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Lot Essay
In 1979, Daniëls produced a small series of paintings, watercolours and drawings depicting floating swans. This was also the period in which he started applying extra layers of meaning to his work by including titles. In the same period Daniëls developed a compositorical interest in what Blotkamp called 'hidden images'. Blotkamp: ''Daniëls knows how to make a good passage between things (...) and he has feeling for the expressive effect of empty spaces (...)." (Kunstschrift, No. 6, 2009). A fitting example to Blotkamps testimony is La Muse Vénale (Swans), a translucent work in watercolour charcoal. In between the waves we see two black swans and an empty outline, suggesting a white counterpart. La Muse Vénale (Swans) fits in a series of work in which Daniëls both ironically and poetically comments upon the habitués of the art world. The artist, the critic, the gallery owner and the collector - all are being mocked in a mild manner. The mysterious title of the watercolour relates to a poem from Baudelaire's masterwork Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire compares the writer to the prostitute and finds the two very similar, sharing their intimacy with the public in exchange for money. Daniëls questions the integrity of the commercially successful 'New Painting'. Is it artistically 'right' to produce romantic swan pictures at the end of the 20th Century?
The Venal Muse
Muse of my heart, you who love palaces,
When January frees his north winds, will you have,
During the black ennui of snowy evenings,
An ember to warm your two feet blue with cold?
Will you bring the warmth back to your mottled shoulders,
With the nocturnal beams that pass through the shutters?
Knowing that your purse is as dry as your palate;
Will you harvest the gold of the blue, vaulted sky?
To earn your daily bread you are obliged
To swing the censer like an altar boy,
And to sing Te Deums in which you don't believe,
Or, hungry mountebank, to put up for sale your charm,
Your laughter wet with tears which people do not see,
To make the vulgar herd shake with laughter.
-Translated from the French of Charles Pierre Baudelaire (by William Aggeler, 1954).