This is the second post on the thread I've entitled Book notes -- ie, interesting stories relating to things I've read or come across on my travels:

1.
More on the intellectuals described in Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels.

Bienvenido Leon underlines the pioneering role of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). A great polymath and self-financing disseminator of knowledge (so much so that he ruined himself), Humboldt was also a forerunner in the field that would come to be called ecology. He understood the universe as a system in which everything is interconnected (a very Romantic trait), which meant not only that he was the first to point to the effects of human action on the climate, but also that he saw no contradiction between scientific precision and what he called "the life-giving breath of imagination".

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, however, and influencing Humboldt, as Beatriz Fernandez Herrero points out, was Jose de Acosta (1539/40-1600). He had already discovered the "Humboldt current" well before it was so named, and was ahead of his time both in his respect for the indigenous inhabitants of South America, and in his foreshadowing -- through his analysis of biogeographic and cultural diversity -- of the science of earth systems.

Not such great press, however, for Friedrich Schlegel, who comes in for a lot of flak in Rebecca F. Kuang's Babel... "The Schlegel Gita is dreadful," comments one of the characters...

Or for G.W.F. Hegel, whom Olufemi Taiwo sees as a "racist philosopher", who contributed to the erroneous concept of "pre-colonial Africa". His designation of Africa as "a land 'outside of Time' and not a part of the movement of 'History'" influenced an array of scholars and politicians to see the continent as "a homogeneous place that they need not think too hard about, much less explain to audiences". The article's argument makes sense. But here, once again, we up against that uncomfortable problem: How do we deal with the blind spots of intellectual giants who grew up in a different era? We have to cherry-pick, surely, or we end up throwing away most of the thought of humanity...



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2.
A propos of which, an article by Lachlan McNamee on "settler colonialism".

This interrogates the blind spot of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), author of The Souls of Black Folk, with regard to Japanese action in Manchuria: "In the wake of the undeniable atrocities committed by Japan against hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, Du Bois doubled down on his defence of Japan. He wrote that 'Japan fought China to save China from Europe' and that, even if it had committed violence in China, Japan was simply following Europe’s playbook." This error of judgement, says McNamee, was brought about by two elements: "The first was to presume that a state officially committed to racial and ethnic equality cannot be a violent, exploitative coloniser. The second was to presume that the colour line, the central political division in the US, is a master key that explains political conflict elsewhere in the world." Both these flaws, he argues, are still detectable in the ongoing misinterpretation of settler colonial projects today.

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3.
And still on the subject of slippage between talent and contemporary times, a discussion of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903).


Parahi te marae

Gauguin left Paris before he could have met Gertrude Stein, but in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she has a couple of anecdotes connected with his work: "In the spring [Ambroise] Vollard announced a show of Gauguin and [Stein and her brother] for the first time saw some Gauguins. They were rather awful but they finally liked them, and bought two Gauguins. Gertrude Stein liked his sun-flowers but not his figures and her brother preferred the figures. It sounds like a great deal now but in those days these things did not cost much... [Picasso's sculptor friend Manolo] once was left for a few days in the house of a friend of Gauguin. When the owner of the house came back, all his Gauguin souvenirs and all his Gauguin sketches were gone. Manolo had sold them to Vollard and Vollard had to give them back. Nobody minded. Manolo was like a sweet crazy religiously uplifted spanish beggar and everybody was fond of him."

The title of Sasha Grishin's article says it all really: "Paul Gauguin was a violent paedophile. Should the National Gallery of Australia be staging a major exhibition of his work?" Gauguin's story is pretty sordid: He looks very much like a sex tourist, leaving his wife and children to go to Tahiti, where he married three young indigenous women (the youngest 13, the others 14), and wrote disparagingly and violently of them, while passing on his syphilis to at least one. What's more, "his criminal lifestyle lies at the very core of his art". Grishin leaves his readers to decide how to answer his headline question, but notes: "It is an exhibition where you may despise the artist, yet invariably admire the formal properties of his art. Gauguin was a brilliant colourist, an exceptional draughtsman and had that rare ability to reinvent the medium with which he engaged."

Kate Fullagar, meanwhile, reviews a new book (by Nicholas Thomas) on Gauguin, which attempts "to reinstate Polynesian women’s agency in their interactions with the travelling artist and to argue for a dynamic Indigenous-centred modernity in the colonised Pacific. Both are controversial efforts, speaking to the heart of current tussles in feminist and postcolonial scholarship." Rather than focusing on the artist's misogyny (a given), he attempts to unpick how Pacific women coped with it. And rather than assuming that Gauguin was regretting the influence of the French, and trying to "recreate a lost paradise in his imagination", he suggests that the artist was affirming the power of Polynesian spirituality. Don't know. Interesting, though.


Rarotonga, 2005. It's easy to do cliches in the Pacific...

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4.

We all remember Ernest Hemingway, but who is the Spanish Civil War photographer who inspired him?



That would be Robert Capa, says Miguel Angel de Santiago Mateos, and one of his most distinctive photos is Death of a Militiaman:



The best known image of the Spanish Civil War, and one of the most famous war images in the world, its authenticity has sometimes been called into question, but its iconic value and continuing relevance are beyond doubt, says Santiago-Mateos, since its in-the-moment qualities represented a turning-point for war photography: "Capa and Death of a Militiaman, like Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls, were quickly associated with the Spanish Civil War as something symbolic. Both works were established as propaganda icons in the service of the Republican cause, just like their authors."


Question-marks in Huesca, 2020 (which is also where the photo at the top was taken). The Huesca Offensive was an operation carried out by the Republican Army in 1937