Hidden Cities II: Embarkation for Cythera

Peter Milton's essay about his most recent print

A central element in my 1975 "Daylilies" was taken from an anonymous photograph of a strolling holiday crowd which has come to see a dirigible. But I thought the dirigible was too distracting and never included it. The crowd, deprived of purpose, begins to merge with the shadows of other figures and disappear over the horizon. The figures take on an air of drifting and melancholy which evoked my identification with them.

Twenty-nine years later I have returned to my mysterious crowd, and I have restored their airship to them. But this time the airship has become a spectacle of such majestic bouyancy that it must be tied down. I imagine it moored to take on passengers. A long line of ineffable associations eventually led towards a voyage for the island of Cythera, Aprhodite's mythic sanctuary of "luxe, calme et volupte". It is also in fact a voyage for me to return to Antoine Watteau's masterpiece "Embarkation for Cythera", and to the concept of beauty so sadly neglected in the contemporary esthetic canon.

The original impulse for this image came from my lifelong obsession with space and urban immensities. The two core inspirations are both European cityscapes. The left is a long down-going, improvised from the steps of Montmartre in Paris. The right is a long up-going, improvised from the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Large spaces have such a palpable living presence that I decided to eliminate the competing presence of central figures altogether. The human figure remains in small details -- peering, lurking, disappearing. But there is the suggestion of a whole population below. There is a city inside the city, unobserved.

Subtexts and Diversions

The Title: Hidden Cities. A chapter in Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities". Calvino gives me permission to shrug aside the inhibiting dictum of my teacher, Josef Albers -- "Boy, there are a hundred wrong solutions to an esthetic problem. And only one right one."

The Buildings: On top, a 19th century villa in Dresden which survived the 1945 fire bombing. Underneath, a recreation of a 16th century building by Antonio Palladio. At the far top of the Spanish Steps, the Trinità dei Monti

METR POL: A subway? A cinema? The sign has lost its "O". There are Art Nouveau fragments of the Paris Metro work of Hector Guimard.

The Taxi: The same cab from The Ministry of the ill-fated ride of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Now there are other goings-on.

The Tree: Mabery Street in Santa Monica, my daily winter walk.

The Café: On the Montmartre steps. I call it "d'Orfée", or the Orpheus Café. Orpheus can only bring Eurydice out of Hades if she follows behind him and he doesn't look back. Here, there's a woman who looks back.

The Airship: Taken from a 1850 drawing of an "aerostatic locomotive" by Petin. It had moveable louvers, steam-driven propellers and was hydrogen filled. It was never built.

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