Orpheus and Eurydice in the 21st Century: R.B. Kitaj, Rilke and Arcade Fire (Part 1)

by Gregg Chadwick

Last night the L.A. Louver Gallery held a rousing discussion: R.B. Kitaj's Life & Passion, with Tracy Bartley (director of the R.B. Kitaj studio), Derek Boshier (artist), David N. Myers (professor and chair of the UCLA History Department), and Paul Holdengräber (curator, instigator and Director/Founder of LIVE from the New York Public Library).

Titian
Orpheus and Eurydice 15 9/16" x 20 7/8" oil on wood ca. 1508–12
Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum, New York

As I listened to the conversation, I scanned the room full of many of Kitaj's last paintings and was struck by the realization that in these artworks Kitaj was attempting to bring his deceased wife Sandra  back from death - Kitaj as the poet/artist incarnation of the mythic Orpheus would bring Sandra (his Eurydice, taken too soon) back from the underworld. These vibrant paintings were not just a testament to their passion but instead an almost alchemical journey into the mystery and abyss of life, loss, and love. 

In the myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld to win back the life of Eurydice, who was bitten by a serpent (seen above in the left vignette of Titian's painting from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy) and died shortly after the two wed. Orpheus plays music of such beauty for Hades, master of the underworld, that he allows Eurydice to return to Earth with Orpheus.  But with the strict condition that Orpheus walk in front of Eurydice and never look back during their journey from the depths. Overcome by an anxious fear, Orpheus breaks his discipline and turns to look back at his reborn Eurydice only to cause her to vanish forever. 

R.B.Kitaj
Los Angeles No. 27 (Go Down)
 36" x 36" oil on canvas 2003–4
photo courtesy L.A. Louver Gallery

When I reached home, Reflektor - the new album from Arcade Fire, was already downloading onto my computer. The songs on this album also engage with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. 

Auguste Rodin’s marble statue of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, graces Reflektor's album cover.  This image portrays the essential kernel of the myth, the mytheme of not looking back, which is also reflected in the Biblical story of Lot's wife escaping from Sodom and the Grimms' folk tale Hansel and Gretel.

Gregg Chadwick
Mulholland Blue
24"x30" oil on linen 2013
(Currently curated by Director Rebecca Wilson on Saatchi Online into featured collection)

My new painting Mulholland Blue also engages with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In my work, an Orpheus-like character in the foreground vanishes as a green dressed Eurydice figure slips into the distance. The distant lights of the city glisten in the night air. Does she stand for a moment to view the world she will never return to? Or is our 21st century urbanity the underworld?

In upcoming posts I will consider these questions as well as diving much more deeply into R.B. Kitaj, Rilke, and Arcade Fire. Next up in Part 2: Rilke Releases Eurydice. 

The Rose of Time

Gregg Chadwick
76cm x 61cm oil on linen 2010
Currently on exhibit at Manifesta Maastricht, the Netherlands


A Bowl of Roses
by Rainer Maria Rilke


You saw angry ones flare, saw two boys
clump themselves together into a something
that was pure hate, thrashing in the dirt
like an animal set upon by bees;
actors, piled up exaggerators,
careening horses crashed to the ground,
their gaze thrown away, baring their teeth
as if the skull peeled itself out through the mouth.
But now you know how these things are forgotten:
for here before you stands a bowl full of roses,
which is unforgettable and filled up
with ultimate instances
of being and bowing down,
of offering themselves, of being unable to give, of standing there
almost as part of us: ultimates for us too.
Noiseless life, opening without end,
filling space without taking any away
from the space the other things in it diminish,
almost without an outline, like something omitted,
and pure inwardness, with so much curious softness,
shining into itself, right up to the rim:
is anything as known to us as this?
And this: that a feeling arises
because petals are being touched by petals?
And this: that one opens itself, like a lid,
and beneath lies nothing but eyelids,
all closed, as if tenfold sleep
had to dampen down an inner power to see.
And, above all, this: that through the petals
light has to pass. Slowly they filter out from a
thousand skies the drop of darkness
in whose fiery glow the jumbled bundle
of stamens becomes aroused and rears up.
And what activity, look, in the roses:
gestures with angles of deflection so small
one wouldn't see them if not for
infinite space where their rays can diverge.
See this white one, blissfully opened,
standing among its huge spreading petals
like a Venus standing in her shell;
and how this one, the blushing one, turns,
as if confused, toward the cooler one,
and how the cooler one, impassive, draws back,
and the cold one stands tightly wrapped in itself
among these opened ones, that shed everything.
And what they shed, how it can be
at once light and heavy. a cloak. a burden,
a wing, and a mask, it all depends,
and how they shed it: as before a lover.
Is there anything they can't be: wasn't this yellow one
that lies here hollow and open the rind
of a fruit of which the same yellow,
more intense, more orange-red, was the juice?
And this one, could opening have been too much for it,
because, exposed to air, its nameless pink
has picked up the bitter aftertaste of lilac?
And isn't this batiste one a dress, with
the chemise still inside it, still soft
and breath-warm, both flung off together
in morning shade at the bathing pool in the woods?
And this one here, opalescent porcelain,
fragile, a shallow china cup
filled with little lighted butterflies,
and this one, containing nothing but itself.
And aren't they all doing the same: only containing themselves,
if to contain oneself means: to transform the world outside
and wind and rain and patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and disguised fate
and darkness of earth at evening
all the way to the errancy, flight, and coming on of clouds
all the way to the vague influence of the distant stars
into a handful of inwardness.
Now it lies free of cares in the open roses.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. "A Bowl of Roses." Translated by Galway Kinell & Hannah Liebman. American Poetry Review 1999 28(3):61.