Stop the Clocks

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

“Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden

We know Frida Kahlo primarily through her self-portraits, which are strung together across the painful abyss of her life like beads on a rosary of resolve in the face of physical and emotional anguish. In Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes, Salomon Grimberg proves that the approximately 40 still lifes Kahlo painted reveal Frida’s internal life just as intensely as the approximately 80 self-portraits she completed. As in his other recent book, Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself (which I reviewed here), Grimberg brings his psychological training as well as his exhaustive research into Kahlo and her world to provide a fascinating new look at this underappreciated aspect of her art. “I paint flowers so they will not die,” Kahlo told her last lover, Josep Bartoli. Grimberg sees this death-defying, time-freezing impulse in all of Kahlo’s still lifes. None of Kahlo’s still lifes express this time fetish as much as The Broken Hours (above, photographed by Lola Alvarez Bravo in 1954), a three-dimensional still life Kahlo created in her home featuring one clock frozen at the time Diego Rivera asked for a divorce in 1939 and another clock frozen at the time they remarried in 1940. “Separation anxiety shaped every moment if her life,” Grimberg writes of Kahlo, “and, obsessed with avoiding inevitable partings, Kahlo painted still lifes with the intention of bringing time to a stop, of holding on to the attachments that nurtured her and the objects that linked her to them. These works became visual representations of her struggle to master the fear of loneliness and of confronting death.” With Grimberg as a guide, Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes decodes the language of things that the artist used to reveal her innermost self.




Using what Hayden Herrera calls in her foreword “the author’s wonderfully inventive analytical process,” Grimberg delves deeply into the structure of many of Kahlo’s still lifes to reveal the meanings left hidden right there in the open. For example, in Kahlo’s Self-Portrait With Bonito (above, from 1941), which is technically a self-portrait, the still life Kahlo surrounds herself with speaks in a secret language of insects and mythology. “The butterfly, caterpillar, and cocoon are symbols of Christ’s Resurrection,” Grimberg asserts, “the cocoon represents the tomb, the caterpillar life on earth, and the butterfly the beautiful form emerging from the tomb and rising toward glory.” The death-obsessed meaning of this painting, done shortly after Kahlo’s father’s death, becomes even clearer when Grimberg connects Bonito, Kahlo’s beloved parrot, with “Horus, a falcon-headed diety from Egyptian mythology best known for avenging the death of his father, Osiris, and redeeming him with eternal life.” Perhaps Kahlo envisioned a similar redemption for her father, himself an amateur painter, through her art. By teasing out the intricacies of Kahlo’s still lifes, Grimberg proves not only his own prowess as an art history detective but also the depth and width of Kahlo’s personal mythology, which goes beyond the self-fashioned persona of the self-portraits.



Understandably, many of Grimberg’s readings of Kahlo’s still lifes centers around Kahlo’s personal issues with sexuality and childbirth. Her Still Life (tondo) (above, from 1942) shows a scene teeming with flowers in which “a uterus-shaped, seed-filled halved squash” sits as a Polyphemus moth flits above it. “Painted with the quiet, even colors of twilight, representing the time of life when we become reflective about the passage of time and the imminence of death,” Grimberg writes, this tondo frankly states Kahlo’s thoughts on her childlessness. The squash serves as an obvious double for Kahlo’s own damaged reproductive organ, but the subtle key to the piece is the moth. Grimberg deftly explains how the Aztecs believed that such moths, whose coloring resembles flames, were the reincarnations of men who died by fire. He then links that death association to sex through the moth’s physiological loss of needing to eat during the caterpillar stage. “Instead, sex is her only requirement,” Grimberg says of the moth, asserting that Kahlo knew such facts also, “and that is how she will spend her limited time and energy until she dies.” Like the moth, Kahlo flitted from relationship to relationship throughout her life, choosing to spend her limited time and energy on empty sexual recreation since fruitful procreation was impossible. Such subtle, profound use of flower and insect imagery recalls usage in Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age art, demonstrating Kahlo’s grasp of art history while still adding her own native land’s baroque mythology to the mix.

In her Flower of Life (above, from 1944), Kahlo literally turns that history of still life flower language on its head. Kahlo’s “flower of life” is a mandrake, the magical plant of lore that could reportedly cure infertility through its phallic power. Flipping the flower phallus end down, Kahlo shapes “its ‘body’ to resemble her internal sexual organs,” Grimberg shows, “adding arteries to feed the vaginal walls, and turn[s] the ‘arms’ into fallopian tubes from which the ovaries are missing.” Minus those egg-bearing ovaries, this “flower of life” is ironically barren. “This flower is Kahlo’s self-portrait as an incomplete woman,” Grimberg concludes, “available to gratify a man’s desire but unable either to conceive or to experience sexual pleasure.” Whereas the “official” self-portraits show us the Frida she wanted us to see, almost always in control despite all obstacles, such still lifes as Flower of Life are where Frida truly reveals herself and her insecurities to those who look deeply enough. In another still life, from 1951, Kahlo places a weeping face on a coconut—the agonized visage behind the masquerades of the self-portraits. Rarely did Kahlo allow herself such moments of complete, uncalculated frankness in her art, but such rare moments most often appear in the still lifes.

Frida loved things in her life, as demonstrated by the pride in which she poses above in a 1940 photo before a part of her collection of native crafts. In addition to setting elaborate dinner tables and sending a flower-strewn lunch basket to Diego each day he was working, Frida created still lifes all around her home of fresh fruit and flowers. Along with painting, such things became the tools through which she expressed her inner life, making the painting of still lifes a natural intersection of those impulses. The Frida of popular culture and Fridamania is primarily the persona of the self-portraits, and understandably so thanks to the expressive power of those works. However, as Salomon Grimberg proves in Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes, the “real” Frida’s self-portrait may actually lie within the flowers and fruit of the still lifes, calling us to find her again and to stop the clocks that counted out her tragic life once more, so that Frida, like her painted flowers, will not die.


[Many thanks to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a review copy of Salomon Grimberg’s Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes and for the images from the book.]

Serving a Higher Power

Most people know Sandro Botticelli, who died May 17, 1510, for his masterpieces of Renaissance classicism—The Birth of Venus and Primavera. Born in 1445, Botticelli has become, through those two works, associated with a delicate, almost porcelain type of beauty that inspired Robert Downey, Jr.’s character in The Pick-up Artist to complement women with the question, “Did anyone ever tell you that you have the face of a Botticelli and the body of a Degas?” Few people know that those two works were created for the rich and powerful House of Medici, Botticelli’s patrons. Even Botticelli’s earliest religious pictures, such as his Madonna and Child with Six Saints (aka the Sant'Ambrogio Altarpiece ; above, from 1470) , serve the Medici family, in this case by presenting Lorenzo il Magnifico and Giuliano Medici kneeling in front of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. After studying with Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli no doubt developed a highly secularized, non-aesthetic view of religion, which allowed him to stomach placing such ruthless types as the Medici comfortably within a sacred setting.

Soon, however, Botticelli fell under the influence of the charismatic religious reformer Savonarola. Like Michelangelo, Fra Bartolomeo, and other artists, Botticelli found Savonarola’s brand of reformed Christianity, stripped of the worldly excesses and corruption of the papacy’s connections to secular power, attractive. Botticelli and Michelangelo allegedly threw some of their pagan-themed paintings into Savonarola’s infamous "Bonfire of the Vanities." Regardless of whether Botticelli actually committed any of his works to the flames, it is clear that his subject matter takes on a more serious, deeply religious tone in works such as Lamentation over the Dead Christ with the Saints Jerome, Paul and Peter (above, from 1490). The casual insertion of powerful patrons disappears as the complete focus centers on the dead Savior and the reactions of such world-rejecting aesthetics as Saint Jerome.

Although Savonarola lost control (and his life) in 1498 and the Medici regained their position of influence over society, Botticelli continued to follow the same devotional path. Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (above, from 1500), one of the few works Botticelli signed, may have been a private work Botticelli painted for his own meditation. As in the years 1000 and 2000, 1500 was a year in which many believed the Day of Judgment was at hand. In the Mystic Nativity, Botticelli abandons all the classical realism and proportion of his early works and indulges in an almost surreal world in which a giant Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus dominate the center of the picture. Episodes from the Gospel of Saint John come to life throughout the painting. After Savonarola’s death, Botticelli simply dropped from view and little is known of his life. That departure from the world helped Botticelli’s memory fade, virtually erasing him from the mainstream of art history (with the notable exception of the work of Giorgio Vasari) until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1920, a Botticelli renaissance made him one of the most written about artists of the time. Although the Medici-supported works continue to make Botticelli’s name in our culture, choosing Savonarola over the Medici may have led to a short-term loss but a long-term gain in art history appreciation.

All in the Family

The youngest daughter of James Peale and the niece of Charles Willson Peale, Sarah Miriam Peale was literally born to be a painter. Born May 20, 1800 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sarah learned the family trade from her father and later from her cousin, Rembrandt, but, as with all the Peales, Charles Willson’s influence is unmistakable. Sarah’s Self-Portrait (above, from 1818) shows the classic Peale touch, warm and colorful, that always captured the twinkle of spirit in the sitter’s eye. Up until 1818, Sarah had concentrated on still lifes and miniatures, the permitted purview of women artists, but three months of intense study with Rembrandt gave her the confidence to tackle portraiture. That confidence, however, comes up short in this self-portrait in that it doesn’t identify her as a painter at all. At just eighteen years of age, Sarah had decades to prove to herself and the world that she was truly an artist worthy of her family’s legacy.

Although still life was considered a “safe” genre for women, i.e., lacking the dangers of the nude model that men could withstand, the still life in the Peale family achieved a higher quality than that of any other artists then working in America. Sarah’s Still Life with Watermelon (above, from 1822) abounds with the vibrant juiciness of the subject. Both Sarah’s cousins Raphaelle and Rubens excelled in the Dutch tradition of still life and undoubtedly guided Sarah’s progress. The same love of nature that led Sarah’s Uncle Charles to become the first great American naturalist can be seen in this faithful reproduction of red, ripe fruit. Sarah and her sister Anna Claypoole became the first women to join the PAFA in 1818, a landmark in the ascent of women in the arts in America.

Sarah’s growing prowess as a portraitist soon gained her a national reputation, pulling her away from her native Philadelphia to work in the social circles of Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, DC, and St Louis, Missouri, before returning to Philadelphia for the last eight years of her life. While in Washington from 1840 through 1843, Sarah painted the portraits of many politicians and dignitaries, including then Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Sarah’s portrait of then Viriginia congressman Henry Alexander Wise (above, from 1842), later the governor of Virginia who signed John Brown’s death warrant and a brigadier general for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, shows the facility with which she could paint the politically powerful. Sarah carried on the family tradition through her work but not through later generations of Peales, never marrying and having no children. Sadly, the same dedicated pursuit of her art that led her to a nomadic existence conflicted with the possibility of family, a price that many women artists still pay today. Although Sarah never received a colorful artistic name like her cousins Rembrandt, Raphaelle, and Rubens, her name belongs within the great tradition of the Peale family and their place in American art history.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Ever since seeing Michael Palin’s documentary Michael Palin and the Mystery of Hammershoi (which I reviewed here), I’ve become an unofficial “Friend of Hammershoi,” the unofficial organization Palin proposes in his documentary to help raise the profile of Vilhelm Hammershoi in the art world. Born May 15, 1864, Hammershoi’s life story is as elusive as the subject matter of his paintings. Although he did paint landscapes in the open air, Hammershoi focused on Vermeer-inspired scenes such as Interior with a Girl at the Clavier (above, from 1901), which recalls Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and many other scenes of young women at keyboards. Whereas we can imagine Vermeer’s young lady turning around or turning to face her teacher, it’s hard to imagine Hammershoi’s keyboardist acknowledging our presence, so self-absorbed in the music she seems to be. Hammershoi’s paintings speak of loneliness, even when people are present—often even more so when people are there.

Hammershoi’s White Doors (aka, Open Doors; above, from 1905) reminds me of Edward Hopper’s famous remark that all he wanted to do was paint light falling on a wall. Hammershoi takes great pleasure in painting the play of light on doors and walls as they reveal more walls and doors. Andrew Wyeth’s approach to painting doors often suggested the presence of his friends, particularly Christina and Alvaro Olson in Alvaro and Christina. Wyeth paints those doors to symbolize his now-dead friends. Hammershoi, however, paints the doors with no feeling of human presence. The sense of absence, of crushing loneliness is palpable. You can almost hear the distant echo of solitary footsteps treading the wooden floors. From the little that is known of Hammershoi, it’s easy to assume that he had a crushing sense of shyness that made contact with others nearly impossible.

Hammershoi painted the interior of his Copenhagen apartment at Strandgarde 30 over sixty times, including Interior, Strandgarde 30 (above, from 1903-1904), which depicts his wife, Ida, holding a serving plate and looking away, as always. (Amazingly, nudes of Ida by Hammershoi exist, showing that he had overcome his shyness at least in one case.) As “shadowy” as the subject matter is in Hammershoi’s works, they are almost always flooded with light. That light reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s amazing short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," in which an old waiter keeps his café clean, brightly lit, and open well into the night for those lonely ones who “do not want to go to bed,” but rather “need a light for the night.” Like Hemmingway, Hammershoi seeks a clean, ordered, well-lit place to fend off the loneliness that filth, disorder, and darkness would only exacerbate. Hammershoi’s paintings, the landscapes excluded, may seem claustrophobic even when all the doors are open, but they served as cocoons in which he could grow, feel safe, and create.

An Unfamiliar Name

Anyone who has toyed with painting watercolors knows the name Cotman from the Winsor & Newton’s line of professional and student-grade paints. Of all the great watercolorists, the name Cotman usually doesn’t ring a bell, but it should. Born May 16, 1782, John Sell Cotman painted some of the most beautiful watercolors of the Romantic period in England. Cotman’s Ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire (above, from 1803) rivals similar works done by J.M.W. Turner, Cotman’s better known contemporary and colleague. It would be easy to mistake such a Cotman for a Turner—the quality is close, the technique is similar, but, most importantly, they’re both painting at the same turning point in British culture. The same Romantic fascination with ruins that fuels Turner and Cotman exists in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and others. If Rievaulx Abbey had been titled Tintern Abbey, the connection would have been complete.

Cotman’s a great “test case” for Turner, the more famous artist. Why did the reputations of two artists so similar diverge? For one thing, Turner had John Ruskin to champion him critically. Nobody ever stood up for Cotman. Turner’s financial success and lack of family responsibilities freed him in a way that Cotman’s need to provide for his family, which required him to take up teaching, limited his opportunities. Another difference that I see in their work lies in the subject matter. While Turner turned to the seas, Cotman turned inland in works such as Ruins and Houses, North Wales (above, from 1800-1802). Again, if you titled this The Ruined Cottage, all kinds of Wordsworthian bells would jingle in my head. Turner’s Romanticism follows a marine course while Cotman goes rustic, which may be truer to the British Romantics, or at least the Wordsworthian strain, but didn’t offer as many picturesque opportunities that a moneyed, elite buying public would pay for.

Interestingly, both Cotman and Turner published etched editions of their works called Liber Studiorum. Turner etched his version in 1807, looking to expand his public and develop an international reputation through reproductions that couldn’t be generated by exhibitions of his original works. Cotman prints his version in 1838, just four years before his death, hoping to ease his financial woes. Cotman The Devil's Bridge, Cardiganshire (above, from Liber Studiorum: A Series of Sketches and Studies, from 1838) shows Cotman’s skill at etching as well as his continued eye for the Romantic ruin—here the arresting view of the strikingly named Devil’s Bridge. Fortunately, Cotman’s art found an audience in the Victorian era, as Ruskin’s promotion of Turner led critics to “discover” similar artists. If you’re ever in an art store and find yourself in the watercolor aisle, skip over the Van Gogh and Rembrandt brands and muse for a moment on Cotman.

All Grown Up

Anyone who has seen one of the many great animated films for kids over the last decade or so knows that the animators always remember who’s actually paying for the tickets and popcorn and throw in a little joke for the adults, hoping it soars over the heads of the kids as they sit agog at the cute pictures swirling before them on the big screen. Out of Picture, Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking in, from the people at Blue Sky Studios (creators of Ice Age and Robots), shows you what these artists can do when they know the children aren’t watching. These artists “dance for years at a time, around a monster called an animated movie,” writes Blue Sky Studios director Chris Wedge in his introduction, “giving only what is asked of them” in the spirit of collaboration, all the while holding back “a reservoir of creative potential that roils, impatient for escape within their hearts.” In Out of Picture, the levy breaks, flooding the pages with images and ideas that amuse, bemuse, and refuse to accept the status quo of twenty-first century America. The term “out of picture” originates in the studio practice of cutting sections out of a film. Although these short pieces by the creative minds never actually touched the cutting room floor, they clearly represent the passions that their day jobs as animators for kid flicks would never allow to see the light of day.

Ever since Bambi’s mother met her fiery end, death and separation anxiety have been the twin towers of children’s animation, extending the gruesome legacy of fairytales and folk legends. If animated films highlight the bright side of the equation with their happy endings, Out of Picture highlights the unresolved reality in which light and dark exist in continual tension. Daisuke Tsutsumi’s “Noche y Dia” (above) enters into the carnival-esque psyche of a woman undergoing therapy to rid her of her dark side. In the end, she recognizes that dark and light are two sides of the same inseparable coin. In “Newsbreak,” by Michael Knapp, the terrorist demons brought to us daily by the media follow us even after we turn off the tube. Those terrorists morph into cuddly characters in David Gordon’s “The Wedding Present,” in which Snuggles, Puppybear, and others sneak a plutonium bomb into the United States. Art Spiegelman’s trick of embodying evil in cute animals in Maus becomes even more sinister in Gordon’s hands thanks to the contemporary setting. Nash Dunnigan imagines a “not so distant future” in which the seeds planted by the Bush administration’s erasure of the line between church and state bloom into a society that forces children to attend a special “Night School” to learn the truth while other children enforce the “law.” “Separation of church and state and evolution just won’t stay dead. Will they?” one character asks, as we hope the answer always remains yes.

But it’s not all doom and gloom in Out of Picture. Vincent Nguyen’s “Domesticity” shows the members of a family all facing their personal nightmares in the dark and then reuniting in the rational light of day, joined by love. In “Four and Twenty Blackbirds,” Greg Couch whimsically recasts The Maltese Falcon with Little Jack Horner as Sam Spade, Humpty Dumpty as the Fat Man, Mary (who had a little lamb) as the femme fatale , and the black birds as the Falcon itself. In “Yes, I Can,” Andrea Blasich wordlessly follows a man helping a dragon to fly. Your heart will finds its wings in Robert Mackenzie’s “Around the Corner,” which hopefully offers the advice: “On those days when the clouds have bottled up the light—/ Don’t look so down./ Look within. / Look ahead, / The world you’ve imagined is waiting for you.” As bleak as the world around us can seem, these illustrators all tell us, the world of imagination within us can still change everything for the better, if you only believe.

A second volume of Out of Picture is set to be released in June. It seems that this effort has tapped a rich, perhaps endless source of imaginative energy. On one hand, these stories are for adults, despite the children’s book style of illustration often used. On the other hand, these stories are for both adults and children—basically anyone who loves to see through the eyes of artists to better picture the world around them. “It was one of those old books not meant for us children to read,” Daniel Lopez Munoz writes in his story “Silent Echoes,” “but up on that shelf it invited the occasion.” Put Out of Picture on the highest shelf, where the kids are sure to read it, and invite them (and yourself) to an occasion of the imagination.


[Many thanks to Villard Books for providing me with a review copy of Out of Picture, Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking in.]

New World Disorder

When you serve as an officer in not one but two world wars, the whole world starts to take on a surreal tint. Paul Nash fought in both World War I and II for England, recording the war in his own personal way, which was shaped largely by the modernist art movements he studied before the conflicts. Born May 11, 1889, Nash acerbically titled his dystopian landscape of the bloody sun rising over the trenches in We Are Making a New World (above, from 1918). There are still places in Europe upon which the violence of World War I and the years of trench warfare are clearly written upon the landscape. The Great War (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) aimed at creating a new world, and succeeded, but not in the way it imagined. Nash loved the writings and paintings of William Blake, whose vision of hell on earth and sense of caustic irony emerge in We Are Making a New World. Nash’s surreal landscape captures the unreal reality of warfare without straying too far from the photographically documented truth.


Between the wars, Nash returned to civilian life in England and interacted with British abstract artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In Pillar and Moon (above, from 1932-1942), Nash paints a sculpture similar to those by Moore and Hepworth. The moon in the sky echoes the moonlike sphere sitting atop the pillar, as if the stars had fallen to earth. The trees in the background seem borrowed from the paintings of the German Expressionists, twisted and gnarled with the angst of having lived through war with a soul not completely intact. That German touch may be a gesture towards understanding that all sides suffered greatly during the war, erasing the dehumanizing rhetoric employed to get the murderous job done. Even when not facing a hail of bullets, Nash couldn’t remove himself from the theater of the military absurd.


During World War II, Nash photographed a field full of damaged aircraft. Looking upon the wrecks, he imagined the shapes of the fuselage to be the waves and breakers of a vast sea frozen in place. Totes Meer (German for “Dead Sea”; above, from 1940-1941) beautifully transforms the machines of death into a roiling sea of grey metal. Only a few scattered German crosses on broken wings identify the “waves” for what they truly are. Whereas We Are Making a New World documented how war transformed peaceful reality into a nightmare, Totes Meer documents how imagination transforms harsh reality into something beautiful. From these ashes, Nash rises with a sense of hopefulness, remarkable given that 1940 and 1941 marked the nadir of British life during the war, when the Blitz rained down death upon London and FDR battled isolationists in the United States just to initiate the Lend-Lease Act to help England survive. Surrealism, which often took the everyday and made it nightmarish, here in Nash’s work takes the tragically horrific and finds a slender ray of beauty and, perhaps, hope.