Also, speaking of disdain for the art establishment, my setting foot in a museum summons Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and its satire of the Met as a "Center of Art Detention." These circumstances reminded me of critiques leveled by the Guerrilla Girls and started me thinking about the overwhelmingly male gaze of fine art and Western culture in addition to, as a Western man, my own learned complicity in this gaze. To boot, it seems Pigeot wasn't directly paid for her involvement.
Despite this distaste, I was interested in the painting "Dancing Girl with Castanets" (1909), especially once I learned that its eponymous girl had a different model for the head (Gabrielle Renard) and body (Georgette Pigeot). The show taught me that I dislike Renoir's work, or at least "Late Renoir." When I shared this opinion with a colleague, she agreed, calling his work "postcards"-precious, trite, sentimental. While "Violets for Your Furs" takes its title from an Adair and Dennis song recorded variously by Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, I began writing the poem after seeing a Renoir exhibit at the PMA. But the crown jewel of the city's art scene is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, imposingly classical on a bluff overlooking the Schuylkill River and a short walk from my front door. These talks put writing ekphrastically in mind, and the town I call home willingly provided fodder: Philadelphia is chockablock with public art, graffiti (street art if you're feeling gentrified), museums, galleries, and art schools. This stems from hearing, at the 2009 Cave Canem Retreat, Natasha Trethewey speak about her poems drawn from Mexican Casta paintings and from attending a Bryn Mawr College panel-featuring Jorie Graham, Rachel Hadas, and Susan Wheeler-on women's ekphrastic poetry. Jazz and Blues inspired many poems in my first collection, Spit Back a Boy, but in writing my next batch of poems, my preoccupation has turned to visual art. Cataloging these ideas will require some name-dropping. That in mind, here I'll lay bare the ideas that undergird "Violet for Your Furs" without doing you the disservice of deciphering individual images. This seems a violation of the literary contract between author and reader. I'm disappointed when writers, in discussing their work, interpret it for their readership. Reprinted with the permission of the author. Let's just agree Gabrielle, let's just agreeĪll rights reserved. Who knows if I ever loved Rhea? Probably not, Other than what I have? Which is to wonder: Renard, is posed with rouge on her cheeks,
The model for the figure's head, Gabrielle
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