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Franz Marc
Franz Marc in 1910

Today is the birthday of Franz Marc (Munich; February 8, 1880 – March 4, 1916 Braquis, France); painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.  He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.

During his twenties, Marc was involved in a number of stormy relationships, including an affair lasting for many years with Annette Von Eckardt, a married antique dealer nine years his senior.  He married twice, first to Marie Schnür, then to Maria Franck; both were artists.

Gallery

Girl with a cat ii

Rote Frau, (1912)

For more on Franz Marc visit artsy.net 

Today is the birthday of Kate Chopin (born Katherine O’Flaherty; St. Louis, Missouri; February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904 St. Louis, Missouri); author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. In my opinion, she is a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background.

Chopin was of maternal French and paternal Irish descent. She married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived in the country in Cloutierville, Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short stories for both children and adults that were published in such national magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth’s Companion. Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they were condemned as immoral by some critics.

Her major works were two short story collections: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included “Désirée’s Baby” (1893), a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana, “The Story of an Hour” (1894), and “The Storm” (1898). “The Storm” is a sequel to “At the Cadian Ball,” which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk.

Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The characters in her stories are usually residents of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana, a region where she lived.

Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, “some of [Chopin’s] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius.”

Quotes

The Awakening (1899)

• Looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage.

• An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish…like a shadow… a mist passing across her soul’s summer day.

• The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

• Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking, and unguided.

• As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

• She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.

• Edna wondered if they had all gone mad, to be talking and clamoring at that rate. She herself could think of nothing to say about Mexico or the Mexicans.

• The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

• She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle — a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium.

• “She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.”

• “Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, ‘Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.’ or, ‘I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?’ or ‘this financier, who controls the world’s money markets?'”

• “The bird that would soar above the plane of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”

• She had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.

• There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.

• “I’ve been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle; the quiet, grassy street of the Chênière Caminada; the old sunny fort at Grand Terre. I’ve been working with a little more comprehension than a machine, and still feeling like a lost soul.”

• All sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.

• There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.

• “You have been a very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontelliere’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, ‘here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,’ I should laugh at you both”

• “And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.”

• “The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life.”

• She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.

• She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop in 1934 as a senior at Vassar

Today is the birthday of Elizabeth Bishop (Worcester, Massachusetts; February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979 Boston); poet and short-story writer.  She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

Verse 

• Why should I be my aunt,
  or me, or anyone?
  What similarities
  boots, hands, the family voice
  I felt in my throat, or even
  the National Geographic
  and those awful hanging breasts
  held us all together
  or made us all just one?
  • Poem: In the Waiting Room
• From a magician’s midnight sleeve
  the radio-singers
  distribute all their love-songs
  over the dew-wet lawns.
  • Poem: Late Air

Poems, North and South (1946)

• The armored cars of dreams contrived to let us do
  so many a dangerous thing.
  • Poem: Sleeping standing up

• Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
  More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
  • Poem: The Map

• The future
  sinks through water
  fast as a stone,
  alone alone.
• “Yes …” that peculiar
  affirmative. “Yes …”
  A sharp, indrawn breath,
  half groan, half acceptance,
  that means “Life’s like that.
  We know it (also death).”

Mac Tag