If the name Ludwig Bemelmans rings only a distant bell, consider these lines from the classic oversized children’s book: "In an old house in Paris/Covered with vines/twelve little girls in two straight lines./The youngest one was Madeline.” Are you with me now? Bemelmans understood that people live in particular places where we create community.
Ludwig Bemelmans, born in 1898, was many things throughout his life — a prolific artist and writer, someone who worked in fancy hotel restaurants like the Ritz Carlton. He understood that people gain comfort from gathering together.
The last time I was in Manhattan, my spouse and I were enjoying a late-spring wander through just-opening roses in the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, winding up the gravel paths toward the faux-medieval folly known as Belvedere Castle. I realized that we were close to the East Side of the park, near The Carlyle Hotel, where I had long wanted to visit Bemelmans Bar – a mid-century bar famously decorated with Ludwig Bemelmans’ frescos. Crossing a few city blocks, we found it, inside the chandeliered entrance to The Carlyle, around the corner and up a few richly carpeted stairs.
The golden-dimness of the low-ceilinged bar has a frozen-in-time feel to it for a reason. The charming Seasons-in-Central Park scenes that Bemelmans was commissioned to paint on every wall and column are perfectly preserved. He created the large-scale frescos in exchange for a year and a half of accommodations in The Carlyle for his family.
I try to imagine Bemelmans at work in 1947, in the ruptured and traumatized world after the war, sketching everyday delights and micro-dramas that remind us that after any cataclysm, it’s small gestures that help us stitch the world back together: A balloon-seller handing an airy bouquet to a sailor-suited child; a bowler-hatted dog-walker tangled in leashes of confuzzled dachshunds; picnicking rabbits and ice-skating elephants. Bemelmans doesn’t shy away from human foibles — there’s a bandit in a cartoon eye mask holding up a bejeweled matron on the same Belvedere Castle path we’d just walked. And, across the room, two burglars are trying to slip away with a framed masterpiece from the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art. But those images include energetic policemen at the ready, their legs caught mid-dash as they speed with their mild billy clubs to right the wrongs painted there.
I admire the human desire to place-make — to leave our mark where we live. Think back to your first apartment or teenage bedroom. Maybe you hung your posters of Carol King or David Byrne with blue putty, worked between your fingers like bubble gum before placing the images that pleased you. And reach back into early history when people left thousands of handprints in red, yellow and purple in the Venezuelan Cueva de las Manos to say: “We made a life here.”
That community-building ethos is at work in public art blooming locally in Alex Allen’s “Mural Mania” series that has transformed blank parking garages and brick walls in our town into large-scale celebrations of vining flowers and vibrant narrative scenes. Place-making was at the heart of the “Arts Café” in the Near Northwest Neighborhood of South Bend this past weekend, where all ages of amateur performers – yes, driven by love - shared their art and music and dance skills in a fizzy celebration of the ordinary, extraordinary talent all around us.
In this frighteningly polarized time, I needed Ludwig Bemelmans’ reminder of how much we can be buoyed by the comfort and delight we create for ourselves. So, have your friends over for soup. Make a date for a walk. Play music and dance in public. After all, the urgent art of community-making is still in our hands.
Music: “This Must Be the Place" by The Talking Heads
