McSorley's, and during the late 19th century,
Feltman's Restaurant at Coney Island was a popular destination for the McSorley
family
Notable
patrons
Abraham
Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Boss Tweed. Cultural icons such
as Woody Guthrie, Hunter S. Thompson, Brendan Behan, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi
Jones, Christopher Morley, Gilbert Sorrentino, and George Jean Nathan,
frequented the tavern. Folk singer/guitarist Dave Van Ronk used photos of
himself outside the doors for album covers, and Wavy Gravy read poetry there. Dustin
Hoffman was a patron. In the early 1910s, anarchist Hippolyte Havel became a
regular. Mcsolrleys's most notable regular, however, was Cooper Union founder
Peter Cooper who would regularly hold court in the back room. John McSorley
instructed that his favorite chair be draped with a black cloth every April 4th
following Cooper's 1883 death.
After the
New York Rangers hockey team won the Stanley Cup in 1994, they took the cup to
McSorley's and drank out of it; the resulting dent caused the NHL to take the
trophy back for several days for repairs.
Roofs, Summer Night (1906)
MWW Artwork of the Day (8/2/15)
John French Sloan (American, 1871–1951)
Roofs, Summer Night (1906)
Etching on wove paper, 12.7 x 17.8 cm.
Wetmore Print Collection, Connecticut College, New London
In his late teens, John Sloan worked for a Philadelphia print dealer and bookseller and taught himself to etch by reading a handbook that described the technique. Between 1891 and 1904, he made approximately one hundred etchings for a publisher of calendars, illustrated books, and novelty items. After taking classes with Ash Can School painter Robert Henri, a proponent of realistic depictions of everyday life, Sloan applied these lessons to his printmaking when he embarked on the series New York City Life in 1905-06. Despite critical acclaim for the ten etchings in this series, the public found them too risqué, and Sloan initially exhibited and sold few of them. One of these prints, “Turning Out the Light,” is an example of the sort of innuendo that some viewers found objectionable. However, in choosing ordinary people for his subjects, Sloan was following the example of artists he admired, including Goya, Dürer, Rembrandt, and Hogarth, as well as contemporary illustrators. In fact, a humanitarian outlook informed much of his art, and part of the appeal of printmaking for him was that it made art more affordable and accessible. As art editor for the Socialist magazine The New Masses from 1910 to 1914, he also published many political and satirical drawings.
Primarily between 1891 and 1937, Sloan completed more than three hundred etchings, as well as a few prints in other mediums, before turning almost exclusively to painting. For printmaking, he usually drew from memory and then worked on his plates with various tools and chemicals, evolving his imagery through several states. “Subway Stairs,” for example, went through seven such states before Sloan settled on the version shown here. As the demand for his prints rose, he sometimes enlisted the services of professional printers to help print the edition.
[Source: Deborah Wye, “Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art,” New York: 2004, p. 120]
Sloan is one of the featured artists in the MWW gallery:
* Ashcan School I: Urban Realism Comes to America
Helen Taylor Sketching (1916). John Sloan (American, 1871-1951). Oil on canvas. Everson Museum of Art.
As an instructor at the Art Students League in New York, Sloan quickly attracted a group of students during his summers in Gloucester. Classes consisted of outdoor painting—the primary reason Sloan left the city for summers in New England—where Sloan and his students ambled about the countryside, setting up easel and canvas on rocky outcrops and grass covered fields. Helen Taylor Sketching illustrates such a scene. Taylor was one of Sloan’s students, visiting Gloucester in the summer of 1916 from her home in Philadelphia.
Francis-Marie Martinez de
Picabia, commonly known as Francis Picabia, was born on 22 January 1879. He was
a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with
Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His
highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He
was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States
and in France. He was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon
turn his back on the art establishment.
Public collections holding works
by Picabia include the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in
New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the
Tate Gallery, London; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; and Museum de
Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands.
From 6 June through to 25
September 2016 at Kunsthaus Zürich and then from 21 November 2016 through 19
March 2017, the first retrospective of Picabia’s work in the United States,
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, took
place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, co-curated by Anne Umland and
Cathérine Hug. The retrospective was widely discussed by international art
critics such as Philippe Dagen from Le Monde.
Among the artists influenced by
Picabia’s work are the American artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel, the
German artist Sigmar Polke, and the Italian artist Francesco Clemente. in 1996,
French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel initiated and co-curated the exhibition
Picabia, Dalmau 1922 (with reference to Picabia’s solo exhibition at Galeries
Dalmau in 1922) shown at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Musée
National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou. In 2002, the artists Peter Fischli
& David Weiss installed Suzanne Pagé’s retrospective devoted to Picabia at
the musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (MAMVP). The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, organized a major retrospective of his entire career, shown from 21
November 2016 to 19 March 2017.
Colossal Statue of Ramesses II
This massive statue was found in 1820 by the Italian traveler Giovanni Battista Caviglia. The Colossus of Ramesses II is an enormous statue carved in limestone, it is about 10m (33.8 ft) long, even though it has no feet, and is located near the village of Mit Rahina (Memphis).
A small museum has been built to house this magnificent piece.
The fallen colossus was found near the south gate of the temple of Ptah,
located about 30m from the huge limestone statue of Ramesses II. Some of the
original colors are still partly preserved
Janus
Janus was the god of beginnings and transitions in Roman mythology, and presided over passages, doors, gates and endings, as well as in transitional periods such as from war to peace. He was usually depicted as having two faces looking at opposite ways, one towards the past and the other towards the future.
Did the Ancient Greeks See Blue Like We Do?
By
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Although
Greece is full of many shades of blue — iconic blue roofs found across the
islands, rich sapphire seas, and bright blue skies — linguists and experts in
the ancient world have long been puzzled by the conspicuous absence of a
distinct word for the color in the country’s archaic past.
Yet
does this mean that ancient Greeks could not see the color
blue, as some argue, or that they just saw it differently, considering it not
as a distinct color, but as part of a spectrum of shades?
We know
that language, especially regarding colors, has a significant impact on the way
we experience the world around us. As linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
wrote, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
The Color Blue in the
Ancient World
Surprisingly,
the word blue is simply missing from nearly all other ancient languages. There
is no distinct word for the color in Chinese, Hebrew, or Sanskrit. Rather, the
color that we call blue is usually grouped in with other colors, like green.
Egyptians,
however, did have a distinct word for the color blue, and not surprisingly,
they were one of the only ancient peoples who had created blue dye from very
early on in their history.
In the
history of nearly all languages, the word for blue emerged much later than
other colors. Through careful examination of ancient texts, linguists have
discovered that almost all languages followed a fairly standard timeline of
when names for distinct colors were introduced — black and white are the most
ancient colors, followed by red.
In
general, the way colors are referred to in Ancient Greek is completely
different from most modern conceptions of them. Rather than describing a
specific color, ancient Greeks frequently referred to the shade or tint of the
hue instead, considering colors on a shade from dark to light.
Colors in Ancient Greek
In
Ancient Greek, the word kyaenos was often used for colors on
the darker end of the spectrum, including what we now know was violet, black,
dark blue, brown, or dark green. Our modern word “cyan,” a greenish blue, comes
from this word.
Glaukos was
frequently used in reference to lighter colors, including yellow, grey, light
green, or light blue. While both kyaenos and glaukos can
be used for a range of colors, there were distinct words for the colors
included in this range — except for blue.
Classicists
have pored over Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, searching for any mention of the
color blue, but it does not appear once in the texts. Although other colors
such as black, red, white, yellow, and green are all specifically mentioned in
Homer, blue incredibly never makes an appearance.
When
referring to a specific color, ancient Greeks would often compare it to another
object of the same shade. This makes Homer’s comparison of the sea not to the
sky, or another blue-colored thing, but to wine, quite interesting. Throughout
Homer’s poetry, the sea is referred to as “wine-dark.”
Strangely,
Homer also refers to honey as “green” and sheep as “violet” in his work,
leading 19th-century academics to believe that ancient Greeks were all
colorblind, or hadn’t yet developed the necessary capabilities to see colors
like we do now.
Early Theories
However,
science has since revealed that humans indeed developed the ability to see
colors on the spectrum of visible light tens of millions of years ago, long
before the ancient Greeks.
This
colorblind theory was used to fuel racist arguments regarding the biology of non-Europeans
in the nineteenth century. Anthropologists took the theory about ancient Greek
colorblindness and posited that, while modern Europeans had evolved past the
ancient Greeks and could now see blue, non-Europeans were biologically
“delayed.”
This theory
was spread after anthropologists discovered that Aboriginal Australians living
on Murray Island considered the sky to be black rather than blue.
These
anthropologists believed that this signaled that the people of Murray Island
lacked the capability to see the color. Instead, colors in their language are
categorized as light or dark, on a spectrum from black to white. To them, the
color of the sky was included with all dark colors, without its own distinct
name.
The
iconic blue roofs of the island of Santorini. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Linguists
argue that ancient Greeks perceived blue in a similar way. Greeks certainly
could see the color blue, but they didn’t consider it separate from other
shades, like green, complicating how exactly they perceived the hue.
Language and Reality
In
English, color can function in the opposite way linguistically. Consider the
color pink: pink is on the red scale, so if we had no word for pink, it could
easily be considered a light red, and we would call it such. Yet, as we have a
distinct name for the color pink, we perceive it as a different color than red.
The
Himba people, native to Namibia in southwest Africa, live a life largely
separate from Western society, maintaining their ancient traditions, customs,
and language to this day. Uniquely, the Himba people only have five words for
color, which describe what most people would consider a group of many disparate
shades.
For
example, some greens, reds, beiges, and yellows, what many would consider to be
wildly different, fall under the same word in the Himba tongue. Most
interestingly, what we would consider to be different shades of green, the same
color, are perceived as entirely different colors in the Himba language.
When
linguists and scientists showed a color wheel featuring green squares, with one
of them a very slightly different hue, the Himba people almost immediately
picked out the differing shade, a feat that would take most others quite a
while to accomplish.
However,
when asked to pick out the bright blue square placed among the green ones, the
Himba hesitated — while clearly a different shade, it falls under the same
color name as green in the Himba tongue.
While
some argue that this means that the Himba people “can’t see blue,” it’s clear
that they can — they just perceive of it on a spectrum of color, much as the
ancient Greeks surely did.
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